From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Mar 20 2005 - 23:08:23 GMT
Hey Scott,
This is a good place to start as we move forward.
Scott said:
I'm afraid I am not sure that I see how that changes things. For example, a
theologian is engaged in redescription, but behind that is a Reality (God)
and within it is an acceptance that Reality really is in a certain way that,
for instance, precludes Darwinism. And for a materialist, Reality really is
in a certain way that, for instance, precludes life after death. So I do not
see how either of these beliefs escape the "How do things_really_ hang
together" formula, or the revised formula "metaphysics tries to get things
hammered down by something else, i.e. Reality, whereas in speculative
philosophy the only thing doing any hammering are people". Perhaps I need a
better example of what counts as a case of Reality pinning down a
metaphysician's moves. I can see cases where a presumed methodology does so,
e.g., Descartes trying to be mathematical. This would count as someone being
metaphysical as a consequence of being foundational. So I can see that
Whitehead can escape being called metaphysical by this definition, in that
he is saying: "let's think (in our philosophical moments) in terms of
process rather than in terms of thingness".
So, as I see it, a nominalist and Darwinist is a nominalist/Darwinist due to
a belief about Reality, namely that *there is* a non-linguistic,
non-conscious reality, for example, in the asteroid belt, or on earth before
there was life.
Matt:
What I'm trying to get a distinction between is the view that "there is a
way things are" and "there is a way things _really_ are." The way I see
philosophy (and this comes from the Anglophone tradition beginning in Oxford
and Vienna, roughly those who first took the "linguistic turn") is as taking
common sense and finding something wrong with it. Common sense, as ways in
which we make our way about the world, entails a way things are. That's
what it is. A rock is a rock exactly because it is a rock and not a book of
philosophy or Bach's Ninth Symphony. What the metaphysicians have taken to
be philosophy (and by metaphysicians I mean right now
representationalists/foundationalists; we'll get to the other permutations
later) is the correction of common sense by getting at the way the things
_really_ are. What fully pragmatized thought tries to do is change common
sense by offering us better ways of thinking how things are.
So, if I, as a (hopefully) fully pragmatized philosopher, am to be
identified as a materialist (as in thinking that corpuscularianism is a good
way of thinking about what science does), or a nominalist (as in thinking
that, if there is distinction between universals and particulars, it can
only be made _within_ a language and not between language (universals) and
non-language (particulars)), or a Darwinian (as in thinking that humans are
simply one more species of animal doing its best), it is not because I think
that any of those ways entail a way things _really_ are (or rather, the way
things _really_ are entails them), but that they entail a way things are, in
that I act and behave and think as if those things are the way they
are--because that's what common sense is: "the way I act and behave and
think."
What metaphysicians think is that our common sense can be corrected by the
way things _really_ are, that the ways we act, behave, and think can be
changed by ascertaining the way things _really_ are in the world.
Pragmatists only think that the ways we act, behave, and think can be
changed by alternative ways of acting, behaving, and thinking and that the
"ascertainment of the _really_ real" is a wheel that plays no part in the
system. Its not that the metaphysicians aren't motivated in their
redescriptions by their belief that their redescription is closer to the way
things _really_ are, but I'm suggesting that there's no difference between
redescriptions offered by metaphysicians who think that they finally have it
and by pragmatists who think that this is just one more potentially better
alternative to try out. So by an act of Ockham's Razor, we'd like to cut
out the wheel spinning all by itself.
Scott said:
The way I do it (or think of doing it -- this is all up in the air at this
point), is to make representation the foundation, though "representation" no
longer works since there is no assumed presence to be re-presented. There is
plenty of correspondence, but it is not a case of language corresponding to
non-language, rather it is metaphoric/analogical extension of one language
to allow translation with another, only some of which are human.
What makes this foundational is that I see certain words as having absolute
application. Such words are, first of all, 'language', but also 'criteria',
'pattern', 'language-game', 'reason', 'value', 'abstract', 'context', and so
forth (plus many synonyms). Now these words as a foundation are anything but
"clear and distinct", and in fact, as I see it, to talk about them, rather
than just use them, requires the logic of contradictory identity. But -- and
here it gets metaphysical -- I assume that all that happens everywhere is
the same sort of thing: creation happens by the creating of criteria,
"things happen" is a consequence of contradictory identity, and so forth.
Matt:
Okay, if I'm getting this, you're saying that language is the foundation
(representationalism sans the representationalism). This would make sense
because I imagine a lot of people might have a tough time deciding whether
you were a linguistic idealist or an old-school mind-idealist, but either
way an idealist. So, all consciousness is semiotic, all reality is
consciousness, so all reality is linguistic, meaning the "foundation"
is...reality, right?
I threw in the scare quotes because, at this stage, you sound just like a
pragmatist, meaning that the "foundation" is no foundation at all, at least
nothing you could put any philosophical weight on. BUT, you go on to say
that there is non-human language available (I don't want to say "out there"
and suck you into Kantian problems, which we can all assume you want to
eschew) in addition to human language. So, you can agree with Berkeley that
an idea can only represent another idea. But, you also say that some of
this language is representing non-human language. The pivot point comes,
though (and this is the only way I can see you getting any mileage out of
foundationism), when you say that one of the things that this non-human
language tells us is that "all consciousness is semiotic, all reality is
consciousness, all reality is linguistic."
You didn't say that, but if you don't make that move I don't see how you'd
get foundationalism to stick. And because you didn't say that "non-human
language" was the foundation (you said instead, after some transposing, that
_language_ was the foundation), I'm not sure if that is an accurate
portrayal of your views. If it isn't, I want to know how you get to a
foundation without the move I made. Because I don't think its enough to say
that "certain words" have "absolute application." I think that move, by
itself, is simply a hypostatization of certain functions of current language
games. We may not think we'd ever be able to get rid of them, but its
possible that we simply aren't being creative enough in our changing of our
current language games. Again, like before, the only way I think you'd get
these "certain words" to stick as a foundation is if these certain words
were written in the "non-human language."
Which, of course, brings us to the issue of knowing when we've encountered a
non-human language.
The way I see the first part of this post hanging together with the second
is that in the first segment I'm trying to get Darwinianism and nominalism
to look more idealist, more having to do with our language, rather than
so-called "Reality." In the second bit, I see you as sounding completely
idealist, everything is language, but the chunk that makes you resistant to
pragmatism is a human language/non-human language distinction, which
substitutes (though, as far as I can see, functions the same as) for the
language/reality distinction which representationalists use.
Does that kind of sound right? Because the way I've been seeing it, much of
our philosophy sounds just the same, until we reach the bit about the
soteriological function of irony and the asymptotic approach to non-human
language. And I still see those things as either 1) having no function or
2) having to be held up by an epistemology.
I'm curious about one bit, though, that didn't come up from the above (and
doesn't really play much role in the meat of the discussion, I'm just
curious): does all of our human language correspond to a non-human language,
or just some of it (meaning there are bits that we may never agree on
because there's nothing pushing or pulling us asymptotically in one or
another direction)?
Matt
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