[MD] Protagoras and "Measure"

[MarshaV]

Excitement and frustration:  

"...that the only way to charge Protagoras with having defeated himself by violating the law of contradiction (and, as a necessary result, *under the circumstances posited,* by violating excluded middle) is to *demonstrate that nothing but the strong realist reading of contradiction (and excluded middle) is conceptually possible.*  No one has ever shown that, and contemporary philosophy is clearly committed to *its being false."  Not that the strong  realism Aristotle supports (or even the doctrine Parmenides supports) is false: only that *its denial is conceptually viable.*  In fact, the distinct pragmatist, anti-essentialist, symbiotized, historicist visions of Putnam, Rorty, and Harman -- and, for that matter, the related doctrines of Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, MacIntyre, and Bernstein, whom we have already mentioned in this connection -- confirm that it is now impossible to pretend to defeat Protagoras or any modern protagorean merely by invoking the strong archic *interpretation* of contradiction and/or excluded middle that (one way or another) all of these thinkers seem disposed to favor.  That is, they favor such a strategy, but only by way of the irrelevant subterfuge of pretending that the relativist, much like Aristsotle's Protagoras, could not "conceivably" have intended his thesis except in the barefaced contradictory sense they are prepared to expose.  Aristotle, Newton-Smith, Wolterstorff, and Dummett, on the other hand, do actually draw, or implicate, their own conclusions by way of the dubious form of the realism just indicated.
   What we must see is that a stalemate here is a victory for Protagoras.  *If* we cannot establish the required realism indisputably then the defeat of Protagoras on so-called "internal" logical grounds fails.  Because all that we require is that Protagoras (or his modern-day protagoren offspring) simply should not be as stupid as Newton-Smith and PUtnam pretend he cannot fail to be."
   (Margolis, Joseph, 'The Truth About Relativism' (Paperback), pp.74-75)



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