From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 15 2003 - 02:19:32 BST
Steve,
Matt said:
Once you get rid of the assumption that there are true essences to words,
fixed, discoverable definitions, True-to-the-World contexts, you get rid of
the philosophical notion of Absolute Truth, because our imaginations can
always come up with contexts in which an "absolute truth" is made false.
Steve said:
It seems to me that pomos say, "there are no true essences to words" and
then conclude that we are hopelessly stuck in words, as if to be forced to
have concluded that words are what we get instead of reality. Matt, I
hope you will tell me that it would only be a "bad postmodernist" who would
make that mistake.
Matt:
I think the above uses confused language. Antiessentialists don't use a
distinction between reality and words, essences and accidents, or
substances and properties. "They are trying to replace the world pictures
constructed with the aid of these Greek oppositions with a picture of a
flux of continually changing relations. One effect of this
panrelationalism is that it lets us put aside the distinction between
subject and object, between the elements in human knowledge contributed by
the mind and those contributed by the world, and thereby helps us put aside
the correspondence theory of truth." ("A World without Substances or
Essences") I see Pirsig attempting the same thing with his metaphor,
Quality. To say, "we are hopelessly stuck in words, as if to be forced to
have concluded that words are what we get instead of reality," is to still
hold onto the hope of a correspondence theory of truth: that we can pierce
appearances to get to reality. When we drop this distinction, pragmatists
think that we get linguistic practices as tools of coping with
reality. They also think that, because we are linguistic creatures, we can
never step out of our language, step out of our skins, so to
speak. Knowledge is knowledge of our linguistic practices, not knowledge
of a reality separate from our language. Reality simply exerts causal
pressures on us that we must cope with. One way we cope with them is
talking about them. So, it may be that we are "hopelessly stuck in words,"
but pragmatists have no idea why the need for the word "hopeless." As far
as they can see, we are stuck right where we were before, coping with
reality. Post-modernists simply redescribe what this coping entails.
Matt
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