From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 26 2003 - 22:44:32 GMT
To whom it may concern,
I'd first like to thank Platt and Squonk for staying out of Paul and my's discussion until it had ended. Their endless incomprehension of pragmatism (and I might go so far as to say contemporary philosophy) typically side tracks and spirals what could have been a productive conversation into pointless, empty exchanges.
Platt again has shown his complete misunderstanding of the pragmatist position and I fail to see how it is my fault this time. The fault, I believe, is Platt's because he didn't "review" _enough_ of our discussion. Platt pulled an exchange from Paul's post of Oct. 29. He apparently failed to realize that the exhange had not yet ground to a halt, however, as some of his claims are completely spurious when compared to the continuation of our dialogue in my post of Oct. 30.
Platt said:
Up to this point it was my understanding, and Paul's, that the criteria for pragmatists in evaluating the "right" of any subject was "intersubjective agreement." But in the above exchange, Matt denies this, saying "Right doesn't belong equally to everybody. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a difference between right or wrong." So when Paul asks, "Who decides?" Matt doesn't answer.
Matt:
This highlights Platt's main failure to grasp what's going on, let alone a failure to read _further_. Platt takes my denial of right belonging to everybody to be a denial of intersubjective agreement, which is plainly false, _particularly_ given my expansion on that point (and my answering of the question "Who decides?") in the next post. Most careful readers take such denials as _clarifications_ of the original statement, not wholesale reversals. Paul, as a good reader, clearly understood this and, seeing that my clarification was simply a denial that needed a little unpacking, asked me a couple pertinent questions to gain the necessary clarification. To which, I supplied:
Roll tape!
Oct. 30:
"Paul said:
Does this mean that e.g. there is such a thing as a wrong [and by virtue of that, a right] reading of Pirsig? Furthermore, if you can be right or wrong about something, what decides?
Matt:
Sure. Nobody will agree that Pirsig discovered an old alchemy book called "Quality" that allows him to turn gold into hash brownies. But, I don't think the words "right" and "wrong" quite allow for the range that appears in the interpretation of a text. I would prefer "better" and "worse". The rightness or betterness of an interpretation is decided by a community of interpreters, of which the interpreter is apart of, and all in relation to the text. This is what Donald Davidson has called "triangulation," and Rorty calls "a suitable balance between respect for the opinions of one's fellows and respect for the stubbornness of sensation." ("Method, Social Science, and Social Hope")"
So much for Platt's first criticism of intersubjective agreement.
Platt's second criticism is to follow Paul and DMB in thinking that "intersubjective agreement" is a poor moniker for the idea being expressed. I still have no idea why, though. Like all pragmatist blurring motions, they take a strict dichotomy and make it into a continuum. On one side you have one 'subject' agreeing with a proposition (formerly the 'subjective' half) and on the other side you have many, many 'subjects' agreeing with a proposition. I don't know, works for me.
But that's not really Platt's criticism anyways. He continues to show his failure to grasp a philosophical argument when he says, "How a continuum of arbitrary opinions, ranging from a disturbed individual to a mindless collective, could ever be considered to be a criteria for truth boggles the mind." See, Platt is already pigeon-holing the pragmatist into subjectivism. He calls the entire continuum "arbitrary opinions," when the entire point of the pragmatist redescription is to make such an epithet unmanageable. On the pragmatist reading, the difference between fact and opinion is in consensus. When a lot of people in the applicable community agree to a proposition, you can call it a "fact". When only one person agrees to it, you can call it an "opinion". ("Arbitrary" is a separate issue, which I'll simply dismiss with: no belief is arbitrary if you can provide reasons for that belief.) So, either Platt has failed to grasp the initial pragmatist redescription or he
is in the business of defamation because nothing in his "criticism" comes close because it all begs the question by immediately pigeon-holing the pragmatist.
Lastly, I'd just like to proclaim my delight in playing an instrumental role in finally getting Platt and Squonk to agree on something: their simplistic, quasi-slanderous incomprehension of pragmatism.
Mark said:
The worrying thing as far as i can discern is that matt's position gives the green light to any despot who wishes to impose a social imperative under the guise of intellectual argumentation. What a pile of garbage.
Matt:
Right.
Well, I have yet to hear either of them explicate good reasons for thinking that's what my position does, though I have talked ad nauseum for why it doesn't. In fact, usually their aren't very many reasons given at all. They usually just say that pragmatism is a despot's tool, or group/social thinking, or trapped in the "Emporer New Clothes" and leave it at that, thinking "Well, its just obvious, of course!" I always give responses to why this isn't the case, but no longer. I refuse to explicate their own positions for them any longer so I can respond to them. I'll simply take it that they don't have any good reasons and that they are simply firing from the hip with irrational impulses.
Matt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Nov 26 2003 - 22:52:50 GMT