From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu May 15 2003 - 03:10:38 BST
Platt,
Platt said strangely:
Talk about begging the question. How can you possibly know what was
rational for the Greeks wasn't rational for the 18th century French, or
that Socrates would've had a fit if he heard French liberals talk about
private rights and independence? Notions of how someone thought at
various times in various contexts amounts to little more than
guesswork. That goes for all "contexts" that pomos endlessly like to
refer to in their arguments because to know any context other than
one's own is the province of historians and fiction writers. Historians are
most noted for their disagreements and, in a few cases, plagiarism,
while fiction writers are, well, writers of fiction. The one context you can
say something about without fear of contradiction or begging the
question is the one inside your head. The rest is divination.
Matt:
Well, you are right, "to know any context other than one's own is the province of historians." I was speaking hist
orically. I could give you what I was thinking about, given my own historical work, but I doubt you'd care. Your point wasn't about what historical thing I had in mind, it was about knowing a context. Your conclusion, that "the one context you can say something about without fear of contradiction or begging the question is the one inside your head. The rest is divination," is provacative and bombastic, but essentially right. That's why pragmatists like Rorty and Bernstein like Germans like Heidegger and Gadamer. They developed a picture of hermeneutics that describes how we attempt to grasp the past. Gadamer argued that it was essentially an interpretive task, we will never get to the way things really were, nor should we want to. We interpret the past according to our needs.
Now, this is also a bombastic thing to say, one you will surely disagree with. And like all bombs, its in desperate need of qualification. But like your bomb, I'll leave it as is.
Matt
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