Frank Kogan

No, you're not getting Rorty's distinction, which I could have gone into in more detail: For this to be "normal" discourse by his def'n, there would have to be agreed-upon conventions for deciding whether or not XTC is shit in the mud, and both Patty and John would adhere to those conventions and would assume that using normal procedures they could answer the question. The reason that John's response works (and doesn't violate any conventions) is that there are no agreed-upon conventions for deciding whether XTC is shit in the mud, and no assumption that the question will be answered, and someone who thought otherwise would himself be ignorant of the conventions. This is why Rorty's distinction doesn't apply to music arguments. What Rorty's taking over from Kuhn is the idea that there can be periods of nonnormal - that is, revolutionary - science, where indeed there isn't clear agreement as to what counts as answering a question, or even what the questions are, or agreement as to what the basic terms mean or even which ones are basic. E.g., in the period between Copernicus and Newton, there's no agreement as to what a planet is and what motion is. Of course, you can say that during the 150 years of the Copernican Revolution it was normal not to agree on the basic terms of physics and astronomy, and I would agree, but that "normal" is not Rorty's "normal," in fact gets rid of the very distinction that Rorty is trying to make. And to give a quick music example, it's normal in music arguments for some people to praise or criticize performers for their hairstyle and clothing and for other people to say that such criteria are irrelevant (and these same other people may well then go and criticize boybands for being about hair rather than music, and therefore dismiss the music rather than try to understand it; this is hypocritical, but whatever). Which is to say that in music arguments it's normal to argue over what counts as a relevant contribution. Whereas by Rorty's def'n, that would be abnormal discourse.

As for beating kids up, that's against the school rules (also against the law), and there's most certainly no general agreement as to whether beating people up is a legitimate part of the discourse. Even if there's general agreement that it happens. In biology there's general agreement that some scientists cheat with their data; but there's also agreement that cheating is illegitimate and makes the data worthless. There's no such agreement in regard to whether people should beat other people up. There really isn't.

I have no problem with the idea of saying what counts as normal or abnormal discourse; just that Rorty's scheme doesn't apply to most normal discourse.

By the way, what Rorty is plumping for in Socrates' salon is for a kind of discourse (by his def'n) where people put into question what they'd normally have counted as relevant, answering a question, and so on. Just because his way of setting the normal-abnormal distinction doesn't work doesn't mean that this isn't a good idea, to talk about what tends to be normal in music discourse and wonder what it would be like to do it differently.