From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Sep 21 2003 - 22:17:56 BST
Andy,
DMB said:
For Rorty, it seems, the problem is thinking that words like "democracy" have an inherent meaning and that too many people take it's definition as an "eternal" truth. (Whatever that is.) But Pirsig sees the opposite problem. The problem was that such a definition could never be found or spelled out, that such priniciples aren't really real. They're just subjective, an amorphous soup of sentiments. Pirsig's take seems to correspond to the real world and the problems were are faced with, while Rorty seems to be attacking a position held by nobody. I mean, is there a serious thinker who believes democracy and human rights have an eternally fixed definition? If so, that would be news to me. It seems quite obvious that the problem is exactly the opposite, that no one has been able to pin it down or spell it out and that the meaning of the word changes through time and from place to place. This is one of the reasons I find Rorty so unhelpful. When I see someone complain about the
"objective" meaning of such words, I can only wonder what planet he's living on.
Matt:
Actually, I think Rorty sees a lot of problems. One is that people think that "democracy" has an inherent meaning, the other is that people don't take their "amorphous soup of sentiments" seriously because they think they are subjective. Because Rorty and Pirsig both attempt to reject the subject/object dualism, their answers are related, but the strategies they take are different. Your attack on Rorty has been on relevance to certain issues, and I think it sticks in certain cases. One case is in law. After Rorty almost single-handedly ressurected pragmatism as a respectable label, legal theorists began seeing how it applied in law. Many began saying that it had nothing to really say, it was already all applied. To which Rorty agreed, pragmatism in law is largely banal.
But, as I've said before, saying that pragmatism is banal in practice is a very poor criticism because pragmatism marks the philosophical movement that has tried to get our theories about our behavior to match up more accurately with our behavior.
Because in philosophy, we still have people like Ronald Dworkin who, in Law's Empire, says that there is "one right answer" to hard legal questions. Rorty is speaking from a context of philosophy professors and social theorists, some of whom still want to be Kantians, people for whom there is "one right answer" to any particular question. You don't take these thinkers seriously. I applaud you, I don't either. I think referencing "objectivity" is an empty gesture. But they are still out there, and my polemics are against them. I think you are living in a dream world if you think they don't exist, that you can quote stats on how many people in America believe in God and the devil, on how many people are held under the sway of the Christian Coalition and still not think there is some polemical work to be done.
DMB said:
Do we have power over our language? Again, it seems that Rorty is exactly wrong and that exactly the opposite is true. Language has power over us. Words like these refer to a certain kind of experience. We don't alter experience by using better or different words. New words come into existence and old words change their meaning through a process that has very little to do with an individual's will power. I mean, we can't force a bigot to become a civil rights activists by simply forcing him to say "African-American" rather than "nigger".
Matt:
I wonder who does have power over language, if we don't. Rorty, amongst a lot of philosophers, says that we have power over language and language has power over us. It is a big mess. Rorty's point is that we do alter experience by using better or different words. To say otherwise is to think that our words should correspond to an object that remains changeless no matter what we say about it.
And I think Shakespeare, as the greatest poet ever, is the perfect example of somebody who, through sheer force of will, through better use of language, changed the way we use our words. Poets are in the business of changing the way we speak, through sheer force of will getting us to pick up on their metaphors and use them.
Matt
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