[MD] Julian Baggini: This is what the clash of civilisations is really about

[david]

Dan said:

Somehow this doesn't seem quite right... how he [Baggini] lumps moral relativism and pragmatism into one group. But being as I am not a philosophy major and that I spend most all my time making up stories in my head, I thought I should look into this a bit before commenting. "pragmatism: a reasonable and logical way of doing things or of thinking about problems that is based on dealing with specific situations instead of on ideas and theories." That seems pretty straightforward. Why would anyone object to using pragmatism in political situations? I don't know. Wait. There's more. What's this about facile pragmatism? Is there really such an animal? Isn't pragmatic thinking the result of specificity? Of dealing with empirical data rather than imaginary scenarios that might or might not play out as anticipated? ...Any thoughts on this ambiguity? Am I simply reading things wrongly here?




dmb says:


The definition of pragmatism that you've quoted is the ordinary colloquial version of the the term and only vaguely resembles the philosophical school known as Pragmatism. In common usage, to say you're taking a pragmatic approach just means that you're not going to be ideological, dogmatic, doctrinaire, fanatical, or otherwise inflexible.


As a school of philosophy, Pragmatism resembles this basic flexible attitude but it's also a full-blown theory of truth, one that fits with William James' Radical Empiricism. You might recall that at the end of chapter 29 in Lila, Pirsig tells us that James had used the exact same terms that Pirsig uses for the MOQ: static and dynamic. I mention this because that is how Pragmatism fits into the MOQ; it is the theory of truth that fits within the MOQ. James and Pirsig both reject the kinds of truth theories that fit with subject-object metaphysics because they both reject SOM in favor of Radical Empiricism. Usually, the rejected theory of truth is what's known as the correspondence theory wherein true ideas are the ones that correspond to or represent an objective reality. In ordinary empiricism, that objective reality is usually taken to be a physical reality and under Idealist or Rationalist schools of philosophy the objective reality is going to be something like Plato's Forms or the Absolute of a Hegel, Bradley or Royce. 


But James and Pirsig are philosophical mystics and so they insist that Reality is beyond words, is outside of thought and language, cannot be captured by any verbal formula. That's why Pirsig insist that Quality cannot be defined, why Quality cannot be a metaphysical chess like the Absolute or Objective Reality. Instead, Pragmatism is very empirical. It says that real questions and real problems emerge in experience, that our ideas and solutions can only be tested in actual experience, when they are put into practice, put to use. This allows us to keep scientific truths insofar as they have been empirically tested but it's also broader than that because every kind of experience can be included as valid empirical data, not just what's encountered in the so-called 'external' world. It's an expanded empiricism that can include the affective, the passions, feelings and the qualitative dimensions of experience in general. By the same token, things that cannot be experienced are excluded from the picture. The supposed Realities that is beyond appearances, beyond the empirical world of experience, cannot be included in the picture. And that's not possible anyway. In that respect, the rejected theories of truth are all based on an incoherent idea wherein your true idea is supposed to correspond to something you can never see or otherwise experience.


But then there is also a more recent philosophical school known as neo-Pragmatism. That's usually what Rorty is called. He's not much of fan of William James, does not subscribe to Radical Empiricism, and many critics have pegged him as a relativist. I agree with those critics and used to say so all the time. If memory serves, Rorty is one of Baggini's examples of an actual relativist and so he's saying what many have said about THAT kind of pragmatism. Rorty's critic of objectivity is pretty damn solid. It explains why the correspondence theories are incoherent nonsense.