[MD] Rejecting SOM

[david]

More helpful help for John to ignore....

Historian James Livingston says the classical pragmatists like Dewey and James were already postmodern way before it was cool. And what is it that makes them postmodern? If you look at what they do not believe, hopefully, you can see that REJECTING SOM is one thing that pragmatism and postmodernism have in common. Livingston says they...

"...do not believe that thoughts and things inhabit different ontological orders: they do not acknowledge an external or natural realm of objects, of things-in-themselves, which is ultimately impervious to, or fundamentally different than, thought or mind or consciousness. Accordingly, they escape the structure of meanings built around the modern subjectivity, which presupposes the self's separation or cognitive distance from this reified realm of objects."

Even further, Richard Rorty thought they were way ahead of the postmodernist....

"James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling."

Larry Hickman takes the ball from Rorty and really runs with it in his book "Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism". He lists several ways in which classical pragmatism is like postmodern. As you can see, both of them are rejecting a series of Modern philosophical doctrines. Here again you can see the rejection of SOM, especially in quote #2 & #6. 

1. "It rejects Cartesian and other types of attempts to provide ultimate foundations for knowledge claims, opting instead for a view of knowledge-getting that involves the construction and reconstruction of temporarily differentiated platforms of action.. indefinitely."

2. "It rejects the spectator theory of knowledge, according to which true knowledge is constituted by an accurate internal representation of an external fact, electing instead a perspectival view of knowledge-getting..."

3. "It rejects the view that the sources of knowledge or the norms thereof are derived from locations that are outside of experience itself. In other words, both the transcendent accounts of supernaturalist theologies and various forms of Platonism, as well as Kantian accounts of knowledge-getting that depend upon a transcendental ego, are rejected.."

4. "It rejects the idea that human knowing can achieve absolute certainty,.. And it rejects the possibility of the grand narrative,.."

5. "What Dewey termed 'the quest for certainty,' based ultimately on an obsession with skepticism that seems to have been the leitmotif of modernist thought, is rejected as unproductive."

6. "Modernist subjectivity is also recast. The self of classical pragmatism is no longer isolated as a self-contained thinking entity - such as a transcendental ego - over against an external world of objects and other thinking entities. ..The self of classical pragmatism is, nevertheless, not so decentered as to be elusive, aas some postmodernist writers would have it."