From: "Phil Walden" <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: is pragmatism true?
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 03:08:54 -0000


Dear Pragma,
I confess to being amused by the jolly writing style of your exchanges
with Metaphysic.  However, does it not require a theory to put dinner on
the table?  I am not making Althusser's point that theory is a practice
(although I think it is).  Rather, I would argue a "primacy of theory"
view.  Now, I would agree with you that reason alone does not define
humans and that there are currently still dark aspects of humans.  But
were not Spinoza and Kant, in fairly dark times, confident that the
reasoning potential of humans meant that there was every chance that
reason would progressively form the solid basis of human affairs?  And
did not Hegel, in a materialist way, reintroduce history to philosophy
and did he not come up with class and, amidst some obscurity, a
dialectical logic that challenges the pragmatic view that if a theory
works in practice it has fulfilled all the requirements to be considered
true?  Truth for Hegel lay at the levels of essence and notion.  In
other words, Hegel felt that the ever-deepening of reflection was
necessary to the fulfilment of the potential of reason in human affairs.
(Although his development of dialectical logic was in a tension with,
and marred by, tendencies of endism and ontological monovalence etc that
have been pointed out by RB).  Despite his brilliance, Marx in my view
sometimes accommodated to the pragmatic view of truth (above) because he
sometimes shared your "primacy of practice" view.  Btw if Peirce has an
argument against Hegel's above view of truth I'd like to see it (or be
pointed in the direction).  My limited reading of Peirce suggests to me
that for him the meaning of a doctrine amounts to its practical effects,
though he does also and to me inconsistently seem to have held the view
that we are converging towards an ideal state of inquiry (a view which
seems suspiciously endist to me).  And if Jamie is there I ask: did you
enjoy this trip?
Philophilosophy
    

Dear Myrmidon,

A Sopite?  Nay, sir: a Soapite, sworn to scrub snobbishness from our
sentience.  'Tis sooth I say: the assertion that h. sapiens sapiens
strides
at the center of existence certainly slides toward an empiricist
analysis.
And such simian-centrism sabotages our struggles to save the bio-sphere,
from which suspends our survival.  Silly?  Sadly, not in the slightest
sense.  And so, submerged in the sea of my satire, a secret serious side
stands solid.

But my sibilant speaking strategy -- which has succeeded for several
sentences -- must, alas, now cease.  You scribed:

> Do I detect alarm bells from the age of mockery?

Yup.

> James's claim is not rendered inaccurate by the fact that other
animals
> reason any more than the fact that chimps use tools disproves that
> tool-making of a certain kind is distinctive of humans (chimps don't
> engage in the second order reflexive monitoring that is necessary to
use
> tools to make tools, etc, and to make history.) Which is not to deny
> continuity, but surely there is discontinuity too. (It's true, though,
> apes do kinda *look* like George Bush and dogs like Tony Blair).

Actually, I have no problem with the view that there's something
distinctive
in the way that humans reason -- I said so in my post, in which I
specifically pointed out reflexive characteristics of human thought.
One
might say, it's an example of the old-style dialectical idea that at a
certain point, an increase in quantity becomes a change in quality.  My
objection was to the claim that reason, of itself, *defines* humans.
*That*
is not a scientifically supportable assertion (wow, those S'es just keep
resurfacing!).  Much more distinctively human is our creativity (which
was
the point of my encomium to the ice cream cone -- definitely not the
"benefits" of the market).  Even that is not solely human, unless you
look
at what we *do* with that creativity.  Frankly, I find cooking much more
impressive than reasoning as such.  The kind of imaginative acts
involved in
inventing bread are mind-boggling.  Grinding grain, adding water and
yeast
and maybe eggs and baking powder (!?) and other stuff, kneading the
resulting goo, building ovens and baking the stuff, under the peculiar
insight that the result would be utterly wonderful -- what the hell?
How
did people come up with all that?  It's more the result of experimental
practice than reasoning.  The human ability to form abstractions is
quite
remarkable, but even laying aside the fact that making reason our
defining
feature has a long association with male domination, materialism
recognizes
that knowledge and reasoning emerge from practical engagements with the
world.  I'm talking the "primacy of practice" thesis here.  One need
hardly
move from one's seat to realize that reasoning easily (in fact, usually)
goes wrong, but there's a remarkable level of success at getting dinner
on
the table, even by people who can't tell a syllogism from a synecdoche
-- 
and for the most part, getting dinner is more fundamental (not just from
a
commonsense perspective, but from a marxist one as well).

Best, Toolbox

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce



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