[MD] Apologies for Dropped Threads

[david buchanan]

Matt had said:
"I applaud [Steve's] good answer to the "mere conversation" slogan this is: "Of course conversation is not excluded from experience, but what you fail to get is that nothing is excluded from conversation." What's great about this is that it catches exactly how the two, conversation and experience, are inverses of each other.  Just as part of our experience is conversation, so can conversation be _about_ anything."

Ian replied:
 ... Matt I still take issue with this. JUST as conversation is "part of" our experience, SO experience is NOT "part of" conversation, This is NOT a simple inverse relation. [Direct] experience IS excluded from conversation; it can be no more than the subject the conversation is ABOUT. Clearly a conversation can be ABOUT ANY experience, but that conversation is not that experience. Sincerely trying to help bottom this out, and again at the risk of winding Dave up, this seems trivial and I still don't see actual disagreements, just people saying different things past each other (for reasons that remain unclear). Ho hum.



dmb says:

Ian, I do not understand how your mind works. Matt says nothing is excluded from conversation. You seem to be defending me by saying that some experience IS excluded from conversation. And then you say you still don't see actual disagreements. He says "nothing" is excluded and you say "something" is excluded. How in the world to you figure that "nothing" is the same as "something"? Did you not articulate the disagreement even while you denied it's existence? And I have to use that word again; you have equivocated once. You point out the difference and then say you don't see it. WTF?

Anyway, I'd really like to know what you guys think about my original answer. I thought that my use of Laura Weed's paper made it pretty clear but none of it seemed to catch at all. When Steve said that "nothing is excluded from conversation", I said, "That is the assertion I'm disputing". Here's the basic idea again:

Laura Weed says, "the view of truth expoused by Foucault, Rorty and other hermeneutical philosophers cannot capture the meaning of truth". She is not only mentioning Rorty by name, she's also referring to his emphasis on language by calling him a hermeneutical philosopher. The idea that there is nothing outside of conversation can also be described as our inability to get outside the hermeneutical circle, our inability to escape the interpretive nature of reality. In any case, I think it's pretty clear that Weed is ALSO DISPUTING that same assertion. She's saying that the language-all-the-way-downers cannot capture the meaning of truth. Why? Well, the part I want to emphasize is empirical reality. Rorty and the others "cannot capture the meaning of truth", she says, "because they do not consider the role of ... practical interactions with a recalcitrantly existent environment, in their considerations of the nature of truth." (Weed, page 14) Like I said, it is the recalcitrance offered by experience that makes James's theory of truth a kind of empiricism and a kind of realism. (Recalcitrance: having an obstinately uncooperative attitude toward authority or discipline : a class of recalcitrant fifteen-year-olds.) This is just a way of saying that experience pushes back, reality resists our efforts and that's what makes bad ideas fail. The pragmatic theory of truth still maintains that empirical reality constrains our beliefs, despite its many differences with traditional empiricism. Further, as Ian points out, Pirsig and James are both asserting a non-linguistic, pre-intellectual category of experience. By definition, this is something that IS excluded from conversation, distinguishable from conversation. It also happened to be the central term of the MOQ. Rorty does not consider the role of this in his view and so fails to capture the meaning of truth as James meant it.






Steve said to dmb:
Rorty understands language to be something that human beings do. How is that free-floating?


dmb says:

As Laura Weed puts it, "if everyone is entitled to an interpretation, and interpretations are not grounded in anything other than one's own imagination, no classification of any claim as a truth, a mistake, or a lie, can be correct. The Enron Executives merely had their perspectives, and the duped investors had their perspectives, and no moral or factual distinction between the two perspectives obtains." (Weed, page 5) That's what free-floating means; "not grounded". The slogan that it's language all the way down" is a denial of any ground other than more language. Weed, Seigfried, myself and many others think that this hermeneutical view amounts to relativism precisely because it paints our justifications as free-floating and ungrounded. Like I said, Weed is basically saying that Rorty has taken the empiricism out of James's theory of truth and replaced it with mere conversation.