[FRIAM] talking to bots is fun for everyone

[David Eric Smith]

Glen, I think today you are fated to suffer death by a thousand tangents.

> On Dec 27, 2022, at 2:41 PM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

First, though, thank you for saving me on the other point.  I was laughing at the structure of the whole conversation by then.  (And thinking about Turing tests for people.)  I was seeking a confirmation that there was an error in a piece of text.  Frank was committed to making true statements.

But now, the tangent:

> Brevity is your enemy. Previously, I asked gpt to contrast Richard Rorty and CS Peirce. It gave me this super simplified answer that woefully misrepresented both.

By God-knows-what route, I happened to notice this, and read it last week (or maybe a day ago…?):

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/01/trumpism-and-the-american-philosophical-tradition/ <https://harpers.org/archive/2023/01/trumpism-and-the-american-philosophical-tradition/>

A colleague pushed Rorty on me, and as I have mentioned, I could not understand why I consider him so awful, and the colleague, with whom I get along very well, considers him a mentor, nearly a guru of some kind.  I got a partial answer this past summer, which was a testimonial to Rorty’s personal goodness of actions.

Anyway, I was pleased with about the first half of Edmundson’s analysis, because he takes Rorty to task for what I consider the right thing, which is killing truth for the sake of expediency in his own social-justice aims.  Some saying like “Those who would kill truth for the sake of social justice won’t have either”.

But then Edmundson makes hamburger of the second half, articulating his own position as an “idealist”, where he substitutes the word “Truth” as the provider of a whole basket of services, not one of which I would take to be the purview of truth, and all of which I would say are the purview of either Justice or Humanity.  How can a philosopher, so blithely, commit what seems to me such an elementary and blunderous category error?  

So I spent some time wondering whether there was any notion of Truth that got very far from what I think it to be: a foundation for more reliably selecting premises about what is the case; and would veer it more toward notions like Justice or Humanity, to me very different things though all of the above can serve as referees that stand above various contestants.  In any case, I didn’t forward to the list, to avoid self-incrimination.

But, since you bring up Rorty and Peirce, why not?  Edmundson did mention that Peirce had already tried to get distance by the time of James; Rorty I am sure has him rolling in his grave still.  But Edmundson didn’t mention _why_ James distracted from Peirce, Dewey essentially reversed him, and Rorty put the all the nail that would fit in that coffin.  Seemed to me like rather a large omission, but in the second half of the essay, maybe I see why.

Eric


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