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

[Dan Glover]

David,

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 12:23 PM, david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
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> dmb says:
>
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> 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.

Dan:
Well yeah.

>dmb:
>
> 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,

Dan:
I might recall? Really? :-)

dmb:
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 Fo
>  rms or the Absolute of a Hegel, Bradley or Royce.

Dan:
I'd hesitate to lump Hegel, Bradley, and Royce into the same category.
But that's just me saying so.

>
>dmb:
> 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.

Dan:
Nope. Gotta disagree. Quality can be defined and he does so in Lila.
in fact, he goes so far as to say the process of consciousness is the
definition of Quality. But Quality can never be entirely defined. Its
inexhaustible. The definition goes on forever.

dmb:
Instead, Pragmatism is very empirical. It says that real questions and
real problems emerge in experience,

Dan:
Strictly speaking, definitions emerge from experience, not in
experience. We are always a moment in the past. Experience comes
first, and then the definition, the questions and the problems.

dmb:
that our ideas and solutions can only be tested in actual experience,
when they are put into practice, put to use.

Dan:
Does actual experience equate to direct experience? If so, no. Ideas
and solutions arise from experience but cannot be tested in
experience. They are tested as an afterthought, the result of
experience.

dmb:
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.

Dan:
Scientific truths are subject to revision. That's the power of
science. We act not upon actual experience but upon a representation
of experience.

dmb:
By the same token, things that cannot be experienced are ex
>  cluded 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.

Dan:
We can never directly see anything. What we see is a representation
based upon not only our own personal history, but the culture in which
we are submerged. Be that as it may, what cannot be experienced has no
value.

>dmb:
>
> 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.

Dan:
Don't know much about Rorty. Heard of him of course.

Thanks,

Dan

http://www.danglover.com