From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 24 2003 - 01:54:06 GMT
David, (Scott),
David said:
I just think you can't talk about how science develops without relating the linguistic to something non-linguistic. However much it has to be seen as being given a linguistic dressing to be part of the game, the act of dressing it has a non-linguistic significance I suggest. Do you see this point, and does it challenge your inclination to say everything has to have a linguistic dressing to play in the game? Yeah sure, but how the dressing occurs remains interesting, despite the fact we can never talk about anything in the nude. We kind of hand nature a blue and a red coat and see what one she puts on and go aha she does like my idea.
Matt:
The reason I keep boggling at your persistence is because as far as the pragmatist is concerned, she's related the linguistic with the non-linguistic as much as she needs to. She thinks the idea of "dressing up" the non-linguistic phenomena in language to be an ugly remenant of the Kantian distinction between representations and reality. It just isn't useful anymore. Instead of saying that language dresses up or represents reality, pragmatists say that language is a tool for coping with reality, for helping us manipulate it.
So, the relation between the linguistic and the non-linguistic is between beliefs and that which causes beliefs. Pragmatists look at your relation between a blue and a red coat, not between a coat Nature puts on and a coat Nature doesn't, but between a useful description and a less useful description.
David said:
We get closer. Well I'm pretty sure that science insists on making the girl talk to us.
Matt:
Again, that's simply the effect of the metaphor you and those who agree with you are using to describe science. Pragmatists are suggesting that we change the metaphor so we don't say that language is in between our Cartesian mental eye and nature, that the blue coat is between us and the Goddess Nature. Pragmatists, it would appear, would think that critical realists behave like pragmatists, but talk like realists. After you cash out the rhetoric of both sides, I'm not sure what the difference is if both sides agree that science is simply looking for better and better descriptions of our physical environment.
David said:
I respect pragmatisms logic and assumptions but then the language used is all too friendly with the materialist metaphysics and ideology that is today's common sense and dominant scientistic world-view. Don't you realise this?
Matt:
Sure I do and so does Rorty. That's why the first four essays of Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth focus on the philosophy of science. But before I answer more fully, something from Scott.
Scott said:
Another reason to ask "what is real" is because one thinks (as I do) that the view that only the material is real is predominant among intellectuals in our culture, and I think that that is a bad thing. And so, when the pragmatist also happens to be a materialist (even a non-reductive one), and says "The only reason to ask that question is if you are trying to bite the person with the philosophy bug" then I see that as an attempt to uphold a particular ontological viewpoint, and not as pragmatism simpliciter.
Matt:
What pragmatists don't know is why materialism is so bad. Pragmatists think it well of David to say "materialist metaphysics" because us pragmatists can all nod our heads in agreement, but the reason we are agreeing is because we all want to dispense with _metaphysics_. After we become anti-reductionistic, pragmatists are unsure why we should worry about materialism.
I see where Scott gets his flame from my answer to "What is real?", but I stand by it. If we answer that question with anything other than "everything," I think you start walking the path of Platonic metaphysics, which I don't think either David or Scott wants, whatever either attempts to rehabilitate "metaphysics" or "ontology". From what I understand, Scott's ironic metaphysics and David's Heideggerian ontology are to be distinguished from the line of metaphysics begun by Plato, what Heidegger calls Platonism. So as long as Scott and David can answer with me "everything", it doesn't matter to me what they do afterwards in "ontology" because I'll simply read it as differing language games in the large, broad attempt to see how things hang together. Or as Scott said, as long as we agree with "pragmatism simpliciter," we can disagree on other things, but for different reasons.
As another attempt to explain why pragmatists are unsure why we should worry about non-reductive physicalism (to which Scott and David still refer to as materialism), I first begin with the pragmatist claim that the only thing that was worrisome was the reductionistic flavor that was carried by the earliest scientists and philosophers that promulgated it. Working in the wake of Galileo and Darwin, the materialist community worked to de-legitamize religion, which they saw as working under the light of superstition, rather than the light of reason which they worked under. Religious defenders counter-attacked but were increasingly beaten back. James was the first to enter this debate from a different direction, a non-metaphysical direction. In The Will to Believe, James argued that science shouldn't be viewed as an alternative to religion. Rather, we should view both religion and science as having different purposes and that as long as those purposes do not conflict, there
's no reason to think that you can have either one or the other. In other words, James was attacking _metaphysics_ and _reductionism_, not science or religion. Pragmatists see the old-school religious defenders and science defenders as having reductionism in common. When we get rid of that, what's the problem with either? To sum up, pragmatists are not simply non-reductive physicalists. In fact, as Scott suggested, you don't need to be a physicalist to be a pragmatist, you only need to be non-reductive. As pragmatists, we can be non-reductive physicalists, non-reductive etherists, non-reductive atomists, non-reductive Catholics, non-reductive Methodists, non-reductive liberals, non-reductive conservatives, non-reductive capitalists, non-reductive Marxists, etc., etc.
I've included positions that typically aren't called reductionist, positions in politics and economics, for a reason. It is to strike up James slogan that the true is what is good in the way of belief. James suggested that our beliefs will change depending on circumstance, that our fall from Catholicism will depend on our personal need for Catholicism. For instance, the old saying "if you aren't a liberal at age 18, you have no heart and if you aren't a conservative at age 50 you have no brain." This slogan strikes up the fact that the older you get, the more stuff you typically have and the more sedentary your beliefs typically are. The drift of your life is found to be correlative to the drift in your political ideology. In economics and science, the change is a little different from that of things of a deeply personal nature, like politics and religion. These shifts are made by experts (more so for science, less so for economics, where politics is tied in). Follow
ing Hayek, the state governed central planning imbedded in the national incarnations of Marxism just haven't panned out. In the spirit of Deweyan experimentalism, we tried it, but it didn't work out so we move on. In science, it was productive to move from thinking that objects had an inner telos to thinking they functioned mechanistically. Science is not in the business of being materialist, they are in the business of coping with our physical environment. If physics changes its self-conception, which it has in its past, then intelligent people can only go along. They're the professionals after all.
So, when Scott says "If nothing else, I would think that quantum physics alone should lead us to re-ask the question "what is real", to question common sense more deeply" pragmatists think that yeah, quantum physics should lead us to question the common sense that is related to _science_ (the physical environment), but to draw any other consequences, I think, is to twist purposes, which James and the pragmatists think is reductionistic.
Matt
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