[MD] humpty dumpty

[david buchanan]

Arlo said:
... So, I'll step back for a second, I know Peirce did some distancing from James, but I always felt his core continued without major disagreement from James and the pragmatic tradition that Pirsig aligns his ideas with. Maybe DMB can offer better insight into this, I'll wait to see what he may say.


dmb says:
Pierce, James and Dewey are considered to be the founders of American Pragmatism but Pierce was unhappy with the direction taken by his dear friend James. He felt that his own version was different enough to deserve a separate name and so called it "pragmaticism" (or something like that), a word he thought was ugly enough to save it from more kidnappers like James. 
The main difference, I think, is that James's pragmatism was more radical with respect to his conception of truth. Pierce's notion of truth was something like an ideal, the final goal of a community of competent inquirers. This notion is not very far away from the scientific, positivistic conception of truth as representing or corresponding to the one and only objective reality. He rejects that kind of objectivity - to be sure - but his notion of truth is still quite scientific. James was one of his oldest and truest friends - helped with money and employment even - but he did not enjoy Pierce's emphasis on logic and the scientific method. James was more attracted to an arts and humanities version of pragmatism, to put it loosely. 
My impression is that James was especially fond of Pierce's description and explanation of an ordinary word: hard. It's not "hard" to imagine the meandering and inconclusive dialogue that would ensue if Socrates got involved in the question and demanded the essential definition of "hard". Pierce didn't even try to dream up the perfect verbal formula or derive the meaning through reason or logical. He simply used the most obvious practical example; the hardest actual thing with which we deal, a diamond. In this case, "hard" means it can scratch other things easily and it means other things can't easily scratch it. It's a simple word we can use to talk about practical things like baseballs or old bread. But we can also work up precise scientific meanings of degrees of "hardness" with same sorts of actual hands-on practices. This is the core concept behind just about any kind of pragmatism, that truth and meaning are to be found in actual practice, in our doings and strivings and in actual engagement with empirical reality. That's where beliefs are useful or not, where they are shown to be true or not. That's what James means when he says that ideas become true in the course of experience. Unlike an objective truth, which is supposed to be true whether or not anyone ever knows it, James's pragmatic truth does not exist is some hidden realm beyond our experience and it does not exist in some other metaphysical dimension. Truth can only ever be an excellent idea, excellent in life, in practice and for particular and for reasons. That's what I mean in saying James's version was more radical. It's a rejection of the ancient distinction between appearance and reality and changes the meaning of the word "truth" so drastically that his critics accused him of effectively changing the subject to something other than truth. ...In fact, I remember a couple of years ago Steve Peterson accused me of the very same thing and kinda freaked out in same way that James's critics had way back when. 

Then of course James and Pirsig also go on to say quite a lot about the rightness of ideas, insisting that the best truths will acknowledge and include the affective domain, to include the passions and the aesthetic and our feelings in general - as well as logic reason. MOQers know it as the expansion of rationality. He didn't do a thing for Quality or the Tao, Pirsig says. What benefitted (from the MOQ) was reason, he says. 

"In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part."  (ZAMM p. 294)