From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 13 2004 - 21:55:34 GMT
Paul,
Paul said:
Fair enough, given the agreement on the use of "ontology," I think you're probably right. I've just never seen a pragmatist create anything like Pirsig's static hierarchy but then I don't claim to have read a great deal of pragmatist philosophy.
Matt:
Okay, what I see you as calling "ontology" is what I once called "positive philosophy." The gist is that it arranges the furniture of reality, so to speak, right? Well, I've almost always limited what counts as pragmatism to its negative philosophy, as the debris clearer function. So, you want to move on from there and find some creative suggestions about how to arrange reality after we've cleared away the garbage, after we've decided what conceptual moves are crap. Yeah, this is all good and desirable and most philosophers split their time between negative and positive philosophy. The closest philosopher I've seen to what Pirsig writes, not just in position but also in terminology, is Dewey (if you want a reading suggestion, I would say Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy). Rorty does spend most of his time performing the negative function, but not all of his time. I'm thinking of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity where he talks about the public/private distinction
and develops a view of language, the self, and society given a pragmatist viewpoint. Now, Rorty's positive philosophy doesn't take as wide a scope as Pirsig attempts, but I don't think that's a strike against Rorty. I just see them as having two different purposes.
Paul said:
On the subject of differences, I think one difference between the MOQ and neo-pragmatism may be that the MOQ still makes use of "empirical experience" as a starting point and as the basis for the existence of value. Is this a problematic aspect of the MOQ for pragmatists?
Matt:
Not exactly. I mentioned Dewey before, and Rorty pretty much uses everything in Dewey verbatum. Almost. The places where he criticizes Dewey are the places where he sounds like a metaphysician (in the degenerate sense) and seems to claim metaphysical things. Which is pretty much what I do with Pirsig. Beyond that though, Rorty simply translates aspects of Dewey where Dewey uses a vocabulary that Rorty thinks it would be best if we didn't use. For instance, the whole idea of a "linguistic turn" in philosophy. Rorty thinks that switching from talk about experience to talk about language focused our conceptual clearing ability, which helped us get rid of a lot of these crappy conceptual moves. So, for the post-analytic, neopragmatist, "empirical experience" is simply translated into "language" and nothing is really lost.
Pragmatists can and still do talk about experience, like experiencing a rose or a heavy metal concert. But when we start doing conceptual things, we start thinking in terms of language instead of experience. We do this for the same reason we don't use the word "ontology," "epistemology," "metaphysics," "correspondence," or "objectivity": we think conceptual accidents are more prone to happen when using these words. Can you tame these words? Sure you can and I think you and Wim and David have been in the process of doing that. Should we _bother_ to tame them? No, I still don't think so, pretty much for the same reasons why you and David just agreed that we shouldn't tame "objectivity" and just drop it from our vocabulary. It's caused too much trouble.
I don't know Paul. I think we are getting to the point where we can start borrowing freely from each other.
Matt
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