From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 16 2003 - 19:23:12 GMT
Platt,
Platt said:
Ah, a brave new world where reason is abandoned in favor of the whim of
the mob. Pray, who will determine the make up of this "Tribunal of
People" and enforce their adjudication of truth? Oh, excuse me. I forgot.
In the brave new world there is no such thing as truth. In the brave new
world anything goes so long as you get enough people to agree with
where you want to go. Of course, just how many is "enough" is never
spelled out. Or is it?
Matt:
Right, right, the usual attacks about how reason and truth are
abandoned. Well, let me expand on what reason looks like by referring to
my good buddy DMB, who has provided recently (in the "Philosophy and
Theology" thread) a really good example of how people typically function:
DMB said:
How we distinguish between intellectual descriptions is a good questions, a
hard question. I took some classes in logic and the scientific method and I
think all that is useful and valid as far as it goes, but my approach has
always been by a process of elimination. I think Pirsig's critera is pretty
damn good, and his expanded empiricism is brilliant. But all that stuff is
only in the back of my mind as I read. When it doesn't seem right I put it
down and walk away. I get bored with it. When it seems right. When it seems
there are no holes, it makes sense logically, it matches experience, when
it all fits together, when it leaves nothing important out, I keep reading.
Its not quite so undisciplined as it sounds, but basically I just judge
different intellectual systems by reading and waiting to see if any alarms
go off. I'm looking for something to go wrong and when it does, I explore
elsewhere. Its not completely negative. Once in a while you find a book or
author that rocks you in a very positive way. These are our favorites.
Pirsig. Campbell. Wilber. You already know my favorite rockers.
Matt:
First, I want to say that this is pretty much how I read. I think it's a
great illustration. What I want to note is how "reason" and "truth" don't
make an appearance as _justifications_ for when something "seems
right." People only have recourse to their own experiences (which include
past books they've read) when judging other things. This is what Pirsig
meant by the building up of analogues in ZMM and static patterns in
Lila. One of the things we inherit when we grow up is a gigantic set of
analogues and patterns that our culture has accumulated. Rorty uses
Quine's image of a web of beliefs and desires to achieve the same
effect. Judging an encountered analogue or pattern or belief that you've
never encountered before involves looking at the rest of your web and
seeing if the new belief fits. If it doesn't, but you like it
nevertheless, you then reweave your web of beliefs and desires to make it
fit. When telling other people why you rewove your web of beliefs, you
justify yourself by making reference to other beliefs, other analogues and
patterns you use. You can almost always do this. How successful you are
or not depends on what others think of your justification, but at the least
you can usually justify it to yourself. If you couldn't, somehow I doubt
the reweaving would've taken place.
If, after you've rewoven your web, you justify your new web by only
referring to your belief "It was demanded by Reason," people will usually
ask you for a little more. Like, "Could you expand on why Reason dictated
it?" And, surprise, surprise, you can usually do so by a whole host of
other reasons. What the Rortyan pragmatist wants to say is the belief "It
was demanded by Reason" is completely superfluous to the act of
justification; you could've completely skipped mentioning it and your case
wouldn't have been any worse off. Saying "It was demanded by Reason"
appears to be little more than a compliment one pays to beliefs one has
already justified in one's own mind. More to point, however, is that if
someone _only_ refers to the belief "It was demanded by Reason" and refuses
or cannot explicate it, people will generally not accept it as
justification. In this case, Reason appears as a stand-in for God, which
we do not usually use as justification for our beliefs because it is
difficult to tell when a person hears the voice of God. Hearing the voice
of God or Reason is the most private affair one can have and it is
completely unverifiable, so other people will never be able to tell the
difference between a prophet and madman by the person solely referring to
their belief that "It was demanded by Reason/God." (None of this means you
can't justify you beliefs by recourse to Reason or God or Truth or
Quality. The problem is that when you start demanding that other people
follow in your beliefs you start to sound like Squonk, which is very
unpersuasive. I would say, unlike hearing the voice of God, Truth, Reason,
and Quality should be explicatable in terms of other beliefs. You should
be able to explain most "high Quality" feelings by reference to other "high
Quality" feelings, which pans out to the same thing as justifying a belief
by other beliefs. The only anomaly to this is, of course, Dynamic
Quality. Pirsig says that Dynamic Quality looks irrational to other
people. This is because if you justify your belief by sole reference to
Dynamic Quality, it looks like no justification at all. What I think this
means is that, when a person can only justify their action by Dynamic
Quality, they are saying that they _presently_ have no way of justifying
their action. In the _wake_ of Dynamic Quality will come static patterns,
and therefore, justification. In other words, if there appears any
justification for Dynamic Quality, it will be history that justifies that
first Dynamic leap.)
The result of all this is that Reason and Truth are utterly useless in
justifying your beliefs to anybody else. So, pragmatists wonder what use
they are at all. One answer is that if we make them objects of inquiry, we
will be able to make more of our beliefs reasonable and truthful (the same
goes for making Morality or the Good an object of inquiry). The pragmatist
rejects this formulation, however, on the grounds that we've spent the last
2500 years in these lines of inquiry and they've had no noticeable effect
on our beliefs becoming more reasonable or truthful (or our actions
becoming more good). We think that what DMB does when he reads is about
all anybody does when they read and that justifying our beliefs by other
beliefs is about all anybody does when they are being reasonable (provided
the beliefs they are referring to are reasonable by our lights).
So, when we make the post-modern turn, we stop thinking that a Tribunal of
Reason is involved in judging us. When somebody tells us, "You are being
unreasonable," we might say, "Oh yeah? How so?" If the person then tells
us, "Because Reason dictates it thus," as before, we might not think that
such a good reason for thinking us unreasonable. We would like to hear
more than that. And in the end, just as before, the notion of Reason
becomes superfluous when deciding if we are being reasonable or not. The
only thing judging us is another person. This is why pragmatists replace
the Tribunal of Reason with a Tribunal of People. Only other people are
involved in judging our beliefs and actions. It is why Rortyan pragmatists
follow Habermas in attacking subject-centered reason in favor of
communicative reason.
The efforts of saying all this changes nothing of our actual
behavior. Switching from a Tribunal of Reason to a Tribunal of People does
nothing to how we read and how we justify ourselves. Everything DMB and I
and everyone else does when reading and justifying our actions goes on like
normal. The only difference is that we will stop trying to get
argumentative mileage out of Reason and Truth. We will abandon inquiry
into these things because, along with women, we will stop treating them
like objects. Reason and truth become compliments we pay to sentences we
like and find useful. They have a function, but it is not the function
Plato and Kant thought they had.
Matt
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