From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Sep 04 2003 - 22:37:12 BST
David, Platt,
David said:
But physicalism makes Rorty an inconsistent post-modernist, as Andrew Bowie says in his book on Schelling: "The important fact that makes one sceptical about Rorty's position is that Rorty himself actually does retain a ground, in that he, albeit somewhat inconsistently, advocates a form of physicalism, which involves a questionable ontological commitment of the kind he critisises in others."
Platt said:
This is precisely the criticism I've levelled at Rorty ever since Matt began touting his philosophy.
Matt:
I gotta' hand it to Platt on this one. He has been leveling this exact criticism at Rorty and myself for the past year (amongst many other repeated criticisms). And I've been answering the criticism in the exact same way for the past year: non-reductive physicalism does not retain an ontological commitment. Ontology is optional. If you think ontology is not optional, and therefore any form of physicalism or any other belief has an ontological commitment, then you are begging the question. Pragmatists don't want to have that conversation and they refuse to be pulled into it. As DeWeese suggested to Pirsig, Do not enter the arena.
Is begging the question a big deal? Only if you want to gain a dialectical hold over a person and wrestle them to the ground.
Matt
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