[Inquiry] Re: Question On Realism

[Jon Awbrey]

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QOR.  Note 4

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BB = Bill Bailey
JA = Jon Awbrey

Re: QOR 3.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/002406.html
In: QOR.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/thread.html#2404

In part:

JA: Now, the Peircean pragmatist will have a difficult time
    arguing from the opposite extremisms of anti-relativism,
    absolutism, essentialism, and so on, since the addition
    of interpretive parameters like the interpretant leaves
    pragmatism guilty as charged to a variety of relativism,
    at least in the eyes of a dyed in the wool reductionist.

JA: So the answer here has to turn on a non-knee-jerk consideration
    of the conditions for the raising of dimensions in our theories.

BB replies:

BB: Exactly.  Relativism and social constructivism are legitimate --
    even essential -- positions from which to analyze aspects of
    human behavior.  And in my reading, shallow as it is, Peirce
    incorporates those positions.  It strikes me that on the one
    hand we have a semiotic (semeiotic) devised by an American
    empirical scientist who confronted the problem that all
    information is necessarily mediated, and starting from 
    the basic requisites of mind, went on to show how real,
    pragmatic knowledge of the world is achieved.  On the
    other hand, we have a semiotic devised by a European
    linguist who took language as his starting point, and
    whose work was extended by others to show how language
    (culture) expresses itself through the person -- so much
    so that the deconstructivists felt it necessary help others
    break out of the political/cultural box of language.  These
    are radically different starting and ending points.  I think
    I've said here that the Derridians were compensatory for a
    semiotics that had no pragmatic dimension, no freedom in
    the use of signs, hence no creativity in communication.
    Part of my negative reaction to the proponents of this
    semiotic is the Olympian, top-down view that treats
    the human as merely an expression of the culture
    rather than a creator of it, and any individual
    attempt at truth as futile.  In other words, to
    speak the truth, the individual mind is never
    enough;  you must be a club member.  Society or
    culture is more like a circulating current.  I am
    more than happy to accept that a major aspect of our
    personal realities is socially constructed, and much
    of it is contingent and relativistic.  But that is not
    all there is.  It is equally the case that innovations
    and real knowledge work their way up and change the
    language/culture before they come back down as
    constraints and facilitations.

Bill, Gary, Martin, ...

One of the things that leads to naive relativism
is a trivializing of the difficulties of keeping
a personal frame or a cultural perspective alive.
However a conceptual frame, language, or culture
gets created, by accident, by design, or by both,
it is not just any such system that can overcome
its encounters with reality on a recurring basis.

Jon Awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
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