[MD] Protagoras and "Measure"

[MarshaV]

Hi Ron,

I have never read or heard of the suggestion that the Law of Contradiction and the Law of 
Excluded Middle were *just* pragmatic tools. You might consider the implication of the 
word *Law*.   But I am not a scholar who has spent my career studying the early greek 
philosophers.   

Marsha



On Jan 3, 2010, at 9:11 AM, X Acto wrote:

> Yes, but was the law of non-contradiction a philosophical stance
> or simply a pragmatic one, useful. 
>> From my reading I tend to think the latter.
> There are several passages that I feel Aristotle
> was coming from a relativistic outlook and was a pragmatist
> in the focus of meaning in experience.
> 
> The arguement of Protagoras is a moral one, and thats
> what Socrates and Aristotle make their observation and
> arguement on. Morals. Relativism has no morals in it.
> No preference, no desire. Nothing on which one
> is prepared to act, in it's philosphical doctrine.
> 
> also
> 
> Plato's arguements were syllogistic, they forced Protagoras
> to contradict himself in his statements.then rested rhetorically
> on the importance of meaning.
> 
> I sincerely think scientific method was a response to elanchus
> (socratic) method.
> 
> Not a philosphical doctrine but a sylogistic method.
> 
> -Ron
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: MarshaV <valkyr at att.net>
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Sent: Sun, January 3, 2010 6:12:22 AM
> Subject: Re: [MD] Protagoras and "Measure"
> 
> 
> 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 *interpr
> etation* 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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