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#15153129
late wrote:1) Moses saw the promised land, but didn't get there.

Fair enough, but that will be forever true for Utopians in my view.

late wrote:2) "Pragmatism cuts across this transcendental/empirical distinction by questioning the common presupposition that there is an invidious distinction to be drawn between kinds of truths.

Sure. I think it's value is primarily outside of the physical sciences, however.

late wrote:For the pragmatist, true sentences are not true because they correspond to reality, and so there is no need to worry what sort of reality, if any, a given sentence corresponds to – no need to worry about what “makes” it true.

For lawyers and programmers, we work with definitions. What does turbulence mean with respect to an aircraft? Moving air that pitches, rolls, yaws or affects the altitude of an airplane rapidly. What do we mean by rapidly? Within a time window of two seconds. And so on. Lawyers are far less precise than computer programmers. Working within a structure like that, we can build systems to dampen turbulence. So we use positivism and utilitarianism simultaneously.

Where I think "truth" is a much more slippery concept is when it's used outside of positive contexts and into normative contexts.

late wrote:So the pragmatist sees no need to worry about whether Plato or Kant was right in thinking that something non-spatio-temporal made moral judgments true, nor about whether the absence of such a thing means that such judgments are is merely expressions of emotion” or “merely conventional” or “merely subjective.

Yes, but the pragmatist in that sense is often just throwing away the burden of justifying something or defending a position. It often becomes a means of taking the easy way out. If we speak in terms of Kuhn's paradigms, we would say that the ISAF forces and the Taliban quite literally live in different worlds. A positivist clearly disagrees with that assertion.

In response to 9/11, the US threw pretty much unlimited money at a means of locating Osama bin Laden, even using six degrees of separation and the promotion of social networks to both push democracy narratives and to harvest social graphs to identify relationships. In-q-tel (CIA) was behind a lot of it. Within 20 years, they've flipped on a dime. First they used social networks to spread ideas in countries that have censorship in controlled media. Yet, they found that the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS could also use the networks to propagate their own ideas. This has led to the people who were promoting freedom of expression in the Arab world to now embrace censorship in the United States itself--even against the president of the United States himself. Natan Sharanksy more or less dropped his well-written and well-argued "The Case for Democracy," because the Palestinians ended up electing Hamas. All the assertions that democracy and freedom were the answer didn't pan out. It is in the normative sense that assertions of "truth" are a much more dodgy proposition.

late wrote:This insouciance brings down the scorn of both kinds of Philosophers upon the pragmatist.

And to a significant extent, it should. Empiricism and logical positivism are the bedrock of the material improvements in humanity over the last two hundred years. It's fair to say that it also gives you the atomic bomb, but there's simply no way we would have the advancements in society that we have today without it. So to simply dismiss it as merely a coping tool is a pretty arrogant disposition in my opinion.

late wrote:The Platonist sees the pragmatist as merely a fuzzy-minded sort of positivist.

Well, the positivist demands more rigor. A positivist will accept fuzzy logic--the notion of "blue green" for example. However, that would be defined in a set with a range of color combinations. So something within a range of values could be described as true. The positivist will also work with quantum computers, where something can be in two states simultaneously.

late wrote:The positivist sees him as lending aid and comfort to Platonism by leveling down the distinction between Objective Truth – the sort of true sentence attained by “the scientific method” – and sentences which lack the precious “correspondence to reality” which only that method can induce.

Physical sciences by themselves, however, are not trying to invalidate all other types of knowledge. There are those who will argue that anything that isn't scientific is worthless erudition. I generally don't agree, but I do think other disciplines often have much less rigor.

late wrote:Both join in thinking the pragmatist is not really a philosopher, on the ground that he is not a Philosopher.

Even Rorty sort of said as much in saying that he just thinks that philosophers can't really build a foundation for meaning.

late wrote:3) That doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps you could connect the dots a little better.

Rorty often talks about truth in relation to goals. It depends on your goals. Rorty's statement that his utopia is something of a universal solidarity among humans, and he uses his "philosophy" to that political end.

Rorty wrote:Ironist theory is thus a ladder which is to be thrown away as soon as one has
figured out what it was that drove one's predecessors to theorize. The
last thing the ironist theorist wants or needs is a theory of ironism. He is
not in the business of supplying himself and his fellow ironists with a
method, a platform, or a rationale.

See, as a technologist, I have to reject this proposition. Einstein isn't invalidating Newton. He's extending Newton with precession, among other things. There is simply no way for our present text-based conversation to ever take place if we were all ironists, because we would never get to the point of building a computer with a graphical user interface, wireless networks to tethered networks to database servers in the cloud and so on. In fact, I would posit that the education system and the medical system wouldn't be possible if we gave up on reason.

Rorty wrote:He is just doing the same thing which
all ironists do - attempting autonomy. He is trying to get out from under
inherited contingencies and make his own contingencies, get out from
under an old final vocabulary and fashion one which will be all his own.

Yes, and the enlightenment was very much about dispensing with society predicated on myth, tradition, religion and so on, and building toward one based more on rationalism and useful arts. So we ditch "God willing," and so forth and look to stronger foundations for reliable information and outcomes.

Rorty wrote:One good example of a view which the "morality system" makes seem
indecent is that sketched in Part I of this book: the view that although the
idea of a central and universal human component called "reason,"

a faculty which is the source of our moral obligations, was very useful in
creating modern democratic societies, it can now be dispensed with --
and should be dispensed with, in order to help bring the liberal utopia of
Chapter 3 into existence.
I have been urging that the democracies are
now in a position to throw away some of the ladders used in their own
construction.

See? Rorty is openly advocating for abandoning reason in order to achieve some sort of human solidarity. He often talks of ladders that can be thrown away. As a computer head, we work on what we often refer to as "stacks." Like floors in a multi-story buildings, we don't think you can keep a computer running if you decide you can throw away one of the ladders from a lower level of technology--like electricity, for example. Without electricity, an electronic computer is functionally worthless. Without reason, democracy itself would likely cease to function.

This is why I said to @Wellsy and @Odiseizam that I think the relativism is something that could be much more pernicious than mere overconsumption.

late wrote:4) Wildly incorrect.

"He shares with the positivist the Baconian and Hobbesian notion that knowledge is power, a tool for coping with reality. But he carries this Baconian point through to its extreme, as the positivist does not. He drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope. His argument for the view is that several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of “correspondence”

I find that difficult to stomach given ever finer understandings from elements to quantum theory, or from cell structures to understanding genes and DNA. The fact that some of our words are relative doesn't mean that we can't arrive at more precise descriptions. It just means without formal definitions, I can say "All the elephants in the world are in front of me" and "All of the elephants in the world are behind me" and in spherical space be essentially correct on both counts, but that's because of unqualified or imprecise prepositions and language itself.

late wrote:5) That has f*** all to do with Rorty. He did more inquiry than a thousand of us lesser beings.

However... that mess again confirmed my suspicions, you're a positivist.

Sure. However, you're denying what I'm quoting Rorty himself as saying. We can, and SHOULD, abandon reason as a means of getting to some sort of human solidarity.
By late
#15153141
blackjack21 wrote:
1) Fair enough, but that will be forever true for Utopians in my view.


2) Sure. I think it's value is primarily outside of the physical sciences, however.


3) Where I think "truth" is a much more slippery concept is when it's used outside of positive contexts and into normative contexts.


4) Yes, but the pragmatist in that sense is often just throwing away the burden of justifying something or defending a position.


5) And to a significant extent, it should. Empiricism and logical positivism are the bedrock of the material improvements in humanity over the last two hundred years. It's fair to say that it also gives you the atomic bomb, but there's simply no way we would have the advancements in society that we have today without it. So to simply dismiss it as merely a coping tool is a pretty arrogant disposition in my opinion.


6) Even Rorty sort of said as much in saying that he just thinks that philosophers can't really build a foundation for meaning.


7) See? Rorty is openly advocating for abandoning reason in order to achieve some sort of human solidarity.

8) He often talks of ladders that can be thrown away.




1) I wasn't being literal. I was talking about how scientists then came up with a new way to do philosophy.

2) The potential value is that it might help us understand. Which is why physicists started doing philosophy, the discipline has gotten 'out there' and they are looking for new ways to get a handle on it.

3) In logic, truth is forever. In science, it can get changed ten seconds from now. It's conditional. That creates problems for any version of positivism.

4) You are talking about an intellectual tradition that goes back to the 1800s. Consequences of Pragmatism is a defense of that approach. You are flat wrong there.

5) One of the words the new philosophers of science like is evolve. Philosophies of science are not responsible for the evolution of science. Science slowly and painfully evolved. One of my favorite moments in history was when Kepler said "I went looking for the handiwork of god, but found a cartload of dung." But he let his brilliant work stand.

6) That was part of a quote by Rorty... He was saying what traditionalists thought of Pragmatists.

7) Nope, read Ch. 3

8) That's Wittgenstein, not Rorty.

You're way out of your depth, kid.

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