[MD] Two flavors of Pragmatism

[david buchanan]

 Bernstein writes:

“A ‘linguistic pragmatism' that doesn’t incorporate serious reflection about the role of experience in human life...not only loses contact with the everyday life world of human beings and fails to do justice to the ways in which experience (Secondness) constrains us... but even more seriously...it severely limits the range of human experience (historical, religious, moral, political, and aesthetic experience) that should be central to philosophical reflection.”

Ron commented:
If I read Bernstein correctly, he is pretty much saying that linguistic pragmatism risks neglecting the "Good" which is the central subject matter and what we generally mean by the practice of Philosophy.

dmb says:
Yes, I think that's about right. In terms of the MOQ, linguistic pragmatism relies entirely on static patterns and eliminates DQ entirely. The following quotes speak in terms that are so close to the MOQ that no translation is needed, no? I added some brackets just in case.
Shusterman says: “[Dewey] always insisted that our most intense and vivid values are those of on-the-pulse experienced quality and affect [DQ], not the abstractions of discursive truth [Intellectual sq]. ...By affirming and enhancing the continuity between nondiscursive experience [DQ] and conscious thought [sq] Dewey thought philosophy could enrich and harmonize how we live."
"Work by Mark Johnson and Daniel Stern explores this further. Linguistic "meaning-making" has a natural genesis in "patterns of experience" which begin in youth and continue throughout life. There are, Mark Johnson writes, “pervasive patterns of feeling that make up an infant’s emerging sense of self and world. Human experience has a feeling of flow[DQ], and differences of pattern [sq] in this flow are the basis for different felt qualities of situations.” “What [psychiatrist] Stern identifies as being at the heart of an infant’s sense of itself and the meaning of its prelinguistic experience [DQ] also lies at the heart of meaning in an adult’s experience [sq]....We never abandon or transcend our early meaning-making ways; we only extend and build upon them.” [Neither DQ nor sq can survive without the other.]

Ron also said:
...Certainly social consensus bounds our meaning of truth but it must not be neglected that the reason those meanings are agreed apon and valued in the first place is that they hold and still hold utility and express a successfulness in the flow of experience, we are prepared to act apon them and what makes them even more valuable is their constant re-evaluation, use, utility and reflection. "Truth" to the experience camp is a "living word" for lack of a better metaphor. 


dmb says:
I think that's right. Well said too.