TJ? Greg? Still buzzing like a molecule in hot water here. Excellent stuff, guys! (And may the soul of Mark Twain rest in its grave over me engaging in the act of (my use of the exclamation mark (“laughing at my own joke”.) But that would seem to be imperative given that we are dealing with a complex issue based on a mixed package that has, of late, taken on a lot of political relevance. Greg gets at this in:
“It IS a high wire act we are engaged in and I suppose I am only suggesting we not get carried away in either direction and reminding that thought is meant to DO something in the world.
So when Truth is attacked as the product of a self satisfied and increasingly static ‘representational’ epistemology I nod in agreement. But when the ‘truth’ of our best evidentially supported accounts are attacked (the Holocaust, climate change etc.) then I have a problem.”
And as far as I’m concerned, it will require a discourse just like this to not so much resolve the issue as get as close to resolving it as we can. And as Greg rightly points out, it is a high wire act. Plus that, I must confess that I am considering this issue for a future PN submission. So yeah, I am using you guys. Sue me when and if the article (for which I won’t get paid (gets published. That confessed, I want to start with a point made by T.J.:
“I want to defend enlightened empiricism while applying the right amount of postmodernism to keep it in check. I’m up on a high wire having a postmod panic attack. : ) Actually, I thought that Fish article we’ve been discussing does a pretty good job of showing the way to a proper balance.”
Not just Fish, but pragmatism in general –especially that of Rorty. Especially important here (the very cornerstone of it (is the role pragmatism played in James L. Christian’s philosophy textbook: The Art of Wondering. In it, he offers a dialectic between the truth test of correspondence (the equivalent of induction (and cohesion (the equivalent of deduction (and, finally, the synthesis of the pragmatic truth test: that which utilizes the advantage of both and more. In other words, whether we are using induction or deduction to prop up our arguments, it ultimately comes down to an argument that works –that seems sufficiently justified.
But the plot thickens. It’s not just a matter of what works. It is also a matter of who it is working for and why. And we see the import of it in Greg’s (or our shared (concern with holocaust and climate change denial.
And much as we see in Rorty’s pragmatism, I agree with TJ’s assertion:
“Actually, I thought that Fish article we’ve been discussing does a pretty good job of showing the way to a proper balance.”
Once again, I have yet to read the article. But my reading of Is There a Text in This Class certainly seems to prop up TJ’s understanding. In the book, Fish basically attempts to undermine Affective Fallacy argument which points to a tendency for the reader confuse the affect of the text with the text itself. This, basically, was an attempt on the part of neo-classicists to establish that the meaning of a text was somehow fixed, that it took an EXPERT to extract that meaning that we were obligated to accept. But Fish brings the reader back into it (democratizes it (by arguing that the text only creates meaning through its relationship with the reader. And William Carlos Williams props this up with his argument that a poem is basically a machine with words: a machine that basically produces an effect on the reader.
Of course, the argument against this would be that Fish opens us to the outright relativism (if not outright nihilism (of allowing every individual to have their own interpretation of the text. But that argument would be wrong. Fish makes a chess-like move in checking this argument by pointing to the feedback-loop between the fact of the text, the writer who wrote it, the reader, and the interpretive community within which it all exists. He basically resorts to the same pragmatic fallback as every other PoMo warrior: intersubjectivity.