--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jst...@...> wrote: > > Stanley Fish discusses a new book by Joseph Margolis, > "Pragmatism's Advantage." Fish's essay may or may not > have relevance to the comments of Chesterton in his > essay "The Revival of Philosophy--Why?" that was > mentioned and quoted from in some recent posts here. > > Excerpt from Fish: > > ----- > ...The content of realism of what the best up-to- > date accounts of the world tell us is > constructively determined by the workings of a > culture-bound process of hypothesis, experiment, > test and calculation that is itself a constructed > artifact and as such can change even as it guides > and assesses research. In the absence of the > alternative pragmatism rejects something called > Mind equipped with something called reason which > enables it to describe accurately something called > the World (Bacon's dream) "realism cannot fail to > be constructivist, though reality is not itself > constructed" (Margolis).
This is a very "relativist" doctrine, no? When he says "culture-bound process of hypothesis, experiment, test and calculation" the hard work is done by the words "culture bound". In what sense is mathematics "culture bound" I wonder? [snip] > Notice how far this is from saying that "anything > goes." At any moment the protocols and procedures > in place will enforce a rigor of method and > interpretation; it is just that the rigor lives and > has its shape entirely within "the existential and > historical contingencies of the human situation" > and not in a realm of extra-human verification and > validation, whether that realm be theological, > philosophical or empirical.... But it's NOT so far from "anything goes" is it? Anything goes just as far we can imagine any culture *goes*... This version of pragmatism (lineage is via Richard Rorty) is I'd say deeply problematic. And of course it suffers from the traditional self-refremtial problem of such positions viz: Is it supposed to be *TRUE* (in some sense) that "The content of realism...is constructively determined" (and not just in our culture ;-) ). Like a lot of philososophy that strays into a deeply relativist position, there seems to be a conscious effort to construct tough, impenetrable sentences for ideas that are not that hard! That is IMO against the *true* pragmatic tradition. Fortunately there is another school of pragmatism that avoids these woes. It is the one founded by Charles Peirce (who anticipated Popper in many ways). In his lifetime Peirce felt obliged to rescue his philosophy from crude stereotyping and coined the word "pragmaticism" which he amusingly claimed to be "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers". Peirce's modern heir is the philospher Susan Haack (Miami) who has written an imaginary dialogue between Rorty and Peirce in "Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate" available here (chapter 2): http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2ezeTXOlQngC&lpg=PP1&dq=Manif esto%20of%20a%20Passionate%20Moderate&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=&f=fals e http://tinyurl.com/yk2hc9e
