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PRAGMATIC_REVIEW

                                             April 5, 2010

       Pragmatism as excuse for
       short-sightedness
       (circa 2000):
                                            Burning Man praised for
          PRACTICAL_IDEALS                  it's practical idealism
                                            (cirac 2007):

       Bertrand Russell argues                 BURNING_DEFENSE
       with Dewey, and I push
       back (outside of math,
       extreme cases settle
       little):

          RUSSELLS_BREAKFAST


             And indeed we must judge
             pragmatism by its own
             consequences:                     PRACTICAL_LIMITS

                MENAND_HAACKED


  If we take a "pragmatic philosophy" as
  one where we choose ideas based on their
  consequences, there's an obvious problem:

  You need to be able to identify good and bad
  consequences for that process to work.
  If you can do that, what do you need the
  guidance of those ideas for, anyway?

  Why not just steer by your own sense of
  rightness and wrongness?  What's the point
  of attempting to codify it in some way?

        There are a few answers to this:

        One is that the formation of
        philosophy is the first step toward
        creation of legal structure, and the
        legal structure is a useful because
        it's a shared, predictable, concrete        Go around looking into
        embodiment of the shared values of a        your soul all you like,
        people.                                     but when you need to
                                                    coordinate with some
        Another is that my definition               other souls, you'll
        of pragmatism may be very                   need to deal with
        oversimplified:                             things like a legal system.

        If moral reasoning cannot proceed
        in an entirely top-down fashion,
        it doesn't necessarily follow that
        it must happen in an entirely
        bottom-up fashion.
                                                         CLOUDS
        Like many other areas, what you would
        really expect is a mixture.  You
        might have a number of "a priori"
        principles which have some region of
        conflict which you will try to
        minimize by looking at the
        consequences of emphasizing one or
        the other principle in different ways.



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