It's a bit of slippage to swap out rationalism in favor of idealism. I do it on purpose. I'm hoping others don't do it by accident.
On 12/28/2015 10:29 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
Idealism is the position that the categories by which we understand reality exist prior to experience. Empiricism is the position that all knowledge of reality comes from experience. [philosophical] pragmatism is the position that all knowledge is knowledge */of /*experience period. (To talk of a reality beyond experience is just silly.) To a pragmatist, what we call “reality” is just that upon which we will all agree in the very long run. Something is “truthy” (to use your term) just in case it seems like the sort of experience that will endure the test of time. Properties of experience that make them seem “truthy” include coherence with other understandings of prior experiences the capacity to pull together the understandings of working experimentalists. (Think about the manner in which various understandings of the periodic table converged over the 19^th Century.) The fact that physicists are arguing about these matters suggests that physicists’ ideas right
now
are not as “truthy” as those of Newton. Now none of this clarifies for me why you are mad at Marxists and Libertarians. Oddly enough, I would suggest the best way to get at this problem is to precede idiographically, avoiding any –ist or –ism words, to tell a few stories in which you were abused by a particular Marxist and/or libertarian, so we, ourselves, can decide if and how you were treated unfairly.
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