From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 15 2003 - 18:54:52 BST
David,
David said:
Essentialism is all about the quest for certainty, if you start seeing essentialism everywhere does that make you an essentialist-ist (only joking)? If you think the real basic nature of reality is the flux does this make you an essentialist? Not exactly, you're trying to catch butterflies (or abraxas (god of chaos) moths) with a fishing rod. No one is going to be banging your pragmatist head into a nasty state of closure with the concept of flux/unknown/nothing/unknowable because it is not fixing a language game it is saying where the borders are, see Wittgenstein on where you can have nothing to say, as Rorty discusses.
Matt:
My response, and I think Rorty's response, would be that saying, "the real basic nature of reality is the flux", is muddled, gives undue leverage for essentialists like Platt to say, "Isn't that a contradiction? The "real" basic nature of reality is that there is no basic nature?" I think that the Heraclitean answer is off to a better start then the Platonic one, but I think it still needs some sorting out: the kind the pragmatist does. Like Berkeley who said "ideas are only about other ideas", the slogan is right only if it is taken nonmetaphysically. But sticking "the real basic nature of reality is ______" into your slogan I think sets you up to look like a metaphysician. Because it sets you up for having to answer the skeptic: how do you know? Its only when we drop metaphysics that we can drop epistemology and then be done with the whole blessed thing. You say you are setting borders, but isn't the ironist stance exactly about _not_ setting borders? Rortyans read
Wittgenstein as not saying that the silence we reach says there is a wall with something special on the other side, but that the silence means "mu", it means we've asked a bad question, conducted a bad line of inquiry.
Matt
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