From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jan 17 2005 - 20:53:44 GMT
Hey Ian,
No, you're not way off, and don't worry about it. The skeptic does sound
like he's looking for absolutes, so I've understood the original impulse of
people impressed by Pirsig to shrug him off. But whether he is looking for
absolutes or not depends on who the skeptic is and whether you can shrug him
off or not depends on who you are.
What the skeptic does is attempt to destroy Rational Faith. In the days of
the Enlightenment, when "rational" was moreorless inextricable from
"absolute," this led to skeptics denying the ability of "reason" to do
anything. Hence, Pierre Bayle, probably the greatest Enlightenment skeptic,
who rended Rational Faith to pieces, only to replace it with a simple faith
in God. Since the Enlightenment, (some) philosophers have learned that you
can pull "rational" off of "absolute." So, now we have pragmatists who, as
they start the dialectical process of moving from, say, representationalism
(realism) to antirepresentationalism (pragmatism) or essentialism to
antiessentialism, sound like skeptics. Often they are called skeptics. But
we generally don't like that self-image. We won't eternally hound a person
with those insipid questions because under certain circumstances the
questions won't be in point, or they won't make sense. But until we change
our philosophical circumstances (assumptions, presuppositions, commonsense,
framework, vocabulary, metaphysics), those questions _will_ make sense and
so need to be answered at the risk of becoming unconversable. To leave the
conversation is the ultimate sin in philosophy. "Conversability" is what
pragmatists translated "rational" into, so in this sense we do have
"rational faith." We have faith that if we keep the conversation going,
good things will happen.
So, what I'm trying to impress upon people is that I don't think they've
changed their, say, "metaphysics" enough to warrant shrugging off the
skeptic. And that when they do, their shrug is unjustified and the
conversational equivalent of a punch to the face: the rules of conversation
won't allow it. (One of my favorite movies right now is I Heart Huckabees,
a philosophical/existential adventure that everyone here should see, where
Marky Mark plays this guy impressed by nihilism. He loves to argue and he
continually gets into shouting matches with people in the movie. The
contradiction of his character is that, while he clearly loves to argue and
use his mind to investigate our internal assumptions and the like, his
continued resorts to physical violence and screamed "Shut up!"s put him
outside the bounds of rational conversation.) Conversely, what people are
trying to impress upon me is that they don't have to take the skeptic
seriously, just like the pragmatist. Either that, and much more drastically
in my opinion, they'll try and convince me that the "rules of conversation"
don't always apply.
Ian said:
I guess I'm one of those who see's MoQ as "self-evident" - pragmatically,
empirically so. Being also a pragmatist, I guess you are also saying people
like me need to recognise the practical need for reasoned argument to back
up my "faith" in the MoQ, if we expect it to get anywhere as a credible
philosophy in the real world. Therefore those pesky skeptics need to have
their arguments addressed ?
Matt:
What pragmatists are trying to get people to realize is that the notion of
"self-evidentness" doesn't work. The notion of something being
"self-evident" was dissolved like Russell's distinction of between knowledge
by appearance and knowledge by description, dissolved by such innovations as
Quine's dissolution of the analytic/synthetic distinction and Sellars'
implosion of the Myth of the Given. I wouldn't just try and get people to
understand the need for reasoned argument to try and get somewhere in the
philosophical world, I would try to impress upon people the need for
_reasoned argument_ to get anywhere with anything, for those are the rules
of conversation, rules most people want satisfied.
At the end of your post, after repeating a quote of Rorty I supplied, you
say, "I read that sentence as indicating the there can be no epistemological
'authority'. ie there are no absolutes again." You're right, Rorty doesn't
want there to be metaphysical absolutes, he wants to pull apart the words
"rational" and "absolute certainty." Rorty will play the part of the
skeptic to show the foolhardiness of looking for an absolute ground, but he
will ameliorate the supposed damage. So when he balances "epistemological
authority" and "decent respect for the opinions of others" he's transposing
the battlefield from epistemology to a regular conversation. If we want to
retain our ability to know absolutely the contents of our own minds, we must
balance that with the idea that we might be wrong. So, in relation to your
seeing the self-evidentness of the MoQ, we can transpose Rorty's quote into
this reminder about the conversation of mankind: "the price of retaining
one's appeal to self-evidentness is a decent respect for the opinions of
mankind." I think the entire idea of philosophy is to investigate the
suppositions that allow us to see things as "self-evident."
Ian said:
Whilst I'm no philosophy expert, I hope you would not see me as
"inattentive" to the history of philosophy. Pirsig railed against
philosophology too. I guess I'm generally looking at philsophy from an
internal pre-cognitive perspective - MoQ seems to have that indefinable
Quality itself - but I am actively looking for the evidence of others to
back it up, philosophical as well as empirical.
Matt:
My thoughts on philosophy and conversation that I've been talking about
lately are generally covered in my last essay, "Philosophologology," where I
try and investigate Pirsig's use of "philosophology." I get the feeling
around here sometimes that people think that we can do philosophy without
the history of philosophy. While I think you can, I'm not so sure that it
pans out to mean the same thing as what other people take it to mean. If
people want to get a good idea of what I think it means, all in relation to
Pirsig's use of "philosophology" as an epithet, I suggest reading section 1,
parts A ("Philosophology: Substance and History") and B ("Philosophy as a
Natural Kind") and section 3, part B ("Concluding Remarks"). In general
though, the pragmatist would try and convince you that the notion of an
"internal pre-cognitive prespective" doesn't do anything (that we are always
"post-cognitive") and to dissolve the distinction between philosophical and
empirical.
Ian said:
Whether it's ontology or epistemology being focussed on, one thing I see in
the history of philosophy is the form of argumentation. For me it is the
argumentation that is loaded in terms of objectivity, logic and an
assumption of absolutes to be found, a metaphysics. That's the handicap, the
Catch22 I call it. ie Until I discover a new mode of argumentation, I do not
feel any obligation to "justify" the MoQ in rational terms.
Matt:
Lately when you've talked about your "Catch-22," I've been confused about
it. I think I've lost my handle on what you mean by it because I don't see
the pragmatist as being caught by a Catch-22, or at least one that matters.
The argumentation in the history of philosophy is generally loaded down with
"terms of objectivity, logic and an assumption of absolutes to be found,"
but that's why its a history. It's gone and the pragmatist thinks he can
purge the conversation of objectivity and metaphysics (though I'm not sure
why "logic" is in there). You say you don't "feel any obligation to
'justify' the MoQ in rational terms," but what could be a bigger, more
important task. If people become quite convinced of the MoQ, and use it to
justify their own views of life and their own decisions, how are you going
to justify your views and decisions to other people if you can't justify the
MoQ? You might reply that a lot of people justify their views and decisions
for reasons that themselves can't be justified, but the evolutionary
progress of the conversation of mankind is in the process of killing off
those unjustifiable positions. People don't want that to happen to the MoQ,
do they?
Ian said:
The hot-stove / pain-sensation examples are legion, but surely state of the
art neuroscience is homing in on this stuff fast. I made refrence to
T.E.Lawrence in my review of Sacks (or was it Austin) - "The trick is not
minding" NB - "Minding". Masochist or not, the "mental" and physical
behaviours are mediated by learned (ie evolved) neural processes. Ditto
intuition vs consciouness of having had an intuition. The problem with the
history of philosophy is its knowledge of the physical world (the world
explicable by physics, and its higher levels of evolution) is always less
than now. One of the reasons I feel the need to explore both the history of
thought and the future of science. Old thought is often true, old science
rarely is.
Matt:
I happen to think that the natural sciences have a lot less to say to
philosophers than people generally think. For instance, I don't think
neuroscience is going to tell us anything about epistemology, at least not
how it was done by Descartes and Kant. What philosophers of mind like Rorty
and Daniel Dennett are trying to convince us of is that our philosophical
problems are structured by the vocabularies we use, the language we use, and
they are trying to change our language to catch up to the times. I don't
think neuroscience will ever tell us anything about the difference between
an intuition and being conscious of that fact. Neuroscience and philosophy
use two different vocabularies to discuss such things. My use of Peirce was
to dissuade people from thinking that we would ever be able deduce when
we've had an "intuition" as opposed to something flowing from a cognitive
process.
Matt
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