From: Ian Glendinning (ian@psybertron.org)
Date: Tue Jan 18 2005 - 09:29:54 GMT
Thanks Matt for a very thorough response ...
Lots of small points in response, so I've inserted them [IG] below ...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Kundert" < >
To: < >
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 8:53 PM
Subject: Re: MD Them pesky pragmatists
> Hey Ian,
>
> No, you're not way off, and don't worry about it. The skeptic does sound
> like he's looking for absolutes, so I've understood the original impulse
> of people impressed by Pirsig to shrug him off. But whether he is looking
> for absolutes or not depends on who the skeptic is and whether you can
> shrug him off or not depends on who you are.
[IG] So my main point - it's about "interactions", "processes", between
things and/or people - Quality.
> What the skeptic does is attempt to destroy Rational Faith. In the days
> of the Enlightenment, when "rational" was moreorless inextricable from
> "absolute," this led to skeptics denying the ability of "reason" to do
> anything. Hence, Pierre Bayle, probably the greatest Enlightenment
> skeptic, who rended Rational Faith to pieces, only to replace it with a
> simple faith in God. Since the Enlightenment, (some) philosophers have
> learned that you can pull "rational" off of "absolute." So, now we have
> pragmatists who, as they start the dialectical process of moving from,
> say, representationalism (realism) to antirepresentationalism (pragmatism)
> or essentialism to antiessentialism, sound like skeptics. Often they are
> called skeptics. But we generally don't like that self-image. We won't
> eternally hound a person with those insipid questions because under
> certain circumstances the questions won't be in point, or they won't make
> sense. But until we change our philosophical circumstances (assumptions,
> presuppositions, commonsense, framework, vocabulary, metaphysics), those
> questions _will_ make sense and so need to be answered at the risk of
> becoming unconversable. To leave the conversation is the ultimate sin in
> philosophy. "Conversability" is what pragmatists translated "rational"
> into, so in this sense we do have "rational faith." We have faith that if
> we keep the conversation going, good things will happen.
[IG] Agreed, kind of, but we've simply shifted the problem to the semantics
of the word "rational" itself - the processes of argumentation. I have very
strong faith that the simple "process" of conversation is at least as
important as any "rules" of logic. The main reason I persist in trying to
get Platt (say) off his pedantic syllogisms, simply into discussion
(opinions / impressions / anecdotes / empirical evidence / jokes, poems,
etc) of the subject matter. If we stop talking to each other, no logic or
axioms are going to save us.
>
> So, what I'm trying to impress upon people is that I don't think they've
> changed their, say, "metaphysics" enough to warrant shrugging off the
> skeptic. And that when they do, their shrug is unjustified and the
> conversational equivalent of a punch to the face: the rules of
> conversation won't allow it. (One of my favorite movies right now is I
> Heart Huckabees, a philosophical/existential adventure that everyone here
> should see, where Marky Mark plays this guy impressed by nihilism. He
> loves to argue and he continually gets into shouting matches with people
> in the movie. The contradiction of his character is that, while he
> clearly loves to argue and use his mind to investigate our internal
> assumptions and the like, his continued resorts to physical violence and
> screamed "Shut up!"s put him outside the bounds of rational conversation.)
> Conversely, what people are trying to impress upon me is that they don't
> have to take the skeptic seriously, just like the pragmatist. Either
> that, and much more drastically in my opinion, they'll try and convince me
> that the "rules of conversation" don't always apply.
[IG] I know the feeling - there but for the grace of god go we all, beyond
rationality, to the asylum, I've said once or twice. When we run out of
argument, with someone who only wants to talk logic, there is nothing left.
So my very point is, the only rule of conversation is to have one. Logical,
syllogistic constructs are useful at times, but the rule should be that
these are NOT the exclusive rules of debate. So I am trying to spread the
word, not just convince you, that rules of conversation are not rules, they
are guidelines, and they are not exclusive or absolute. A poetic joke, say,
is at least as valid a contribution. What I do believe pragmatically, is
that the MoQ Layers and DQ Processes do provide rules for ranking the
relative applicability and validity of arguments to different domains -
exactly how, I'm still trying to work out of course.
> Ian said:
> I guess I'm one of those who see's MoQ as "self-evident" - pragmatically,
> empirically so. Being also a pragmatist, I guess you are also saying
> people like me need to recognise the practical need for reasoned argument
> to back up my "faith" in the MoQ, if we expect it to get anywhere as a
> credible philosophy in the real world. Therefore those pesky skeptics need
> to have their arguments addressed ?
>
> Matt:
> What pragmatists are trying to get people to realize is that the notion of
> "self-evidentness" doesn't work. The notion of something being
> "self-evident" was dissolved like Russell's distinction of between
> knowledge by appearance and knowledge by description, dissolved by such
> innovations as Quine's dissolution of the analytic/synthetic distinction
> and Sellars' implosion of the Myth of the Given. I wouldn't just try and
> get people to understand the need for reasoned argument to try and get
> somewhere in the philosophical world, I would try to impress upon people
> the need for _reasoned argument_ to get anywhere with anything, for those
> are the rules of conversation, rules most people want satisfied.
[IG] I think I appreciate that, I see as MOQ as "self-evident" only
pragmatically, and clearly I am looking for "evidence" to show others - my
life's quest these days, but what we are discussing again is the evolution
in the meaning of the word (or the idea of) "reasoned argument". And
evolution is all about history - that's why I'm studying the history of
philosophy, the history of Pirsig's own life, history itself, etc. What I
don't buy is the logical positivist / objective fundamentalist /
hyper-rationalist idea that reasoned argumement depends only on logical
rationale.
>
> At the end of your post, after repeating a quote of Rorty I supplied, you
> say, "I read that sentence as indicating the there can be no
> epistemological 'authority'. ie there are no absolutes again." You're
> right, Rorty doesn't want there to be metaphysical absolutes, he wants to
> pull apart the words "rational" and "absolute certainty." Rorty will play
> the part of the skeptic to show the foolhardiness of looking for an
> absolute ground, but he will ameliorate the supposed damage. So when he
> balances "epistemological authority" and "decent respect for the opinions
> of others" he's transposing the battlefield from epistemology to a regular
> conversation. If we want to retain our ability to know absolutely the
> contents of our own minds, we must balance that with the idea that we
> might be wrong. So, in relation to your seeing the self-evidentness of
> the MoQ, we can transpose Rorty's quote into this reminder about the
> conversation of mankind: "the price of retaining one's appeal to
> self-evidentness is a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." I
> think the entire idea of philosophy is to investigate the suppositions
> that allow us to see things as "self-evident."
[IG] Absolutely - All I "want" is the debate with other peoples opinions,
what I don't want is a "debate" with logic and numbers (which are
objective - independent of people) - that's pointless, I can do that alone
in a quiet room.
>
> Ian said:
> Whilst I'm no philosophy expert, I hope you would not see me as
> "inattentive" to the history of philosophy. Pirsig railed against
> philosophology too. I guess I'm generally looking at philsophy from an
> internal pre-cognitive perspective - MoQ seems to have that indefinable
> Quality itself - but I am actively looking for the evidence of others to
> back it up, philosophical as well as empirical.
>
> Matt:
> My thoughts on philosophy and conversation that I've been talking about
> lately are generally covered in my last essay, "Philosophologology," where
> I try and investigate Pirsig's use of "philosophology." I get the feeling
> around here sometimes that people think that we can do philosophy without
> the history of philosophy. While I think you can, I'm not so sure that it
> pans out to mean the same thing as what other people take it to mean. If
> people want to get a good idea of what I think it means, all in relation
> to Pirsig's use of "philosophology" as an epithet, I suggest reading
> section 1, parts A ("Philosophology: Substance and History") and B
> ("Philosophy as a Natural Kind") and section 3, part B ("Concluding
> Remarks"). In general though, the pragmatist would try and convince you
> that the notion of an "internal pre-cognitive prespective" doesn't do
> anything (that we are always "post-cognitive") and to dissolve the
> distinction between philosophical and empirical.
[IG] I think this may be the crux. I'm a pragmatist that thinks the
pre-cognitive stuff (Quality) is the most important, the externalised stuff
is for the birds (well, accountants). I will re-read your essay.
> Ian said:
> Whether it's ontology or epistemology being focussed on, one thing I see
> in the history of philosophy is the form of argumentation. For me it is
> the argumentation that is loaded in terms of objectivity, logic and an
> assumption of absolutes to be found, a metaphysics. That's the handicap,
> the Catch22 I call it. ie Until I discover a new mode of argumentation, I
> do not feel any obligation to "justify" the MoQ in rational terms.
>
> Matt:
> Lately when you've talked about your "Catch-22," I've been confused about
> it. I think I've lost my handle on what you mean by it because I don't
> see the pragmatist as being caught by a Catch-22, or at least one that
> matters. The argumentation in the history of philosophy is generally
> loaded down with "terms of objectivity, logic and an assumption of
> absolutes to be found," but that's why its a history. It's gone and the
> pragmatist thinks he can purge the conversation of objectivity and
> metaphysics (though I'm not sure why "logic" is in there). You say you
> don't "feel any obligation to 'justify' the MoQ in rational terms," but
> what could be a bigger, more important task. If people become quite
> convinced of the MoQ, and use it to justify their own views of life and
> their own decisions, how are you going to justify your views and decisions
> to other people if you can't justify the MoQ? You might reply that a lot
> of people justify their views and decisions for reasons that themselves
> can't be justified, but the evolutionary progress of the conversation of
> mankind is in the process of killing off those unjustifiable positions.
> People don't want that to happen to the MoQ, do they?
[IG] Obviously I to see the need to back up MoQ with "reasoned argument",
but I have a wide definition of rationality, beyond logical, absolute
objectivity. The Catch 22 is that (people think) the accountants (and
decison makers and commentators) want to see numbers, arithmetic and logic,
so anything that can't be expressed in those terms is discounted. The whole
prevailing meme is logical positivism. As Einstein said - not everything
that counts can be counted.
> Ian said:
> The hot-stove / pain-sensation examples are legion, but surely state of
> the art neuroscience is homing in on this stuff fast. I made refrence to
> T.E.Lawrence in my review of Sacks (or was it Austin) - "The trick is not
> minding" NB - "Minding". Masochist or not, the "mental" and physical
> behaviours are mediated by learned (ie evolved) neural processes. Ditto
> intuition vs consciouness of having had an intuition. The problem with the
> history of philosophy is its knowledge of the physical world (the world
> explicable by physics, and its higher levels of evolution) is always less
> than now. One of the reasons I feel the need to explore both the history
> of thought and the future of science. Old thought is often true, old
> science rarely is.
>
> Matt:
> I happen to think that the natural sciences have a lot less to say to
> philosophers than people generally think. For instance, I don't think
> neuroscience is going to tell us anything about epistemology, at least not
> how it was done by Descartes and Kant. What philosophers of mind like
> Rorty and Daniel Dennett are trying to convince us of is that our
> philosophical problems are structured by the vocabularies we use, the
> language we use, and they are trying to change our language to catch up to
> the times. I don't think neuroscience will ever tell us anything about
> the difference between an intuition and being conscious of that fact.
> Neuroscience and philosophy use two different vocabularies to discuss such
> things. My use of Peirce was to dissuade people from thinking that we
> would ever be able deduce when we've had an "intuition" as opposed to
> something flowing from a cognitive process.
[IG] We need to disagree here, we'd just be debating the semantics of
"intuition" and "deduce". Yes, historically different vocabularies have been
used, but I'm open-minded about a convergence. I can't get a cigarette paper
between science and philosophy any more, and originally science was simply
natural philosophy was it not. When a scientist like Schroedinger talks
about what exists he is talking philosophy all the "new physicists" in early
1900's say that. When Chalmers, Hameroff, Penrose and Dennet all turn up to
the same "Science of Consciousness" conferences, you know something is going
on. But the detail is not important. I do not believe anything is
"inexplicable", just unexplained.
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