From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 16 2003 - 20:43:03 BST
David,
David said:
Sure pragmatism has an epistemology, you do some creative language and you say 'it works' test rather than 'its truth' test.
Matt:
Well, either you are begging the question or you're using a different definition of epistemology. I think begging. Epistemology as some traditional variant of "What is knowledge"" would ask the question "How do we know you have knowledge?" As David says, the epistemologist says "Its true" whereas the pragmatist says, "it works". However, I think that saying that pragmatism has a metaphysics or epistemology is to pick pragmatism up by the entirely wrong handle. The answer "it works" never satisfies the epistemologist because "it works" amounts to "I don't know" or a shrug. That's the effect the pragmatist wants, but the pragmatist acknowledges, with the epistemologist, that its a non-answer. Saying the pragmatist has a metaphysics or epistemology puts the pragmatist in an awkward position, a position he doesn't want to be in. You want to read the pragmatist as continuing the epistemological conversation, but the pragmatist wants to end it. And I have no idea how epis
temology would continue with an answer like "it works". "It works" isn't a test on our praxis to see if we are doing it right, its just our praxis, its just what we do.
As for nature being non-human, pragmatists think the only philosophically interesting notion of non-human isn't tenable because we don't think it possible to unwind the human from the nonhuman and hold the two apart, which is what both Foucaultian social constructionism and Sellarsian psychological nominalism stand for.
Matt
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