CLASH OF THE PRAGMATISTS
By
David Buchanan
dmbuchanan@hotmail.com
December 2006
According to the conventional
meaning, pragmatism is aimed at practical solutions
and characterized by a fair-minded and unbiased acceptance
of whatever works. It’s exactly the kind of thing that
doesn’t make one’s blood boil. It wouldn’t be entirely
misleading to characterize philosophical Pragmatism in such
terms but it’s not quite as superficial or as dull as that
might suggest. Pragmatists have inspired many heated debates
at the Robert Pirsig discussion group (found at
www.moq.org)
and, in the process of investigating the differences between
Richard Rorty’s neoPragmatic theory of truth and the
metaphysics of William James and Robert Pirsig, I found
radicals, revolutionaries, a defector and a mystic or two.
In this case, it’s easy to take Rorty’s advice to drop our
pretensions about objectivity and instead view the debate as
a drama with good guys and bad guys (Rorty 1991, 79). In
this case, there is an all-star cast, conflict among the
characters and nothing less than the truth is at stake.
The plot is complicated by the fact
that the Radical Empiricism of William James stands on its
own and need not be married to pragmatism (Pirsig 1991,
363). Like James, Pirsig is both a Pragmatist and a Radical
Empiricist, but the latter claims to have woven them
together “into a single fabric” (Pirsig 1991, 365). The task
of comparing their Radical Empiricism with Rorty’s theory of
truth is further complicated by the fact that Rorty refuses
to have a theory of truth, a position that has led David
Hildebrand to the conclusion that Rorty’s anti-metaphysical
view removes much of the significance (i.e. “constitutes an
evisceration”) of the pragmatic view (Hildebrand 2003a,
154). Fortunately, sorting out such matters is beyond the
scope of this essay. Each of the players calls himself a
Pragmatist and the disputes occur against that background,
but the debate will focus upon their epistemological
positions, their theories of truth or lack thereof.
Since Rorty’s view lacks an empirical
theory per se, the best that can be hoped for here is an
examination of the reasons behind his refusal. For that
purpose, I will begin with a look at his essay “Texts and
Lumps”, which was published as a chapter in Objectivity,
Relativism and Truth. After hearing from Rorty in his
own voice some of his critics will be introduced. This
preliminary drama will serve to set the stage for the final
conflict, for his showdown with Radical Empiricism. For the
latter, I will rely on James’ Essays in Radical
Empiricism as well as Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila: An Inquiry into
Morals.
Rorty’s central concern in “Texts and
Lumps” is to persuade the reader that philosophy is no more
scientific than literary criticism. He’d like to convince
the reader to erase that distinction. He suggests that it
would be better to think of philosophy as a form of literary
criticism, one that is different only because it serves a
particular genre of literature and not because of it has any
kind of primary status or special access to the Truth.
“When applied to literary criticism,
pragmatism offers reasons why critics need not worry about
being ‘scientific’, and why they should not be frightened of
the appearance of ‘subjectivity’ which results from the
adoption of an untheoretical, narrative style. It suggests
that we […] simply proceed to praise our heroes and damn our
villains by making invidious comparisons” (Rorty 1991, 79).
It’s likely that Rorty would receive
praise from critics and be damned by scientists for this
assertion, but that’s a different battle. For the purpose of
this essay, it is fortunate that Rorty begins his essay with
“a general account of pragmatism’s view of the nature of
truth and of science” (Rorty 1991, 79). Here is a relatively
succinct description of his reasons for refusing to have a
theory of truth, or rather for his view that none of us can
have one. By looking at his largely negative points we can,
at least, find out what kind of “God” he doesn’t
believe in.
“Pragmatists say that the traditional
notion that ‘truth is correspondence to reality’ is an
uncashable and outworn metaphor. […] On this view, the
notion of reality as having a ‘nature’ to which it is our
duty to correspond is simply one more variant of the notion
that the gods can be placated by chanting the right words”
(Rorty 1991, 79-80).
In this same passage Rorty shows that
only very simple assertions of a certain kind can produce
anything like a correspondence to reality, using a cat on a
mat as his example. Here we have a case where a common,
solid, observable object can be located on another solid,
observable object. It doesn’t take much to seriously
complicate this situation. How can the same kind of
correspondence apply when we say the cat is not on
the mat? How can we get our assertions to match up with
“other chunks of reality” when we speak of highly abstract
concepts or talk about the things that give us pleasure? I
think if Rorty sounds like a Positivist here it is only
partly due to his background in the analytic tradition. It
may appear, at first glance, that he is only saying
objective truth can be had with respect to physical objects
and that any sentences that venture beyond that are merely
subjective, but Rorty is not done yet. Objective Truth is
the god he doesn’t believe in, the god of his former faith.
In the second part of his pragmatic argument he makes a case
against factuality, against the so-called hardness of
scientific truths.
“Here the pragmatist invokes his second
line of argument. He offers an analysis of the nature of
science which construes the reputed hardness of facts as an
artifact produced by our choice of language game. We
construct games in which a player loses or wins if something
definite and uncontrollable happens. […] The hardness of
fact in all these cases is simply the hardness of the
previous agreements within a community about the
consequences of a certain event” (Rorty 1991, 80).
Rorty insists that he is not merely
confusing the data with its interpretation here. He agrees
that the data itself is real and that “there is such a thing
as brute physical resistance […] but he sees no way of
transferring this nonlinguistic brutality to facts, to the
truth of sentences” (Rorty 1991, 81). So it’s not that he
refuses to admit the distinction between the data and its
interpretation. The problem is that there is no way to
finally say which one of the interpretations is correct.
Rorty uses Galileo’s eyeball as an example here. Light waves
traveled through space and the telescope to exert pressure
on that sense organ, or so the story goes, but question of
whether or not this “fact” shattered the crystalline spheres
is up for grabs. There are countless ways to interpret such
things, some of which may have nothing to do with
crystalline spheres or even waves of light. To those who
would insist that something real had an effect upon
Galileo’s retina, Rorty just shrugs. He says it’s
“pointless” to demand respect for “unmediated causal forces”
because we have “no choice” but to respect them. This brings
him to his conclusion about the possibility of having a
theory of truth. For these reasons, he believes that we
can’t have an “ideal empirical theory” because we can’t directly translate “the brutal thrusts of reality into
statement and action” (Rorty 1991, 81). This is where he
returns to the suggestion that philosophers and critics
should just tell their stories, the ones with heroes,
villains and “invidious comparisons”. It seems he’s not
just giving us a reason to be comfortable with subjectivity.
He’s saying that it’s all we can have. The brute
facts by themselves are trivial. “In the case of texts,
these forces merely print little replicas on our retinas”
(Rorty 1991, 82). Like the light waves on an astronomer’s
retina, the meaning of the data can be shaped in any number
of ways and there is no way to strip it “bare of human
concerns” (Rorty 1991, 83).
The thing to notice, for the purposes
of our story about the clash of truth theories, is that
Rorty is working within a subject-object metaphysical (SOM)
framework even as he makes a case that it doesn’t work. Here
we get the impression that Rorty’s universe is one big
Kantian thing-in-itself to which we can never have access;
that we can never have the objective scientific truth of the
Positivists, not even about objects. My hunch is that Rorty
is like a man fated to marry his true love’s poorly educated
little sister. His interest in a post-Philosophical culture
shows that he thinks the best thing to do is make the best
of his disappointment. This SOM framework will presently be
discussed in some of the criticisms of Rorty’ view and the
rejection of this framework, it will be seen, is central to
the doctrine of Radical Empiricism.
There is support for both parts of
this critique in David Hildebrand’s Beyond Realism and
Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists, where he
gives voice to Hilary Putnam’s speculative charge that Rorty
could not quite “shed the ideological vestiges of
positivism, his philosophical roots” (Hildebrand 2003a,
169). There he also makes specific reference to the
“subject-object dualism” as the source of the problem for
both Rorty and Putnam, as well as John Dewey’s New Realist
critics (Hildebrand 2003a, 185). He succinctly describes the
landscape of Dewey’s time as suffering from the same SOM
assumptions. “Realists and idealists assume that subject and
object are discrete and then debate which term deserves
first rank” (Hildebrand 2003a, 27). His characterization
evokes a debate that would have to be both circular and
ridiculous, like twins fighting over which one of them has
the best parents.
Putnam thinks Rorty’s position
amounts to a relapse into “metaphysical realism” (Hildebrand
2003a, 169). In his article “Rorty, Putnam, and the
Pragmatist View of Epistemology”, Teed Rockwell says he
would prefer to call it “Idealism in denial”
(Rockwell 2003, 4). It does seem that Rorty is
trapped within the assumptions that would usually lead a
philosopher to choose one or the other, but in this case I
don’t see him picking sides so much as giving up on such
debates. He believes that history has shown that they never
pay off. He wants to forget about trying to bridge the
epistemic gap between subject and object, to give up the
attempt to get them to match up in any meaningful way, and
yet he remains unwittingly committed to the assumptions that
have generated the gap. It seems he has concluded that there
is a gap between subject and object but that it’s impossible
to cross the gap. I believe this is what leads Rorty to
commit an “illegitimate inference”, as Hildebrand calls it.
“Rorty’s zeal to dismiss certain aspects
of the history of philosophy – such as the very possibility
of any kind of representationalism – causes him to make an
illegitimate inference from the unintelligibility of
metaphysical realism (especially the idea that words have
meaning by virtue of a fixed totality of things outside
them) to a total skepticism toward any representation
relation at all. This conclusion is unwarranted” (Hildebrand
2003a, 168-9).
Hildebrand also quotes Putnam making
a similar complaint against Rorty, saying that Pragmatism is
only opposed to “a certain style of metaphysics” while Rorty
would “get rid of metaphysics once and for all” (Hildebrand
2003a, 167). Rockwell spotted the same logical leap in
Rorty. He doesn’t disagree with Rorty’s assessment that the
traditional epistemological projects have failed. “But it
doesn’t follow from this fact that therefore epistemology
itself should be abandoned” (Rockwell 2003, 2). It looks
like these complaints register different aspects or pieces
of the same basic mistake. Each of them refers to Rorty’s
apparent belief that the failure of epistemology is final.
Rorty’s attitude seems to be that the goal of those failed
projects was an impossible dream all along. Like immorality,
the Truth is something we’ve imagined and hoped for despite
the complete absence of any actual progress towards that
goal. It’s pretty clear that Rorty would like to abandon the
whole thing and simply change the subject. From his point of
view, to continue with any such epistemological project
would only be to so much dead-horse kicking.
I think this is why Rorty is so
interested in reforming the poorly educated little sister.
It seems that “solidarity” is something like a consolation
prize for those who can’t have objectivity. His most famous
slogans come out of this reform project. He describes the
alternative to Truth as “agreement with one’s cultural
peers” as a quest for intersubjective agreement and, as we
saw in his “Texts and Lumps”, fearless subjectivity and good
story-telling. “For Rorty, talk is all we’ve got”
(Hildebrand 2003a, 166). This relatively modest goal, as
Rorty sees it, is based on “a no-metaphysics metaphysic”
(Hildebrand 2003a, 167). In fact, Rorty is a defector from
Philosophy. He left it behind in 1982 and joined the
Humanities department instead. As I see it, all this is a
result of Rorty’s failure to escape the SOM assumptions. He
insists that it’s useless to keep trying to get them to
match up, but apparently he has not seriously entertained
the possibility that there is something wrong with the most
basic premise, that subjects and objects are discrete, that
there is an epistemic gap between knower and known. This is
where Radical Empiricism comes riding in to save the day.
Rockwell says that Dewey’s
Experience and Nature and James’ Essays in Radical
Empiricism,
“contain some of the best expressions of pragmatist
metaphysics and epistemology, and ignoring them is to lose
an essential part of the pragmatist worldview” (Rockwell
2003, 2). In the same paragraph, he also quotes Rorty
describing these essential books, “as pretty useless, to my
mind” (Dewey between Hegel and Darwin 1994, 320).
Rockwell also quotes from page 59 and 60 of the same book where
Rorty says, “James and Dewey, alas, never made up their
minds whether they wanted just to forget about epistemology
or whether they wanted to devise a new improved epistemology
of their own. In my view they should have opted for
forgetting” (Rockwell 2003, 4). This account makes it clear
that Rorty might have been rescued by Radical Empiricism or
by Dewey’s alternative to SOM, but apparently didn’t hear
the offer. Maybe he thought no help was needed or that no
alternative was possible. In any case, it’s obvious that he
did not see Radical Empiricism as a viable alternative.
I think Rorty’s refusal has something
to do with the fact that this alternative is so weird. It
defies common sense. At first glance it might even look
like nonsense or madness. Maybe our heroes don’t ride to
the rescue or engage in a shootout as in a western, but
rather rescue Rorty from SOM in the same way that Neo rescues
Morpheus from “The Matrix”. Science fiction is a more
suitable genre for this story because Radical Empiricism
says, “everything you think you are and everything you think
you perceive are undivided” (Pirsig 1974, 126). In this
account, Pirsig is both a revolutionary and a mystic and
both roles are predicated on his critique of the subject-object
metaphysical assumptions. As Hildebrand noted earlier, this
is the assumption that Rorty and Putnam both failed to address
so continuing the debate between the Realists and Idealists
of more than a few decades ago. It was the underlying problem
with Dewey’s New Realist critics. Similarly, Eugene Taylor
and Robert Wozniak have written an introduction to Pure
Experience, the Response to William James, which is
a collection of responses to Radical Empiricism when it
was new. They tell us that this part of James’ work was
“largely ignored or misunderstood” and that it was “sidestepped
by his contemporaries” (Taylor and Wozniak 2000, 1).
“The fact was, nothing in their history
had prepared Western philosophers and psychologists for
radical empiricism. As reaction to his writings showed, it
is exceptionally difficult to suspend our logical categories
and see the immediate moment shorn of our labels of it. […]
Yet we have in James’s radical empiricism a position that
goes right to the heart of the Western viewpoint, exposing
its limits. In this he resembles, not chaos and anarchy, as
some of his rationalist critics might have supposed, but
more the position in Western philosophy of European
existentialism and phenomenology, or the metaphysics of Far
Eastern psychology …the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of
co-dependent origination (pratityasammutpada); or Zen
suchness (tathata)” (Taylor and Wozniak 2000, 9).
If these writers are correct, the
problematic SOM assumptions go back much further than a
century or two. We can’t exactly blame Descartes or Kant or
even Modernity for this conceptual framework. It is at “the
heart of the Western viewpoint”. This is consistent with
Rorty’s view. He famously and repeatedly attributes the
failed epistemological project to a persistent Platonism.
James says it has been with us, “from Democritus’s time
downward” (James 1912, 11). Pirsig also traces the problem
back to the ancient philosophers and to the very structure
of the grammar we’ve inherited from the “old Greek mythos”.
By contrast, he says, “cultures such as the Chinese, where
subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by
grammar, one finds a corresponding absence of rigid
subject-object philosophy” (Pirsig 1974, 315-16). In any
case, the point is simply that SOM is widely felt and long
established. That’s why the alternatives seem so weird. But,
as Pirsig points out, a person can get used to the idea and
the lack of “weirdness isn’t the test of truth” anyway
(Pirsig 1991, 98-99). So what, finally, is this weirdness
all about? What is Radical Empiricism?
“To be radical, an empiricism must
neither admit into its constructions any element that is not
directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that
is directly experienced” (James 1912, 42). At this point I
am forced to reverse myself and say that this doesn’t seem
strange at all. If I understand it properly, this is an
extraordinarily modest starting point. This is an
exceptionally reasonable principle insofar as James is only
saying that we ought not ignore any experience in our
account of reality nor are we allowed to make up stuff. We
can’t exclude any portion of experience nor should we posit
abstract metaphysical entities or principles which are
supposed to stand behind experience or act as the cause of
experience. Things only start to get weird when it is seen
that subjects and objects are among the suspicious
metaphysical entities that Radical Empiricism would
scrutinize.
“The second of James’ two main systems of
philosophy, which he said was independent of pragmatism, was
his radical empiricism. By this he meant that
subjects and objects were not the starting point of
experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are
concepts derived from something more fundamental which he
described as ‘the immediate flux of life which furnishes the
material to our later reflection with its conceptual
categories’. In this basic flux of experience, the
distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between
consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and
matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make
them. Pure experience cannot be either physical or
psychical: It logically precedes this distinction” (Pirsig
1991, 364-5).
For Rorty, “nothing pre-linguistic is
conceivable” (Hildebrand 2003a, 186). He shares the view
with many that the world as we know it is “text all the way
down”. Interpretation is bottomless, so to speak. But that
is exactly what Dewey and the radical empiricists are
willing to defy. It hardly matters whether we call it “pure
experience” as James did, the “undifferentiated aesthetic
continuum” as Northrop did, the “whole situation” as Dewey
did or the “primary empirical reality” as Pirsig does. A
rose is a rose. The idea is simply that everything follows
from that first and most basic experience. All the
conceptual distinctions are secondary to that, are derived
from that. We are not talking about some other realm or any
kind of thing. And this is not meant to suggest that the
world as we know it suddenly pops into existence the moment
a subject conceptualizes it. We are simply taking about
experience before one has a chance to think about it, before
it has been interpreted by our conceptual schemes.
This pre-linguistic moment of
experience has gone unnoticed as James says, because only
“only new born babes” and people in extraordinary
circumstances have access to pure experience (James 1912,
93). The infant also appears as an example in Pirsig’s
explanations (Pirsig 1991, 118-9). The “unverbalized
sensations” of experience are “identified and fixed and
abstracted” into the shapes we recognize as the world of
things (James 1912, 94). For adults, arguably like myself,
these abstractions have been fixed for so long and are used
so automatically and habitually that they are invisible.
This habits of mind have developed and evolved over long
periods and are inherited by us from the culture in the
normal maturation processes, in the process of acquiring
language in childhood. I think this explains why SOM has
assumed such a powerful role in Western conceptions of
reality. The radical empiricists are saying they are not
reality, that SOM is a theory that doesn’t look like a
theory. Its a metaphysical abstraction so old and pervasive
that it has become common sense.
Dewey and Pirsig both think of themselves
as Copernican revolutionaries and SOM is their pivot point.
For Pirsig this “Copernican inversion” is aimed at SOM generally
and scientific materialism in particular (Pirsig 1974, 221).
Dewey, on the other hand, “characterizes his philosophy
as effecting a Copernican revolution, this time upon Kant
himself” (Hildebrand 2003a, 60). It seems they were working
in different times, but were using some of the same terms
and applying them to the same problem. James may not have
invoked the famous astronomer, but attacks the Kantian subject
as a fiction, humorously asserting that it’s all hot air.
“Breath”, of the sort that comes out of one’s nose, he says,
“is the essence out of which philosophers have constructed
the entity known as consciousness” (James 1912, 37). Pirsig
concurs. “There is no empirical evidence for this assumption
at all. It is just an assumption (Pirsig 1991, 99).
These three pragmatists seem to
differ very little on this point. Each saw the possibility
of a new empirical theory as an alternative to the failed
projects of SOM. Their perspectives are similar enough that
a side-by-side comparison of one succinct quote on each of
them could serve to paint something like a synoptic view of
this metaphysical alternative.
“The instant field of the present is at
all times what I call the ‘pure experience’. It is only
virtually or potentially either a subject or an object as
yet” (James 1912, 23).
“Dewey assumes that what is primary is a
whole situation – ‘subject’ and ‘object’ have no a priori,
atomistic existence but are themselves derived from
situations to serve certain purposes, usually philosophical”
(Hildebrand 2003a, 27).
“When a subject-object metaphysics
regards matter and mind as eternally separate and eternally
unalike, it creates a platypus bigger than the solar system”
(Pirsig 1991, 153).
In each case we see that subjects and
objects them selves are not the problem. The trouble begins
when they are taken beyond the realm of conventional
concepts and turned into the pre-condition of experience,
the pre-existing and atomistic entity that does the
experiencing or the eternally separated ontological
categories. The problem is when subjects and objects are
seen as the starting point of reality.
As I read it, Rorty’s central thesis
in “Texts and Lumps” is predicated on the existence of an
epistemic gap between us and reality. The Radical Empiricism
of James and Pirsig, by contrast is like Dewey’s empiricism.
“No transcendental gaps are posited; we are of nature,
live with nature” (Hildebrand 2003a, 60). This has the
magical effect of making some of the most serious problems
of traditional epistemology disappear. It doesn’t give
answers to old riddles. It simply dissolves the questions.
“This obviates the need to argue for ‘access’ to reality by
insisting that this access is something we find we already
possess” (Hildebrand 2003a, 154). Hildebrand was referring
to Dewey in both of these statements but my contention is
that it applies equally well to our radical empiricists.
They are not saying that they’ve found a way to cross the
gap between subjective experience and the objective world.
Nor are they saying that it is an impossible gap. They’re
saying there is no gap. This doesn’t deny subjects and
objects, which are real enough as concepts. As a practical
matter, the idea that we live in a world of objects distinct
from ourselves is extremely useful. It is very handy in
traffic, for example. They’re just saying that the gap
created in that distinction does not cut us off from
reality. They are saying reality is entirely pervious.
As you may have noticed, Rorty is the
villain in this story. Everybody in the cast is a pragmatist
of some sort and there are many reasons to be sympathetic
with Rorty’s view, but they say a movie is only as good as
its bad guy. I think the whole idea of truth as agreement
among one’s cultural peers is a dangerous view. Mentioning
Nazis at this point is likely to give the impression that
I’m a little too desperate for drama, but fascism is
ethnocentrism gone wild. At best, truth by agreement would
all but eliminate the marginal cranks, the hopeless dreamers
and others who disagree with their cultural peers. In my
opinion, the finest examples of humanity come from these
ranks and any version of truth that excludes them has to be
wrong. Those are the people most worth telling stories
about, after all. They say people like happy endings so I’ll
offer one last thought about the future. If Taylor and
Wozniak are correct and Pirsig’s use of Radical Empiricism
is any sign that they are, this epistemology may serve to
unite the philosophies of East and West.
“When Zen teachers introduce students to
nirvana (which the MOQ translates as the world of pure
undifferentiated value) they do not do so with books and
thesis. They sit the students in a room until their clutter
of intellectual knowledge is abandoned (especially values
judgments!) and the pure vision of the newborn infant is
regained” (Pirsig quoted in McWatt 2004, 83).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
James, William. 1912. Essays In
Radical Empiricism: A Pluralistic Universe. New York,
London and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, ed. Henry
James.1947.
Hildebrand, David. 2003a. Beyond
Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists.
Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Hildebrand, David. 2003b. “The
Neopragmatist Turn”. Published in Southwest Philosophy
Review, Vol. 19, no 1 (January, 2003).
McWatt, Anthony. 2004. A Critical
Analysis of Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality.
Ph.D. Thesis, University of Liverpool. Unpublished.
Pirsig, Robert. 1974. Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New
York: Bantam Books.
Pirsig, Robert. 1991. Lila: An Inquiry
into Morals. New York: Bantam Books.
Rockwell, Teed. 2003. “Rorty, Putnam, and
the Pragmatist View of Epistemology and Metaphysics.”
Education and Culture: the Journal of the John Dewey Society
(Spring 2003b). Accessed online 11/16/06 at
users.California.com/~mcmf/rorty.html.
Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of
Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1991. Objectivity,
Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge
University Press.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
2001. Online entry for Richard Rorty. First published 2/3/01
and accessed on11/18/06 at plato.Stanford.edu/entries/rorty/.
Taylor, Eugene and Wozniak, Robert. 2000.
“Pure Experience, the Responses to William James: An
Introduction”. Posted online by York University, Toronto,
March 2000. Accessed 11/30/06 at psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/TaylorWoz.htm.
(Originally published 1996. Pure Experience: The Response
to William James (pp ix-xxxii). Bristol: Thoemmes
Press.)
Please
note that the copyright of this paper remains with the
author who need to be contacted directly for permission to
use this material elsewhere.
dmbuchanan@hotmail.com
Another paper of David’s,
“Fun with Blasphemy”,
can also be found on this website
here.
It now features the full
“director’s
cut” so don’t
miss it!
