From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Thu Nov 27 2003 - 03:26:57 GMT
Matt,
> 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.
[Scott:] Do we (in some interesting sense) survive death? A materialist must
answer "no", while a non-materialist can answer "I don't know".
>
[Matt:]> 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".
[Scott] I think we should revive Platonic metaphysics. We have learned a lot
to be skeptical about since then, so it won't bear much resemblance to
Plato, or even Plotinus, but the general idea that our common sense is a
false appearance is, in my opinion, salutary. In particular, I think we need
to shift from the belief that consciousness developed from with a
spatio-temporal non-conscious world to the belief that conscious creates
space and time.
[Matt:]> 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.
[Scott:] We can (and do) disagree on things like the above, but I don't see
how we can articulate the difference without specifying different
ontological, and hence metaphysical, beliefs.
>
[Matt:]> 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.
[Scott:] Yes, but then why the remark above: "After we become
anti-reductionistic, pragmatists are unsure why we should worry about
materialism." I worry a great deal that so many intellectuals are
materialists, and wish to persuade them of the error of their ways. (I
understand "physicalist" as one variety of the class "materialist".) Where I
get bothered is when Rorty says "the pragmatist holds that..." when it is
his materialism that holds it. I gave an example of this in a post to Sam a
while back:
[part of a post to Sam (9/7/03:]
Here is a quote from Rorty (from the introduction to Consequences of
Pragmatism):
"What really needs debate between the pragmatist and the intuitive realist
[non-pragmatist materialists like Nagel] is *not* whether we have intuitions
to the effect that "truth is more than assertability" or "there is more to
pain than brain-states".... *Of course* we have such intuitions. How could
we escape having them? We have been educated within an intellectual
tradition built around such claims -- just as we used to be educated within
an intellectual tradition built around such claims as "If God didn't exist,
everything is permitted"....But it begs the question between pragmatist and
realist to say that we must find a philosophical view which "captures" such
intuitions. The pragmatist is urging that we do our best to *stop having*
such intuitions, that we develop a *new* intellectual tradition."
Now I agree, more or less, with Rorty on the "truth is more than
assertability" intuition (since I don't hold with truth by correspondence
theory), but I think Rorty is not being accurate with the "there is more to
pain than brain-states" intuition, which is what I am dealing with in my
argument. He is saying that it is the pragmatist who wants to stop having
such intuitions, but I think he is wrong. It is the materialist who needs to
stop having such intuitions in order to continue being a materialist.
This is because it is only the materialist who has to think that "seeing the
tree" (or feeling pain) is all and only brain-states. The dualist or
idealist, or mystic, doesn't have any problem at all with the intuition.
[End of post]
>
[Matt:]> 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.
[Scott:] From quantum phsyics, and from other considerations, I draw the
conclusion that the non-spatio-temporal is ontologically prior to the
spatio-temporal. This has big consequences, and not just in science. It
means, for example, that the usual narrative (Big Bang and nominalist
evolution) which has become a basic part of our culture is all wrong.
- Scott
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