From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Mon Nov 03 2003 - 10:45:01 GMT
Hi Matt
Paul said:
Does this create a reality/Reality distinction?
Matt replied:
Sure, but this distinction is between two kinds of books with Plato to
Kant to Husserl and Russell on one side and Protagoras to Hume to
Nietzsche and James on the other.
Paul:
Is it fair to say that pragmatists replace metaphysical distinctions
with philosophological distinctions? For example, reality is only
"ideal" and "material" because there are idealists and materialists and
there is no way of deciding which is correct. Does this therefore extend
outside of metaphysical writing and into other types of literature? For
example, is Tolkien's middle-earth as "real" as Plato's forms, Kant's
noumena and James' flux?
Paul said:
Does this create a description/reality distinction or is "a
description," for all intents and purposes, what pragmatists mean by
reality? If so, does it follow that describing produces reality?
Matt replied:
No, there is no description/reality distinction because pragmatists
don't think we can pull off our descriptions of reality and look at
reality bare and naked. But neither is "a description" what we mean by
"reality". That would be idealism. Pragmatists agree with realists
that there is a world "out there," we just think that it affects us
causally.
Paul:
I'm not convinced. If you believe that there is a world out there
(reality) that descriptions don't represent, then the two (reality and
descriptions) are not the same and surely you have made a
description/reality distinction?
If this is not the case, then all there is to "cause" a description is
another description then another description and so on, therefore it is
not possible for you to hold that there is a reality outside of
description which pushes you around, and as you say, this is linguistic
idealism.
On the other hand, descriptions can be considered as *part of* the
"reality that pushes us around," but this is not what the realists that
you agree with are saying.
The only other way out of it, as far as I can see, is to shrug off the
distinction along with the rejection of metaphysics and treat philosophy
as a form of fiction that is mainly concerned with writing a "good
story" about a fictional place called "reality." It is then up to
pragmatists to convince everyone who is interested that metaphysics (and
physics, chemistry, biology, sociology and so on?) is also a form of
fiction and no better at getting at reality than their "story."
Is this a fair conclusion?
Paul
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