From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 26 2004 - 23:25:39 GMT
David,
David said:
What you say seems deeply inaccurate and inconsistent to me. Quite simply what are these strange isolated vocabularies that you are referring to? Once upon a time we all spoke using metaphors developed within a religuious context, then we gained new secular and scientific metaphors that have done a great deal to change religious conversation in turn. Tomorrow the most exciting part of our culture might be some new religious metaphors and off we go in a post-secular direction. You seem to want to erect artifical barriers hat cultural history shows do not and cannot exist.
Matt:
This is a misunderstanding of what I mean by a distinction between vocabularies. Yes, vocabularies aren't isolated. The simplest way to erect the practical division between different vocabularies, different on-going conversations in our culture, is to note, for instance, that "particle" is a word and concept that comes up a lot in physics, but not in ethics, and that "intention" is a word and concept that comes up a lot in ethics, but not in physics.
Can we redescribe ethics to fit in the word "particle"? Sure, but I take the postivists and Skinnereans as trying to do that and nobody really thinks they succeeded. Can we redescribe physics to fit in the word "intention"? Sure, Aristotle did and Pirsig is the obvious recent example of somebody who does. Does he talk about it a lot? No. I take it to be because he was making a point about redescription, not a point about how we should resurrect the notion of telos when we are using a particle accelerator. "Particle" in ethics and "intention" in physics just don't turn out to be that useful. The more you can note the remoteness of a large batch of concepts and purposes in one area of your vocabulary from another area, the more it becomes useful to speak of "different vocabularies."
David said:
It is one great value market, the main thing is to stop claiming that we can justify our positions in terms of something other than value. You certainly can't justify me not using any vocabulary I want, sure you can say you don't understand, but we have that problem all the time anyway. We are bound to talk politics based on our values, these have many sources, one key one being religion, if we disagree about values we are probably going to have to understand each others religions to progress our dialogue and attempt to reach compromise/agreement.
Matt:
Again, I think you are misunderstanding me. 1) Of course I agree that "it is one great value market," but there comes a point when it may be useful to make a distinction between the value market of say, physics, and the value market of ethics. I'd like for you to point me to where I claim that "we can justify our positions in terms of something other than value." 2) You certainly do have the right to use any vocabulary you want, that's what I called sincerity. However, when we talk politics, the nature of such discourse is to reach commensuration and to do stuff. If it weren't, the entire 2500 year philosophical dialectic from Socrates to Pirsig and Rorty would have occured in the political arena. So, when we are talking politics, we need a vocabulary we can agree on, and in the face of diversity it's going to end up being thin. The only strategy we've come up with so far to help us stick to a vocabulary we can agree on is secularization. 3) Yes, our values have many
sources and it might be a good idea to understand them, but is it really all that efficient for our Senators to hold Intro to Religion seminars on the Senate floor, or might it be more efficient to have them attend them at night _before_ they hit the Senate floor to debate about what they are going to do about it (whatever "it" is). As I said to Sam, the Senate floor isn't even a _good_ instrument for consciousness-raising because nobody _watches_ C-SPAN.
David said:
In the end I wonder if views like 'being kind to each other' or 'avoiding cruelty' may in fact prove to be shallow, or hard to really make sacrifices for.
Matt:
You are right to wonder, but Rorty and I hope not because those thin kinds of views are the only types of things we can see a culturally diverse population agreeing on. One's reasons for being kind may differ, but we take the view that cruelty is the worst thing you can do as the least common denominator of the type of people we want running around.
David said:
You are suggesting we may find more common ground on secular ground but that is only a contingent matter that may be true today and false tomorrow, it is not entirely looking like common ground at the moment on a world (rather than a US) basis.
Matt:
Yes, as I already noted, it is a contingent matter. My further prediction is that the only way to keep up liberalism is with secularism.
Matt
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