From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 09 2003 - 04:51:40 BST
Scott,
I'm with you on, "Physicalists are betting one way, while I am betting
another, and this choice of bet does affect one's actions," but not, "the
only program that I can see resulting from taking the physicalist bet is to
urge one on to actually look for that description of 'our actions in
micro-structural terms', which is to say, finding that reduction of the one
language to the other." I don't see why urging to look for
micro-structural terms means reducing macro-structural terms to
micro. Physiologists don't have to think that what they are finding out is
how things really work, they can be thought of as simply doing what
physiologists do. As far as I can see, Rorty and Davidson see them as two
different language games, one or the other of which may someday become
obsolete, depending on whose side of the bet history chooses (though, as
Rorty thinks, neither side will ever become completely obsolete).
The other thing I would add is that neither Rorty or Davidson are
empiricists. They don't take "non-empirical" claims as being necessarily
metaphysical. In the language game that Rorty and Davidson play, there is
a phenomena, a table or mind, and then we can generate descriptions of that
causal impression. All of those descriptions we generate are descriptions
of the same phenomena. But none of these descriptions is the "right" or
"true" description. This is because we've already discarded the
appearance/reality distinction. All of the descriptions are internal to
the language games they are contained in, the background assumptions from
which they gain meaning. The descriptions do not "get at" the phenomena in
question. They are merely ways in which we cope with the phenomena. If
this is an appearance of an appearance/reality distinction, then I suggest
that the reality is that this appearance is a trivial occurence, one that
is, by pragmatist lights, philosophically uninteresting, just as the
pragmatic distinction between the ego (which is in some circles a
disputable concept) and the tiger is uninteresting, because the pertinent
claim, that this is how reality _really_ is, doesn't exist.
Matt
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