From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 12 2003 - 21:44:08 GMT
Platt,
Platt said:
If it's raining outside and someone questions the truth of my assertion that it's raining outside, I don't need to quote others to justify the truth of whether it's raining or not. I can simply say, "See for yourself."
Matt:
It isn't true that we can only quote others to justify ourselves. Rorty follows Davidson in the idea of triangulation: truth occurs in that muddle between us, our community, and the world. As Rorty put it long ago, it is the attempt to find "a suitable balance between respect for the opinions of one's fellows and respect for the stubbornness of sensation." For Rorty, there are three ways to change your beliefs: inference, metaphor, and perception. "Perception changes our beliefs by intruding a new belief into a network of previous beliefs." Following Davidson, perception doesn't justify our beliefs in the sense reasons, i.e. pointing out the inferences between beliefs. Perception _causes_ us to have beliefs. The only sense in which perception justifies our beliefs is the sense that we can try and help the person have the same perception as you, thus intruding that same belief upon that person. But Davidson and Rorty want to draw a line between showing and reasoning.
Platt said:
The problem with Rorty's view is the problem Pirsig pointed our with logical positivism which claims if we can't talk about it it must not exist, and if it doesn't exist it can't be true. I go along with Pirsig's view that phenomena exist independently of talk (intersubjective agreement) about them.
Matt:
The sense in which Rorty agrees with the logical positivists is the sense that we pragmatists believe that if we can't talk about it, then there's no sense in debating about whether it exists or not. This is certainly to be distinguished from "if we can't talk about it, it must not exist." Because one of the ways in which we change our beliefs is through metaphor, which expands our language, let's us talk about more things. It is through metaphor that we begin to talk about more things and it is at that point that we can begin debating whether something exists or not.
Matt
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