Frank Kogan

Here's what I wrote a few weeks ago in my "Unexplained Noises" post:

In my pragmatism writeup in March I deliberately buried the following paragraph for reasons that the paragraph itself makes plain.

I haven't yet mentioned philosophy, since I think that philosophy is a dead end, and pragmatism is better off liberated from philosophy. Of course the word "pragmatism" is associated with certain philosophers (Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty, maybe Wittgenstein, some aspects of Quine). In any event, my pragmatism when applied to philosophy isn't a way of doing philosophy but just a critique of philosophy, one that attacks philosophy's sense of its own relevance. One form of attack is the sentence, paraphrased from my book, "As a philosopher I can say 'Nothing exists in isolation' and a minute later say 'I grew up in an isolated village' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." And as with isolation, so it is with "autonomy," "independence," "essence," "necessity," "reality," and so forth. Which is to say that philosophy concerns itself with extremes that are rarely in effect but fools itself into thinking that in discussing these extremes it's dealing with the village - i.e., the world - as well. Note that this critique doesn't merely knock down philosophy: it also knocks down deconstructive and pragmatic attacks upon philosophy.

And I refer back to my Rorty post from last year (which I quite like and recommend you read in its entirety), a particularly relevant portion of it being:

"Nothing exists in isolation" is another way of saying, "I can't conceive of what it would even mean to say that the grounds for a social practice are absolutely independent of the practice that's being grounded, philosophy's standard of independence being that if the thing being grounded ceased to exist, the ground for it would remain unchanged." But I'm adding, in effect, "But that doesn't matter, that such absolute independence is inconceivable, given that villages - unlike philosophy - have never demanded this of grounds, that they be absolutely independent." So not only doesn't foundationalist philosophy have anything to say to the village, neither does the critique of foundationalist philosophy. So pragmatism and relativism don't matter. I read Rorty as urging philosophers to rejoin the village, but it seems to me that they rejoin the village as simple human beings, as no more than villagers, not as philosophers.

Of course, if I want to support what I've just said (I'll post my arguments someday, maybe), I'd have to (1) explain what "Nothing exists in isolation" means in the context of philosophy; (2) say why I think it's correct in the context of philosophy; (3) say why I don't think it's correct in the context of villages; so, for instance, say why I don't think villages make the demands on grounds that philosophy had made; (4) say why I don't think you can take the conversation from philosophy to the village; and (5) explain what's going on when villagers make philosophy-like noises with their mouths, uttering words like "relativism" and "mediated" and so forth.