wordfailure

Where do these "pure" pragmatists live? Where is the distillery from which pure pragmatism is dispensed? Aren't we trafficking in conceptual idealizations?

John Page

Wordf:

1. In the "real" world.
2. The mind/brain.
3. Yes, but are we doing this "pragmatically", and how does this square with a deterministic view of what we do?

BTW, I cribbed the original definition of Pragmatism from a book.

Cheers, John

Pyrrho

Although some may argue that you need to work on the exact details of what pragmatism is (in part because different pragmatists have somewhat different conceptions of it, and also because your expression of it too clearly exposes it for what it really is), I think you are essentially correct, and pragmatism is self-contradictory.

For something to be judged to work, one must have standards for success. How are those standards determined?

I think the same kind of idea applies to utilitarianism, or any consequentialist ethical theory, as something that is supposed to not involve any nonconsequentialism. If you judge an action by its consequences, then you must have standards for which consequences are "good" and which are "bad", and that takes us away from the idea that we really have something that avoids the problems associated with nonconsequentialist theories. What consequentialist theories do is push back the problems of the foundations of ethics (out of sight, out of mind), and people imagine that they have solved problems rather than simply pushing them under a veneer of something else.

If one uses enough obfuscation, one is believed by many to be brilliant.

John Page

Thank you. I beginning to wonder if your point highlights the "need" for utilitarianism to have a "causeless" free will to avoid the consequences of its contradiction.

Cheers, John

Pyrrho

No, I don't think it needs "free will" any more than most ethical theories. It just needs a method for deciding which consequences are better than others, or, in other words, it needs the same kind of justification as most nonconsequentialist theories.

wordfailure

There appear to me be some problems with how philosophy is done. For example it seems incongruous to me for someone to agree that we are trafficking in conceptual idealizations then carry on unphased. I'm obviously not grasping something-- probably more than one something. Reading back through the posts I seem unnecessarily confrontational, and off topic to boot. Sorry. I didn't intend to sound like Starboy. I'm not anti-philosophy, and certainly not anti-John Page.

wordfailure

Oops!