From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sat Nov 22 2003 - 14:08:10 GMT
Wim, David,
Wim said:
My questions to you are therefore: how do you organize your beliefs and your experience without metaphysical questions?
You are quite right NOT to want to organize your beliefs and your experience with ANSWERS to those questions that suppose an appearance-reality distinction, but what's wrong with asking the questions, answering them in a way that does NOT suppose such a distinction and organizing one's beliefs and experience with those answers? (E.g.: "All reality is experience. Both aspects of experience, the dynamic and the static aspect, are equally real. Neither represents the other.")
Matt:
I think this might be a definition issue. If a question doesn't suppose an appearance/reality distinction, it isn't a metaphysical question. Dogmatic? Sure, but you have to be dogmatic about your definitions when you are using a specific vocabulary. I have been suggesting that people are switching vocabularies on me, trying to criticize the pragmatist for doing something he's not.
Case in point, when the question "What is reality?" is not asked in the way that it is meant "What is the _nature_ of reality?" it becomes one of two things: a specific discipline that already currently exists (anthropology, history, literary criticism, physics, etc.) or it is in the vein of Sellars' description of philosophy as "the attempt to see how things, in the widest possible sense, hang together, in the widest possible sense." That's just the way the words I'm using function in the vocabulary I'm using. I have explained that I have no problem with people who use "metaphysics" to designate what I would refer to as "philosophy". My problem is that I think some people are still using "metaphysics" in the old way, while thinking they've escaped the badness of traditional metaphysics, or at least, I'm still trying to ferret out those who are.
Again, the question pragmatists want to get rid of is not "What is reality?", but "What is the nature of reality?" In my usage, the first is simply philosophical, while the second is metaphysical. So when I say we should get rid of metaphysical questions, I'm not referring to "What is reality?"
Wim said:
That is, if metaphysics is understood to mean our answers to three questions:
1) How can we know? (epistemology)
2) What can we know? (ontology)
3) How can we know what we should do? (meta-ethics)
My answers are:
1) We can only know by experience.
2) Only Quality or value can be known experientially.
3) We can only know what we should do by attaching differential meaning to alternative actions.
Are these trivial, too??
Matt:
I'm pretty sure we can treat them as such, yeah. The epistemological questions should generally be avoided, but I think your answer can be quickly become a non-answer, a "how the hell else are we supposed to know things?" What I mean by this is that, if you take the question seriously, you would answer my incredulous question with a list of alternatives, which leads you into epistemology, which is bad because you will be hounded till the end of your days by the skeptic ("How do you know? Howdoyouknow? Howdoyouknow? Howdoyouknow? Howdoyouknow?"). If you don't take the question seriously, as the pragmatist suggests, the incredulity comes from thinking that the question is bad.
The ontological question I think is touch and go, too, because it seems to imply we can know everything. But again, that's only if we take it seriously. If you don't, it just means we can know stuff in our experience.
And definitely to the metaethics question. The only way to take it seriously is if you think that relativists actually exist. Pragmatists don't. They think relativists and skeptics are of a piece: they are both dialectical figments of Plato and Kant's imaginations.
Wim said:
By the way, even the question "What is real?" is not trivial BEFORE you have answered it with 'everything is'. Asking that question CAN be important to distinguish oneself from Platonists and other villains.
Matt:
I'll say this: it is true that the question "What is real?" is not trivial before you have answered it the way pragmatists do. But as soon as the pragmatists answer the way they do, answer it by treating it trivially, the gig is up. As Heidegger saw, pragmatism is the dialectical consequence of that long chain of events begun by Socrates. They are the next stage of philosophical evolution. The hope of the pragmatists is not to re-enact that chain of events forever to make people, all people, trivially pragmatists, but simply make them trivially pragmatists. We don't need to rehearse the philosophical canon to make pragmatism synonymous with common sense. By pragmatic eyes, we are already half way there. Half the time, to get regular people asking "philosophical questions" we _do_ have to rehearse the Plato-to-Kant sequence. This is just what the pragmatists want. They want it to seem unnatural to do metaphysics (just as it seemed natural for Aquinas to do metaphysic
s).
I don't think we need to forever keep asking the question, "What is real?" to our children. The only reason to ask that question is if you are trying to bite the person with the philosophy bug, do a bit of intellectual history by reenacting the series of footnotes stretching out from under Plato, get them to _understand_ why pragmatism rose to the top of the philosophical heap. Pragmatists agree with Hegel that philosophy is the attempt to "hold your time in thought," and to do that you have to do a little history.
So, when David, responding to my "anti-metaphysics" (which, I should remind, should only be interpreted as referring to appearance/reality inferring claims), says "Matt likes the sophistication of the pragmatist anti-metaphysics posiyion ad I can relate to that, but I feel it is unlikely ever to be able to explain itself beyond the philosophically sophisticated," I can only agree, but that goes for every philosophical question that has lasted a long time, or any question in general. The people who are thought to have been the best thinkers about those questions generally created some sophistication to deal with them, starting with Socrates and Plato, to Augustine and Aquinas, Hume and Kant, James and Nietzsche, and Rorty and Pirsig. Pragmatists do not think that everyone has to be a philosopher. Its not hard to make it common sense: you just educate people to not take questions asking about the "nature" or "essence" of something seriously. Then the persistent question fo
r people bitten by the philosophy bug isn't "What is the nature of reality?" or even "What is reality?", but "Why don't we take questions about essence seriously?" That's when you can rehearse the sequence.
Matt
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