>This is true; given enough like-minded persons. There
>is a difference between saying all is indetereminate
>and saying that as long as you have general tacit
>agreement (or acceptance) on certain underlying issues
>(ie homogeneous populations in a broad sense) then the
>problems are "managable"
Actually, I see the underlying premise of liberalism as fundamental disagreement and irreconcable conflict. Liberakism, with its relentless retreat from profundity, its refusal to ask more than agreement on procedurally sound outcomes, is whay makes thsi conflict manageable. Heterogeneity is the premisw. Liberalsim is the conclusion.
When this is not the case, as
>is quite often the case with inflows of immigrants and
>different ideologies, there are impositions with which
>we may both sympathize but can not ground except on
>pragmatic bases. By the way, this:
Pragmatic bases is all we can hope toa ttain agreement upon.
>
> "clear enough to be predictable, fairly uniformly
>applied, and more or less democratically decided"
>
>can be true in the sense I take you to mean and quite
>consistant with what I am saying. I would not have
>thought it necessary to go to the crits for this at
>any rate nor do I deny the difference between the US
>and Russia-that's why I cited EP Thompson on the law.
Good, a central source for me too.
>
> > Actually my experience is that most casesa re less
> > hard in practice than they are in theory.
>
>In the future looking backward, a great many of those
>"easy" cases just may "seem" more complicated-perhaps
>even "wrongly" argued and decided.
Maybe. Hilary Putnam proposes the following metinduction: in the past, it has turned out that all our scientific beliefs have been wrong. Therefore, if the future is like the past, all our scientific beliefs now are wrong . . . . Nonetheless, what makes for a decent political solution is that it works now. As long as no concrete grounds for doubt arise, we have no nonspeculative basis to criticize it.
Perhaps you take
>much for granted, not unlike Walzer/Rorty for whom our
>pragmatist conceptions today just happen to accord
>with late 20th century liberal/democratic capitalist
>social relations (and usually only in the US).
>
Probably. I am a former Rorty student, and the older I gits, the better Dick seems to me in many ways. The more I sound like him, for sure! We prags don't consider ethnocentrism to be an insult. We think it's the human condition. Others in different times and places may have different problems for which our solutions won't work. But these are our times and places, and the solutions we have had better work for us, or they are no good at all.
jks
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