SUSAN HAACK
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can devise, for finding out the little that can as yet be found out about the
universe of mind and matter from those observations which every person
can make in every hour of his waking life .. . laboratory-philosophy ...
(1.126, 129).
RR:
From the radically anti-representationalist viewpoint I ... commend
... pragmatism can be seen as gradually .. . escaping from scientism (pPD, p.4).
CSP:
[Philosophical theories] have the same sort of basis as scientific
results have. That is to say, they rest on experience - on the total everyday
experience of many generations.... Such experience is worthless for dis–
tinctively scientific purposes ... although all science . .. would have to shut
up shop if she should manage to escape accepting them. No "wisdom"
could ever have discovered argon; yet within its proper sphere, . . . the
instinctive result of human experience ought to have so vastly more
weight than any scientific result, that to make laboratory experiments to
ascertain, for example, whether there be any uniformity in nature or no,
would vie with adding a teaspoonful of saccharine to the ocean in order
to sweeten it (5.522) .
RR:
The basic motive of pragmatism was . . . a continuation of the
Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment's sanctification of natural science
(EHO, p.lS).
CSP:
[Science] embodies the epitome of man's intellectual development
(7.49). Iconoclastic inventions are always cheap and often nasty (4.71).
SH:
May we go back for a minute to Professor Rorty's reference to
Romanticism?
RR:
The Platonist and the positivist share a reductionist view of
metaphor: They think metaphors are either paraphrasable or useless for the
one serious purpose whi ch language has, namely, representing reality. By
contrast, the Romantic has an expansionist view .. . Romantics attribute
metaphor to a mysterious faculty called the "imagination," a faculty they
suppose to be at the very center of the self. . . (CIS, p.19) .
CSP:
When a man desires ardently to know the truth, his first effort will
be to imagine what that truth can be... . there is, after all, nothing but
imagination that can ever supply him an inkling of the truth... . For thou–
sands of men a falling apple was nothing but a falling apple; and to
compare it to the moon would by them be deemed "fanciful."
It
is not
too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so
indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination ....
There are, no doubt, kinds of imagination of no value in science, mere
