Episode 245: Pragmatically Speaking

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] You know, anything too hard in life is not worth doing. Remember that. Okay. Like snowboarding or martial arts. You know? Yeah. Pottery. Why? Or math. I'm a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:00:50] I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, if I ask you what is your favorite music? The University of Houston. Dave, if I ask you what the opening question is and you answer me, is that the opening question? Oh, so meta. It has to be.

[00:01:33] It has to be. But then there's no content to the question. And what if that question doesn't correspond to what the question really was? You know what? Just with all concerns such as this, one solution is to nip it in the bud.

[00:01:49] So I'm just going to make the opening question. Tamler, do you think that mermaids can be black? That's the opening question. That is now the opening question. Definitely is. Is it okay to have a black mermaid for the little mermaid?

[00:02:05] But in the second segment, we are going to talk about pragmatism, an essay by Richard Rorty called Objectivity or Solidarity. Is that right? Solidarity or objectivity? I don't think even Rorty would say that it matters. Solidarity or objectivity? Solidarity or objectivity.

[00:02:25] But first, yeah, so you know more about the story than I do. So why don't you fill me and the listeners in? Because I'm so online. For people who aren't extremely online as you are.

[00:02:38] There is just this vibe right now where the proximal thing that made me want to ask that is yes, that there's a little mermaid movie live action cast with a black woman playing Ariel. Ariel? Ariel. Ariel. One's like an Israeli guy name and one's like the little mermaid.

[00:03:00] But there's been a couple of these instances where people start complaining that a black actor is portraying a character, like a completely fictional character that everybody envisions as white or maybe that was originally described as white.

[00:03:14] So it happened in the Lord of the Rings where there's like some elf that's played by a black character and in Sandman, the character of death is portrayed by a black actor. And it's just funny because it's not like these are real people who

[00:03:31] existed in history, but the fucking little mermaid and people take it seriously. They become these like realists about fiction where they're like, no, in my mind, the little mermaid was white all the time. Well, so right. There's a particularly annoying kind of guy that's the, you know,

[00:03:48] you're ruining my childhood by having girl ghostbusters, you know? Right. And those people, it's like, you know, fuck off. You know, that's it doesn't the Ghostbusters movie is still the same Ghostbusters movie. You can always go back to it.

[00:04:03] And, you know, like I also don't like those things typically, but like feel free to do them as often as you want. It doesn't affect my affection for the original thing. But yeah, like it gets especially ugly and it gets a little more disturbing

[00:04:17] in the case of like, why would you just because the original little mermaid was white? Like, why does she have to be white this time? Like, what is that? So this, so this douche, Matt Walsh apparently like, this is what I mean by some weird kind of realism.

[00:04:31] Like he started making arguments that mermaids couldn't be black because like the they live in the sort of darkness of the undersea. So their skin would not have become black. Like as a species or something like that.

[00:04:46] They probably wouldn't also talk and like be able to turn into humans. Or, you know, like there's these weird rules that are being followed. It does. And it's just like not even at this point, it's not even a thinly veiled racism.

[00:05:02] You know, there wouldn't be like a real like Jamaican crab dancing around the kitchen. Yeah, Matt Walsh said it wasn't scientific. That was his argument. And you know, in some cases, like I was telling you before recorded, there is a kind of

[00:05:22] casting activism in Hollywood nowadays that I that as soon as it becomes like super obvious that that's the whole point of the casting, then I find it grating and irritating because it's not in the service of the story. Right. And, you know, people complained, for instance,

[00:05:41] that that in the in the Sandman TV series, there were a bunch of characters who were portrayed as gay or death was being played by black women in those cases, like the original text is there's tons of gay people in the

[00:05:55] original Sandman. And so they're just ignorant and death is just obvious that death appears to whomever as whatever she wants to. Like she appears to African people like Africans. You know, I get wokeness for the sake of wokeness, but God damn it.

[00:06:10] Like if it's just it's just a good actor, leave them alone. Yeah. If it's against the service of the story, then I find it also grating and annoying. If it's neutral for the story, then I also

[00:06:25] then I think it's OK to try to increase diversity of cast if it doesn't really affect things one way or the other. That's what like I heard an interview with Neil Gaiman and he was talking about this issue and he said we had a very simple straightforward rule.

[00:06:38] If it mattered to the story that this character was a man or white or whatever, then we kept the character like that. But if it didn't matter for the story, if the story would be equally

[00:06:49] or just not affected either way, then we often tried to be diverse when we could. You know, like that seems fine to me. Yeah. And there is a particular cool way in which the in the Neil Gaiman world

[00:07:04] these creatures, death of which is one of them, Dream is another one. And they appear to creatures across the universe as whatever those people look like. So if there is a world in which everybody looks like some blob, a gaseous blob, then they appear as a gaseous blob.

[00:07:20] So there was always something kind of funny to me that you would resist death being portrayed as black, because to me what that says is you don't think the audience is black. Like you're ignoring the fact that lots of people who are watching

[00:07:36] might want to see that part of like reflected as them is what they look like. And so so it is and I feel that way about the little mermaid like God, you know, there's black people who might be like, Oh, cool, that mermaid.

[00:07:49] Totally right. That's why you do it. You know, in addition to also like being more diverse and hiring but like actors and stuff, like that's why you do it is you can connect with more people and people who Hollywood hasn't done a good job connecting with.

[00:08:02] And here's the question. You know, there have been so people get mad, like if Superman as Clark Kent, the character Clark Kent was cast as a black man, um, then maybe there's room for complaint because Clark Kent, the Midwestern white guy has always been

[00:08:21] Clark Kent, the Midwestern white guy. And it seems as if that's like essential to his character. I well, that's what I don't know. It's it's like it seems to me that there is a Midwestern whiteness about

[00:08:32] Clark Kent, but it might it might not be like I guess what I'm saying is I'm not it's not that I think that there should be no rules for fiction. It's just, you know, unclear where you draw the line. Like a fellow has to be black, I guess.

[00:08:46] Yeah. Right. Clark Kent probably doesn't have to be white. I think he doesn't, but I don't really care, you know, about like Superman. So like it seems to me that he could be a nerdy black guy. And just the same way he's a nerdy white guy.

[00:09:01] Yeah, that's true. That's true. And he was created by Jews. So he's probably actually Jewish in the ontologically. Exactly. I think instead of bitching about it, like Matt Walsh or whatever, they should just do get revenge and have like Beverly Hills cop,

[00:09:16] but like the guy is white, you know, just go into like black culture and just have everybody be be white in that. You know, like on August Wilson play, but like all the actors are white. You mean like what they did with rock and roll? Yeah, exactly.

[00:09:33] What they always did and then rap. All right. This isn't even our opening segment. No, it's not. Yeah. So for the opening segment, we asked our Patreon supporters, our beloved Patreon supporters to suggest episodes, topics for us. And you know, like we've been struggling lately.

[00:09:52] So this is always a good thing to. And we got like hundreds, 130. Yeah, 130 suggestions. And we are tasked in this segment is to narrow them down to like five or six. That's what we've done for the finalists.

[00:10:07] And then after that, our $5 and up per episode subscribers will get to vote. And we do the topic that they vote on. And they've typically been like really, really good, I think, like all of them. Yep. Oftentimes because we have the pressure of preparing better. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:26] Yeah. So like we were wondering how much overlap we were given, how many suggestions there were. I kind of suspect there is going to be overlap. I hope so. I hope so. But but here's where and we did on purpose, did not talk about this before recording.

[00:10:44] I tried to follow at least one rule out of sheer just sort of for the sake of my sanity, which was mostly if the recommendation was an entire book, I didn't put on the list. Interesting.

[00:10:59] Because, you know, takes a lot, especially some of the suggestions, very long books. And yeah, I didn't put long books on, but I think I put a couple of short books that we could tear through or in particular one, I think only one.

[00:11:12] Yeah. My rule was no like surprising for me, but no movies because they never win. Yeah. You know, and we're going to do that. Followed that rule. Yeah. You know, like we're like we're going to do the movies that we want to do is up in those lists.

[00:11:27] So, you know, right? I would love to have soccer like. Yeah. We've already agreed to do that. Yeah. And so just because we haven't doesn't mean. Speaking of the movie episode, we have a hell of a movie episode coming up. That's right. We better save that.

[00:11:42] Yeah. It's all right. In no order. Other than maybe the order that they were written in. Shall we just start? Yes. You want me to go first? Sure. So Richard O'Farrell says, would be interested to hear you guys talk about for e cognition and cognitive science.

[00:12:02] The idea that minds are embodied, extended, embedded and enacted. I think I would like this stuff. And I know the challenge is finding like a reasonable thing. Yeah. That was not on my list, but mainly because I couldn't think of of a reading that

[00:12:22] intended to be biased in favor of when readings were specifically suggested because it's easier. But but yeah, I feel like we could find something with not too much research, you know, and we'll get suggestions from listeners. Keep it in mind.

[00:12:37] And along that line, stoicism is one of my picks. That was my next one. Yeah. Eleni, I'm going to do my best, Eleni. Panagiotopoulou suggested stoicism. And then Daisy followed up by saying maybe one of Seneca's letters.

[00:12:55] Surprisingly little, the one Seneca thing that I know is stuff on anger. I would do this. I think we could definitely find a good couple of readings. Yeah. And a lot of listeners have asked us over the years to do this. And if you have a hold on.

[00:13:12] Oh, see. And along that line, if anybody has specific readings to suggest, feel free to message us. OK, my next one. James Marshall had a couple of suggestions, but the one I thought might be interesting was the origin and history of hell. That almost made my list. Yeah.

[00:13:35] Yeah, I like that origin and history of hell as a as a kind. You know, we toyed with when we were doing evil. Yeah. The original intention was to maybe do something on the devil. But I think that that this might be that thing that maybe we could.

[00:13:50] We do one on like revelations. Like, I don't really know anything about that. It's just except that it's like fucked up. It is fucked up. We could. It would be hard because it is so, so symbolic and it's like super unclear

[00:14:05] what, you know, it reads like random things. But but I just was reading a book by Elaine Pagels on revelation. Yeah. So yeah. So I definitely pretty much any of the Bible I'd be down to do, except for

[00:14:18] like the book of Leviticus that lists all your your people's rules. We need to do it. It's like a little bit of kids that I get the downloads. OK, so both Doug Orleans and Jason Clinton talked about the multiverse and sort of this.

[00:14:43] I believe that Doug mentioned just a few things that works of art that have recently had multiverse ideas. We've talked about simulation stuff and why that might be in the air, like why why that might be an exciting topic for people nowadays.

[00:15:00] I don't think we've given the multiverse that much of a treatment. I'm not sure. I kind of feel like a lot of what I think about simulation theory, I think about the multiverse. And I don't know if I have much more to say about like the multiverse idea.

[00:15:17] I mean, I think the details of why when you know, respected scientists positive, that's one answer to like some quantum puzzle and like that the details of that are interesting. But I feel like, you know, that's that's something you could better learn

[00:15:32] about on Sean, Sean Carroll's podcast or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Like there's I like consuming things that have multiverse themes, but I don't know how much I have to say. I think you put Twin Peaks as one of the one plays with the multiverse,

[00:15:48] which is totally fair. It's an interpretation, but it's controversial. Yeah. What standard for justification do you have for Twin Peaks? I like that people bring their own interpretations. Yeah, I don't think I can stand outside myself to come up with the most rational.

[00:16:07] That's a little sub tweet of the next episode. Next segment. OK, Alexander Zanny mentioned the dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. This is a book that is, I think, totally doable for us. It's a novel. I think it reads really quickly.

[00:16:24] I don't think it's very long and I think it would be up our alley. I it's not on my list, but that's because I have two other Alexander Zanny suggestions. But of course, I'd be I'd be up for any Ursula. Yeah. And in fact, the Zanny Alexander Zanny's

[00:16:46] suggestion that I had next was de Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity, which I feel like we've talked about doing that before. Yeah, it's a book, though. Yeah, I know. Like this is that's a big that would be a big undertaking.

[00:17:01] Yeah, I didn't even look to see how long it was. Oh, actually, it's not that long. I think some ambiguity. It's 76 pages. Oh, you know, PDF pages. It's still all right. I have for reads William James, the variety of religious experience, which we've talked about doing a lot.

[00:17:19] And he even mentions a chapter that we might just do, you know, that one chapter, Missism. Yeah, that would be cool. Yeah, we do not have a lot of overlap. I know, I know. I was I was thinking this might happen. Oh, Emily Meyers, Sandman.

[00:17:38] I do want to have you gotten through the Sandman. No, not only that, but my dog. Oh, my God, it got to it while I was in New York this past. It was, I guess, sitting on like a table by the couch and don't

[00:17:52] me just tore through it. Yes. Omar. Sorry, Emily. Omar has shattered your dreams. So you messed that up. I was like, I read it like a first couple of things. But I also listened to the audiobook version of it. I listened to the first volume, I think.

[00:18:08] Oh, yeah. I haven't listened to that. Yeah, it was good. It was a little, I don't know, abrasive, like, but, you know, more than it felt like it needed to be. But, you know, getting the sense from reading him and then

[00:18:23] the I watched a little of the Netflix Sandman series. It's like, that's just who he is. Like it's just like, yeah, a little extra, you know. Yeah, it's it exists in a time and place also. Like it's very, very much early 90s.

[00:18:41] And if you sensibility and the yeah, yeah. Probably responsible for a lot of kids becoming goth back, including Emily, probably. Yeah, we've put that on the list before it doesn't. Yeah, that's the problem. I didn't do that well the last time we put it on the list.

[00:18:57] That's right. I'm going to probably get it in another copy. I'll send you one. Kailin Mitchell said an episode on long termism, which, you know, we have been not choosing not to do while Will McCaskill had his new book out.

[00:19:13] But I don't know, it's it's hit such a nerve the book that that book now. Yeah. And there are so many fierce critics and defenders that I don't know, maybe we should do an honestly. The only reason I didn't include it is because I thought

[00:19:29] you wouldn't be interested in doing it. Yeah. So I'm definitely down to put it on the list. Yeah, what's your next one? So T.L. suggested a book by Mercier and Sperber called the Enigma of Reason, which is their argumentative theory of reason.

[00:19:47] But but they have a BBS article that they wrote before that, which we looked at that though. I looked at that. I couldn't get into it. You couldn't. I feel like it's so up your alley. Like maybe I just I was not in the right mood.

[00:20:02] I'll look at it again. Yeah. I mean, we'll just do that. Like if it's good because you've been wanting to do it for a while. Yeah. If if I reassess and like I will just definitely do that. We don't need to put it on the list. OK.

[00:20:17] I had a different one by T.L., which is Metaphors We Live By by George Lekoff and Mark Johnson. That this is an interesting topic to me. Metaphors and the way and like how fundamental they are to our communication and understanding. Yeah, I've read that.

[00:20:33] I've read that book and it's a it is a very good book. Yeah, I think that would be cool. I have did this make it last time? I still want to do it even though it is a book, but Hofstadter's I am a strange loop. Oh yeah.

[00:20:46] I had this in like an honorable mention category. But yeah, I think we it was just long, you know, it's long. It would be so. But I think when we have the time, we should just do that. OK, so I see what you're doing.

[00:21:01] You're dismissing all my my advice. No, no, we'll just do that. No, no, no, you're imagining things. Pretty sneaky. So. Oh, you're crazy. I think this has made the list before. I don't think but I'll just say it. Ian Boise, the hedgehog in the Fox by Isaiah.

[00:21:25] I think it's a good book. I feel like that's one here. I'll do it for myself that when we have the time to do it, we'll do it. You know, right? You don't need to put it on the list. See, yeah. Fair. Oh, totally fair.

[00:21:41] OK, my last one is as nebulous as you can get. But Kate Rodriguez and then Emily chimed in something on anthropology. This is to me contingent upon finding the right thing. Yeah. Yeah. So if you have suggestions, I'm sure we'll, you know,

[00:21:58] if you send us a good paper, it will be very likely to do an episode on that. And there's different kinds of anthropology. And I feel like, you know, there's cognitive anthropology and then there's, you know, ethnography. Yeah. Or cultural anthropology.

[00:22:14] I did a lot in my relative justice book. I went into that literature and I always loved it. OK, just a few others to shout out. A few people recommended Lolita. And I think, you know, if that's like a summer one, but that would be awesome.

[00:22:30] A bunch of people recommended the new Nathan Fielder show, The Rehearsal, which I have seen. That might actually win if we put it on the list. I have not seen it. It's really interesting. It won me over.

[00:22:42] I was pretty much out after the first episode and then convinced my like got convinced to see the next one and then was very into it. Kevin T recommended very bad daughters. Our daughters take over the mic and tell stories about us. Yeah, that was cute.

[00:22:58] My daughter will never do it. I think she might. And then Edgar said something by Raymond Yate. Like this is one of these blind spots for me. Like I feel like I've heard people praise him and say I would love him.

[00:23:11] And I just like always just forget about it afterwards. What is he? Is he the codgess? Like a philosopher definitely wrote for more popular audiences. But is it about consciousness? Like philosophers dog is in some sense about minds and, you know, minds of other people.

[00:23:27] And he has a he comes from a very kind of late Vidkinsonian approach apparently like again, I'd looked all this up today just to see who he was. We should just put Wittgenstein on the list because clearly you have been jerky.

[00:23:42] You've been edging yourself to Wittgenstein for like the last five months. Five years. Have you ever read him directly? Yeah, I mean, I've read philosophical investigations and it's good. But, you know, it's aphorisms, so it would be hard to do. We could try, but it would be hard.

[00:24:00] They're not as fun as Nietzsche's aphorisms. But we should just write a book of aphorisms because that seems pretty easy. Aphorisms climb the mountain and tame the woman. All right. I have. I would say, yeah, like what do we got?

[00:24:22] Well, I was going to if you if you will allow me to say a couple of honorable mentions of Ruge Patel mentioned a couple of specific episodes of Love, Death and Robots, which is, I guess, an anthology series that I take it like Black Mirror-y kind of.

[00:24:40] And then this is one that I would never do as as an episode. But I might. I don't think it would take a lot of convincing to have me talk about podcasts and music setup that was mentioned by Zylem Flem, Zylem Flem.

[00:25:00] Because I could probably just hop on and do a 15 minute bonus episode about what microphone I use. Yeah. Happy to do that. That would be a good solo podcast. Yeah. Like Sam Harris, I just just talk into a microphone. Yeah. Yeah. Or Colin Cowherd.

[00:25:18] It's unclear to me what we have. We had stoicism. That I think was the only one that was actually on both of our lists. Yeah, we had a lot of them that were, you know, like long term ism. You only get it put on.

[00:25:30] Should we put that on? I feel like that might win if we put it on. So we have to make careful. Right. And then I said I would put Likwins, The Dispossessed as well. My picks, you all, you shuffled into another category.

[00:25:48] So there's nothing of mine other than stoicism that has made the final list. What about metaphors we live by? Are you up for that? Or is it too long? It's a book. I don't remember how long it is. I'd be down to put it on.

[00:26:08] But really what I was looking for was an acknowledgement that only one of my picks has made it on the list. We haven't made the list yet. So how do you know what's on the list and what's not on the list?

[00:26:17] Well, right now we have stoicism, long term ism, Likwins, The Dispossessed. Well, these are like these are the final draft. These are just some that we, you know, that we wouldn't mind having. Yeah, metaphors we live by.

[00:26:34] I don't care how long it is, I'd be down to do it. All right. It is 242 pages. So it might, you know, we should specify these might take longer. Yeah, maybe Christmas break or something. Yeah, right. I would also do.

[00:26:51] Hell, it's the thing is, hell, it does seem like it'd be we haven't really gone. Like a history, like that's like history. You know, it almost like we'd have to have somebody like a hell expert. All right. Somebody who's been there. Yeah, been to hell and back.

[00:27:11] The right. Oh, ethics about ethics of ambiguity. You said it was only 76 pages. Yeah, we could put that on. Also, if we didn't do hell, we could do mysticism. Yeah, that's the next thing I was going to say. So how many is that? Is that already too many?

[00:27:28] Stoicism, dispossessed, long term ism metaphors with it by ethics of ambiguity and varieties six. That sounds like a good list. Yeah. And we'll keep embodied cognition if we can find a good manageable article, because I think I could get really into that. Yeah.

[00:27:44] You know, with the Merleau-Ponty side of it and just I don't know, the Buddhist side of it. I think I could really enjoy some good readings on that. There's a lot of that stuff that's just straight up, you know, like cognitive neuroscience too.

[00:27:59] Yeah, it's a possible place of convergence and solidarity. All right, let's get it. OK, so we have a good list here because we also have things that we want to do anyway, like the hedgehog in the fox and I am a strange loop.

[00:28:17] Maybe I'll just read that on my time and then if I'm like super excited about it, I'll try to bring it on. Thanks to our listeners for not just supporting us, but for giving us like a half year worth of episodes that has fought or food for our

[00:28:36] for the machine that is very bad wizards and for our souls. Food for our souls. All right, we'll be right back to talk about Richard Rorty. Now, word from our longtime sponsor, BetterHelp. You know, my daughter just turned 18. She's now officially an adult.

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[00:30:35] When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com slash VBW to get 10% off your first month. That's better H-E-L-P dot com slash VBW. Thanks to Better Help for sponsoring this episode. One point, one deal, son. It's really great, really great.

[00:31:17] It's a real son. It's a really real son. Let me know what's real son. It's really great. The knock-a-pill son. I'll hit up and kill one. One point, one deal, son. It's really great, really great. Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

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[00:34:08] But I don't know why I have it literally written down as segments. Bonus episodes, entire ones. In fact, they're longer. They're longer than most of our other episodes. So I don't their segments of something. But they are segments of the whole larger like of a life.

[00:34:27] Yeah. So we have a few of those just in the bank. And we look forward to recording more at $5 and up. You get to vote on an episode topic. In fact, this very episode, as you heard, we've narrowed down the

[00:34:42] episode topics and you'll be able to do that soon. You'll also get access to our five part brothers, Karamazov series, Tamla's lectures on Plato's symposium, a few of my Intra-psych lectures. And finally at $10 and up, you get all of those things.

[00:35:01] Plus you get to ask us anything for a monthly video series where we answer every single question that we get. And we also release the audio for everybody at $2 and up as well. Yeah, I was thinking about this. We now do five episodes a month, right?

[00:35:22] Because two of the main episodes, two deadwoods and then ask us anything at minimum. Like, you know, that's if we don't do any other kind of bonus content. And so what are we doing with our lives? This is actually the best part.

[00:35:38] So thank you, everybody, for your support. We really appreciate it. And yeah, keeps us going. Thank you. All right. Let's get to this essay, Solidarity or Objectivity or Objectivity or Solidarity by Richard Rorty. Richard Rorty is American philosopher, died in 2007, author of a bunch

[00:35:59] of famous books, including Philosophy as a Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. And this essay is kind of a, I don't know, pretty accessible presentation of a lot of his views in those kinds of book. It is a really nice just introduction to the views.

[00:36:22] So what he's defending here is like a pragmatist theory of truth against like more realist theory, a correspondence theory of truth. We'll talk about what those things are. And this is what he argued against in Philosophy as a mirror to nature.

[00:36:37] And what he wants to defend and what he spends a lot of his time in this essay defending is the pragmatic theory against charges of relativism. And he wants to argue that pragmatism is totally compatible with continuing to endorse European Enlightenment values and contemporary scientific methodologies.

[00:36:55] Like he wants to be an ethnocentric pragmatist. What he says is, look, can we justify them as objectively the best systems of inquiry or the best value systems, the most rational ones viewed from the outside, from outside of our own cultural framework?

[00:37:12] And he thinks the answer to that question is no. He doesn't think anyone can do that. It's not possible. But it doesn't follow that we can't still favor the values that we know have contingently come about in our culture.

[00:37:28] So that's sort of, I think, a summary of what he's trying to do in the essay. What did you think of it overall? I enjoyed it in the sense that you and I had looked through a bunch of articles on pragmatism because we wanted to discuss

[00:37:44] pragmatism for an episode. And I found this to be one of the. Just clearest statements of honestly, I found it hard to figure out what a pragmatic theory even was or what it was a theory of. And I found that this this was just a good starting point

[00:38:05] for at least this neopragmatist kind of view. As I. I'll be honest, I struggle to understand what the claims are. And so I did a lot of reading outside of this essay because as clear as the language is, sometimes I found the ideas

[00:38:23] still to be unclear as I got to understanding it, though. I'm pretty sure that I disagree strongly with what he's saying, not in a way that makes me hate what he's saying, because I think that when we read the will to believe by James and his

[00:38:43] his flavor of pragmatism, I found sort of almost just really objective and maybe even incoherent. I think that this actually does a good job of defending something like a reasonable pragmatist. I'm not sure what the positive claim is, like I'm actually not sure

[00:39:00] for a theory that calls itself pragmatic. I'm not exactly sure what, like how practical it is, like how you're supposed to proceed once you endorse this. Or how how you differently you might. Yeah, then if you believed in a realist theory,

[00:39:17] that's not necessarily an objection to Rory's view. It could just as easily be made against the realist view, like in a similar kind of deflationary way, like Simon Blackburn does this with with values and says, look, if you believe my quasi

[00:39:34] realist or more pragmatic for you, your behavior doesn't change at all than if you were a realist. So that should that's kind of evidence that the metaphysically simpler one might be the right one. You know? Yeah, I think I mean something slightly different,

[00:39:52] which is that the say the traditional realist view, the correspondence view of truth that motivates you by dangling in front of human beings, the idea that maybe we're approaching a true description of objective reality. That that motivation I see as following from endorsing this kind of realism.

[00:40:14] Yeah, there's actually a later essay in this collection on pragmatism by Hugh Price, who kind of argues exactly what you're saying that it actually does make a difference to think that your theory in science meets a norm of truth as in reflecting reality.

[00:40:32] You know, it's almost like a greater meta-pragmatism of being a realist or something like that. But let's let's take a step back. First of all, just for the record, I think you were very unfair to William James, very unfair. Of course you think that. In that episode.

[00:40:48] No, but in a way I don't think you are normally when I disagree with you. But and secondly, relatedly, I think, and actually this explains your lack of charity towards William James, that you are a pragmatist, but you just won't admit it to yourself yet.

[00:41:06] So like, you know, the homophobe, the guy that goes to gay porn or whatever, you know? The doc, you're calling me Doc Rivers. Yeah. It's interesting that you would say that I was unfair because I get why you would think that because my temperament

[00:41:22] is generally so even-handed even when I disagree, that unlike you, I don't just yell and talk about how stupid a view is like you do. But James really disappointed in that. And I felt vindicated today when I was reading up more on pragmatism, that even James' contemporaries

[00:41:42] like Perce were like, whoa, James, you're like gone a little crazy with this. I guess you're more impressed with appeals to authority of no, no, they were. They were tapping the objective. All right, let's let's talk about what's at stake here.

[00:41:59] I would say the central point of disagreement is that the realist is on this quest to present or discover reality as it really is. Their idea of true, if you say that something is true, then there has to, that has to correspond to some fact in

[00:42:24] objective reality independent of our perspective. Right. And that's what it means for something to be true. And the pragmatist says, well, there's no way we could access that kind of truth. You know, we can't step outside of our own perspective. It's just like not epistemically possible.

[00:42:44] And so we should accept that what we're doing is just coming up with better and better theories for our different purposes that are no doubt influenced contingently by the culture that we find ourselves a part of and the various little

[00:42:59] accidents of history that led us to favor one thing over another. So I'd say like in some ways, there's a lot of affinity with Thomas Kuhn here, you know? But what Rorty wants to maintain is so we lose the pretension that we can from some transcendental perspective

[00:43:19] describe the world as it really is. We lose that as a pretension as a goal, but we can still keep the, you know, enlightenment approach to both science and ethics for the most part. You know, always in conversation, always trying to improve.

[00:43:36] But when the pragmatist says that something is true, they just mean that's just like I'm very strongly committed to this. That's what true means. Or I don't think anybody is going to come up if you say a theory is true.

[00:43:49] I don't think anybody is going to come up with a better theory than this. Right. That's what you mean by that or nobody has. Yeah. So so Rorty, you know, starts off by saying, look, I think there are these two modes as the title suggests,

[00:44:05] two modes of thinking about truth. And one is this objective stance and this quest for objectivity. And he tells the story that he thinks that it started with the Greeks. It's kind of an interesting analysis. He says it was perhaps the growing awareness by the

[00:44:23] Greeks of the sheer diversity of human communities, which stimulated the emergence of this ideal, that there is a real reality that can be accessed independent of whatever culture, whatever part of the world you're from. Right. So Herodotus writes about the Persians and their

[00:44:37] and their customs and their right in the ways they investigate the world and finds that it's completely different from the Greeks. And that he says gives rise to this fear of parochialism that OK, wait, maybe we're we're not actually looking getting the truth.

[00:44:51] We're we're seeing through a very specific cultural lens and mistaking like our own cultural habits for axioms or self evident truths. And so so this is already described that the idea of truth is something to be pursued for its

[00:45:05] own sake, not because it will be good for one's offer for one's real or imaginary community is the central theme of this tradition. Now I like that, but I do wonder whether or not this is convenient history because I I think if you go before the Greeks

[00:45:24] or after whatever that this is just a view that people have, it's just usually expressed in supernatural terms, which is that there is a fundamental true nature of reality. And maybe only God knows it, but it's but it's there. So there is it's my God, not your

[00:45:42] God that's actually in charge of the world. And and so I think it's deeper. I think this desire to have this correspondence view is deeper than just something that started with the Greeks. I don't know, it's hard. It's hard to judge that

[00:45:58] because if you look at the literature from before this, so the biblical texts, a lot of Egyptian literature like Iliad and Odyssey, they're presenting worlds and there it seems like they're taking for granted that this is the actual world, but they're not nobody is

[00:46:14] investigating, trying to determine like whether their point of view is reflects the deeper underlying nature of reality. You know, in the Bible, there is a lot of that though. So when when confronted with Philistines who you know, the Israelites just referred to as idolaters, these

[00:46:37] these other misuppotamnion cultures who bowed down to bail, you know, there's like Elijah comes and says like, well, let's see who's God is really the true God. Right. And that's like you go and do do your rituals and and try to summon

[00:46:51] your God and then I'll pray to my God. And sure enough, the fire burns the altar when only when Elijah prays, not when they pray. So like it seems as you have to believe like you have to believe that what's going on is that they

[00:47:02] believe that they genuinely believe that their God is right. Right. I guess. Yeah. I mean, the pragmatist way of telling that story might be like, we'll see whose procedure can generate a reliable result. You know, like that doesn't correspond to there is an actual God.

[00:47:22] But that seems like a stretch. I kind of agree with you that which is fine actually because it doesn't really matter whether nothing really hangs on. Yeah. Yeah. Like where it came from, it does pop up, I think more in the Western straight tradition than in the

[00:47:35] Eastern texts where they're very sensitive to the way culture shapes our way of viewing the world. And if anything, like almost explicitly the other way pragmatist in how they approach inquiry. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you once again by one of

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[00:50:40] Again, that's Givewell dot org and then pick podcast at checkout. They'll ask you how did you find out about it and then enter very bad wizards there. Thanks again to Givewell dot org for sponsoring this episode. There was a part of me that

[00:50:59] struggled so much early on when we started reading this because I just not knowing that much about pragmatism. I couldn't figure out whether pragmatism is supposed to be an epistemological theory or like a metaphysical one, whether it's about, you know, because sometimes they talk

[00:51:19] about realism and whether or not there is an objective reality, which is just ontology and metaphysics. And then sometimes they talk about just how do we acquire truth or what is truth in a way that's just epistemology. And I was like genuinely confused and

[00:51:34] I felt like I needed to understand that before even processing what we were reading until I got to a point where where I realized that it's neither. Exactly, like it's it's a rejection of having to like make that choice. Yeah. And they are trying to

[00:51:54] shatter these kinds of dichotomies. That's certainly what Thomas Dewey was doing from what I understand. Right. And is just there's all these puzzles that are kind of almost taken for granted in metaphysics and epistemological literature. And Dewey thinks like after Darwin, like all of this should just

[00:52:15] be we need to get over it. Right. It's like you don't argue against them. You just get over it, right? You know, which is a very something I find very simple like I'm very sympathetic to that. Yeah. Yeah. And and I'm not not sympathetic to my honestly,

[00:52:31] my feelings about this are mixed genuinely mixed because I think that there's a lot here that that makes sense. It's it's pushing on the edges that sort of rattles me. But there is this section that I found really helpful in in this article. So he's already says

[00:52:50] the pragmatist is not holding a positive theory, which says that something is relative to something else, which is why as you were saying he doesn't think that it's a relativist theory, he is instead making the purely negative point that we should drop the traditional distinction

[00:53:03] between knowledge and opinion construed as the distinction between between truth as correspondence to reality and truth as a commendatory term for well justified beliefs. The reason that the realist calls this negative claim relativistic is that he cannot believe that anybody would seriously deny that truth

[00:53:19] has an intrinsic nature. So when the pragmatist says that there's nothing to be said about truth, say that each of us will commend as true those beliefs which he or she finds good to believe. The realist is inclined to interpret this as one more positive

[00:53:31] theory about the nature of truth, a theory according to which truth is simply the contemporary opinion of a chosen individual or group. Such a theory would, of course, be self-refuting, but the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth, much less a relativistic one.

[00:53:44] Yeah. And in that way, I sort of misspoke introducing it saying it's a theory of truth. But at the same time, it is an account what the word true means. So so I'm trying to think why does he say we don't have a theory of truth

[00:53:58] when when he does kind of explain what he thinks true means? And I think the idea is that it's so ingrained in the realist to say, well, then you're saying that if this group of people believes that to be the best theory, then that's true.

[00:54:18] He's like, no, I'm not like saying that. I'm not taking like a stand. I'm just saying what the word true means when you look at practice. Right. So so and all it could mean to like there's no like there's it can't mean anything more than that.

[00:54:34] Yeah. So word he says, I don't know if it's here or in something else I was reading or even watching where he says, look, the correspondence theory of truth can't be right because usually you need a condition for success and the condition for success

[00:54:50] for that kind of theory would be that when you finally reach that true, that objective reality, then you know it. And he says, but there is just no way we could know it. And so because of that, he rejects any discussion of truth as this objective separate reality

[00:55:05] that that we're trying to access. Yeah. And I get that negative claim. I just don't quite get the positive one. And and he says the same about epistemology. He says as a partisan of solidarity, the pragmatists account to value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base,

[00:55:24] not an epistemological or metaphysical one, not having any epistemology off or theory. He does not have a relativistic one. So so so I get what he's against. Yeah. So then I think like when he says he doesn't have an epistemology, it doesn't mean that he doesn't have

[00:55:42] a method of inquiry. Right. It's what he doesn't have is an epistemology that claims to like, this is how we get knowledge where knowledge is a reflection of like an understanding of reality as it really is or something like that. I don't have, we don't have that,

[00:55:59] but we do have methods of inquiry that we use. And word he says we should continue to use because they work really well, but they're not epistemologies because they don't have the pretense to accessing reality in and of itself. Like the intrinsic nature or something.

[00:56:17] And you can argue about whether he's projecting too much metaphysical ambition to scientific inquiry. But I think that's the idea is that's why they don't have a metaphysics because they don't have any positive view about what the world really is. And they don't have any positive view

[00:56:34] about the right way to access knowledge defined as the realist defines it. And so what they have instead is just culturally informed and continually evolving habits of inquiry and values that they subscribe to. So there is a lot of discussion of justification here, which it's still,

[00:57:03] I don't know if you can help shed light on this. So he says for the pragmatists by contrast, knowledge is like truth, simply a compliment paid to the beliefs which we think so well justified that for the moment further justification is not needed. But the grounds for justification,

[00:57:20] he's already said are not not what a realist would have. Like at least it's not a correspondence view. But he seems to arrive at some view that when a belief is justified is when you have sort of consensus among your community.

[00:57:38] But he backs away from that a little bit because he doesn't wanna be self-defeating. I think he just says that's often what we strive for. We're trying to come up with reasons that will make sense to other people and that sometimes I think it also,

[00:57:54] he's pretty flexible about the criteria for justification being different depending on the domain we're talking about. So you could like a betting, like a sports betting strategy would be justified if it has like a 60% success rate over like two NFL seasons or something like that.

[00:58:17] That's a way of easily justifying something without making any kind of metaphysical claim, right? So I think for scientific, if you're trying to come up with a vaccine, you'll be, this will be a justified if it leads to create something. It works according to your goals.

[00:58:38] One that actually stops people from getting the disease. So he talks about this, we're just embedded in this particular socio-historical moment. And so what we call a justified belief is dependent on that. And he wants to embrace it. That's what he's saying when he says,

[00:58:56] let's just admit that we're ethnocentric but not in the bad way, but just say of course, because that's the only way that we could be. Yeah. It's interesting because your example of the, whatever the betting strategy or the scientists, what it is that scientists actually believe

[00:59:16] can be confusing sometimes or mathematicians. Because if you ask, I think a physicist, I think they'll generally just say like, all we're doing is approximating our models to our observations and to see like which is the best one.

[00:59:31] And I think a lot of them are in practice saying that obviously none of these models are like a complete description of reality, but they're merely a way of approximating it. Approximating it or finding some degree of correspondence with the other pieces

[00:59:53] of information that we're getting from experiment or whatever. Yeah. But when push comes to shove, I think that they would say, well, that's because we're limited. So it's an epistemological problem. It's not that I don't think that there is a way in which quantum effects work.

[01:00:09] I think those are the question would be, do you think that we can actually get to a point where say in one domain at least, we have peered into the nature of reality independent of our own kind of perspective and contingent methodologies,

[01:00:32] like that this is we have peered into from the God's point of view like reality as it really is. And are these kind of models like just better and better images or photographs of it or copies of copies and stuff like that?

[01:00:51] Like are we moving closer to it and getting a kind of blurry look? Right. And this is where it gets so confusing to me because when you say getting better or approximating, I think that you need to believe that you're approximating something. So the whole like getting better

[01:01:12] seems like a very hard thing to determine. So here's like one issue that I wanted to raise. So it makes sense to me that Rorty would say something like the notion of human rights or of what justice is is one that sure you could believe

[01:01:32] that there is this realm, like you could be a moral realist and believe that we're accessing some true like moral realm. And that does seem crazy to me. It seems to me like a pragmatist view on that is the right one, which is

[01:01:47] the question is this just or is this right? Doesn't make sense set aside from the socio-historical moment. And you can try to put yourself in a veil of ignorance and come up with, but that's right. It's not gonna work because even just the idea

[01:02:06] that that would lead to a more objectively just set of principles is culturally influenced. And I think Rawls like the later Rawls realized that but the early Rawls was more content in trying to access the... So Rorty says stuff like early on here

[01:02:28] that this belief that there is a universal human nature that we all would have access to that might lead to agreement there that itself is not the case. But I do wonder when it comes to just science

[01:02:46] that it seems as if you can be a kid in whatever like third grade in Thailand in 1954 and do an experiment and it'll come out the same way as your daughter doing that same experiment in high school in 2019. And that there is something that needs to be explained

[01:03:09] as to why those observations are coming out the same. That there seems to be a domain that I want to maintain some degree of realism or objectivity in my views. Yeah, I know I get that. And it's like, so I think there's a couple of things

[01:03:26] that you're getting me to think here. Number one, like you could see the pragmatists really at every step saying, well, of course there's reasons for convergence. Like our world is such that when you run these kinds of experiments you can reliably get these

[01:03:44] and that leads us to create this model that is pretty good at predicting these kinds of things, explaining these kinds of things. And so they end up sound like just essentially saying the realist story in like these pragmatic terms. But then... It seems cart before the horse

[01:04:01] in some of those ways of saying. But then I think Rory's point is you're just projecting a realist intuitions or motivations on others because you have them yourself. I mean, it is... Like I wonder to what extent scientists even think about...

[01:04:17] This was always the true with metaethical debates too. Like to what degree that people really, when you come down to it, think that they're accessing something objective versus just trying to persuade other people and come up with different ways of expressing your values.

[01:04:37] So I think you could do that with science. The more interesting version of it is if you're sympathetic to the kind of moral pragmatist view, science ultimately is also governed by values. And a lot of the same kinds of arguments can be applied to scientific values,

[01:04:56] values and forms of inquiry. And so recognizing that you can't escape the fact that you have to endorse some values that can't themselves be justified independently of our cultural way of investigating the world. And so like there's no getting out of that circle to say,

[01:05:16] oh, these are the right forms of inquiry. Yeah, but we've shifted now from that kind of agreement, the universal agreement that like, 9.8 meters per second to the values of a science, which is fine. I think that there can be... Wait, I didn't understand.

[01:05:38] So like we've shifted from the question of whether the fact that a kid in 1941 and a kid in 2012 from completely different parts of the world both arrive at the same exact answer without really a shared community, seems to me contingent upon the fact

[01:05:53] that the earth really does act that way and the universe really does act that way. So I... But nobody's denying that it acted the way it clearly did, right? I mean that those two things happened and that it's unusual for them to happen

[01:06:09] so that there's probably some explanation for why that happened. Well, that's what I don't see Rorty engaging with, which is how does his view account for... Right, because he talks about communities and local and historical and justification being about agreement, but we can't...

[01:06:25] But there is no such thing as universal human nature. So we're not gonna have agreement across cultures. But then you get these like huge chunks of like scientific inquiry where there is agreement. Okay, maybe it'd be helpful to like give an example

[01:06:40] of this kind where two people from different cultures come across the same result. And so the explanation for that you're suggesting has to be a realist one. It presumes a realist picture. But what would the explanation be in this case? Because I think the details would matter.

[01:07:02] I mean we do. I think that say the various ways in which people at different times independent of each other have determined that the earth is a sphere is most easily explained by the fact that the earth is in fact a sphere.

[01:07:14] Like whether or not humans are around to talk about it. That's just a simple, like you don't need anything complicated. I'm talking about like the most simple. So sure you could say some, you could spin some story, but it seems like the best explanation

[01:07:29] is that the earth is in fact a sphere. Yeah, so like it's not that Rorty hasn't thought of that. I think what he would say to that is in that passages where he's talking about the disanalogy with alternate geometries. What the pragmatist argues, he says,

[01:07:52] look people will say, well if you have these two systems that are incommensurate then you have no explanation for convergence. You wouldn't have any explanation for it if you were dealing with two different kinds of geometries or something like that. And he says, well like those are different

[01:08:09] at the axiomatic level in the mathematics case, but in the case of values and science and science like there's plenty of overlap. And so it won't be surprising if people have similar practices which lead to similar results across cultures. I think that's what he would say.

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[01:09:21] wherever you get your podcasts if any of these topics sound interesting to you. Our thanks to the I Am Bio podcast for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. It seems like a kind of an ass backward attempt to explain why two people

[01:09:37] would have the same observation though, which is I guess my general concern is no, I mean, of course, Roe already has thought of it, but I don't think that he really addresses it. So in that explanation that you're giving, you're saying the attack on relativism might be,

[01:09:51] well, look, if you have these separate independent geometries, never the twain shall meet. So is that what you're saying about different human cultures and human communities? And he says no, like you just said, because there's lots of overlap in stuff, right?

[01:10:05] But that doesn't seem like a better explanation for why people a thousand years apart who came up with two different ways of measuring the circumference of the earth arrive at the same estimate. How is it the most obvious explanation that it's because that is in fact

[01:10:23] the circumference of the earth? It's ass backwards in the sense that that would be what you would say after you've given reasons to buy the more pragmatist view in the first place. And if you're already a pragmatist, you can come up with this kind of explanation.

[01:10:41] But I think that's because in this essay, he is more concerned to combat like a misconception about pragmatism that it leads to relativism and that it means that every belief is as good as another or you know, like, and what he wants to do

[01:10:56] is sketch out a version of it that actually is congenial to most of our practices. But can I just say one other thing in response, another possible response that he would have is one that he puts in towards the end

[01:11:10] where he says, you know, it used to work to say, oh, we're accessing reality. That was a good way to think about science. But lately, and he's probably writing this in a time where the postmodernists are starting to get more momentum.

[01:11:27] And he's saying that like at this point, the rhetoric of scientific objectivity is starting to lead to more damaging results. And he says, like so he says, the rhetoric of scientific objectivity pressed too hard and taken too seriously

[01:11:41] has led us to people like B.F. Skinner on the one hand and people like Althuzer on the other to equally pointless fantasies both produced by the attempt to be scientific about our moral and political lives. And like that might be a fair charge to make,

[01:11:58] you know, you could make it again some of the like effective altruists or that all like this obsession with objectivity is actually starting to be from a practical perspective like a bad thing. And it would help to be a little more humble

[01:12:12] about what we're doing or just recognizing what we're doing, whether not what we think we're doing. Yeah, this is the thing, you know, that what he says about Skinner, for instance, like I'm totally on board with. I think that there is this like,

[01:12:27] there was this both the positive, the positivists and the behaviorists, you know, brought together this particular view of science that was kind of damaging and probably wrong. And I feel like Rorty's advocating for something that I think is totally right, which is that when it comes to inquiries

[01:12:50] about values and morality and even just put, you know, like normative questions about politics like what form of government is best, like all of those things, I can get on board with that kind of critique. I feel like it's heavy handed though

[01:13:09] to chop off the ontology of the universe in order to get to like, let's not put our kids in Skinner boxes. I'm sort of with you in that this isn't enough to convert anybody to pragmatism. What you need is what he does in philosophy

[01:13:24] as a mirror, a real negative critique of like fundamental realist assumptions, you know? And so that have nothing to do with, you know, it's a fact on our practices or anything like that, but which I typically find pretty compelling. I'm also just temperamentally less threatened

[01:13:43] by the idea that, you know, we have no access to reality as it really is. There is this way that Rorty kind of pisses me off that Rorty does do these rhetorical turns where he's like, yeah, you know, some people are threatened and they're weak

[01:14:01] and they can't accept this. And I'm like, wait, why can't I just say you're two weeks off to be able to accept and that maybe the earth is round? Meanwhile, I'm going like hell yeah, that's coward. He does get, I can imagine it must have been frustrating

[01:14:16] to be his philosophical enemy because he- But it was also frustrating to be him and get called, you know, like people can be very snide towards what they believe are relativists. Yeah, absolutely. And that actually is the thing that I enjoyed most about this art.

[01:14:34] And honestly, I find that a lot of the IDWE type people fall real fast onto that like, well you're incoherent and a relativist because- Self-refuting. Yeah, self-refuting because, you know, whatever. They take this inappropriately take something that is to me like there's a little space

[01:14:59] where I want to maintain some sort of scientific realism even if our epistemology will never get us there. They take that thing and use it as a hammer for anybody who dares suggests that there might be a plurality of moral values or anything like that.

[01:15:15] And it's like, well fuck you, you can't just say like, oh, oh, you want to be non-binary relativists. Like, you know, there goes, we could have never launched a rocket to the moon if we had listened to your kind of science. Is the truth of relativism relative?

[01:15:32] Oh, you don't know what to do with that one. That's like some 11th grade shit right there. No, they're the worst. They're the good example of like, and obviously so parochial in the way they understand like an approach like political issues.

[01:15:47] Like, you know, this is just classic liberalism, you know, as it's like been shaped and especially in America. Liberalism brings with it this pretense to this being the real, the true, the rational. And I think Rorty is a very good reaction against that. I understand the reluctance

[01:16:06] when it comes to scientific inquiry, especially I guess like, so it takes something like the multiverse right theory. It's like, what are we talking about if we're not talking about whether there really are multiple different universes? You know? Right, right, right. Yeah, exactly.

[01:16:24] So here's a way in which I can be fine with what Rorty's saying and not be bothered about like what it says for science. Like, it could, when scientists take a step back and say, what are we really describing when we have these models of the multiverse?

[01:16:42] I think Push Come to Shove, they'll say the thing that's real that's actually there. But I don't think so let's say that in some corner of your mind, if you're doing science, you hold that the thing that you're studying is there. It's mind independent, stance independent.

[01:16:59] It's real whether we're here or not. But to take that attitude, which I think is what Rorty is in a large part trying to do with this is saying he's warning against taking that attitude and then thinking that you can apply it

[01:17:14] to the truth with the capital T for all of these other really complicated human issues. Yeah, I mean, he also thinks you shouldn't take it with something like the multiverse. But that's why I'm okay with the critique in the sphere in which he is talking about now

[01:17:33] because I honestly would have to read maybe Rorty on scientific realism to see if he says anything that I find. He does say, for instance, when he's defending against the accusation of relativism, he says, well, what relativism means

[01:17:47] is that there is a truth that is relative to some standard. And he says, I do not see how a claim that something does not exist can be construed as a claim that something is relative to something else. And there he's very much saying there is no truth.

[01:18:03] And so you can see, you could just... No truth as the realist understands it, which is correspondence to objective fact. Yes, no capital T. And so you can see, you could just see like how the fight plays out and leads us to this sort of like weird fight

[01:18:20] against like post-modern versus like... Leads us to James Levy. Yeah, like the wine scene. Two plus two equals four tweets and all that shit. Yeah, totally. And I do think also what's interesting at a meta level is that a lot of it hangs on

[01:18:37] which is a better approach to take to the world? You know, like you see in science that it matters to think that you're actually describing reality whereas in ethics or in value systems, A, doesn't matter as much

[01:18:52] and B is obviously not something that we could make a claim to. So the passage I wanted to read of his is where he tries to give the benefits of just taking the pragmatic attitude like I guess like the practical benefits. This is where he talks about Nietzsche.

[01:19:09] He says, my suggestion is the desire for objectivity is in part a disguised form of the fear of death of our community echoes Nietzsche's charge that the philosophical tradition which stems from Plato is an attempt to avoid facing up to contingency to escape from time and chance.

[01:19:26] Nietzsche thought that realism was to be condemned not only by arguments, but from its theoretical incoherence, the sort of argument we find in Putnam and Davidson but also on practical and pragmatic grounds. So this is what I'm talking about, right? Nietzsche thought that the test of human character

[01:19:40] was the ability to live with the thought that there was no convergence. He wanted us to be able to think of truth as a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms. In short, a sum of human relations which has been enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically

[01:19:58] which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to people. Nietzsche hoped that eventually there might be human beings who could and did think of truth in this way but who still liked themselves. Who saw themselves as good people for whom solidarity was enough.

[01:20:14] So I get the appeal of this view too because it leads to a more maybe aesthetic approach to life. You're trying to come up with things that are beautiful and useful and that can bring people together and that other people will also find compelling and you're not pretending,

[01:20:38] you can't take the stance that the Weinsteins take or the IDW, it's just precluded from just your whole approach to the world. Right, I had that passage highlighted too because it was like, Nietzsche and I think that you realize they're pussies.

[01:21:00] Right, I was thinking as I was reading it, this is just gonna be, he's just gonna say what he said before. No, there's a lot of that on both sides. Yeah, yeah, that's true. God is not happy about my anti-realist leanings right now.

[01:21:18] It's just a huge peel of thunder. I hope that makes it into the recording. Like it is intriguing to me the claim that some sort of pluralism is threatening to people and I kind of believe it and I believe that we need to get over the naive realism.

[01:21:37] Just our everyday intuitions that what the way that we do things, it must be the right way to do things. You see this as a parent, right? It's not just that they think that their way of raising the kid was the best way of raising their kid,

[01:21:50] is that they think it's the best way that you should raise your kid too. So there is like a reliance on, it's easy to slip into some sort of No, I- Claim to objective, access to objective facts. I think though that you can separate the epistemological humility

[01:22:13] that maybe we can't access objective facts to, doesn't necessarily mean that there are none. But maybe Rorty thinks, as Perse seemed to think, maybe we just need to surgically remove the bane on philosophy of thinking that we're doing anything that can get us there.

[01:22:32] That's the question I think and it is in some ways a practical question. Here's what I'll say, if you think Rorty is wrong then you also don't want a black aerial in the lower. I'm not. Only a realist would think. I'm a realist about mermaids.

[01:22:52] I have access to the numinal realm from which I saw mermaids. The true mermaid is white and a redhead. You know, shouldn't mermaids be like, have like, if they live deep enough wouldn't they have those little lanterns coming out of their heads, like those deep seeps?

[01:23:12] If we're gonna go full science. Yeah, they should have like, well I don't know how far I can see. That's another empirical question. There's a lot we have to determine whether there should be a black aerial. There's a lot of like research that needs

[01:23:26] or further work needs to be done. Maybe Matt Wall should be okay with like a light skinned one. Like a, like a, yeah. Yeah, like a spicy Latina aerial. Like I will go see that movie. Okay, before we end, I did have one question for you.

[01:23:42] Do you think adopting something like this pragmatic theory or neopragmatism of Rorty, do you think that that weakens your claim on, like weakens the firmness of your belief in anything? So not in practice cause I believe Rorty like, you know, probably had strong opinions

[01:24:04] about what food is better than others. Like I don't think that he's going around like, but when it comes down to it, the one thing about a realist that you can count on is that they're gonna affirmally believe. Well, that's the thing.

[01:24:17] Like I go back and forth on this question. It's really good question. Like okay, like you're, I'm a pragmatist. I fully embraced it. You're, you know, you're rejecting it at least for certain scientific questions. So is our behavior any different? Do you believe the certain scientific things

[01:24:35] more strongly than I do because you're a realist about it and I'm not? On the one hand, like I think, like initially described abstractly, you would think well sure, yeah. If you think this is the true theory that actually reflects reality, you're gonna believe that more strongly

[01:24:51] than if I believe it and I recognize that it's like, you know, like essentially contingent that I have this belief. Like, but on the other hand, when you get to the details of, you know, providing reasons for why you believe it and all of that,

[01:25:08] like I wonder if there would be that much of a difference. Well, and it could go the other way where if what you believe by saying that something is true is justified by say the community standards, then I think you have kind of a lower bar

[01:25:21] in some cases to be confident in your view. Whereas if you're a realist, but you are sort of very illusively understand that tapping into reality is something that we're way far away from, you might hold any theory as temporary. Right, yeah.

[01:25:40] Yeah, like you could be a very epistemically humble realist and I think you could be an epistemically arrogant pragmatist. Part of me thinks- Like willing James. Like willing James. Like willing James. No, not like willing James. Part of me thinks, and maybe this is self-serving,

[01:25:57] but I think the pragmatist is just going to be temporarily more prone to be humble in there, the way they approach problems. I think that's true in ethical debate, for example, that if you're a pluralist, you're probably going to be more charitable and understanding of different perspectives,

[01:26:20] even ones that you reject and you feel like you have good reasons for rejecting, but I don't know if that's true. Like, certainly the post-modernist could have really bitter views. They won't work hard to save the lives of people who are dying because like who's to say

[01:26:39] that that's like a value that they should endure. The belief that you should exterminate people is just as good as the belief that you should try to save them. Really? Practical from this point of view. Yeah. You know, there is an interesting question about temperament and philosophical commitments,

[01:27:02] and I wonder, I'm sure people have done this before, but does feel like there's like a cluster of kinds of views that particular personalities are more attracted to than others? I mean, most people don't even think about these issues, but like once you subscribe to them,

[01:27:19] does that have an impact on... You get downstream. Yeah, or like it's hard to know the chicken really yet. Maybe I'm just such an epistemically humble person that I was attracted to pragmatism, but... That is one theory. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.

[01:27:35] It's like it's tough to explain my epistemically humility, how it can be calibrated so quickly. Maybe it's just a weed. It's probably the... Yeah. It's a good hybrid. It's a tea bed. I enjoyed this article more than I thought,

[01:27:53] and I certainly disagree with it, but a lot of it. You publicly disagree with it, but like a big part of you, I think, fully. You just have to like... You need psychotherapy or something. Seriously? No, this article made me read a whole bunch of other stuff

[01:28:11] that it felt kind of fun to get like to learn, just hadn't been exposed to a lot of this. So like I feel like it challenged me. The best thing about the pragmatist is how little patience they have for like bullshit philosophy. You know, like they really just...

[01:28:27] They just refuse to participate in any of that. You know, like I have a lot of respect for that perspective. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. No knowledge argument. It's no like I'm not gonna even like, yeah, no. We're moving on. It's weird cause they get into the arguments

[01:28:47] only to tell people that they're stupid. Yeah, I mean there is, especially for some of them, there is this question of, well you seem to be hammering this point home over and over again, but this is what I like about Rorty

[01:29:00] and what I like about the perspective is, I think Rorty really did think, look, what this means is philosophy is not some special practice and literature and art and all these other ways are also just, you know, other valuable ways of acquiring your beliefs and approaching the world,

[01:29:20] like appreciating the richness of the world. And so it has a more kind of artistic sensibility too because it fully embracing the idea that there's all these different ways of learning about the world. And Rorty himself, even though he would get trapped

[01:29:36] in like a, you know, internal debate with Putnam and stuff like that, he also did a lot of kind of fleshing out of what the positive world view of a pragmatist is. We should wrap up, but is it here that he says

[01:29:50] that there are people who probably legit believe that if the Greeks hadn't come up with their ideas that somebody eventually would have? Yeah, like this is where I actually was a little bit, like he attributes a lot of things, desires and like needs of the realist

[01:30:05] that I feel like a lot of realists that I know don't have. Right, yeah. You don't necessarily think that like the Greeks would necessarily have popped up somewhere else. Right. Yeah. That's like a Star Trek thing. Like everyone's on the old Star Trek.

[01:30:21] There's just like an old West world like out in the middle of space because just convergent evolution, like it was gonna, these things were gonna pop up. All right, well I'm glad you enjoyed it. I certainly did. I would do more pragmatism. We could do Dewey.

[01:30:35] I mean, I would actually like to get into some Putnam, but that would mean that you have to... Twin Earth. Yeah, let's do twin Earth. Like I don't know about that, we'll have to. Well, you know, I mean the Putnam that engages with word.

[01:30:50] Like I feel like if you truly are open-minded you have to like expose yourself to the counterarguments. All right, join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. The Queen and the Power of Brains in the US. Anybody can have a brain? I'm a very good man.

[01:31:42] Just a very bad wizard.