From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 10 2003 - 22:43:27 BST
David,
David said:
I agree with Platt to the extent that I think you should be pushed and made to feel uncomfortable about using the word utility with respect to beauty and other values.
Matt:
Well, I'll continue to nonchalantly shrug off the pushing. I'm pretty flexible about my definitions because as a good pragmatist there are no natural definitions. We make them. So if you want to make a distinction between utility and value, by all means and I'll follow in it. But that doesn't count as a strike against the pragmatist. The pragmatist is completely and fervently value-centric. The way this comes out is in a number of different slogans ("everything is value," "everything is political," "everything is socially constructed," "everything is based on power relations," "everything is based on utility," "everything is based on an aesthetic response," etc.), all of which appear to be local, but are really quite ubiquitous and so, after you've chosen to believe one slogan, the others become quite uncontroversial. If you take the word out of the slogan and use it for a local purpose, I have no problem with the restriction under that context. But that doesn't mean
the pragmatist, just because he uses one of those words a lot rather than the others, is missing out on something. Rorty gets a lot of these squinty-eyed criticisms from people I usually register as allies and I think its just a matter of getting hung up on a word and missing the bigger picture of what the series of words mean. The movement away from atomism in linguistic philosophy is the movement away from "concepts" to "propositions" as the basic unit of currency. Words aren't true or false. Words are stand-ins for propositions, which can then be true or false. I don't think Rorty misses beauty and I've said why.
Matt
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