Platt,
When you said I and Rorty were anti-rational and anti-logical your were
referring to sentiments reflected in this quote (and probably elsewhere)
from me:
"For Rorty desires a poetized culture, a literary culture, a culture whose
vocabulary 'revolved around the notions of metaphor and self-creation
rather than around notions of truth, rationality and moral obligation.'"
What Rorty is calling for is not for us to start being anti-rational or
anti-logical (though his enemies might like to think he's calling for
this), his position is much more subtle. Situate that quote within the
framework of the other things I've said about pragmatism: we need to abjure
our search for ahistorical Truth, we need to stop using Reason as a
surrogate for God, we need to stop thinking of Moral Obligation as
ahistorical like Kant thought of it (if I didn't say any of that, well, I
apologize and I'll say it now). In a literary, poeticized culture we will
still have truthfulness, reasonableness, and moral conduct to our fellow
human beings, but all of these things will be based on an intersubjective
agreement: on solidarity, not objectivity.
So, when you say it must be ironic that Aristotle "was the 'self-creator'
of formal logic which I gather Rorty is no fan of," I must decline
agreement on its ironic value. Rorty still to this day finds value in the
Analytic, anglophone style of philosophy. Logic is a tool like any other.
Its when the Analytic tradition takes Logic as the purest form of Reason
and tries to reduce everything to it that Rorty starts to roll his eyes.
Its the description of Aristotle as "discovering" logic that Rorty would
object to, so when you describe Aristotle as creating it, you've made it
agreeable to Rorty.
>Surely you wouldn't hold Rorty up as a shining example of "economy of
>explanation."
Actually, I would, for the same reason one might hold up Pirsig. Pirsig's
books are quite large by the standards of most popular fare. The problem
is convincing people, tempting them with your words, that the way you are
describing things is better and more economical than others. That has
nothing to with the amount they write (if that was what you were referring
to). As an example of Rorty's economy of explanation, take his attempt to
cut off the last vestiges of God. Some people still think we need a
"skyhook" (to take Hilary Putnam's phrase) to legitimate our knowledge and
practices. A moral theory always refers to a tradition of how we should
act based on how we've acted. Rorty is attempting to show us that we don't
need a theory of "how we should act," but simply "how we should act." The
only thing a theory does is provide a nice summary of what we are already
doing.
Rorty is trying to effect the same switch in thinking that Copernicus did,
Kant did, Kuhn did, or Pirsig did. The shift to thinking of Quality that a
Pirsigian or MoQist makes is the same shift in thinking like that which a
historicist-pragmatist makes.
So, when you say Rorty seems "more interested in how things are said rather
than the validity of what is said," under such charges, I would apply the
same charge to Pirsig. They are both attempting to change our descriptions
of the world to get us to start paying attention to more important
concerns. Validity is not measured against objectivity, but against
solidarity, intersubjective agreement.
Matt
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