[MD] Ironistic Metaphysics

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
I've been to trying to describe the issue to avoid needing to talk about specialized terms like "final vocabulary." I guess I'm not doing a very good job.

dmb says:
Not at all. You're doing just fine speaking for yourself. Your writing is clear and I think it's pretty easy to understand what you're saying. It's Rorty's explanations that need explaining. 


Steve said:
I agree that Pirsig often seems to use metaphysics that way, and if that is what we always mean by metaphysics, it is indeed impossible to argue about having one. But then we can still ask, do we need to model our thinking about knowledge on vision at all? Do we have to think of ourselves as wearing cultural glasses that come between a mental eye and its object and prevent us from knowing the world as it really is?

dmb says:
Ah yes, I remember that one too. It could be that Matt got the idea elsewhere but I think the objection to "ocular metaphors" comes from Rorty. As you indicated by putting it in terms of "a mental eye and its object", this objection is something like an attack on SOM wherein the correspondence theory of truth says that real knowledge exists when our subjective understanding "sees" objective reality clearly and accurately. This objection is a good one when it's used to identify such a theory of truth or the assumptions that support it. But this problematic theory of truth is only associated with ocular metaphors. We can't always apply the objection just because some explanation or the other uses "seeing" or "eyes" (or eye glasses) as a metaphor. I mean, Pirsig doesn't think the glasses sit between the world and our eyes so much as he thinks the glasses constitute the world as we understand it. He's talking about the mythos, that evolved pile of analogies upon analogies that constitutes our reality. Or, to put it quite simply, the objection doesn't apply to the MOQ because it already explicitly rejects of a single objective truth. Also, please notice that the glasses are used to "interpret experience", not to see objective reality.

Steve said:
But I'm very attracted to the paintings in a gallery bit: ".. if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist.  Then one doesn't seek the absolute "Truth."  One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along." 

Steve interjects:If he expects something better to come along, then he sounds to me like an ironist about his own creation. [AND] ...He is not willing to say that any particular metaphysics is true, then he sounds like an ironist to me.


dmb says:

Maybe this is only a semantic debate but I don't think there is anything particularly ironic about the position that says truths are provisional. That, and the unwillingness to declare metaphysical truths, just means you're not an absolutist or a religious fanatic. 

If you'll indulge me, I'd to highlight part of the quote you posted but use it for a slightly different purpose. Hopefully, its a relevant tangent. I'm thinking about Bodvar's contention that the intellectual level and SOM are the same thing. I think the painting gallery analogy refutes this notion pretty clearly. Just the idea, just the image of "intellectual realities" all in a row like "paintings in an art gallery" is enough but then Pirsig says...

"There are many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have more quality than others..  ... saying that a MOQ is false and a SOM is true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. ...Both are simply intellectual patterns for interpreting reality ..."

Getting back to the main topic, this gallery analogy doesn't express the provisional nature of truth so much as perspectivalism. Often confused with relativism, perspectivalism says that there are many valid ways of understanding any given subject matter but that none of the perspectives can be privileged over the others and it says that no perspective can exhaust the subject matter. Not coincidentally, this position is associated with James and Dewey, both of whom were radical empiricists. The idea here is that experience is too rich, too thick, too overflowing to be captured entirely by any conceptual scheme but that the various ways of examination and understanding can take something from that rich, thick, overflowing experience and say something that is true, that agrees with experience and helps to guide future experience. This is not relativism, however, because a person can be quite wrong about something within the perspective itself. In other words, the polar map isn't any truer that a rectangular map but that doesn't mean that map readers are never wrong or that nobody ever made a crappy map. The same is true with the "provisionalism", if that's a word. History shows that truth is not eternal but that doesn't mean that our truths are so fleeting and ephemeral that we don't have time to make a simple point or even to write a metaphysical novel. 
For Rorty, I think, it's not so easy to escape the charge of relativism. Sandra Rosenthal thinks that's exactly what he is.

Tanks.
dmb
  

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