Note: I'm trying to put some of my notebook observations on this blog without being so persnickety about the quality.
The thing I never got about the French philosopher Henri Bergson was why he was so popular for a time and why he lost popularity so completely. So often when he was mentioned the standard thing to say about him was that he was the most famous philosopher in the world in the pre-WWI period and then he was forgotten. I remember reading in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy a dismissive article about Bergson.
It would commonly be said of Bergson that he theorized duree which is our subjective experience of time in contrast to objective, clock time. Like the way boredom makes things slow down and interest makes time go by faster. Didn’t seem like much when described like that. But I knew that Gilles Deleuze wrote a book called Bergsonism and reinterpreted Bergson in the late sixties and saw great insight there. So what was the Bergson story?
Bergson, according to Suzanne Guerlac in her book Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, is saying that a background presupposition of our taken-for-granted conception of reality - not even to be noted - is space. Whatever happens has to happen within a container, a space, a field, an environment. The place in which things occur.
Bergson contrasts pure duration - duree -which she says he says can be distinguished from “time.” Because space is presupposed to be there holding whatever is, time is conceived along the lines of space, as a holder - past, present, future - of what happens. History happens “in” time (“in” being a spatial category used to described time). As if time is a thing that exists and contains the contents that occur in it.
Bergson is saying that what we experience subjectively are qualities, differences, but not just differences in quantity but difference in quality. So his example of the piece of paper illuminated by four candles and then progressively unilluminated as each candle is blown out. Is there a quantitative reduction in brightness, so that the white paper gradually looks black (after the fourth candle is blown out) or are there a succession of different hues going from white to greys to black? Is objective time and the space everything is happening within the real reality and the subjective experience of qualities the more ephemeral reality? Bergson reverses it so that the world is seen what it looks like when what arises in our experience and its qualities are taken to be fundamental.
Here is the French connection to phenomenology and Buddhist practice. Even Modernist literature and their focus on first-person subjective experience. Perhaps there is a French tradition getting at the lived subjective experience, life as lived, going back to Montaigne. And more recently Maupassant, Bergson, Joyce (in Paris), Beckett (in France), Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze. Even Foucault and how self and consciousness are formed. And Pierre Hadot and how the Greek philosophers were interested in "spiritual exercises" to train oneself to experience life rightly.
Sunday, February 09, 2014
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Areas of Interest
After studying for thirty years I recently realized how many themes of interest I have that keep getting picked up, satisfied for the time being, and then set aside. I thought I'd try to list some of these areas of interest. Some of them are relatively new. Some of them I left in graduate school in the eighties and always wanted to explore again:
Romanticism. The German variety from the late 18th and early 19th century. I never learned the difference between all those German “S-C-H’s”: Schiller, Schelling, Schleiemacher, the two Schlegels. I see though that there is a philosophical anti-foudationalism there and I’d like to understand it. Started reading Frederick Beiser's well-written intellectual histories, The Romantic Imperative and others.
Pragmatism. Looking at the Notre Dame Philosophical Book Review site there are some new books on Pragmatism. Since it is my basic philosophy I'd like to see what people who can explain it well are saying about it. So read Robert Schwartz's Rethinking Pragmatism and Michael Bacon's new introduction to Pragmatism.
The other day I saw on the new book shelf at my college library an introduction to The Kyoto School of philosophy. This is the school of philosophy that arose in Japan in the 20th century and used western philosophical language and techniques to philosophize an Eastern way of understanding existence and the world. I’ve always thought I’d like to understand better what philosophers using a analytic style would do with Buddhist concepts and that’s what these guys did.
I’ve always wanted to understand Spinoza better but haven’t found the right book for it.
Recently I read a compelling reinterpretation of ordinary language philosophy. It's always intrigued me but it always seemed dry and dusty. But Avner Baz’s book When Words are Called For interprets ordinary language philosophy as a radical critique of central parts of contemporary philosophy.
I’ve always wanted to understand how those who practice philosophical counseling understand it and distinguish it from psychotherapy. I got a couple books by Peter Raabe on it. Looks like they have trouble defining what philosophical counseling is.
While I assume – because of my assimilation of Chomsky’s political insight – that Iran is being set up as a useful enemy by the American political establishment and media, I didn’t really understand contemporary Iran well. I just figured it’s an authoritarian Islamic state and bad, but of course not to be threatened, sanctioned and attacked as the US is doing. But the recent book by longtime policy insiders Floyd and Hilary Mann Leverett, Going to Teheran, is quite an eye-opener. They say that the Islamic revolution of 1979 was an authentic revolution and that Ayatollah Khomeini was an authentic revolutionary. I always figured he was an evil guy (remember those eyebrows?) who established with others an authoritarian Islamic state. The Leverett’s always refer to “The Islamic Republic of Iran” instead of just “Iran” to emphasize that there was a genuine attempt at, and that there is a genuine kind of, democratic republic in Iran. That it is an Islamic-democratic hybrid and that the people do have some say. They even present solid evidence that the last elections that re-elected Ahmadinejad, which were presented in the American media as fraudulent, were actually as legitimate as elections generally are in democratic countries. More recently, the current elected president, Hassan Rouhani, is considered, by Iranian standards, more moderate than Ahmadinejad.
I want to understand more about what Charles Peirce, the pragmatist philosopher, said about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Did he really see ethics as more fundamental than epistemology and aesthetics as more fundamental than ethics?
What are the further implications of seeing knowledge as a kind of social status that some information has conferred upon it by a social consensus, rather than as a designation of the information’s validity according to some independent means of validation?
I still want to get back to Hegel. Maybe through Robert Pippin, maybe through Zizek, and maybe through Fredric Jameson. Not sure I want to read Hegel himself.
Some day I’d like to try reading Lacan himself. I spent a couple years in a reading group reading secondary sources on him: Bruce Fink and Slavoj Zizek.
The concept of the normative seems to be big these days. It still seems murky to me. This new book by Joshua Gert, Normative Bedrock, seems to take an approach I like, but I’m having trouble getting into it.
I still would like to read some Bakhtin after reading in a study group a selection from Tzvetan Todorov’s The Dialogical Imagination. I like Bakhtin’s attempt to see meaning as originating not just in contexts but in specific, unique contexts that, because they are the context that are occurring right now with these people who are talking, gain meaning from what has just been said and what we anticipate saying. It could link up with Baz’s interpretation of ordinary language philosophy since he criticizes both the semantic and the contextualizing approaches to determining truth and meaning by focusing on not trying to create a theory of meaning. That ordinary language philosophy is, Wittgenstein-like, a careful dismantling of the need for such theories. Maybe a kind of philosophical therapy.
In general, through pragmatism, ordinary language philosophy, Nietzsche, Buddhism, phenomenology, Bakhtin and others I seem to keep wanting to get away from abstraction and systems to a thinking that focuses on the texture of lived experience. Philosophy as being used to alter ourselves for the better and so having practical purposes.
I want to read more Zizek, but not commentary on Zizek, because he’s so enjoyable and delightful to read. And he gives lively and understandable descriptions of tough thinkers’ thoughts.
I’d like to finish Richard Bernstein’s Praxis and Action.
I’d like a nice book on Kierkegaard and to read again, in the Hong translation, the parts in Concluding Unscientific Postscript about subjectivity. As I recall the passages on subjectivity are so compelling that it seems while reading them that subjectivity is the true reality and the starting point for any thinking or living. That’s rhetorical skill!
Still want to read Adorno again and the Frankfurt School but not sure what. Maybe the nice looking history of the school by Rolf Wiggershaus.
More Hayden White. Still want to read all of his Metahistory.
I’d like to understand the dichotomy between the figural and the literal. Does literal correspond to the correspondence theory of truth? Literal meaning how things actually are? But isn’t that a philosophical assertion: how things actually are. We live a culture in which the surest knowledge is from the natural sciences and so what is "literally" true is what is physically true and not metaphysically true. Compare how those from medieval times may have thought that God and the soul were literally true and nature was a metaphor, messages from God, to be interpreted. This difficulty with the idea of the literal underlay Nietzsche’s metaphorization of language. That metaphor or the figural comes first and then comes literality.
I'd like to review Max Weber's sociology and the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz. I could never get into Schutz because I was so politically minded and much more attracted to The Frankfurt School thinkers. Perhaps I could appreciate Schutz now.
I still want to understand theories of the placebo effect. If the placebo effect has to be ruled out as a cause of healing against every new medicine, and if it also is superior, sometimes, to doing nothing and letting the body heal itself, how does it work? What is the physiological mechanism by which we heal ourselves better than our natural process because we think we're getting medicine? Mind over matter doesn't explain much since almost everyone would see mind as a result of the matter of the brain and nervous system.
Romanticism. The German variety from the late 18th and early 19th century. I never learned the difference between all those German “S-C-H’s”: Schiller, Schelling, Schleiemacher, the two Schlegels. I see though that there is a philosophical anti-foudationalism there and I’d like to understand it. Started reading Frederick Beiser's well-written intellectual histories, The Romantic Imperative and others.
Pragmatism. Looking at the Notre Dame Philosophical Book Review site there are some new books on Pragmatism. Since it is my basic philosophy I'd like to see what people who can explain it well are saying about it. So read Robert Schwartz's Rethinking Pragmatism and Michael Bacon's new introduction to Pragmatism.
The other day I saw on the new book shelf at my college library an introduction to The Kyoto School of philosophy. This is the school of philosophy that arose in Japan in the 20th century and used western philosophical language and techniques to philosophize an Eastern way of understanding existence and the world. I’ve always thought I’d like to understand better what philosophers using a analytic style would do with Buddhist concepts and that’s what these guys did.
I’ve always wanted to understand Spinoza better but haven’t found the right book for it.
Recently I read a compelling reinterpretation of ordinary language philosophy. It's always intrigued me but it always seemed dry and dusty. But Avner Baz’s book When Words are Called For interprets ordinary language philosophy as a radical critique of central parts of contemporary philosophy.
I’ve always wanted to understand how those who practice philosophical counseling understand it and distinguish it from psychotherapy. I got a couple books by Peter Raabe on it. Looks like they have trouble defining what philosophical counseling is.
While I assume – because of my assimilation of Chomsky’s political insight – that Iran is being set up as a useful enemy by the American political establishment and media, I didn’t really understand contemporary Iran well. I just figured it’s an authoritarian Islamic state and bad, but of course not to be threatened, sanctioned and attacked as the US is doing. But the recent book by longtime policy insiders Floyd and Hilary Mann Leverett, Going to Teheran, is quite an eye-opener. They say that the Islamic revolution of 1979 was an authentic revolution and that Ayatollah Khomeini was an authentic revolutionary. I always figured he was an evil guy (remember those eyebrows?) who established with others an authoritarian Islamic state. The Leverett’s always refer to “The Islamic Republic of Iran” instead of just “Iran” to emphasize that there was a genuine attempt at, and that there is a genuine kind of, democratic republic in Iran. That it is an Islamic-democratic hybrid and that the people do have some say. They even present solid evidence that the last elections that re-elected Ahmadinejad, which were presented in the American media as fraudulent, were actually as legitimate as elections generally are in democratic countries. More recently, the current elected president, Hassan Rouhani, is considered, by Iranian standards, more moderate than Ahmadinejad.
I want to understand more about what Charles Peirce, the pragmatist philosopher, said about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Did he really see ethics as more fundamental than epistemology and aesthetics as more fundamental than ethics?
What are the further implications of seeing knowledge as a kind of social status that some information has conferred upon it by a social consensus, rather than as a designation of the information’s validity according to some independent means of validation?
I still want to get back to Hegel. Maybe through Robert Pippin, maybe through Zizek, and maybe through Fredric Jameson. Not sure I want to read Hegel himself.
Some day I’d like to try reading Lacan himself. I spent a couple years in a reading group reading secondary sources on him: Bruce Fink and Slavoj Zizek.
The concept of the normative seems to be big these days. It still seems murky to me. This new book by Joshua Gert, Normative Bedrock, seems to take an approach I like, but I’m having trouble getting into it.
I still would like to read some Bakhtin after reading in a study group a selection from Tzvetan Todorov’s The Dialogical Imagination. I like Bakhtin’s attempt to see meaning as originating not just in contexts but in specific, unique contexts that, because they are the context that are occurring right now with these people who are talking, gain meaning from what has just been said and what we anticipate saying. It could link up with Baz’s interpretation of ordinary language philosophy since he criticizes both the semantic and the contextualizing approaches to determining truth and meaning by focusing on not trying to create a theory of meaning. That ordinary language philosophy is, Wittgenstein-like, a careful dismantling of the need for such theories. Maybe a kind of philosophical therapy.
In general, through pragmatism, ordinary language philosophy, Nietzsche, Buddhism, phenomenology, Bakhtin and others I seem to keep wanting to get away from abstraction and systems to a thinking that focuses on the texture of lived experience. Philosophy as being used to alter ourselves for the better and so having practical purposes.
I want to read more Zizek, but not commentary on Zizek, because he’s so enjoyable and delightful to read. And he gives lively and understandable descriptions of tough thinkers’ thoughts.
I’d like to finish Richard Bernstein’s Praxis and Action.
I’d like a nice book on Kierkegaard and to read again, in the Hong translation, the parts in Concluding Unscientific Postscript about subjectivity. As I recall the passages on subjectivity are so compelling that it seems while reading them that subjectivity is the true reality and the starting point for any thinking or living. That’s rhetorical skill!
Still want to read Adorno again and the Frankfurt School but not sure what. Maybe the nice looking history of the school by Rolf Wiggershaus.
More Hayden White. Still want to read all of his Metahistory.
I’d like to understand the dichotomy between the figural and the literal. Does literal correspond to the correspondence theory of truth? Literal meaning how things actually are? But isn’t that a philosophical assertion: how things actually are. We live a culture in which the surest knowledge is from the natural sciences and so what is "literally" true is what is physically true and not metaphysically true. Compare how those from medieval times may have thought that God and the soul were literally true and nature was a metaphor, messages from God, to be interpreted. This difficulty with the idea of the literal underlay Nietzsche’s metaphorization of language. That metaphor or the figural comes first and then comes literality.
I'd like to review Max Weber's sociology and the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz. I could never get into Schutz because I was so politically minded and much more attracted to The Frankfurt School thinkers. Perhaps I could appreciate Schutz now.
I still want to understand theories of the placebo effect. If the placebo effect has to be ruled out as a cause of healing against every new medicine, and if it also is superior, sometimes, to doing nothing and letting the body heal itself, how does it work? What is the physiological mechanism by which we heal ourselves better than our natural process because we think we're getting medicine? Mind over matter doesn't explain much since almost everyone would see mind as a result of the matter of the brain and nervous system.
Friday, August 09, 2013
Chomsky and Zizek and the Journal
The recent “feud” between Chomsky and Zizek that the Wall Street Journal is promoting is only interesting for the use it is being put by the Journal. Reading Chomsky on politics in 1982 transformed me into a lifelong learner, reader of Chomsky and reader of Chomsky’s political critics. His empirical accuracy over a thirty year period has been astounding (check out the 500 pages of footnotes that accompanied the book Understanding Power). Contrary to many who are fans of Chomsky’s political critique, I’ve also loved the work of Salvoj Zizek. Chomsky’s statements implying that Zizek’s work has no value are wrong. I’ve found Zizek’s insights stimulating, helpful and fun. I don’t think I would understand what’s valuable in Lacan without Zizek and Bruce Fink. So I think Chomsky is wrong about Zizek and Lacan, and Zizek is wrong about Chomsky. They are both great in their domains. I do think that Zizek’s comments about contemporary political events – like the war in Afghanistan – are weak. That kind of stuff is Chomsky’s great strength.
It shows how skewed mainstream debate is that you can just state a crude version of Chomsky’s views and they seem foolish. But is the sense of foolishness in Chomsky’s views or in the mainstream assumptions that he is countering? What if it turns out that the mainstream assumptions are ludicrous – the US is pro-democracy, there is an Israeli-Palestinian peace process? If the radical argument against mainstream assumptions is seriously considered then the reader has to find out what’s right by exploring the issues. The Journal author doesn’t want the reader to do this and so the whole incident is presented as humorous and not to be taken seriously. Ironically, this is just the kind of journalistic behavior that Chomsky and Zizek help us understand. No wonder the author doesn't want to confront the issues they raise.
The whole point of the story of the “feud” is to marginalize these thinkers who offer a radical and rationally argued critique of western social and political structures and policies. Since the Wall Street Journal is a bastion of and, on its editorial page, a promoter of mainstream conservative policies they naturally oppose radical critique. Since the Journal is in the power position they can make fun of opponents. By not treating them seriously they can try to get their readers not to treat them seriously and instead use them for entertainment purposes.
It shows how skewed mainstream debate is that you can just state a crude version of Chomsky’s views and they seem foolish. But is the sense of foolishness in Chomsky’s views or in the mainstream assumptions that he is countering? What if it turns out that the mainstream assumptions are ludicrous – the US is pro-democracy, there is an Israeli-Palestinian peace process? If the radical argument against mainstream assumptions is seriously considered then the reader has to find out what’s right by exploring the issues. The Journal author doesn’t want the reader to do this and so the whole incident is presented as humorous and not to be taken seriously. Ironically, this is just the kind of journalistic behavior that Chomsky and Zizek help us understand. No wonder the author doesn't want to confront the issues they raise.
The whole point of the story of the “feud” is to marginalize these thinkers who offer a radical and rationally argued critique of western social and political structures and policies. Since the Wall Street Journal is a bastion of and, on its editorial page, a promoter of mainstream conservative policies they naturally oppose radical critique. Since the Journal is in the power position they can make fun of opponents. By not treating them seriously they can try to get their readers not to treat them seriously and instead use them for entertainment purposes.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Nietzsche and Klossowski
For the last few months I've been poring over Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. I had heard about it as one of the great Nietzsche interpretations, but I was unprepared for how great it is. What first intrigued me was the translator's quoting Michel Foucault's letter to Klossowski after the publication of the book in French in 1969. Foucault wrote: "It is the greatest book of philosophy I have read" and that in its quality it is "with Nietzsche himself." That's high praise! But it's true. I don't think I've ever read a book a second time right after finishing it the first time. I've told myself I would with some books, but never did. I'm just finishing it a second time and may start a third. I don't use it to derive arguments or know what Nietzsche really said. I experience it. It elaborates pretty precisely a proto-Freudian vision of existence and the world in which all that we take for granted as what makes things happen as they do are actually secondary or tertiary epi-phenomena or froth on the waves of reality. So consciousness, reason, the will, the self, distinct things, order all are plausibly, acutely and convincingly dismantled and seen as the result of an underground world of forces and impulses.
Recently a friend asked his standard question when I tell him about a thinker I'm reading: "What is the essence of the thinker's view in one sentence?" In one way it's absurd to try to summarize someone's thought in one sentence, but in another way it's an interesting challenge. He asked me to summarize Nietzsche and I thought my answer pretty good. I said: "Existence is a cacophonous melody."
Recently a friend asked his standard question when I tell him about a thinker I'm reading: "What is the essence of the thinker's view in one sentence?" In one way it's absurd to try to summarize someone's thought in one sentence, but in another way it's an interesting challenge. He asked me to summarize Nietzsche and I thought my answer pretty good. I said: "Existence is a cacophonous melody."
Sunday, November 11, 2012
The Preferential Moment
If the preference for an idea, the liking or disliking, strikes first, and the reasoning that justifies it follows, then learning more about the ingredients and mechanics of preference tells us about belief. And in learning about belief we learn about one of the determinants of what we confer the word “knowledge” upon. For knowledge, in part, is made up from the mix of beliefs that people have. Without a method for analyzing the moment of preference it passes by mostly unnoticed. Generally, when we are questioned about this moment of preference – called assumption, intuition, the given, self-evidence - we shrug because we have to accept its role in belief creation, but there’s not much more to say about it. Additionally, there’s often a discomfort with it because it runs counter to the primacy of reason as the reason we believe. Yet how do reasons which justify an opposite view also gain allegiance? How does a reasoning and conclusion the opposite of ours convince? Its convincingness has to have an alien quality to us because it cannot do to us what it does to our intellectual opponent. To know it in that way – the way the convinced know it – is to have “gone native” and become a convert. Conversion occurs when we transcend reason and have an experience of something as the truth.
This focus on the preferential moment, our liking or disliking, our desires, is unusual. It runs contrary to the main thrust of post-Enlightenment reason and science. But its role in believing the ideas we adopt as our own is, I’m arguing, necessary. If necessary we should know more about it.
This focus on the preferential moment, our liking or disliking, our desires, is unusual. It runs contrary to the main thrust of post-Enlightenment reason and science. But its role in believing the ideas we adopt as our own is, I’m arguing, necessary. If necessary we should know more about it.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Whose Truth?
Here's a reply I made here:
I think it's understandable even with a few inside references:
By what means or criterion do we determine the Truth? F. has his approach. I would guess that if you practiced his/Dan Brown’s/the Mahamudra approach then it would look that way. But if you practiced another approach you may find a different Truth or no Truth or some Non-Dual, ineffable, relative/absolute, Truth/Non-Truth. How are these differing Truths to be adjudicated? How do we sort out which is really the Truth? Whose practices, traditions, concepts, experiences are we to trust as providing The Truth?
Even with powerful practices to determine the Truth we still have to convince others through our words and through our persuasiveness to do the practices that we’ve found show the Truth. It’s the interaction with the community of those involved in determining what we know that we must engage regardless of how convinced we are by our Truth, which, of course, we know is The Truth. (This is Wilber’s three strands of any valid knowledge quest, the last strand is the opinion of the relevant community about the proposed piece of knowledge, that’s why his concept of orienting generalizations is important to him, because it determines what is knowledge.)
This view of the inevitable plurality of truths causes me to like, in contrast to Fede, Wilber’s move to a post-metaphysical integral theory in which the leading edge development is both discovering and creating the truth through its life practice on more developed levels. I don’t think that’s what’s really happening, but this incorporation of the role of the person and the human community in the creation of what we know is true captures something important about our postmodern present and so could argue that it is a transcendence and inclusion of a contemporary understanding.
But I also made the point that there is too much made of Truth in spiritual circles. I said that we should care more about ethics and actions. A person who has the Truth may still do bad things and a person without the truth may do good things. What we want is people acting better and talking about how we should act and altering their selves in order to act more ethically.
So a difference between us is how we believe you determine when you have knowledge. For you powerful mystical experiences are the means to Ultimate knowledge. Probably because you’ve had those experiences and were convinced by them. I have not had those experiences. For a different set of reasons than you I promote an emphasis on knowledge as more fundamentally dependent on ethics and the power structure of the institutions that determine knowledge. So when we are at the intellectual level in which we discuss philosophical topics like the character of knowledge, our views start diverging and we reach a point where you cannot give reasons for your choice of one criterion of knowledge over another. That’s when we would inquire into the extra-rational reasons any given person believes in something rather than something else. I advocate and demonstrate a “psychology of belief” in order to examine the nature of our attachment to the belief we find convincing for extra-rational reasons.
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Preferential Treatment
An excerpt from what I am writing:
The hidden importance of the statement: “I like it.” Why like it rather than not like it? There is a lot packed into that experience. The quality of one’s experience of something varies widely for people. Beyond the level at which we give reasons for our beliefs, it is this preference which is determining for belief. Nietzsche writes about the importance of taste. Interestingly, this is the level at which most people contemplate the cultural products they experience: movies, books, TV shows, fashion. They say "I liked it" or "I didn’t like it." Very much in touch with their preferences and generally out of touch with their ability to say why they like or dislike. This is useful for maintaining aggregate demand in a consumer society, but bad for the dream of an informed, thinking, democratic public. One of the many ways capitalism and democracy contradict.Intellectuals focus on their reasons for belief and neglect their affective preferences, yet, it’s contended here, these affective preferences, taste, play an important role in the development of a person’s worldview. So behind the ordinary persons preferences is their whole disposition toward life. One could do an interesting psychodynamic investigation of why a person likes x or y cultural product and similarly, I contend, we can do an interesting psychodynamic investigation of why an intellectual or anybody believes in x and not y when x and y are arationally assumed or felt or seem to be true.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Intellectual Contradictions
We intellectuals have some fun pointing out how the political candidates contradict themselves and are inconsistent in their views. A lot of the humor on The Daily Show uses this and it’s quite funny. But the joke could be on us. Being intellectuals we care about whether someone contradicts themselves. The law of non-contradiction is central to reason and science. But politicians, when they are being politicians, are not trying to be rationally consistent. They are trying to gain power. Contradiction or non-contradiction only matters to them if it affects their success in gaining power. They don’t have to care about contradiction in and of itself like intellectuals do. So we intellectuals think we’ve got them when we show how ridiculously inconsistent politicians are, but we are using an alien criterion – non-contradiction – which is much lower down on their list of important criteria. Now, if Jon Stewart and The Daily Show’s exposure of the blatant contradictions of the politicians becomes a force that affects political outcomes, then politicians would care; not because they’ve contradicted themselves and that’s bad but because it may be detrimental to their chances of gaining power. So we laugh at contradictory politicians and they laugh at us for missing what’s important to getting elected.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Hermeneutic and Preferential Circles
Is there a preferential circle as there is a hermeneutic circle? The hermeneutic circle describes how we interpret a text through the circular feedback of parts and wholes. We start with the first word (a part) and a sense of what this text we are about to read is about (and so the whole of the text), and then we interpret each succeeding part using our conception of the whole. In turn we alter our understanding of the whole by the understanding we make of each new part. So this is a continual, circular process by which interpretation occurs. At the end of the text our conception of the whole, the meaning of the text, has changed, and it has changed through the reading of the parts which got their interpretation through the then current understanding of the whole, which they, the parts, in turn, continually altered as we read.
So I had the idea that there is another circular process occurring which I call the preferential or, more awkwardly, tendentious circle. While the hermeneutic process is occurring another process is occurring which is the continual adjustment of our liking and disliking of the text. Each successive part rubs us one way or another – actually three ways: liking, disliking and neutral – and changes our feeling about the whole. And each feeling about the whole affects our experience of each successive part. At the end we have our disposition towards the piece: we liked it, didn’t like it or are mixed. This preferential reaction could then be examined more closely.
As I think about it, there is also the involvement of our previously accumulated likes and dislikes which inform the way we react to the piece. But this must also be true of the hermeneutic dimension. To interpret a piece we must use the whole of our understanding, placing it within the context of our larger understanding of things. (This is Gadamer's horizon of understanding.)
The preferential circle occurs with differing degrees of self-consciousness. Most people watch movies with very little consciousness of their reaction to it. And, at the lowest level, all they can say is “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” But we can increase our consciousness of our reaction to the film. Good film critics are reacting to the film and simultaneously or in retrospect recovering their reactions and the reasons for their reactions. (Pauline Kael was a master of this.) Generally this is described as an aesthetic reaction, but it has a personal/psychological dimension that usually goes unexplored. But it can be explored, as I do in the psychology of belief.
So I had the idea that there is another circular process occurring which I call the preferential or, more awkwardly, tendentious circle. While the hermeneutic process is occurring another process is occurring which is the continual adjustment of our liking and disliking of the text. Each successive part rubs us one way or another – actually three ways: liking, disliking and neutral – and changes our feeling about the whole. And each feeling about the whole affects our experience of each successive part. At the end we have our disposition towards the piece: we liked it, didn’t like it or are mixed. This preferential reaction could then be examined more closely.
As I think about it, there is also the involvement of our previously accumulated likes and dislikes which inform the way we react to the piece. But this must also be true of the hermeneutic dimension. To interpret a piece we must use the whole of our understanding, placing it within the context of our larger understanding of things. (This is Gadamer's horizon of understanding.)
The preferential circle occurs with differing degrees of self-consciousness. Most people watch movies with very little consciousness of their reaction to it. And, at the lowest level, all they can say is “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” But we can increase our consciousness of our reaction to the film. Good film critics are reacting to the film and simultaneously or in retrospect recovering their reactions and the reasons for their reactions. (Pauline Kael was a master of this.) Generally this is described as an aesthetic reaction, but it has a personal/psychological dimension that usually goes unexplored. But it can be explored, as I do in the psychology of belief.
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part XI
This is my response to the philosopher's post (Exchange Part X). My comments follow the **. His comments are un-starred.
** Ok let’s not fly off the handle here, it’s only reality that’s at stake. I'm sorry for the length of this, but I get anxious to defend my view.
** Two approaches at answering. The first is something new, an attempt to avoid the thrust and parry. The second is the blow-by-blow responses which I think continues the back and forth.
** First Approach:
** I wonder if there is a different way to approach this difference. After all, Rorty has engaged and parried the best philosophers on this, especially in Rorty and His Critics. So I doubt we will come to a resolution. The thrust, lunge and parry could go on and on. Now we would learn things about our beliefs and maybe modify them so I think that can be beneficial. But I wonder if there is another approach. Maybe to just clarify what the difference is and see if we can agree on the nature of that difference.
** We both think science is extraordinary and a wildly successful way to gain knowledge. We both think that talking about “discovering reality” and making a distinction between “all the evidence points to it and it seems wholly justified, but is it true?” are useful ways to think and talk. But there is a difference (and this is where we have to see if this characterizes the difference accurately) between how we regard the nature and importance of the concept/realness of “reality” or “the real.” You say we’ve got to have a robust understanding of “the real” and give reasons that argue for its robustness and, dare I say it, its reality. Otherwise we can’t understand why science and any other avenue to truth and the real works. We bang into a world out there, if you drop that notion then we lose touch with it and you (Rortians) are making believe that there is no world we bang into.
** I say, channeling Rorty, philosophers have made a valiant effort to know reality through metaphysics and ontology, debates about realism vs. anti-realism, but they’ve been unsuccessful. Let’s stop those debates about this entity that always seems to be on the other side of knowing and just continue with our inquiries and understand them as the result of social practices that produce useful or un-useful results. Scientists will still talk about discovering reality, but there isn’t much for philosophers to add to our knowledge of reality. Let's do a Wittgensteinian therapy on the need for an extra-pragmatic understanding of reality.
** Does that describe the difference?
** I’d go on to ask:
** Is there anything more to know about reality than that it stands as kind of absolute but ever unattainable goal which may or may not be correcting inquiry so that inquiry can approach it? Is there anything for philosophers to say about it – reality – beyond the various knowings of it in science, mysticism, religion, poetry, literature, history? Do the natural sciences tell us about physical reality as it is in itself and so help us with our metaphysical investigations or does science give us one extraordinarily powerful, elegant, useful, dangerous, predictively successful view of physical reality? Is there anything else for philosophers to do with reality? Can they tell us something more about It?
** You’re saying, “Hey Rorty, don’t be so fixated on the rigid, absolutistic, Platonic, Kantian-noumenal, reality. Rorty, you betray your beholdeness to absolutism in your fixation on rejecting it. Instead let’s set aside that Absolute Reality and the attempt to dismiss any discussion of Reality and talk about "reality." There is something for philosophers to contribute, that we don’t get from scientists, about that non-Absolutist reality.
** Second Approach: And here are your assertions and my response interspersed:
I'm not "satisfied that working toward agreement with my fellows" is all that science is doing and I'd venture to guess that most scientists don't see their work that way either. Most scientists view their work (at least the biologists and physicists I've read) as a kind of exploration, an adventure of discovery.
** But we’re asking philosophical questions. Scientists are usually poor philosophers. Rorty has a reply to the Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg, (in “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics”) the only time I’ve sensed irritation in his tone, and, ironically, he defends philosophy from that scientist’s crude defense of a crude realism.
They almost expect to be surprised by the real. They wonder, ponder and nature often surprises them. It's not just playing with human models that have no ultimate reference or can't "arrive" at any reference beyond itself. I mean, do you think it makes sense to say that germ theory, gravitational theory, cell theory and any other well verified theory in science has no reference to the way things really are?
** What’s the difference between the way things are and the way things really are? I think philosophers think there is a “really are” beyond “are.” Is that “really” the too severe Reality that Rorty is hooked on or the more moderate real that you are advocating as a more reasonable view? And what is that real like? We have no idea how things “really” are but we have been successful in wondering if our current understanding fits all the evidence and, as a shorthand, saying “but is it true?”.
Of course, scientific theories don't disclose reality in any final, once and for all sense, but surely they are more correct than theories of infection that appeal to demon spirits. If Rorty were right there'd be no more sense in saying that astronomy is preferable to astrology or evolution to creationism so long as we can secure agreement that that's what reality is like from our fellows, or enough of our fellows.
** But what is the criterion for determining greater correctness? If it’s explanatory power then demon spirits could be as good within its overall weltanschauung as the theory of infection, depending on the needs of the person to retain their culture. If it’s what cures better I’d say the theory of infection. But I don’t see the use of “gets reality better” or “more like the way things are” except for rhetorical and practical purposes. But astrology is preferable to astronomy if you are trying to understand yourself and guide your life. Does astronomy do that? But if you want to predict the next eclipse or know the extent of the cosmos, I say, do astronomy. If your criterion for knowing the origin of species originates in the absolute faith in the literal words of God in the Bible then creationism is superior. My God! what better authority is there than God? I think that’s wrong, but how do I convince the believer? Steven Hales argues that we have to accept a relativism when it comes to deciding between the rational worldview, the Christian worldview and the tribal hallucinogenic spirituality worldview in Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy. Also Rorty is a Kuhnian and there is a different conception of science derived from Kuhn and the sociology of science which does not see science as a gradually more accurate representing of the real.
But the history of science is and has been a testing of models, falsification of models and re-testing against the benchmark of the real.
** Is there any more to say about the real beyond the ways we have of identifying it? Is it matter, spirit, consciousness, God, some substance, the Tao? How do we know which it is? Is it fruitful to pursue it philosophically? It’s certainly fruitful to continue describing and explaining physical reality using science. Is there a difference between what science currently tells us physical reality is like and what reality is really like?
Often, it has been the individual against the community in this regard. Scientists often don't want to see reality in a certain way, they have their own pet theories of the way things are, but if the theory unifies the disparate data in a powerful and elegant way, they can or often do come around.
** Rorty is fine with criteria such as “powerful” and “elegant.” Powerful meaning predictive, consistent with the evidence, cohering with what else we know. Those are fine criteria of science. The coming around can be explained by the adherence to certain criteria and the arising of the younger generations overturning of the older generations conceptions. The creative individual, on the margins, Einstein let's say, takes the anomalies and evidence and the applied standards of arguing and does something new. This causes a crisis for the established figures. They have to wrestle with it, to the degree that there is a democratic structure in their institution. A debate ensues, younger people (usually younger) are excited by this new approach and enter the fray. A struggle ensues. One side wins. We can say the winners have a better explanation, more of the evidence fits, old conundrums are solved (and new ones created) the old theory’s limitations are seen and it is incorporated into a better, more coherent whole. We can do more things – build atom bombs, yea! Is the world remade in the new conceptions image or do we know better what the world is really like?
Scientific theories and their verification are not at all as arbitrary and socially constructed as Rorty makes out. Rorty wants a guarantee and behind his pragmatism there may be this rhetoric of regret, fueled by his Cartesian anxiety. Knowing is taking a look for him and if he can't be supplied with the super look that will bridge the gap between theory and reality, then we're supposed to give up on knowing reality and settle for playing with models and garnering votes from our peers. But knowing is not taking a look, at least not for Aristotle. It may be for Plato. I'm not sure.
** So you’re saying that Rorty is too hung up on a crudely dichotomous, black-and-white division between Reality with a capital “r” versus not talking about Reality except as is useful in given situations which is too pale and makes no sense of science’s successes. And he misses that there is another small “r” real that is neither of those. Is there a philosophical debate about the character of that moderate real? Maybe I’ve gotten too much of my understanding of philosophy from Rorty. Who are the thinkers talking about it and what do they say it’s like? Do they distinguish old-fashioned, Reality, the noumena, what’s seen from the God’s-eye-view from this other thing called “the real” which scientists are very good at knowing and telling us about? And is this real quarks or sub-quarks or something else according to these debates?
Whew!
** Ok let’s not fly off the handle here, it’s only reality that’s at stake. I'm sorry for the length of this, but I get anxious to defend my view.
** Two approaches at answering. The first is something new, an attempt to avoid the thrust and parry. The second is the blow-by-blow responses which I think continues the back and forth.
** First Approach:
** I wonder if there is a different way to approach this difference. After all, Rorty has engaged and parried the best philosophers on this, especially in Rorty and His Critics. So I doubt we will come to a resolution. The thrust, lunge and parry could go on and on. Now we would learn things about our beliefs and maybe modify them so I think that can be beneficial. But I wonder if there is another approach. Maybe to just clarify what the difference is and see if we can agree on the nature of that difference.
** We both think science is extraordinary and a wildly successful way to gain knowledge. We both think that talking about “discovering reality” and making a distinction between “all the evidence points to it and it seems wholly justified, but is it true?” are useful ways to think and talk. But there is a difference (and this is where we have to see if this characterizes the difference accurately) between how we regard the nature and importance of the concept/realness of “reality” or “the real.” You say we’ve got to have a robust understanding of “the real” and give reasons that argue for its robustness and, dare I say it, its reality. Otherwise we can’t understand why science and any other avenue to truth and the real works. We bang into a world out there, if you drop that notion then we lose touch with it and you (Rortians) are making believe that there is no world we bang into.
** I say, channeling Rorty, philosophers have made a valiant effort to know reality through metaphysics and ontology, debates about realism vs. anti-realism, but they’ve been unsuccessful. Let’s stop those debates about this entity that always seems to be on the other side of knowing and just continue with our inquiries and understand them as the result of social practices that produce useful or un-useful results. Scientists will still talk about discovering reality, but there isn’t much for philosophers to add to our knowledge of reality. Let's do a Wittgensteinian therapy on the need for an extra-pragmatic understanding of reality.
** Does that describe the difference?
** I’d go on to ask:
** Is there anything more to know about reality than that it stands as kind of absolute but ever unattainable goal which may or may not be correcting inquiry so that inquiry can approach it? Is there anything for philosophers to say about it – reality – beyond the various knowings of it in science, mysticism, religion, poetry, literature, history? Do the natural sciences tell us about physical reality as it is in itself and so help us with our metaphysical investigations or does science give us one extraordinarily powerful, elegant, useful, dangerous, predictively successful view of physical reality? Is there anything else for philosophers to do with reality? Can they tell us something more about It?
** You’re saying, “Hey Rorty, don’t be so fixated on the rigid, absolutistic, Platonic, Kantian-noumenal, reality. Rorty, you betray your beholdeness to absolutism in your fixation on rejecting it. Instead let’s set aside that Absolute Reality and the attempt to dismiss any discussion of Reality and talk about "reality." There is something for philosophers to contribute, that we don’t get from scientists, about that non-Absolutist reality.
** Second Approach: And here are your assertions and my response interspersed:
I'm not "satisfied that working toward agreement with my fellows" is all that science is doing and I'd venture to guess that most scientists don't see their work that way either. Most scientists view their work (at least the biologists and physicists I've read) as a kind of exploration, an adventure of discovery.
** But we’re asking philosophical questions. Scientists are usually poor philosophers. Rorty has a reply to the Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg, (in “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics”) the only time I’ve sensed irritation in his tone, and, ironically, he defends philosophy from that scientist’s crude defense of a crude realism.
They almost expect to be surprised by the real. They wonder, ponder and nature often surprises them. It's not just playing with human models that have no ultimate reference or can't "arrive" at any reference beyond itself. I mean, do you think it makes sense to say that germ theory, gravitational theory, cell theory and any other well verified theory in science has no reference to the way things really are?
** What’s the difference between the way things are and the way things really are? I think philosophers think there is a “really are” beyond “are.” Is that “really” the too severe Reality that Rorty is hooked on or the more moderate real that you are advocating as a more reasonable view? And what is that real like? We have no idea how things “really” are but we have been successful in wondering if our current understanding fits all the evidence and, as a shorthand, saying “but is it true?”.
Of course, scientific theories don't disclose reality in any final, once and for all sense, but surely they are more correct than theories of infection that appeal to demon spirits. If Rorty were right there'd be no more sense in saying that astronomy is preferable to astrology or evolution to creationism so long as we can secure agreement that that's what reality is like from our fellows, or enough of our fellows.
** But what is the criterion for determining greater correctness? If it’s explanatory power then demon spirits could be as good within its overall weltanschauung as the theory of infection, depending on the needs of the person to retain their culture. If it’s what cures better I’d say the theory of infection. But I don’t see the use of “gets reality better” or “more like the way things are” except for rhetorical and practical purposes. But astrology is preferable to astronomy if you are trying to understand yourself and guide your life. Does astronomy do that? But if you want to predict the next eclipse or know the extent of the cosmos, I say, do astronomy. If your criterion for knowing the origin of species originates in the absolute faith in the literal words of God in the Bible then creationism is superior. My God! what better authority is there than God? I think that’s wrong, but how do I convince the believer? Steven Hales argues that we have to accept a relativism when it comes to deciding between the rational worldview, the Christian worldview and the tribal hallucinogenic spirituality worldview in Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy. Also Rorty is a Kuhnian and there is a different conception of science derived from Kuhn and the sociology of science which does not see science as a gradually more accurate representing of the real.
But the history of science is and has been a testing of models, falsification of models and re-testing against the benchmark of the real.
** Is there any more to say about the real beyond the ways we have of identifying it? Is it matter, spirit, consciousness, God, some substance, the Tao? How do we know which it is? Is it fruitful to pursue it philosophically? It’s certainly fruitful to continue describing and explaining physical reality using science. Is there a difference between what science currently tells us physical reality is like and what reality is really like?
Often, it has been the individual against the community in this regard. Scientists often don't want to see reality in a certain way, they have their own pet theories of the way things are, but if the theory unifies the disparate data in a powerful and elegant way, they can or often do come around.
** Rorty is fine with criteria such as “powerful” and “elegant.” Powerful meaning predictive, consistent with the evidence, cohering with what else we know. Those are fine criteria of science. The coming around can be explained by the adherence to certain criteria and the arising of the younger generations overturning of the older generations conceptions. The creative individual, on the margins, Einstein let's say, takes the anomalies and evidence and the applied standards of arguing and does something new. This causes a crisis for the established figures. They have to wrestle with it, to the degree that there is a democratic structure in their institution. A debate ensues, younger people (usually younger) are excited by this new approach and enter the fray. A struggle ensues. One side wins. We can say the winners have a better explanation, more of the evidence fits, old conundrums are solved (and new ones created) the old theory’s limitations are seen and it is incorporated into a better, more coherent whole. We can do more things – build atom bombs, yea! Is the world remade in the new conceptions image or do we know better what the world is really like?
Scientific theories and their verification are not at all as arbitrary and socially constructed as Rorty makes out. Rorty wants a guarantee and behind his pragmatism there may be this rhetoric of regret, fueled by his Cartesian anxiety. Knowing is taking a look for him and if he can't be supplied with the super look that will bridge the gap between theory and reality, then we're supposed to give up on knowing reality and settle for playing with models and garnering votes from our peers. But knowing is not taking a look, at least not for Aristotle. It may be for Plato. I'm not sure.
** So you’re saying that Rorty is too hung up on a crudely dichotomous, black-and-white division between Reality with a capital “r” versus not talking about Reality except as is useful in given situations which is too pale and makes no sense of science’s successes. And he misses that there is another small “r” real that is neither of those. Is there a philosophical debate about the character of that moderate real? Maybe I’ve gotten too much of my understanding of philosophy from Rorty. Who are the thinkers talking about it and what do they say it’s like? Do they distinguish old-fashioned, Reality, the noumena, what’s seen from the God’s-eye-view from this other thing called “the real” which scientists are very good at knowing and telling us about? And is this real quarks or sub-quarks or something else according to these debates?
Whew!
Thursday, September 01, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part X
The Philosopher writes:
I'm not "satisfied that working toward agreement with my fellows" is all that science is doing and I'd venture to guess that most scientists don't see their work that way either. Most scientists view their work (at least the biologists and physicists I've read) as a kind of exploration, an adventure of discovery. They almost expect to be surprised by the real. They wonder, ponder and nature often surprises them. It 's not just playing with human models that have no ultimate reference or can't "arrive" at any reference beyond itself. I mean, do you think it makes sense to say that germ theory, gravitational theory, cell theory and any other well verified theory in science has no reference to the way things really are? Of course, scientific theories don't disclose reality in any final, once and for all sense, but surely they are more correct than theories of infection that appeal to demon spirits. If Rorty were right there'd be no more sense in saying that astronomy is preferable to astrology or evolution to creationism so long as we can secure agreement that that's what reality is like from our fellows, or enough of our fellows. But the history of science is and has been a testing of models, falsification of models and re-testing against the benchmark of the real. Often, it has been the individual against the community in this regard. Scientists often don't want to see reality in a certain way, they have their own pet theories of the way things are, but if the theory unifies the disparate data in a powerful and elegant way, they can or often do come around. Scientific theories and their verification are not at all as arbitrary and socially constructed as Rorty makes out. Rorty wants a guarantee and behind his pragmatism there may be this rhetoric of regret, fueled by his Cartesian anxiety. Knowing is taking a look for him and if he can't be supplied with the super look that will bridge the gap between theory and reality, then we're supposed to give up on knowing reality and settle for playing with models and garnering votes from our peers. But knowing is not taking a look, at least not for Aristotle. It may be for Plato. I'm not sure.
I'm not "satisfied that working toward agreement with my fellows" is all that science is doing and I'd venture to guess that most scientists don't see their work that way either. Most scientists view their work (at least the biologists and physicists I've read) as a kind of exploration, an adventure of discovery. They almost expect to be surprised by the real. They wonder, ponder and nature often surprises them. It 's not just playing with human models that have no ultimate reference or can't "arrive" at any reference beyond itself. I mean, do you think it makes sense to say that germ theory, gravitational theory, cell theory and any other well verified theory in science has no reference to the way things really are? Of course, scientific theories don't disclose reality in any final, once and for all sense, but surely they are more correct than theories of infection that appeal to demon spirits. If Rorty were right there'd be no more sense in saying that astronomy is preferable to astrology or evolution to creationism so long as we can secure agreement that that's what reality is like from our fellows, or enough of our fellows. But the history of science is and has been a testing of models, falsification of models and re-testing against the benchmark of the real. Often, it has been the individual against the community in this regard. Scientists often don't want to see reality in a certain way, they have their own pet theories of the way things are, but if the theory unifies the disparate data in a powerful and elegant way, they can or often do come around. Scientific theories and their verification are not at all as arbitrary and socially constructed as Rorty makes out. Rorty wants a guarantee and behind his pragmatism there may be this rhetoric of regret, fueled by his Cartesian anxiety. Knowing is taking a look for him and if he can't be supplied with the super look that will bridge the gap between theory and reality, then we're supposed to give up on knowing reality and settle for playing with models and garnering votes from our peers. But knowing is not taking a look, at least not for Aristotle. It may be for Plato. I'm not sure.
Saturday, August 06, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part IX
The Philosopher responds.
My responses to him are inserted and always follow an asterisk *:
I like your spirited reply!
I guess I'm going to just have to read that damn book [Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature] and hope to God I don't lose my "illusions."
* This, for me, raises the question of what makes us attach to the ideas, conceptions, beliefs that we are attached to that "seem right" even when (or if) the argumentation and evidence don't prove them or when the relevant community doesn't agree on an answer? We could say that some of us have an intuitive connection to the way things are, but that begs the question of whether there is a "way in which things are." And what's the nature of the "intuitive" connection? There is an interesting, bypassed world hidden in words like: assumption, intuition, conversion.
That having been said, sometimes it seems to me that Rorty is too absolute. (Ha!). Either the Real is self-present to us in some absolute way, a la Descartes, "clear and distinct" and all that or we must simply give up any hope of knowing the real and turn our attention to more "useful" topics. But isn't that attitude overdrawn? I mean, why can't we, in Aristotelian fashion, move toward the real, make models, test them, listen to what nature is telling us she's like, try to correct for bias, and "slouch toward verisimilitude" (with apologies to Yeats). We don't have to be the (Rortian) victims of his Cartesian anxiety. Rorty seems to couch things in this "all or I want no part of it" way. I believe science is one very good way, perhaps our best and only way, of getting out of our way, and letting nature tell us what she's like. How, for example, can we explain its pragmatic success if it doesn't bear some semblance to the real (note small r)? Anyway, I suspect Rorty's model of knowledge is too Platonic. He'd have done good for a good dose of the Stagirite. But, hell, I haven't done my homework.
* Rorty would be fine with making models, testing them, correcting for bias, even using colloquially the phrases "listening to nature" and "seems right but is it true?" as long as some ambitious philosopher doesn't say "Is nature really telling us things?, What is the 'real'?" Being a pragmatist he'd support all scientific inquiry. He just recommends not getting fooled by metaphors - here the aural metaphor of "listening" rather than the visual metaphor of a "mirror of nature" - like nature telling us what she's like. He suggests that we be satisfied with working towards agreement with our fellows and not taking the Peircian step of "The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in".
* Now how does Rorty explain why science works so well if it's not telling us what nature is like? But does poetry work less well? Does it tell us what nature is like?
* Here's Rorty: "[The pragmatist] drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope. His argument for the view is that several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of 'correspondence' (either of thought to things or of words to things). The pragmatist takes the moral of this discouraging history to be that 'true sentences work because they correspond to the way things are' is no more illuminating than 'it is right because it fulfills the Moral Law.' Both remarks, in the pragmatist's eyes, are empty metaphysical compliments - harmless as rhetorical pats on the back to the successful inquirer or agent, but troublesome if taken seriously and 'clarified' philosophically." Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xvii.
* So you and Rorty agree on the doing of science, he would just caution against letting the sometimes useful concept "real" slide into the historically unsuccessful investigation of the "Real."
Thank you for your interesting reply.
* And thank you.
My responses to him are inserted and always follow an asterisk *:
I like your spirited reply!
I guess I'm going to just have to read that damn book [Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature] and hope to God I don't lose my "illusions."
* This, for me, raises the question of what makes us attach to the ideas, conceptions, beliefs that we are attached to that "seem right" even when (or if) the argumentation and evidence don't prove them or when the relevant community doesn't agree on an answer? We could say that some of us have an intuitive connection to the way things are, but that begs the question of whether there is a "way in which things are." And what's the nature of the "intuitive" connection? There is an interesting, bypassed world hidden in words like: assumption, intuition, conversion.
That having been said, sometimes it seems to me that Rorty is too absolute. (Ha!). Either the Real is self-present to us in some absolute way, a la Descartes, "clear and distinct" and all that or we must simply give up any hope of knowing the real and turn our attention to more "useful" topics. But isn't that attitude overdrawn? I mean, why can't we, in Aristotelian fashion, move toward the real, make models, test them, listen to what nature is telling us she's like, try to correct for bias, and "slouch toward verisimilitude" (with apologies to Yeats). We don't have to be the (Rortian) victims of his Cartesian anxiety. Rorty seems to couch things in this "all or I want no part of it" way. I believe science is one very good way, perhaps our best and only way, of getting out of our way, and letting nature tell us what she's like. How, for example, can we explain its pragmatic success if it doesn't bear some semblance to the real (note small r)? Anyway, I suspect Rorty's model of knowledge is too Platonic. He'd have done good for a good dose of the Stagirite. But, hell, I haven't done my homework.
* Rorty would be fine with making models, testing them, correcting for bias, even using colloquially the phrases "listening to nature" and "seems right but is it true?" as long as some ambitious philosopher doesn't say "Is nature really telling us things?, What is the 'real'?" Being a pragmatist he'd support all scientific inquiry. He just recommends not getting fooled by metaphors - here the aural metaphor of "listening" rather than the visual metaphor of a "mirror of nature" - like nature telling us what she's like. He suggests that we be satisfied with working towards agreement with our fellows and not taking the Peircian step of "The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in".
* Now how does Rorty explain why science works so well if it's not telling us what nature is like? But does poetry work less well? Does it tell us what nature is like?
* Here's Rorty: "[The pragmatist] drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope. His argument for the view is that several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of 'correspondence' (either of thought to things or of words to things). The pragmatist takes the moral of this discouraging history to be that 'true sentences work because they correspond to the way things are' is no more illuminating than 'it is right because it fulfills the Moral Law.' Both remarks, in the pragmatist's eyes, are empty metaphysical compliments - harmless as rhetorical pats on the back to the successful inquirer or agent, but troublesome if taken seriously and 'clarified' philosophically." Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xvii.
* So you and Rorty agree on the doing of science, he would just caution against letting the sometimes useful concept "real" slide into the historically unsuccessful investigation of the "Real."
Thank you for your interesting reply.
* And thank you.
Monday, July 18, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part VIII
The Philosopher was wondering:
I've been thinking about this question regarding Rorty: Is there
anything natural in Rorty's philosophy, anything, as he would put it, "found"? Or, is everything, "made?"
I thought:
Rorty's a big champion of the natural sciences and we certainly use the designation "natural" usefully. Humans are understood to be natural beings causally tied up in the whole causal unfolding of the physical world. And of course there are our everyday uses of "found" and "made".
But if you or someone else wants the distinction between "found" and "made" to do some epistemological work, like be a reliable distinction between ontologically distinct things one of which - the found - is simply there in the same way for all of us and so serves as a universal touchstone or referrent for reality and so creates an epistemological task of how we know when and who has the perspicuous representing of it beyond all "made" or human-createdness, then they will be disappointed as we see by a review of the history of philosophical attempts to find such a referrent and they should really talk about other, more useful, topics.
By telling a particular story of the history of philosophy Rorty wants to convince people that a distinction - the eternal and the contingent, the phenomena and the noumena, how things are in and of themselves and how they are because we see them that way - has led us astray and been ultimately unproductive, and so other topics are better to be discussed.
But maybe I'm not understanding your question. I assumed that you were saying that natural was connected to found as artificial or artificed would be connected to made.
This is one of the main themes of "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." I'm reading it again twenty years later and poring over it like its a sacred text. I want to be converted and inducted into the cult! Yet aren't I already a true believer? It seems some small part won't let go. Maybe that's the attachment to the absolute, the transcendent, the Truth. And is that a sane connection to what's real or is it the last vestige of the illusion?
Ah philosophy!
I've been thinking about this question regarding Rorty: Is there
anything natural in Rorty's philosophy, anything, as he would put it, "found"? Or, is everything, "made?"
I thought:
Rorty's a big champion of the natural sciences and we certainly use the designation "natural" usefully. Humans are understood to be natural beings causally tied up in the whole causal unfolding of the physical world. And of course there are our everyday uses of "found" and "made".
But if you or someone else wants the distinction between "found" and "made" to do some epistemological work, like be a reliable distinction between ontologically distinct things one of which - the found - is simply there in the same way for all of us and so serves as a universal touchstone or referrent for reality and so creates an epistemological task of how we know when and who has the perspicuous representing of it beyond all "made" or human-createdness, then they will be disappointed as we see by a review of the history of philosophical attempts to find such a referrent and they should really talk about other, more useful, topics.
By telling a particular story of the history of philosophy Rorty wants to convince people that a distinction - the eternal and the contingent, the phenomena and the noumena, how things are in and of themselves and how they are because we see them that way - has led us astray and been ultimately unproductive, and so other topics are better to be discussed.
But maybe I'm not understanding your question. I assumed that you were saying that natural was connected to found as artificial or artificed would be connected to made.
This is one of the main themes of "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." I'm reading it again twenty years later and poring over it like its a sacred text. I want to be converted and inducted into the cult! Yet aren't I already a true believer? It seems some small part won't let go. Maybe that's the attachment to the absolute, the transcendent, the Truth. And is that a sane connection to what's real or is it the last vestige of the illusion?
Ah philosophy!
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part VII
I respond to the philosopher. My responses follow the ***
*** Good to hear your questions and criticisms.
I don't know. You do argue well and forcefully. I am not convinced and I can see you are not convinced by me.
*** Yes, that’s why there is the flourishing area of philosophy examining "rational disagreements."
Let me ask a few more questions about something Rorty says in this text book I have. He says: "A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' (or 'right' or 'just'). . . whatever view wins in a free and open encounter."
Some of my questions are these:
1) Who decides who wins in this "free and open encounter?"
*** The participants and the institutional structures that deem these things. If the participants agree – let’s say the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we agree there is a 90% chance of man-made climate change – then that’s a powerful, but not conclusive, “win”. That doesn’t mean others won’t disagree – Bjorn Lomborg – and continue to speak against it. Or, science journals decide what gets published. That’s an institutionalized way for someone to “win.” And the winners have to be contended with either as what you must cite in your article or as what you must criticize in order to change a prevailing view you think is wrong. Rorty used the word “content” in that quote to emphasize that that’s all we’ve got, we have to settle for that level of surety.
Who decides what the criteria of "winning" are?
*** The institutional norms in science are decided or maintained by those in power. The criteria that they use have a history dating back to the origins of modern science. But even those criteria have to be struggled over with different criterion gaining and losing power depending on trends in argumentation. The logician Graham Priest has written about the lack of argumentation for the law of non-contradiction and argued that there are true contradictions at the limits of thought. He calls this view "dialetheism." I'm not saying it's right (although I think it is), it just seems like an example of criteria being examined and modified.
2) Hasn't Rorty smuggled in an implicit notion of good into this definition by having the encounter be free and open? If he has, then he has begged the question regarding what is true, right and just. I think this may be true since the reason that he wants the encounter to be "free and open" is presumably, because he thinks that, in this way, it will be more fair, more just and well, right. But isn't this just to assume the truth of the position you should justify?
*** But doesn’t everyone argue as best they can for their view and then if pushed to the limit say: “Well, I just assume, that cruelty is the worst thing we do to each other.” Rorty isn’t saying he doesn’t have beliefs about what is just and right and best justified (true) he’s saying that we can have discussions about our differing moral and political views but let’s drop the Philosophical discussion about what is The Right Moral View, the absolutely right moral view. That conversation looked like it would be helpful centuries ago, but now its gotten so dry and specialized that philosophers no longer play a role in public intellectual life.
3) Following on 2), I want to ask, Why should the encounter be free and open? If the object is winning and if winning determines what is true and right and just, then why not win by any means necessary?
*** If we watch a sports race or political election and are focused on who won, it doesn’t mean we don’t care how they won. Why? Because in the sports race we’re interested in finding the currently best at that sport according to the current rules, or politically we’ve established a majority rule procedure to settle disputes and called it democracy. So winning by the rules is important because we think we get better outcomes and so solve our differences and problems better. Rorty could say that “free and open” allows more people to flourish, feel dignity, offer more varied views and so makes for a better discussion and that these are good things because they make for a better society, which is one that is more inkeeping with the image that he and his allies have for society.
4) If what is true and just and right is determined by who wins, then what happens to minority voices? If winning means simply whichever side gets the most votes (at least that's what I would assume he means) then does that mean that the minority position must be wrong? I assume that this is not what he means, but I wonder what his position on minority views would be since they are not on the "winning" side and so, at least by his definition, they can't be on the side of what is true, right and just.
I'm aware that he advocates cultivating a stance of "irony" toward our "final vocabulary" and so he probably wouldn't want even those who "win" to take themselves too seriously since they could "lose" next year, next month or next week!
*** I don’t think we have to press the use of “winning” in that sentence too far. Rorty can say that winning in intellectual forums is almost never a 100% win. The laws of physics are as close to 100% as you get perhaps, but, short of that, so much is revisable as new generations and other societal changes occur. I can see him elaborating a view in which there are current relative winners and losers and that each individual will, depending on their view, assign differing valuations to the differing sides: a current winner is considered by person A as a should-be-a-loser and person B as a rightful winner.
*** So Rorty writes several lines after the sentence you quote: ‘Habermas] still insists on seeing the process of undistorted communication as convergent, and seeing that convergence as a guarantee of the “rationality” of such communication. The residual difference I have with Habermas is that his universalism makes him substitute such convergence for ahistorical grounding, whereas my insistence on the contingency of language makes me suspicious of the very idea of the “universal validity” which such convergence is supposed to underwrite. Habermas wants to preserve the traditional story (common to Hegel and to Peirce) of asymptotic approach to foci imaginarii [certainties, I believe]. I want to replace this with a story of increasing willingness to live with plurality and to stop asking for universal validity. I want to see freely arrived at agreement as agreement on how to accomplish common purposes (e.g., prediction and control of the behavior of atoms or people, equalizing life-chances, decreasing cruelty)…” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p.67.
Something else I wrote a couple nights ago but didn't send is this:
Here's a pragmatic argument from Socrates against postmodern pragmatism. It's in Plato's Meno:
"I wouldn't swear to other things on behalf of the argument [immortality of the soul, knowledge as recollection] but for this, if I were able, I would fight in word and in deed: that we would be better and more courageous and less idle, if we thought that we ought to seek for what we don't know than if we thought that what we don't know it isn't possible to seek nor ought we to seek."
(My stilted translation of Meno 86b)
I'd say that if you think that truth and good are just human constructions, then there is no real reason to defend them since we're only fighting, in the end, for our right to use our "final vocabulary." But what is that? Is that worth fighting for? Dying for? I don't think there are many things that I would kill for, but I do think there ought to be some things worth dying for. Rorty's postmodern pragmatism gives us nothing to live for or die for and to that extent it is potentially corrupting in just the way that Socrates worries about in the passage above.
If Rorty is right, then we can't be wrong since there's only your perspective and my perspective and his and hers. But no perspective is really any better than any other since they're all perspectives that are made not found.
Socrates' position is just right--between relativism and dogmatism. He rejects both the position that there is no Truth (only truths) and the position that whatever that Truth is, he knows it. He believes that we can and must advance toward the truth. Progress entails vigorous self-examination and examination of others, but if there is nothing to advance toward, nothing to strive for, this can lead to the sort of intellectual and moral complacency he's talking about. So, in the end, I side with Socrates on the grounds of what effects Rorty's philosophy could have on our character. Take care, gentlemen.
*** When and how do we know that we know the Truth? If we can’t know then how does it guide inquiry? It’s true that Rorty does not give us something to live and die for. But who lives or dies for the concept of absolute truth?
*** And is our choice only between striving for Truth and nothing to strive for? This sounds like the either personal taste or an independent standard dichotomy from a previous exchange. We can be motivated to vigorous self-examination and examination of others so that we can learn more, interpret more creatively, create a better world, make our ideas cohere better, or solve problems together. None of those are the Truth but neither are they “nothing”.
*** Why the “just” in “just human constructions”, what’s wrong with human constructions? And what’s the difference between a “real reason” and a “reason”? If “final vocabulary” seems too thin or flip we could say we would fight for our “deeply held beliefs.” They are connected to and gain their meaning from many things like our attachment to family, land, society, way of life, future generations, etc. Those things and others are worth fighting for even if we can’t show that or don’t know if they correspond to the independent standard of truth and the good.
*** Whew! Now you must be convinced! It seems we don’t give up our deeply held beliefs so easily whether we think they have or could have the backing of absoluteness or not.
*** Good to hear your questions and criticisms.
I don't know. You do argue well and forcefully. I am not convinced and I can see you are not convinced by me.
*** Yes, that’s why there is the flourishing area of philosophy examining "rational disagreements."
Let me ask a few more questions about something Rorty says in this text book I have. He says: "A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' (or 'right' or 'just'). . . whatever view wins in a free and open encounter."
Some of my questions are these:
1) Who decides who wins in this "free and open encounter?"
*** The participants and the institutional structures that deem these things. If the participants agree – let’s say the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we agree there is a 90% chance of man-made climate change – then that’s a powerful, but not conclusive, “win”. That doesn’t mean others won’t disagree – Bjorn Lomborg – and continue to speak against it. Or, science journals decide what gets published. That’s an institutionalized way for someone to “win.” And the winners have to be contended with either as what you must cite in your article or as what you must criticize in order to change a prevailing view you think is wrong. Rorty used the word “content” in that quote to emphasize that that’s all we’ve got, we have to settle for that level of surety.
Who decides what the criteria of "winning" are?
*** The institutional norms in science are decided or maintained by those in power. The criteria that they use have a history dating back to the origins of modern science. But even those criteria have to be struggled over with different criterion gaining and losing power depending on trends in argumentation. The logician Graham Priest has written about the lack of argumentation for the law of non-contradiction and argued that there are true contradictions at the limits of thought. He calls this view "dialetheism." I'm not saying it's right (although I think it is), it just seems like an example of criteria being examined and modified.
2) Hasn't Rorty smuggled in an implicit notion of good into this definition by having the encounter be free and open? If he has, then he has begged the question regarding what is true, right and just. I think this may be true since the reason that he wants the encounter to be "free and open" is presumably, because he thinks that, in this way, it will be more fair, more just and well, right. But isn't this just to assume the truth of the position you should justify?
*** But doesn’t everyone argue as best they can for their view and then if pushed to the limit say: “Well, I just assume, that cruelty is the worst thing we do to each other.” Rorty isn’t saying he doesn’t have beliefs about what is just and right and best justified (true) he’s saying that we can have discussions about our differing moral and political views but let’s drop the Philosophical discussion about what is The Right Moral View, the absolutely right moral view. That conversation looked like it would be helpful centuries ago, but now its gotten so dry and specialized that philosophers no longer play a role in public intellectual life.
3) Following on 2), I want to ask, Why should the encounter be free and open? If the object is winning and if winning determines what is true and right and just, then why not win by any means necessary?
*** If we watch a sports race or political election and are focused on who won, it doesn’t mean we don’t care how they won. Why? Because in the sports race we’re interested in finding the currently best at that sport according to the current rules, or politically we’ve established a majority rule procedure to settle disputes and called it democracy. So winning by the rules is important because we think we get better outcomes and so solve our differences and problems better. Rorty could say that “free and open” allows more people to flourish, feel dignity, offer more varied views and so makes for a better discussion and that these are good things because they make for a better society, which is one that is more inkeeping with the image that he and his allies have for society.
4) If what is true and just and right is determined by who wins, then what happens to minority voices? If winning means simply whichever side gets the most votes (at least that's what I would assume he means) then does that mean that the minority position must be wrong? I assume that this is not what he means, but I wonder what his position on minority views would be since they are not on the "winning" side and so, at least by his definition, they can't be on the side of what is true, right and just.
I'm aware that he advocates cultivating a stance of "irony" toward our "final vocabulary" and so he probably wouldn't want even those who "win" to take themselves too seriously since they could "lose" next year, next month or next week!
*** I don’t think we have to press the use of “winning” in that sentence too far. Rorty can say that winning in intellectual forums is almost never a 100% win. The laws of physics are as close to 100% as you get perhaps, but, short of that, so much is revisable as new generations and other societal changes occur. I can see him elaborating a view in which there are current relative winners and losers and that each individual will, depending on their view, assign differing valuations to the differing sides: a current winner is considered by person A as a should-be-a-loser and person B as a rightful winner.
*** So Rorty writes several lines after the sentence you quote: ‘Habermas] still insists on seeing the process of undistorted communication as convergent, and seeing that convergence as a guarantee of the “rationality” of such communication. The residual difference I have with Habermas is that his universalism makes him substitute such convergence for ahistorical grounding, whereas my insistence on the contingency of language makes me suspicious of the very idea of the “universal validity” which such convergence is supposed to underwrite. Habermas wants to preserve the traditional story (common to Hegel and to Peirce) of asymptotic approach to foci imaginarii [certainties, I believe]. I want to replace this with a story of increasing willingness to live with plurality and to stop asking for universal validity. I want to see freely arrived at agreement as agreement on how to accomplish common purposes (e.g., prediction and control of the behavior of atoms or people, equalizing life-chances, decreasing cruelty)…” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p.67.
Something else I wrote a couple nights ago but didn't send is this:
Here's a pragmatic argument from Socrates against postmodern pragmatism. It's in Plato's Meno:
"I wouldn't swear to other things on behalf of the argument [immortality of the soul, knowledge as recollection] but for this, if I were able, I would fight in word and in deed: that we would be better and more courageous and less idle, if we thought that we ought to seek for what we don't know than if we thought that what we don't know it isn't possible to seek nor ought we to seek."
(My stilted translation of Meno 86b)
I'd say that if you think that truth and good are just human constructions, then there is no real reason to defend them since we're only fighting, in the end, for our right to use our "final vocabulary." But what is that? Is that worth fighting for? Dying for? I don't think there are many things that I would kill for, but I do think there ought to be some things worth dying for. Rorty's postmodern pragmatism gives us nothing to live for or die for and to that extent it is potentially corrupting in just the way that Socrates worries about in the passage above.
If Rorty is right, then we can't be wrong since there's only your perspective and my perspective and his and hers. But no perspective is really any better than any other since they're all perspectives that are made not found.
Socrates' position is just right--between relativism and dogmatism. He rejects both the position that there is no Truth (only truths) and the position that whatever that Truth is, he knows it. He believes that we can and must advance toward the truth. Progress entails vigorous self-examination and examination of others, but if there is nothing to advance toward, nothing to strive for, this can lead to the sort of intellectual and moral complacency he's talking about. So, in the end, I side with Socrates on the grounds of what effects Rorty's philosophy could have on our character. Take care, gentlemen.
*** When and how do we know that we know the Truth? If we can’t know then how does it guide inquiry? It’s true that Rorty does not give us something to live and die for. But who lives or dies for the concept of absolute truth?
*** And is our choice only between striving for Truth and nothing to strive for? This sounds like the either personal taste or an independent standard dichotomy from a previous exchange. We can be motivated to vigorous self-examination and examination of others so that we can learn more, interpret more creatively, create a better world, make our ideas cohere better, or solve problems together. None of those are the Truth but neither are they “nothing”.
*** Why the “just” in “just human constructions”, what’s wrong with human constructions? And what’s the difference between a “real reason” and a “reason”? If “final vocabulary” seems too thin or flip we could say we would fight for our “deeply held beliefs.” They are connected to and gain their meaning from many things like our attachment to family, land, society, way of life, future generations, etc. Those things and others are worth fighting for even if we can’t show that or don’t know if they correspond to the independent standard of truth and the good.
*** Whew! Now you must be convinced! It seems we don’t give up our deeply held beliefs so easily whether we think they have or could have the backing of absoluteness or not.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part VI
The philosopher writes:
I don't know. You do argue well and forcefully. I am not convinced and I can see you are not convinced by me. Let me ask a few more questions about something Rorty says in this text book I have. He says: "A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' (or 'right' or 'just'). . . whatever view wins in a free and open encounter."
Some of my questions are these:
1) Who decides who wins in this "free and open encounter?" Who decides what the criteria of "winning" are?
2) Hasn't Rorty smuggled in an implicit notion of good into this definition by having the encounter be free and open? If he has, then he has begged the question regarding what is true, right and just. I think this may be true since the reason that he wants the encounter to be "free and open" is presumably, because he thinks that, in this way, it will be more fair, more just and well, right. But isn't this just to assume the truth of the position you should justify?
3) Following on 2), I want to ask, Why should the encounter be free and open? If the object is winning and if winning determines what is true and right and just, then why not win by any means necessary?
4) If what is true and just and right is determined by who wins, then what happens to minority voices? If winning means simply whichever side gets the most votes (at least that's what I would assume he means) then does that mean that the minority position must be wrong? I assume that this is not what he means, but I wonder what his position on minority views would be since they are not on the "winning" side and so, at least by his definition, they can't be on the side of what is true, right and just.
I'm aware that he advocates cultivating a stance of "irony" toward our "final vocabulary" and so he probably wouldn't want even those who "win" to take themselves too seriously since they could "lose" next year, next month or next week!
Something else I wrote a couple nights ago but didn't send is this:
Here's a pragmatic argument from Socrates against postmodern pragmatism. It's in Plato's Meno:
"I wouldn't swear to other things on behalf of the argument [immortality of the soul, knowledge as recollection] but for this, if I were able, I would fight in word and in deed: that we would be better and more courageous and less idle, if we thought that we ought to seek for what we don't know than if we thought that what we don't know it isn't possible to seek nor ought we to seek."
(My stilted translation of Meno 86b)
I'd say that if you think that truth and good are just human constructions, then there is no real reason to defend them since we're only fighting, in the end, for our right to use our "final vocabulary." But what is that? Is that worth fighting for? Dying for? I don't think there are many things that I would kill for, but I do think there ought to be some things worth dying for. Rorty's postmodern pragmatism gives us nothing to live for or die for and to that extent it is potentially corrupting in just the way that Socrates worries about in the passage above.
If Rorty is right, then we can't be wrong since there's only your perspective and my perspective and his and hers. But no perspective is really any better than any other since they're all perspectives that are made not found.
Socrates' position is just right--between relativism and dogmatism. He rejects both the position that there is no Truth (only truths) and the position that whatever that Truth is, he knows it. He believes that we can and must advance toward the truth. Progress entails vigorous self-examination and examination of others, but if there is nothing to advance toward, nothing to strive for, this can lead to the sort of intellectual and moral complacency he's talking about. So, in the end, I side with Socrates on the grounds of what effects Rorty's philosophy could have on our character.
I don't know. You do argue well and forcefully. I am not convinced and I can see you are not convinced by me. Let me ask a few more questions about something Rorty says in this text book I have. He says: "A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' (or 'right' or 'just'). . . whatever view wins in a free and open encounter."
Some of my questions are these:
1) Who decides who wins in this "free and open encounter?" Who decides what the criteria of "winning" are?
2) Hasn't Rorty smuggled in an implicit notion of good into this definition by having the encounter be free and open? If he has, then he has begged the question regarding what is true, right and just. I think this may be true since the reason that he wants the encounter to be "free and open" is presumably, because he thinks that, in this way, it will be more fair, more just and well, right. But isn't this just to assume the truth of the position you should justify?
3) Following on 2), I want to ask, Why should the encounter be free and open? If the object is winning and if winning determines what is true and right and just, then why not win by any means necessary?
4) If what is true and just and right is determined by who wins, then what happens to minority voices? If winning means simply whichever side gets the most votes (at least that's what I would assume he means) then does that mean that the minority position must be wrong? I assume that this is not what he means, but I wonder what his position on minority views would be since they are not on the "winning" side and so, at least by his definition, they can't be on the side of what is true, right and just.
I'm aware that he advocates cultivating a stance of "irony" toward our "final vocabulary" and so he probably wouldn't want even those who "win" to take themselves too seriously since they could "lose" next year, next month or next week!
Something else I wrote a couple nights ago but didn't send is this:
Here's a pragmatic argument from Socrates against postmodern pragmatism. It's in Plato's Meno:
"I wouldn't swear to other things on behalf of the argument [immortality of the soul, knowledge as recollection] but for this, if I were able, I would fight in word and in deed: that we would be better and more courageous and less idle, if we thought that we ought to seek for what we don't know than if we thought that what we don't know it isn't possible to seek nor ought we to seek."
(My stilted translation of Meno 86b)
I'd say that if you think that truth and good are just human constructions, then there is no real reason to defend them since we're only fighting, in the end, for our right to use our "final vocabulary." But what is that? Is that worth fighting for? Dying for? I don't think there are many things that I would kill for, but I do think there ought to be some things worth dying for. Rorty's postmodern pragmatism gives us nothing to live for or die for and to that extent it is potentially corrupting in just the way that Socrates worries about in the passage above.
If Rorty is right, then we can't be wrong since there's only your perspective and my perspective and his and hers. But no perspective is really any better than any other since they're all perspectives that are made not found.
Socrates' position is just right--between relativism and dogmatism. He rejects both the position that there is no Truth (only truths) and the position that whatever that Truth is, he knows it. He believes that we can and must advance toward the truth. Progress entails vigorous self-examination and examination of others, but if there is nothing to advance toward, nothing to strive for, this can lead to the sort of intellectual and moral complacency he's talking about. So, in the end, I side with Socrates on the grounds of what effects Rorty's philosophy could have on our character.
Friday, June 03, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part V
My responses following the *** to the social worker's comments:
I don't know if I'm responding a la Rorty, but it was Rorty who more or less convinced me that yes, the way reality functions is that the true and the good does amount to our ability to convince another.
*** But a caveat here. I hold my Chomskyan radical critique of US foreign policy for the last thirty years even though it is a minority view.
We can believe our position has some independent status, but there's nowhere to find it. You can do a study, for example a recent one that showed that more competitive societies with higher income disparities are less dynamic, show less creativity, and have lower scores of overall well being, and I can marshal that as evidence, but a committed free marketer will tear apart the study and so it goes. 1984 is what happens when the forces of justice and right (my side) don't fight hard enough against fascism, McCarthyism or whateverism. You can appeal to tradition, but traditons change. As we discussed, there's no standard meter anywhere to point to (and even a standard meter is an agreement). We're not so much inviting a person to sign onto a truth that transcends them, but one that they can agree with.
I guess I also have trouble with you using "only" in front of "individual" or "socially/cultural." Why do those standards have to be demeaned or demoted. I want to live and work in a place that shows toleration, that's free of sexism and homophobia. To me those are truly durable principles to live by, that are worth fighting for (but not fighting with violence, yet force may have to be used, like the force of law, federal marshals etc.). My reason tells me that. I don't value any social or cultural practices that go against those principles and I do think those principles transcend cultures who don't embrace such, yet I'm aware that my principles are a culture, too. Yet, no one could convince me that these principles are only true in certain cultures. So I could say, yes I value your culture in where ever, but I think practices or laws that don't allow everyone to be fully enfranchised are wrong. I love the principle of the rule of law, but I hate unjust laws.
*** And your culture transcending value of anti-sexism could be not acted upon because of another value of national sovereignty and the wrongness of military intervention in another country's affairs. So yes the Taliban's sexism is wrong, but no we shouldn't justify our invasion and occupation by using it because it violates another value: national self-determination.
I do think it's worth giving our reasons, because I do think there's something worthwhile in being reasonable, but I'd have a hard time convincing a romantic of that who values passion over thought. I wouldn't devote my time giving my reasons for my ice cream preference (though I might wax poetical about them) nor would I try to convince or even discuss with someone I felt just loved to argue (unless I was in the mood) or didn't really listen to my point of view.
I know that this position can devolve into might makes right, but that's a principle I don't agree with (unless of course when the MA Supreme Court say the state has to recognize gay marriage-- that's a might I like). But then again, I agree to abide by the country's choice in a president, even if I fight against his/her policies.
*** It may be that in the last instance might makes right. Max Weber said that the state is that entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. A certain regime of truth is in place because secular forces overthrew religious and monarchical forces and now we all know that liberal pluralist tolerant democracy is the best system even though for most of its history "democracy" had a negative connotation.
I don't know if I'm responding a la Rorty, but it was Rorty who more or less convinced me that yes, the way reality functions is that the true and the good does amount to our ability to convince another.
*** But a caveat here. I hold my Chomskyan radical critique of US foreign policy for the last thirty years even though it is a minority view.
We can believe our position has some independent status, but there's nowhere to find it. You can do a study, for example a recent one that showed that more competitive societies with higher income disparities are less dynamic, show less creativity, and have lower scores of overall well being, and I can marshal that as evidence, but a committed free marketer will tear apart the study and so it goes. 1984 is what happens when the forces of justice and right (my side) don't fight hard enough against fascism, McCarthyism or whateverism. You can appeal to tradition, but traditons change. As we discussed, there's no standard meter anywhere to point to (and even a standard meter is an agreement). We're not so much inviting a person to sign onto a truth that transcends them, but one that they can agree with.
I guess I also have trouble with you using "only" in front of "individual" or "socially/cultural." Why do those standards have to be demeaned or demoted. I want to live and work in a place that shows toleration, that's free of sexism and homophobia. To me those are truly durable principles to live by, that are worth fighting for (but not fighting with violence, yet force may have to be used, like the force of law, federal marshals etc.). My reason tells me that. I don't value any social or cultural practices that go against those principles and I do think those principles transcend cultures who don't embrace such, yet I'm aware that my principles are a culture, too. Yet, no one could convince me that these principles are only true in certain cultures. So I could say, yes I value your culture in where ever, but I think practices or laws that don't allow everyone to be fully enfranchised are wrong. I love the principle of the rule of law, but I hate unjust laws.
*** And your culture transcending value of anti-sexism could be not acted upon because of another value of national sovereignty and the wrongness of military intervention in another country's affairs. So yes the Taliban's sexism is wrong, but no we shouldn't justify our invasion and occupation by using it because it violates another value: national self-determination.
I do think it's worth giving our reasons, because I do think there's something worthwhile in being reasonable, but I'd have a hard time convincing a romantic of that who values passion over thought. I wouldn't devote my time giving my reasons for my ice cream preference (though I might wax poetical about them) nor would I try to convince or even discuss with someone I felt just loved to argue (unless I was in the mood) or didn't really listen to my point of view.
I know that this position can devolve into might makes right, but that's a principle I don't agree with (unless of course when the MA Supreme Court say the state has to recognize gay marriage-- that's a might I like). But then again, I agree to abide by the country's choice in a president, even if I fight against his/her policies.
*** It may be that in the last instance might makes right. Max Weber said that the state is that entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. A certain regime of truth is in place because secular forces overthrew religious and monarchical forces and now we all know that liberal pluralist tolerant democracy is the best system even though for most of its history "democracy" had a negative connotation.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part V
The Social Worker asserts:
I don't know if I'm responding a la Rorty, but it was Rorty who more or less convinced me that yes, the way reality functions is that the true and the good does amount to our ability to convince another. We can believe our position has some independent status, but there's nowhere to find it. You can do a study, for example a recent one that showed that more competitive societies with higher income disparities are less dynamic, show less creativity, and have lower scores of overall well being, and I can marshal that as evidence, but a committed free marketer will tear apart the study and so it goes. 1984 is what happens when the forces of justice and right (my side) don't fight hard enough against fascism, McCarthyism or whateverism. You can appeal to tradition, but traditons change. As we discussed, there's no standard meter anywhere to point to (and even a standard meter is an agreement). We're not so much inviting a person to sign onto a truth that transcends them, but one that they can agree with.
I guess I also have trouble with you using "only" in front of "individual" or "socially/cultural." Why do those standards have to be demeaned or demoted. I want to live and work in a place that shows toleration, that's free of sexism and homophobia. To me those are truly durable principles to live by, that are worth fighting for (but not fighting with violence, yet force may have to be used, like the force of law, federal marshals etc.). My reason tells me that. I don't value any social or cultural practices that go against those principles and I do think those principles transcend cultures who don't embrace such, yet I'm aware that my principles are a culture, too. Yet, no one could convince me that these principles are only true in certain cultures. So I could say, yes I value your culture in where ever, but I think practices or laws that don't allow everyone to be fully enfranchised are wrong. I love the principle of the rule of law, but I hate unjust laws.
I do think it's worth giving our reasons, because I do think there's something worthwhile in being reasonable, but I'd have a hard time convincing a romantic of that who values passion over thought. I wouldn't devote my time giving my reasons for my ice cream preference (though I might wax poetical about them) nor would I try to convince or even discuss with someone I felt just loved to argue (unless I was in the mood) or didn't really listen to my point of view.
I know that this position can devolve into might makes right, but that's a principle I don't agree with (unless of course when the MA Supreme Court say the state has to recognize gay marriage-- that's a might I like). But then again, I agree to abide by the country's choice in a president, even if I fight against his/her policies.
I don't know if I'm responding a la Rorty, but it was Rorty who more or less convinced me that yes, the way reality functions is that the true and the good does amount to our ability to convince another. We can believe our position has some independent status, but there's nowhere to find it. You can do a study, for example a recent one that showed that more competitive societies with higher income disparities are less dynamic, show less creativity, and have lower scores of overall well being, and I can marshal that as evidence, but a committed free marketer will tear apart the study and so it goes. 1984 is what happens when the forces of justice and right (my side) don't fight hard enough against fascism, McCarthyism or whateverism. You can appeal to tradition, but traditons change. As we discussed, there's no standard meter anywhere to point to (and even a standard meter is an agreement). We're not so much inviting a person to sign onto a truth that transcends them, but one that they can agree with.
I guess I also have trouble with you using "only" in front of "individual" or "socially/cultural." Why do those standards have to be demeaned or demoted. I want to live and work in a place that shows toleration, that's free of sexism and homophobia. To me those are truly durable principles to live by, that are worth fighting for (but not fighting with violence, yet force may have to be used, like the force of law, federal marshals etc.). My reason tells me that. I don't value any social or cultural practices that go against those principles and I do think those principles transcend cultures who don't embrace such, yet I'm aware that my principles are a culture, too. Yet, no one could convince me that these principles are only true in certain cultures. So I could say, yes I value your culture in where ever, but I think practices or laws that don't allow everyone to be fully enfranchised are wrong. I love the principle of the rule of law, but I hate unjust laws.
I do think it's worth giving our reasons, because I do think there's something worthwhile in being reasonable, but I'd have a hard time convincing a romantic of that who values passion over thought. I wouldn't devote my time giving my reasons for my ice cream preference (though I might wax poetical about them) nor would I try to convince or even discuss with someone I felt just loved to argue (unless I was in the mood) or didn't really listen to my point of view.
I know that this position can devolve into might makes right, but that's a principle I don't agree with (unless of course when the MA Supreme Court say the state has to recognize gay marriage-- that's a might I like). But then again, I agree to abide by the country's choice in a president, even if I fight against his/her policies.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part IV
The Philosopher replies:
Sorry it has been so long since I've replied. I've been mulling over what you wrote. I guess one thing I question is why you think that what is good or true is determined only by whether one can convince someone else of what you think. Is true or good determined only by whether we can persuade another that it is so? You may say that that's the pragmatic upshot of it. I guess I would have to agree that convincing another of what is true or good is important but should those things be reduced to solely my ability or inability to convince you of it? Surely the true and the good (however they are defined) shouldn't amount to simply my ability to convince you of whatever position I happen to hold? Surely those things have some sort of existence, meaning and status independent of whatever individuals happen to believe? Again, I want to say that if you claim that there is no such independent standard then I think that is dangerous in terms of opposing those who wish to ignore such (what I take to be) standards in the interests of defining them for their own political or social purposes. I've just finished listening to 1984 and what Rorty believes is just the sort of philosophy that Oceania and O'Brien thrives on.
The other thing is that you think that we can or should give reasons for what we believe is true or good. But why bother? If the good and the true is just a matter of contingency and is made up why should we bother giving reasons for what we believe? Isn't that like arguing that vanilla is superior to pistachio? Aren't we doing something more than expressing private or cultural preferences by giving reasons? I think so. We're appealing to another person's reason and inviting them to open themselves to a truth that transcends them. Anyway, I don't see any point to argue for my position if what I'm expressing is only my individual or socially/ culturally situated perspective.
Sorry it has been so long since I've replied. I've been mulling over what you wrote. I guess one thing I question is why you think that what is good or true is determined only by whether one can convince someone else of what you think. Is true or good determined only by whether we can persuade another that it is so? You may say that that's the pragmatic upshot of it. I guess I would have to agree that convincing another of what is true or good is important but should those things be reduced to solely my ability or inability to convince you of it? Surely the true and the good (however they are defined) shouldn't amount to simply my ability to convince you of whatever position I happen to hold? Surely those things have some sort of existence, meaning and status independent of whatever individuals happen to believe? Again, I want to say that if you claim that there is no such independent standard then I think that is dangerous in terms of opposing those who wish to ignore such (what I take to be) standards in the interests of defining them for their own political or social purposes. I've just finished listening to 1984 and what Rorty believes is just the sort of philosophy that Oceania and O'Brien thrives on.
The other thing is that you think that we can or should give reasons for what we believe is true or good. But why bother? If the good and the true is just a matter of contingency and is made up why should we bother giving reasons for what we believe? Isn't that like arguing that vanilla is superior to pistachio? Aren't we doing something more than expressing private or cultural preferences by giving reasons? I think so. We're appealing to another person's reason and inviting them to open themselves to a truth that transcends them. Anyway, I don't see any point to argue for my position if what I'm expressing is only my individual or socially/ culturally situated perspective.
Friday, May 13, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part III
The philosopher writes:
I may be thinking of this whole thing in more Kantian terms than Aristotelian, which I'm not too happy about. But, maybe not.
I think, for starters, we have to define that Protean term, "useful." It's so easy for that term to be used in a myriad number of ways. Useful for what? Useful to whom--and for what purposes? It was, useful, for whites to regard blacks as property for centuries. It was useful for males to regard females as inferior. The list goes on. Once you ask these sorts of questions, it seems to me that the question of some sort of supra-cultural norm becomes inevitable.
If one denies the existence of such a norm, then culture becomes the default court of appeal--and, as the old sociologist (whose name I have forgotten!) once said, "In the folkways, whatever is, is right." The "folkways" then call the moral shots and slavery and male superiority are "true" because they have been deemed "useful" to those in power.
In the absence of any supra-cultural, transcultural norm(s) for deciding what is "useful" Rorty's philosophy sanctifies the status quo, however that is defined by the majority or the dominant cultural voice. This is what I find so dangerous about Rorty. In his own way, he's not so radical or liberal but really rather depressingly conservative.
How are we to critique unjust social or political or moral practices in the absence of any normative notion of truth or the good? If he does offer such a critique, from where can he possibly stand?
Rorty may reply that it's just his claim that this or that is wrong or unjust, but why should we take his perspective seriously since he's just articulating his individual or cultural preference?
Well, I wrote more than I thought I would! Anway, I'm not sure I'm thinking about this correctly or adequately. I may have to come back at this from a more Aristotelian perspective, arguing more for the adequacy or inclusiveness of a moral tradition than the search for a transcultural moral norm, but for now I do think that if there is no transcultural good there can be no theoretical grounds for critiquing injustice--other than, of course, individual assertion--which I take to be inadequate because there are no rational grounds for distinguishing justice from injustice. Rorty may think he needs no rational grounds for his assertion, but then there is no ground for me to take what he is saying seriously.
And I reply:
I hope I have some good replies. Otherwise I'd have to change my mind and I'm very attached to my beliefs. Interestingly, we use rational argumentation to decide what is right in the secular, rational, Enlightenment tradition and so we shouldn't really care if we have to change our minds as long as the view we adopt is the better argued. Yet we are attached to our views for extra-rational reasons and these, I think, are the foundations of our moral views and it is why we cannot make a rational argument to convince all inquirers that one view is most correct, or is the objectively best moral view. Beyond the reasons that we give for believing as we do are also the other reasons we believe: because it feels right, our heart tells us it's true, it would violate our being to believe the opposite, it just seems right, we get choked up when we see certain norms enacted, etc.
Yes, "useful" is only useful if we have some goal in mind. If one of my goals is the flourishing of human beings and one norm is that they must be treated equally when it comes to certain basics such as justice and having the material necessities and if I apply this norm to all human beings then I am applying my norm to all. It's being held, by me, supra-culturally, but can I ground or prove it with rational argumentation to convince those who differ - white supremacists, religious fundamentalists, American-firsters, libertarians - that mine is the objective right, supra-cultural norm? I think not, because our norms, ultimately, are not held for rational reasons. So I tend to use my norms as if they are supra-cultural (even though I can't prove that they are).
What is the difference between the person who believes there are supra-cultural norms or objectively right norms and the one who may apply their norms supra-culturally but doesn't think they can be convincingly demonstrated using reason to be the objectively superior supra-cultural norm? That is, between you and me. You can't, and no moral philosopher can, demonstrate to the satisfaction of his colleagues that he has the best norms and yet believes such an objectively best norm exists. I hold norms that I apply supra-culturally, but don't think that ultimate rational demonstration of them will occur and see no need to cling to the belief in their objective rightness. We all still have our array of moral beliefs of varying degrees of coherence and incoherence which we apply in consert and conflict with others using reason, action and force.
Perhaps the difference here is between the belief that norms are wholly human made and the belief that there is some other origin for norms. Or, perhaps that is how I've interpreted the issue when you had something more like universal norms vs. ethnocentrism in mind.
I may be thinking of this whole thing in more Kantian terms than Aristotelian, which I'm not too happy about. But, maybe not.
I think, for starters, we have to define that Protean term, "useful." It's so easy for that term to be used in a myriad number of ways. Useful for what? Useful to whom--and for what purposes? It was, useful, for whites to regard blacks as property for centuries. It was useful for males to regard females as inferior. The list goes on. Once you ask these sorts of questions, it seems to me that the question of some sort of supra-cultural norm becomes inevitable.
If one denies the existence of such a norm, then culture becomes the default court of appeal--and, as the old sociologist (whose name I have forgotten!) once said, "In the folkways, whatever is, is right." The "folkways" then call the moral shots and slavery and male superiority are "true" because they have been deemed "useful" to those in power.
In the absence of any supra-cultural, transcultural norm(s) for deciding what is "useful" Rorty's philosophy sanctifies the status quo, however that is defined by the majority or the dominant cultural voice. This is what I find so dangerous about Rorty. In his own way, he's not so radical or liberal but really rather depressingly conservative.
How are we to critique unjust social or political or moral practices in the absence of any normative notion of truth or the good? If he does offer such a critique, from where can he possibly stand?
Rorty may reply that it's just his claim that this or that is wrong or unjust, but why should we take his perspective seriously since he's just articulating his individual or cultural preference?
Well, I wrote more than I thought I would! Anway, I'm not sure I'm thinking about this correctly or adequately. I may have to come back at this from a more Aristotelian perspective, arguing more for the adequacy or inclusiveness of a moral tradition than the search for a transcultural moral norm, but for now I do think that if there is no transcultural good there can be no theoretical grounds for critiquing injustice--other than, of course, individual assertion--which I take to be inadequate because there are no rational grounds for distinguishing justice from injustice. Rorty may think he needs no rational grounds for his assertion, but then there is no ground for me to take what he is saying seriously.
And I reply:
I hope I have some good replies. Otherwise I'd have to change my mind and I'm very attached to my beliefs. Interestingly, we use rational argumentation to decide what is right in the secular, rational, Enlightenment tradition and so we shouldn't really care if we have to change our minds as long as the view we adopt is the better argued. Yet we are attached to our views for extra-rational reasons and these, I think, are the foundations of our moral views and it is why we cannot make a rational argument to convince all inquirers that one view is most correct, or is the objectively best moral view. Beyond the reasons that we give for believing as we do are also the other reasons we believe: because it feels right, our heart tells us it's true, it would violate our being to believe the opposite, it just seems right, we get choked up when we see certain norms enacted, etc.
Yes, "useful" is only useful if we have some goal in mind. If one of my goals is the flourishing of human beings and one norm is that they must be treated equally when it comes to certain basics such as justice and having the material necessities and if I apply this norm to all human beings then I am applying my norm to all. It's being held, by me, supra-culturally, but can I ground or prove it with rational argumentation to convince those who differ - white supremacists, religious fundamentalists, American-firsters, libertarians - that mine is the objective right, supra-cultural norm? I think not, because our norms, ultimately, are not held for rational reasons. So I tend to use my norms as if they are supra-cultural (even though I can't prove that they are).
What is the difference between the person who believes there are supra-cultural norms or objectively right norms and the one who may apply their norms supra-culturally but doesn't think they can be convincingly demonstrated using reason to be the objectively superior supra-cultural norm? That is, between you and me. You can't, and no moral philosopher can, demonstrate to the satisfaction of his colleagues that he has the best norms and yet believes such an objectively best norm exists. I hold norms that I apply supra-culturally, but don't think that ultimate rational demonstration of them will occur and see no need to cling to the belief in their objective rightness. We all still have our array of moral beliefs of varying degrees of coherence and incoherence which we apply in consert and conflict with others using reason, action and force.
Perhaps the difference here is between the belief that norms are wholly human made and the belief that there is some other origin for norms. Or, perhaps that is how I've interpreted the issue when you had something more like universal norms vs. ethnocentrism in mind.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
The Richard Rorty Exchange Part II
Here are my responses to the philosopher's comments about Rorty's views. My responses follow the **** (four asterisks):
Here is a quote from a guy I rather like on the topic of relativism, which I take Rorty to be, me and lots of others. HIs name is Roger Trigg and he's emeritus Prof. of Philosophy, U. of Warwick. He was (and still may be, not sure, Chairman of the United Kingdom National Committee for Philosophy, representing all British philosophy departments--so says the back jacket of this book). This is from his book, Philosophy Matters:
"Richard Rorty is quite happy to demolish the distinctions which he sees built into the vocabulary we inherited from Plato and Aristotle. He says (speaking as an 'anti-Platonist' accused of relativism: 'Our opponents like to suggest that to abandon their vocabulary is to abandon rationality--that to be rational consists precisely in respecting the distinctions between the absolute and the relative, the found and the made, object and subject, nature and convention, reality and appearance.'
**** For Rorty these are fine distinctions if they serve a pragmatic purpose. But if they become reified into eternal objects or essences that limn the nature of reality then they are going to lead to abstruse arguments and philosophical nitpicking that have been exhausted by Western philosophy.
His (philosophical) argument is that these distinctions are not essential to philosophy, any more presumably than are such binary opponents as the self and the other, or even truth and falsity.
**** These distinctions may be essential to capital "p" Philosophy because that's how it has defined itself. But there are many everyday uses of these distinctions that Rorty would endorse. But we don't need get a "theory of truth" or to finally define the self. This isn't going to happen and it's more productive to talk about other things or to create new conceptions of the self. Novelists do this and Nietzsche and Heidegger were creative self creators.
The danger in all this is that of losing grip altogether on the idea of rationality, the idea that there are norms for belief, so that we ought to believe some things and reject others. It is all too easy to settle for what people do believe, and, if they disagree, to resort to a relativism that suggests that differences in belief do not matter. Indeed, 'pluralism' becomes something to be welcomed. Philosophy never ceases to be a matter of rational criticism. It is hard to see how it can then have any function at all. It must become absorbed into the general cultural stream. Philosophers can then articulate the assumptions of one cultural tradition in a way that is irrelevant to the members of another.
**** Or, philosophers could articulate, mediate, integrate, distinguish differing cultural traditions with the goal of creating greater understanding. Rorty would probably like philosophy to become part of the "general cultural stream" instead of falsely assuming a position above the cultural stream. We still have norms of belief, we just don't make believe they are grounded in The Objecitve Norms or God's Norms.
Rorty explicitly allies himself with American pragmatism, an important philosophical tradition, but one which has clearly come from a specific cultural background. Genuine philosophy must aspire to universality. American pragmatism must stand on its merits, and not on the fact that it is American. Relativism cannot allow this, and there is nowhere for Rorty to stand to allow him to recommend his views to those beyond his own tradition. It is not enough to be an American speaking to Americans or, in an even more restricted way, an American East Coast liberal speaking to American East Coast liberals.
**** Rorty embraces an ethnocentrism but that doesn't mean that different vocabularies or cultures are incommensurable. We make sense with others all the time, there's just no supra-sense that we can prove to all others is The Supra-Sense to end all questions of Supra-Sense.
Philosophical justification has to demonstrate why the views of such people are relevant to those with different backgrounds. By attacking traditional conceptions of rationality, Rorty can narrow the scope and impact of philosophy, so that any distinction from the rest of culture is removed. Just as an unremitting, literally mindless, materialism can dissolve reason into a series of physical events, so relativism dissolves philosophy into a series of cultural stances. The one makes philosophy cede its position to science, and the other to sociology or cultural studies. Philosophy becomes impotent, without any distinction between what seems to us to be so and what is so, or might be. What is the point of criticisms or questions if we cannot be wrong? There is no point in examining the basis of our beliefs if the most important fact is merely that we have them, and not whether they are true." (137-138)
**** Yes, the appearance/reality distinction is not useful if it is absolutized. But it can be useful as what we thought was the case (appearance) but now see was not the case (colloquially, reality), perhaps because we now have more evidence. And the thing we are so sure of because it is so justified in the present we may say may not be the truth, using "truth" as a marker for "finding out in the future that what seemed so justified turned out not to be the case." So we have a use for the expression, and so the concept, "Yes, it's justified, but is it the truth?" This is the "cautionary" use of "truth." It makes us hold open the possibility that what presently seems justified may not be.
I think Trigg gets to the heart of the matter with Rorty, here. His relativism undercuts, undermines the very possibility of rationality and philosophy itself--and with that gone, what can philosophy be but "a series of cultural stances?"
Here is a quote from a guy I rather like on the topic of relativism, which I take Rorty to be, me and lots of others. HIs name is Roger Trigg and he's emeritus Prof. of Philosophy, U. of Warwick. He was (and still may be, not sure, Chairman of the United Kingdom National Committee for Philosophy, representing all British philosophy departments--so says the back jacket of this book). This is from his book, Philosophy Matters:
"Richard Rorty is quite happy to demolish the distinctions which he sees built into the vocabulary we inherited from Plato and Aristotle. He says (speaking as an 'anti-Platonist' accused of relativism: 'Our opponents like to suggest that to abandon their vocabulary is to abandon rationality--that to be rational consists precisely in respecting the distinctions between the absolute and the relative, the found and the made, object and subject, nature and convention, reality and appearance.'
**** For Rorty these are fine distinctions if they serve a pragmatic purpose. But if they become reified into eternal objects or essences that limn the nature of reality then they are going to lead to abstruse arguments and philosophical nitpicking that have been exhausted by Western philosophy.
His (philosophical) argument is that these distinctions are not essential to philosophy, any more presumably than are such binary opponents as the self and the other, or even truth and falsity.
**** These distinctions may be essential to capital "p" Philosophy because that's how it has defined itself. But there are many everyday uses of these distinctions that Rorty would endorse. But we don't need get a "theory of truth" or to finally define the self. This isn't going to happen and it's more productive to talk about other things or to create new conceptions of the self. Novelists do this and Nietzsche and Heidegger were creative self creators.
The danger in all this is that of losing grip altogether on the idea of rationality, the idea that there are norms for belief, so that we ought to believe some things and reject others. It is all too easy to settle for what people do believe, and, if they disagree, to resort to a relativism that suggests that differences in belief do not matter. Indeed, 'pluralism' becomes something to be welcomed. Philosophy never ceases to be a matter of rational criticism. It is hard to see how it can then have any function at all. It must become absorbed into the general cultural stream. Philosophers can then articulate the assumptions of one cultural tradition in a way that is irrelevant to the members of another.
**** Or, philosophers could articulate, mediate, integrate, distinguish differing cultural traditions with the goal of creating greater understanding. Rorty would probably like philosophy to become part of the "general cultural stream" instead of falsely assuming a position above the cultural stream. We still have norms of belief, we just don't make believe they are grounded in The Objecitve Norms or God's Norms.
Rorty explicitly allies himself with American pragmatism, an important philosophical tradition, but one which has clearly come from a specific cultural background. Genuine philosophy must aspire to universality. American pragmatism must stand on its merits, and not on the fact that it is American. Relativism cannot allow this, and there is nowhere for Rorty to stand to allow him to recommend his views to those beyond his own tradition. It is not enough to be an American speaking to Americans or, in an even more restricted way, an American East Coast liberal speaking to American East Coast liberals.
**** Rorty embraces an ethnocentrism but that doesn't mean that different vocabularies or cultures are incommensurable. We make sense with others all the time, there's just no supra-sense that we can prove to all others is The Supra-Sense to end all questions of Supra-Sense.
Philosophical justification has to demonstrate why the views of such people are relevant to those with different backgrounds. By attacking traditional conceptions of rationality, Rorty can narrow the scope and impact of philosophy, so that any distinction from the rest of culture is removed. Just as an unremitting, literally mindless, materialism can dissolve reason into a series of physical events, so relativism dissolves philosophy into a series of cultural stances. The one makes philosophy cede its position to science, and the other to sociology or cultural studies. Philosophy becomes impotent, without any distinction between what seems to us to be so and what is so, or might be. What is the point of criticisms or questions if we cannot be wrong? There is no point in examining the basis of our beliefs if the most important fact is merely that we have them, and not whether they are true." (137-138)
**** Yes, the appearance/reality distinction is not useful if it is absolutized. But it can be useful as what we thought was the case (appearance) but now see was not the case (colloquially, reality), perhaps because we now have more evidence. And the thing we are so sure of because it is so justified in the present we may say may not be the truth, using "truth" as a marker for "finding out in the future that what seemed so justified turned out not to be the case." So we have a use for the expression, and so the concept, "Yes, it's justified, but is it the truth?" This is the "cautionary" use of "truth." It makes us hold open the possibility that what presently seems justified may not be.
I think Trigg gets to the heart of the matter with Rorty, here. His relativism undercuts, undermines the very possibility of rationality and philosophy itself--and with that gone, what can philosophy be but "a series of cultural stances?"
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