From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 07 2002 - 21:31:25 BST
John,
Thank you for the thoughts on Rorty. I'm certainly going to look into the
essay you mentioned critiquing Rorty (being as its on the net). The
commentary on Rorty I keep pushing is David Hall's Richard Rorty: Prophet
and Poet of the New Pragmatism. Its an extremely well-balanced (in my
opinion), takes you through his philosophy (serving as an introduction),
and adds some interesting philosophy perspectives in its own right. The
most interesting thing that comes to mind at the moment, in relation to
Scott's idea of an "ironic metaphysics," is Hall's questioning of whether
or not metaphysicians can be ironic or not. That Rorty's distinction
between metaphysicians and ironists isn't as cut-and-dry.
Your quote of Peirce is of particular interest. "Reasoning should not form
a chain which is no stronger that its weakest link, but a cable whose
fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and
intimately connected." You read it as arguing, "that we must isolate
different aspects which taken together are adequate to support our belief
system."
I would offer a different reading of the quote. I see Peirce making a
Rortyan claim, that our beliefs and desires are woven together like a
quilt, evoking his image of the self as a "centerless web of beliefs and
desires." I see it making a Davidsonian coherentist claim. Above all, I
don't see the cable as supporting our beliefs, in the way of a theory
"holding them up." I see it as the pragmatic, historicist claim that the
cable is our historically contingent beliefs. A chain of reasoning is one
that reaches back into the contingent past, resting, not on a metaphysical
system or theory, but on our traditions of reasoning, traditions of coping
with our surroundings.
Matt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 10:37:54 GMT