From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 06 2003 - 20:32:49 BST
All,
Because of the recent flare up between Scott and Squonk and me and Platt and DMB and David and, well, everyone here, I thought it might be a good idea to repost my original post on Rorty, "Confessions of a Fallen Priest". It talks about argumentation with specific references to this discussion
group. I don't quite have the energy to replace my outdated examples with new examples from the recent tiffs, but I think people will generally get the idea from them. I hope by posting this again, it will clear the air about my "method" of engaging my interlocuters.
I should note first, though, that I don't quite hold to some of the ferocity with which I first presented these issues. I was chastized for my enthusiasm for bashing argumentation and I except it. Argumentation does have a place. Just not all the time.
-----------------------------------
Members of the MD,
As you might be able to tell from the title, I am, with heavy heart, relinquishing my place in the sanctuary. I'm not sure who first compared the MoQ to religion and, though I'm sure it was meant despairingly, I find the analogy fitting and use it as an apt description, rather than an off-hand
denunciation. Though certainly not as shocking as, say, Bo or Platt leaving the fold, it is a tad shocking for myself, having been there for all the thoughts and essays and misfired essays I've had over the past two years. Though not as vocal in the MD forum as the two aforementioned priests, I
was a staunch advocate and was in the process of carving out my own little place in the Forum. In fact, my silence for the past year is part of why I'm writing now.
The last several posts I had written were about two things I've been thinking about a lot lately: Rorty and argumentation. As I had commented a while ago during a pragmatism thread, I've been reading a lot of Rorty lately and I've finally come to a realization: Pirsig was doing to me what Plato
did to Pirsig. For Pirsig, Plato created the Western philosophical nightmare called "Professional Philosophy," amongst other things. But through Rorty's eyes I'm finding that Pirsig is attempting the same thing, rather than really fundamentally changing anything. To turn Pirsig's eloquent phrase
back on him, the halo is gone from Pirsig's head. This is not to say that I'm still not an avid Pirsig supporter. But I'm finding that the better parts of Pirsig are to be found in ZMM, not Lila. What Rorty has given me is the tools necessary to see and to enunciate what I've disliked about
Pirsig, without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And though Rorty gave Pirsig the short shrift,
I implore you not to do the same to Rorty. Rorty has a lot to offer Pirsig and vice versa.
The main topic I wanted to cover in this little introduction to the new movement of my thought is the issue of argumentation, something we know all too well here. A lot of arguing goes on here, some of it edifying, much of it belligerent and uninteresting (so goes my opinion). When I first signed
onto the MD I lurked for a while and then was pulled by the force of God to respond to someone's "stupidity." "They are making a mistake and I must set them straight!" or so went my megalomania. After a while the arguments became tedious. My point didn't seem to be coming across, or rather, since
the point of argumentation is conversion, nobody was budging. This had happened before in other forums, so I just took a step back. But as I've watched over the past year, I've seen a lot of intense bickering with no ground being given or gained in one direction or the other. I'm not the first to
see this or say something about it, but people seem to drive their arguments at the others and
then defiantly defend their own position without much give or leeway for new perspective. This is why antagonists in the MD have despairingly called the MoQ a "dogma" and a "religion." Defenders of the faith have then, rightly, come back and called the antagonists own positions dogma and
religion. Obviously, there is an impasse. What is this argumentation if it does not align our thoughts into a single thread? That's what argumentation is for, after all, right?
Reading Rorty, however, put this uneasiness I felt with argumentation into focus. Rorty suggests that we picture "the self" as Quine did: a centerless web of beliefs and desires. This web includes "a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These
are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt of our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these
words a persons 'final vocabulary.'" (from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) Rorty feels that the centerless web of beliefs and desires that we label "the self" is changed, not by something called Reason, but causally. This means that arguments are of little practical use because a person's
final vocabulary is self-justifying. It's the end of the road and, for all practical purposes, final. Argum
ents proceed by common ground, but if common ground is not had, then logical argumentation is superfluous. Our final vocabularies are not judged by some Kantian tribunal of Reason. If an argument does "work," it is not because it was "rational" or "logical," but because it was persuasive. At
root, people have a fundamental incorrigibility of their final vocabulary, so, in Rorty's words, we "must tempt the rising generation with our words."
My uneasiness with argumentation stems from two things: 1) the feeling that people need to reach their own conclusions, work through their own problems, think it through themselves, etc. This "philosophical individualism" finds voice in the incorrigibility of a person's final vocabulary. If a
person cannot be forced by Reason into a new belief, then they must be persuaded to think it through themselves. 2) The results of most dialectical arguments are as so: two people each defend a separate position, they argue, one person forces the other into a position of weakness through a series
of dialectical gambits, the "loser" invokes her incorrigibility ("Well, I'm still right" or "I'm still not convinced" or "You're a big doo-doo head"), and the "winner", having already supposedly won the encounter, resorts to rhetorical measures of labeling which have no logical, dialectical
bearing ("Well, you're not being rational" or "Your'e being dogmatic" or "You're an insane freak"). Eithe
r way, the rational, logical, undistorted dialectical match is ended rhetorically. Hence, the primacy of tempting people with your words, rather than with argumentation.
This is essentially what I see being played out on a daily basis in the MD forum. Two or more positions come together, clash, and eventually, through finding that arguing with a brick wall is tiresome, end the debate. The debate is found to be exasperating rather than elucidating. The debates
that rage over the supremacy of the MoQ over some other usurper (SOM, Wilber, etc.) or vice versa play out this type of clash, but they also illustrate the self-justification of alternate paradigms. Two recent examples come to mind: the Beasley/McWatt clash (and its subsequent backlash on the MD)
and a relatively minor skirmish between Platt Holden and Glenn Bradford.
The Beasley/McWatt battle took place over John Beasley's essay "Understanding Quality." Anthony McWatt claimed that Beasley is "discussing the MOQ from an SOM perspective. He's not yet made that perceptual shift to the MOQ…." McWatt then offered a MoQian critique of the essay which, McWatt would
claim, shifted the ground of the debate onto MoQian terms and showed that Beasley, by not following this shift, had not even begun to understand the MoQ and, ergo, cannot begin to yet critique it. The backlash that occurred was led by Struan Hellier who (as per his pattern) attacked the
credibility of McWatt, amongst other apparent holes in McWatt's argument. What this incident illustrates is how McWatt accused Beasley of not engaging Pirsig's MoQ (by not shifting into a MoQ paradigm), but then himself did not engage Beasley's essay (by staying in the MoQ paradigm). Hellier
solidified the incommensurability and, ultimately, self-justifying nature of these alternate paradigms (as he h
as done on so many occasions) with rhetorical attacks in the way of ad hominem arguments, rather than logical argumentation which is what is supposedly desired.
The recent skirmish between Holden and Bradford only receives notice because of its timeliness, commonality to other skirmishes (this as only a single exemplar), and its explicitness. On July 18, 2002, Holden (posted under Re: MD Understanding Intellect) said:
"It all hangs together and, as you [Bodvar Skutvik] say, 'the MOQ makes much more sense than the SOM.' When all is said and done, SOM's dogma of 'chance.' [sic] is every bit as rigid and unprovable as what creationists believe. The faith of science in chance knows no bounds."
Bradford took issue and wrote:
"You've written a number of similar criticisms of 'chance' over the years yet you've never fleshed out the issue, opting instead for the rhetorical pot-shot.
...
"Would you mind expanding on your criticism of the SOM notion of 'chance' and, as an exercise in intellectual honesty, give the best defense of 'chance' that you can find, *before* positing the MOQ position?" (July 20, 2002, MD MOQ on chance)
This is a further illustration of the common shifting of perspective. Bradford, taking issue with it, redesribes such a shift as intellectual dishonesty. Holden, in defending himself, notes the same thing as I have:
"Asking me to defend 'chance' before positing the MOQ position is like asking you to defend creationism before positing the scientific position. I fail to see the connection to 'intellectual honesty,' but I'm open to enlightenment on the subject." (July 20, 2002, Re: MD MOQ on chance)
As a further illustration of the circular, self-justifying nature of alternative modes of thought, I would illustrate two more positions: the Platonic dialectical-foundation position and the Rortyan recontextualization position. These two positions are on the nature of intellectual engagement and
so receive special notice. The Platonic tradition argues that for intellectual discourse to occur, we must agree on terms and then argue various positions and platforms according to these terms. At the end of an engagement some sort of consensus will have occurred given the singular use of terms
and the rigorousness and thoroughness of argumentation. If consensus has not occurred, it is only because of equivocation in terminology, sloppy reasoning, or plain old stubborness. The Platonic dialectic is the basis for this logical argumentation. The Rortyan position holds that beliefs are
changed causally, not through "rational" argumentation. The proper "method" for intellectual engagem
ent is recontextualization. The private position of a person is recontextualized within a narrative of history by which the private position is shown to have an inadequate understanding of the patterns of the past and the needs of the present. Positions aren't so much engaged as they are
circumvented by shifting the grounds of debate into one's own private vocabulary. Consensus is reached if you can persuade the other person that their understanding isn't as useful as yours.
The "engagement" of these two positions is, obviously, quite problematical. The Platonic tradition demands agreement of terms and dialectical argumentation, while the Rortyan position demands circumvention of opposing terms and persuasiveness of narrative. So how do these two positions engage?
If you're a Platonist, they engage like normal: logical dialectic. If you're a Rortyan, they don't like normal: the arguments are circumvented and then recontextualized. The Platonist would dialectically engage the Rortyan by showing that dialectical reason is supreme and/or needed for rational
discourse to take place. The Rortyan would shift the terms and show that dialectical reason has given us the entire misconceived tradition of Western metaphysics. The two positions cannot do anything but find recourse in their own methods. If either one were to alternate to another method to
enshrine the original method, then that undermines the entire effort by showing that there is another me
thod at work behind the original. Both "methods" are necessarily self-justifying.
Now that I've laid out some of the Rortyan tools and terminology, we can see how they can help resolve the recent debates on the MD I pulled out earlier. We can see how the Rortyan suggestion that much of our final vocabularies are incorrigible and the circumvention of alternate vocabularies
works its magic on the outstanding differences between MoQ priests and MoQ heretics. The heretics demand some rational, neutral foundation for debate, while the priests continue to shift the terms of debate onto the MoQ (this isn't to say that some priests don't call for rational foundations and
some heretics don't shift the terms). Rorty helps us realize that this is precisely what should be done. McWatt was correct in shifting the playing field to MoQ terms (whatever the particularities of his critique) and so was Holden. Rorty, however, continues the train of thought and recommends
that we forego an argument model of persuasion. But while we should forego the argumentation model, this
does not mean we should abandon discourse or dialogue.
This isn't to say that argumentation isn't possible. Argumentation may be possible as a reasonable device for discourse if one is arguing within a given vocabulary. For instance, it may be possible for argumentation to play a role between two "priests." There are two problems with this thought,
one theoretical, the other practical. First, it is not entirely clear what the difference is between "discourse between vocabularies" (inter-vocabulary discourse) and "discourse within a vocabulary" (intra-vocabulary discourse). The practical problem as I see it is that, as of yet, I don't think
anybody is agreed to what the MoQ vocabulary consists of for intra-vocabulary discourse to be made viable. There are still major disagreements and, when moving between vocabularies, "rational" arguments are still of little value. When all the key words are still up for grabs, we can do little
more then suggest different ways of picturing and accounting for things.
Finally, I wish to elaborate briefly on why I find the MoQ-religion analogy a pleasing description. As I've said, all people have recourse to their own final vocabulary. The most famous source for final vocabularies in the West is the Judeo-Christian tradition. With the indentification of
religions as supplying final vocabularies we have the ability to compare secular vocabularies to traditionally religious vocabularies. However, consequently, the divide between the secular and the religious has been blurred. Many Religious Studies academics are constructing definitions of
religion that include, for instance, Marxism and Capitalism. This has had the effect of making the secular/religious distinction, not only blurred, but even ubiquitous and therefore as having outlived its usefulness. Not only that, it has also had the effect of turning the heinous charge of being
religious (as necessarily being dogmatic) into a gentle, descriptive analogy.
Before I sign off, I wish to simply allude to the fact that there is much that has been left out of Rorty's philosophy so far (notably Bloomian strong misreadings, Rorty's use of irony, systematic vs. edifying philosophy, post-Philosophical culture, and metaphors vs. literal words, amongst much
else). I hope to submit this posting to a kind of peer review before I commit it to essay. As such, any forthcoming engagements with this post will almost certainly elicit the other strands of Rortys thought. I don't wish to spring them on anyone in some sort of ambush; I only wish to get a feel
for when they would best be introduced. If you feel like youre being ambushed, remember that this post is meant only as an introduction to the intersections of Rorty and Pirsig and my own use of them. As should already be apparent, I don't wish convince anyone using Platonic, dialectical strong-
arm tactics; I only wish to tempt you with the gentle purring of Rorty's edifying discourse.
Matt
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