From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 15 2003 - 01:57:33 GMT
Wim,
Wim said:
Yes, and you can't describe 'little cumulative innovations' as (different) answers to yes/no questions.
Matt:
Okay, I'll bite: why not?
Wim said:
I agree that 'saying something particular, like about a true statement or a good action or a piece of common sense' is in the end more important than discussing metaphysics and 'how things hang together'. The problem is, that 'we' appear not to be able to reach any sort of agreement ('we' being primarily Americans among themselves...?!) about the truth of a particular statement, the quality of a particalar action or whether something is really common-sensical.
Matt:
(My eyebrows are raised.)
We can't? I beg to differ, I think we've reached agreement about a lot of things. And I mean a lot. Think of all the things we don't question. Besides the physical stuff like "Is it raining outside?", think of the discussion going on right now on this forum about us Americans' campaign finance laws. One side thinks its a restriction on free speech, the other doesn't, but notice that _nobody_ has questioned the value of free speech. The truth of this particular statement of common American sense "Free speech should be maximized as much as possible to the greatest amount of people" is agreed on.
Donald Davidson, in fact, makes the point that if we didn't already agree on a large part of our beliefs communication would be impossible.
Wim said:
Neo-pragmatism may be very right that metaphysics and philosophy in general have done a poor job until now in enabling 'us' to reach more agreement (on the basis of the assumption that FIRST agreeing on answers to metaphysical questions would better enable us to reach agreement about the things that really matter). The point is however, that I don't see neo-pragmatism offering a better way to reach agreement between say liberals and conservatives yet.
Matt:
The neopragmatist point is that we shouldn't be looking for a better way of reaching agreement from philosophy. In fact, we shouldn't be looking for a better way of reaching agreement. Outside of the regular ole' "methods" of persuasion and give-and-take, to me any attempt to "look for a better way of reaching agreement" looks like an attempt to construct some sort of Algorithmic Method that will decide these things before hand, demarcate the boundaries of discussion in an ahistorical manner, rather than a historical manner.
I oppose the two kinds of demarcation because pragmatists do think there are historical demarcations of discussion, and these change over time. What I think philosophy can do is what Locke described as the underlaborer function, clearing away our conceptual debris. Philosophy can suggest new ways of thinking and talking about things, ways that may lead to easier agreement. For instance, Isaiah Berlin's distinction between negative and positive liberty (a recapitulation of Benjamin Constant's distinction between Modern and Ancient). In this respect, I think Rorty has helped sharpen my thinking about the public/private split as he reformulated it in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Rorty and I hope that it catches on because it will help people agree on, say, the line between church and state and, as Rawls generalized it, the distinction between philosophy and politics.
Wim said:
By the way: you have been writing relatively little about 'something particular' yourself. You usually keep out of the more concrete political discussions on this list.
Matt:
Absolutely (though I just broke my self-enforced rule). I do that because this list is for me to discuss philosophy, a hobby of mine that I do on the weekends. Because I do not think of philosophy (and subsequently this forum) as a vehicle for politics, I simply stay out of it. It reminds me of when, about a year ago, Mari came on the board wanting to rally together the forum to do practical things. Scott and I both demurred. That's not what we are here for, though we both wished Mari luck. Our point wasn't that nobody should use this forum to do practical things or to discuss politics, but that nobody should feel forced to do these things, which I generalize to the maxim "all conversations are optional". Nobody is obligated to talk about anything on this forum. That's why there are lurkers: they don't want to talk about anything currently being bandied about (or they don't want to pipe up for fear of being ripped to shreds). When DMB said of me once that I was obvi
ously no activist, I replied that that conclusion applies to everyone here. We generally have no idea what any of us do in our non-forum time because it is rarely discussed. We are here to discuss philosophy, not talk about what political rallies we've recently organized.
Matt
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