[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[Steve Peterson]

Hi Marsha,

> Marsha:
> ... To me 'Man is the measure of all
> things.' means that Protagoras, and the early Sophists, were  
> relativists and
> RMP agrees with them.  Not the "source" of all things, but the  
> measurer of
> all things, meaning measured relative to their experience of them,
> participators.  From Wiki: 'The term (relativism) often refers to  
> truth
> relativism, which is the doctrine that there are no absolute  
> truths, i.e.,
> that truth is always relative to some particular frame of  
> reference, such as
> a language or a culture.'  And not an ethical relativism where  
> anything
> goes, but one where man should participate using intelligence to  
> determine
> the best course of action, arête.

Steve:
I think we should always defend ourselves against the charge of  
relativism since it is used as an epithet and a way of dismissing  
someone without having to address their arguments. While we can like  
the slogan "man is the measure of all things" because it captures the  
notion that unlike theists and rationalists we are not looking for a  
great, non-human, ahistorical power to tell us right from wrong, we  
also still deny being relativists because we deny the absolute- 
relative distinctions on the same groups that we deny the objective- 
subjective distinction. It's the same thing as not wanting to be  
called a subjectivist.

Pirsig later brings back the terms subjective and objective without  
their metaphysical baggage where subjective is just taken to mean  
social and intellectual patterns or "things that are hard to get  
agreement about" and objective is taken to mean inorganic and  
biological patterns or "things that are easy to get agreement about."  
Absolute and relative could be retooled in the same way, but I still  
think that we should avoid using such terms because doing so implies  
accepting an SOM premise that we don't accept. We can just say that  
some morals are easy to get agreement on and others not so much, and  
we can argue our case for the morality of our position. When someone  
has to say "well, some things are just wrong" or "it's wrong because  
God says so," we don't have to take them to be absolutists so much as  
having exhausted their conversational resources for making a case for  
their point of view.

Best,
Steve