From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 28 2003 - 21:18:44 BST
DMB,
DMB said:
It seems like I need to get a handle on some of your assumptions, ones you've made along the road. The kind of pragmatism you're putting out on the table here seems to rest on ideas you pretty much take for granted as settled, but which I find quite strange and controversial. Trying to fit it all into place is quite like putting together a pictureless jig-saw puzzle.
Matt:
Its much the same way for me. I find them strange and weird given the climate of opinion I've intellectually grown in.
DMB said:
We can't TALK about anything that isn't already 'inside' a language. OK. Sounds like a harmless truism to me. But is that really all Pirsig is saying? Paul seems to think its about balancing materialism and idealism. Those two interpretations seem completely unrelated to each other. So what's up? Is it about linguistics, materialism, idealism or, more likely given Pirsig's inclinations, mysticism? There is room for ambiguity, but this looks like outright confusion. Its gotta hang together in a more coherent way.
Matt:
I don't think it is "all Pirsig is saying." However, because I like to put my best Pirsig forward, so to speak, I make Pirsig sound like that's all he's saying. But as Paul pointed out, there are passages that make Pirsig sound like something other than a pragmatist. I've never thought that Pirsig was as thorough-going a pragmatist as I want him to be, but neither do I think that makes him an anti-pragmatist, as you and Platt have suggested.
On balancing materialism and idealism, I definitely think its a mistake, the two are mutually exclusive. I think saying that you'd like to balance between materialism and idealism is a muddled way of saying that you want to be a pragmatist, who erase the line between materialism and idealism by refusing to do metaphysics and saying what the world is _really_ like. I think your suggestion that for Pirsig it has something to do with mysticism is on target, though I've yet to be convinced of what that coherent interpretation looks like.
DMB said:
You seem to go from the simple enough claim, that the limits of language are the limits of what we can talk about, to the assumption that language is the only reality we can have. I mean, the rejection of correspondence theories is rooted in this linguistic observation, no? The denial of a world "out there" is rooted in it, no? And how about the idea of objectivity being replaced by collective subjectivity or intersubjective agreement? That is also supposed to follow from the idea that we are trapped in language? Is that about right?
Matt:
I should be more careful. The denial isn't that there is not a world "out there," like trees and tigers and stuff, but that we cannot correspond to something "out there." There are a few correlated assumptions that are switched in the move from Kantian, metaphysical philosophy to pragmatist philosophy. One is that language is a tool for coping, not a mirror for reflecting. If language is a mirror, then getting better knowledge amounts to having better and better representations of the object of inquiry, to mirror the world so that eventually our language will be transparent to the world. This means that the final judge and jury of the truth of a proposition is Nature, the World, something "out there" that is not us. If we switch to thinking of language as a tool, then everything changes. Better knowledge means being able to better cope. In James' phrase, the true is what it is good to believe. This switch, what Rorty refers to as being Darwinian about language, says
that we do not have knowledge of the world "out there" as supposed by the representational picture of language, but rather that we have knowledge of our linguistic practices.
I'll rehearse briefly the historical dialectic that led to this. (I shouldn't have to warn, but I will in case there is any confusion. The story I'm about to tell is from the pragmatist's eyes. You should be able to guess from the outset where the story is going and who the hero is at the end before I even get there.) There were, in very broad terms, three basic steps (how Hegelian). Descartes's picture of language was as a mirror of nature. He thought of language as representing the world and that the object of the game was to get better and better representations, to have clear and distinct ideas. Locke made the next partial step by saying that we could talk about nominal essences, but that we would never really know if we had reached the real essence of the thing (he was nevertheless confident that we would reach them). The next full step was by Kant who took Locke's step and turned out its full implications, marking the distinction between the phenomenal and the
noumenal. Language was representational, but we would never know the thing-in-itself. The partial step after Kant was taken by Hegel and German idealism. They said that, if we can't reach the thing-in-itself, that which is beyond language, then all we have is language. There is no world "out there", the world exists in language, or it is constituted by language.
The full step beyond idealism is pragmatism. In pragmatism, we make the switch from language-as-representing to language-as-coping. From the pragmatist's point of view, the problem with idealism was that it was caught in the old Cartesian vocabulary of language-as-representing. After the Critique of Pure Reason, people were pretty convinced that we would never know the thing-in-itself, we would never represent it. But rather than thinking that meant that we should ditch representationalism, idealists thought that meant all we had were representations. Counter to the idealist's claim that there is no world "out there", the pragmatists says, yes, there is a world out there. However, our language doesn't represent it, it copes with it. Pragmatists think they learned the moral of Kant's story that the idealists should have learned. Language is a tool with which we use to survive in the world, like a spoon or a fork (or the next stop on the evolutionary train, the spork).
A corrollary of this moral is that there is nothing called "knowledge for its own sake". There is only knowledge that is useful and knowledge that is not useful. (Its difficult to tell when a knowledge producing discipline has made the move from "useful" to "not useful", so it usually takes a long time for a discipline to wither off the branch. Making the switch from thinking that there are things that it is good to know for its own sake to thinking that there are things that are useful to know and things that are not, isn't itself enough leverage to weed out a discipline. It takes years of regular ole' persuasion along the lines of "should we really be putting as much time and money into this discipline?")
Now, you'll notice that I've muddied the historical waters by making Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Hegel talk about language. The reason I did this was because, in the move against representationalism, it isn't necessary that we talk about language as opposed to ideas and mind. Therefore, it is very easy to reconstruct their arguments to make it look like they were talking about language (which, to be fair, in some cases they did), and it is also just as easy to reconstruct the pragmatist's argument in terms of mind and ideas--at least in the limited argument of representationalism. For pragmatists like Rorty do think it was progress to move from talking about ideas to talking about language, the so-called linguistic turn. Rorty thinks it helped us get over representationalism, though it wasn't exactly necessary in any logical sense. And he also thinks that there are other good reasons for moving from ideas to language.
So, we are caught, in Fredric Jameson's phrase, in the "prison-house of language". However, pragmatists don't think of this in terms of idealism, we think of it in terms of only having knowledge, as I said before, of our linguistic practices. Having knowledge is being familiar with a certain way of speaking. For instance, I have knowledge of pragmatist philosophy and you, DMB, admittedly, do not. And you have knowledge of mysticism and mystic philosophy (to employ Scott's helpful distinction) and I, admittedly, do not. What is at issue between the two of us, and in a larger sense, between pragmatism and mystic philosophy (I leave mysticism to itself for the moment), is which knowledge is more useful, which is to say, which way of speaking is better at coping with the world. As we learn more about the other we are able to make better and better judgements as to which is more useful. This doesn't mean I think either one of us is going to convince the other (who knows, r
eally), but it means that, at the end of the interlocution, we will be able to better justify our judgement, our choice in vocabularies. And for the pragmatist, justified belief is the only thin explication of "true knowledge" that we need.
This leads to your question about the move from objectivity to solidarity. Like the move from representationalism to antirepresentationalism, the linguistic turn, again, has nothing directly to do with this particular move. However, the move to antirepresentationalism does have something to do with it. Representationalists (roughly, realists) think that knowledge is justified true belief. They believe that what counts as knowledge needs to be both justified and true. The first component is made in terms of other people. You have to be able to justify a belief in terms of reasons and argumentation. The second component is made in terms of the world. A belief is true when it gets something about the world correct. With these two components, some philosophers go on to say that, for instance, we can have knowledge of rocks because we can justify our beliefs in rocks and we can see that they are correct (notice the reliance on ocular metaphors). But we cannot have knowl
edge of God because, though it may be true that God exists and such, we will never be able to justify it to anyone, the truth being based on faith.
Pragmatists have no idea what "made true by the world" means. We don't see what the difference is between rocks and God in terms of their truth value. Pragmatists have yet to see a satisfactory explanation by a realist of how the world makes our statements true, and there have been a lot of smart realists taking stabs (from Moore and Russell to Searle and Nagel). For the pragmatist, we drop the ocular metaphors and think of knowledge as justified belief. Justified to whom? To the community in which you are conversing. Under the pragmatist's explication of knowledge, we can have knowledge of rocks and God (or, rather, knowledge of God-related things given some religions' propensity for thinking that God is ineffable) because knowledge is being familiar with a way of speaking. Again, the real issue is the utility of each way of speaking, not which way of speaking gets something Right and Correct about the world.
I hope that goes some way towards answering the questions you posed.
Matt
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