From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 05 2004 - 20:04:08 GMT
Anthony,
Anthony said:
I thought the soliloquy by Matt ... was a good one though, to add balance, I have pasted below a defence of metaphysics by Professor Ronald Pine that, amongst other issues, refers specifically to the metaphysical(!) underpinnings of Rorty’s work:....
Matt:
I'm glad you liked it and I'll simply take up a few points of Pine's to flesh out what Rorty's likely response would be.
I'm not sure where in the conclusion you are referring to about metaphysics except the third full paragraph, but the paragraph is mostly the sounding of assertions that I'm guessing were fleshed out in the body of the paper (and I don't have time to go back and read the whole thing). The rest of the conclusion isn't about Rorty's underpinnings, but about his interpretation of history and the consequences of that interpretation.
But, I've fielded the claim before and I don't see having to stray far Rorty's typical first line response. To assume that Rorty _automatically_ has a metaphysics is to either beg the question or stretch "metaphysics" out to proportions where it has lost all of its interesting philosophical punch.
Now, I get the feeling that that isn't what Pine is claiming, though I'm not sure. If he's claiming that you _could_ get out from underneath ontology, though Rorty doesn't, I have a series of responses, but I don't think it really matters because what really matters in Pine's thesis is the consequences of Rorty's thought, not that he's doing ontology whether he likes it or not. It would appear that, even if we could get out from underneath ontology, Pine would rather we not. This is the best line to take with
Rorty.
The most general thing I would say is that Pine doesn't treat the postmodernists very well, he gets most of their general flow wrong. You might be able to pin some of the stuff he says on third-rate pomos, or maybe even a few of the big names, but I only have a concern with Rorty, and I think he misses him.
"My claim is that we can argue about metaphysics to the extent that we can at least compare contrasting arguments and eliminate those that present the weakest case. Rorty is using the very process he criticizes: he is reasoning inductively (generalizing) to what the world is like via an analysis of history. The issue then is who has presented the best case."
The only way to contrast arguments is if you already share enough of the relevant assumptions. Arguments work from premises. If you don't share the premises, then you can't have an argument: its just two ships passing in the night, like having two different conversations. This is Rorty's point. He wants to drop the conversation of metaphysics. He does reason inductively about the world and history, but if this is all Pine means by "metaphysics" then, like I said, it packs no philosophical punch at all. The
whole idea of metaphysics is to get a foundation. If you eliminate foundationalism, or reduce it to minimal status, then it becomes something that pragmatists would agree to, floating islands, or platforms we stand on for brief periods of time (brief given the full extent of time). Rorty's claim is that we can only compare entire vocabularies, but this doesn't involve argumentation because arguments only occur within vocabularies. The "best case" will end up being
the vocabulary that works the best given our purposes.
"From the standpoint of this thesis, for Rorty there is no need to worry about distinguishing between adjustments to an adjudicatory trail that fail and creative advances in belief through collateral theoretical analysis, pursuit and acceptance, no need to worry if the pursuit or acceptance of one reasoning trail -- one path of propositions-brought-forward-in-defense-of-other-propositions -- is better constrained than another, for the old notion of convergence of belief is not only not possible, it is not
desirable."
This is wrong. It is not the case that the notion of convergence of belief is not possible or not desirable. Rorty's claim is that there is no reason to believe that, given the full extent of time, all of our beliefs will _no matter what_ converge, which is what Peirce and Habermas claim. People converge on beliefs all the time. It happens more in the sciences, less in the humanities, but it does happen. In the case of the sciences and politics, convergence of belief is desirable. In the case of the
humanities, not so much.
Does Rorty use strong rhetoric sometimes? Sure, much like Feyerabend. But Rorty's _philosophical_ point has always been not to change radically our practices (notably because, in Rorty's view, philospohy is parasitic on practices and not at the forefront of changing them anymore), but in changing our image of what we are doing when engaging in those practices. It is possible to change our practices by doing philosophy, just not likely. Philosophy is typically about self-image.
"My argument is that given the methodological scaffolding discussed throughout this thesis, and a proper understanding of the fallibilism it implies, we see that the responsibility Rorty fears the loss of is left intact and in fact brought forward with focus and urgency: WE HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MAKING INTELLIGENT INFERENCES GIVEN MANY ALTERNATIVES, KNOWING ALL THE WHILE THAT THERE CAN NEVER BE COMPLETE JUSTIFICATORY CLOSURE TO ANY OF OUR INFERENCES, NO ULTIMATE EPISTEMIC SECURITY FOR ANY POINT OF
CONSENSUS."
Again, I'm not sure what Pine is making Rorty out to believe, but I see no problem at all for Rorty in believing the part in caps. We do have a responsibility to make intelligent inferences. Its just that sometimes shifts we make in beliefs has nothing to do with inference. Does this mean they were unintelligent shifts? No, I don't think so. I take imagination to be a shift that does not include inference and we usually tap those with expansive imaginations as marked with intelligence.
"Rorty has taken a Kantian truism (of course our theories do not re-present a noumenal realm untouched by human filters) and blown it all out of proportion. Providing a good argument that we do not and cannot accurately represent the world as it is itself does not automatically entail, as Rorty assumes, that we do not interface with one world that responds evidentially to our webs of belief, such that we learn that some belief networks are better than others."
Rorty does not assume that "we do not interface with one world that responds evidentially to our webs of belief, such that we learn that some belief networks are better than others." Rorty would likely say that _we_ respond to the world, rather than the other way around, but Rorty's point is it is easier to achieve commensuration in some areas than in others. In the sciences, its pretty easy. In the humanities, not so much. Rorty's problem is that he has very little idea in how we are to say that the world
respondes evidentially to our moral beliefs. He has no idea what that means. As far as he can tell, our moral beliefs are about other people and _they_ respond evidentially. But people notoriously respond in a variety of ways to similar circumstances, so commensuration is more difficult to achieve (notice I did not say impossible, I would love to convince everyone of the good of liberalism). And I don't think Pirsig adds anything to this inability to understand how
we get morals to correspond to the real world.
"However, the burden of this thesis has been to show that these acknowledgments underscore all the more that we ought to invest in an enterprise that stands back from the fray and attempts to see what we do when we are at our best. That we do indeed confront the world with webs of belief, but these webs are best seen as networks that can be adjusted piecemeal and not as hegemonic paradigms or gestalts with all aspects of a point of view locked neatly in place. It is ironic that Kuhn and others, who have been
taken in by what Popper called the myth of the framework, did not see that such holism is inconsistent with the very messiness of history they so often point out. History would be a much neater appearing story, if our webs of belief were such locked-in frameworks. The complexity of history is much better understood by seeing scientists as debating, adjusting, pursuing, and accepting complex hypertextual adjudicatory trails of reasoning; of making the best ampliative infe
rences that they can given the context…"
Since I just commented to Ian that intellectual change is piecemeal and that I don't find this incommensurate with Kuhn, I might as well flesh this out now (though it means putting off my long and tortured response to Anthony's earlier critique of Rorty). First, in this passage we get the relevant description of metaphysics for Pine: "an enterprise that stands back from the fray and attempts to see what we do when we are at our best." Rorty's response is that there is nothing general to be said _except_ for a
few intellectual virtues, "moral virtues characteristic of the empirical scientist--openness, curiousity, flexibility, an experiemental attitude toward everything." (Rorty, "Is Natural Science a Natural Kind?" in ORT, 46) Aside from a few behavioral things, there are no general _criteria_, which I take it Pine already acknowledges ("we must acknowledge that neither scientific change, commitment, pursuit, nor acceptance is the result of an algorithmic process and a ti
dy response to empirical data").
So, what of this "myth of the framework?" That would indeed be unfortunate and it is related to something that Donald Davidson has been trying to shake us out of for a very long time, what he calls the third dogma of empiricism, the scheme/content distinction. I think Popper's myth is propogated by thinking that when Rorty talks about "vocabularies" he's talking as if people speak with one vocabulary, or even two or three. This isn't true. There is no natural demarcation between vocabularies, only ad hoc
ones we make. People speak with a multitude of vocabulaires. The gist is that it only becomes relevant to speak of a particular vocabulary when you want to contrast it with another vocabulary, when you make that ad hoc distinction. This is only relevant when a bunch of your beliefs are in tension and to fix that tension, you have to drop some of your beliefs will holding others constant. Beliefs in tension is what Kuhn calls anamolies. Anamolies piling up are what I
would call the piecemeal movements forward, those little intellectual changes. As those changes pile up, they put more stress on certain of our other beliefs. At some point it becomes relevant to speak of making a shift in vocabulary or a paradigm shift. People who made that shift, Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein, were the recipiants of a number of anamolies, small changes that had piled up. They made the shift, they made the relevant distinction, sometimes because of "a rich texture of flesh and blood
idiosyncracies, soap-opera-like contingencies," but the reason their idiosyncratic changes _won the day_ was because of their results, because their shift produced consequences that we deemed better given the relevant purposes (in science, the relevant purpose is generally prediction and control).
"What postmodernists fear most is that unless the pretensions of scientism are undermined, a bounty of reliable beliefs in a multitude of successful cultures will be obliterated, like so many shinning sea shells on a beach of diversity washed away by a tidal wave of the world view of modern science (14) They believe that we must protect diversity by eliminating all desire for convergence and unity. Wrong."
Exactly, wrong. Pine's problem is that he has Rorty wrong. As for Pine's desire for a critical rationality, the pragmatist response is that we are not sure what an articulated criterionless critical rationality is supposed to be, aside from the relevant moral virtues of civilized society. As such, we view Pine's desire as a confused, nostaligic desire for something we've since renounced the desire for.
Matt
ORT -- Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
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