[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
Are you saying that we should not take the MOQ literally as a metaphysical system? I'm not sure what that means but maybe it is something like Rorty's ironism.

dmb says:
I'm not so sure that irony is the same thing as not taking something literally. In literature irony is where the actual meaning turns out to be the opposite of the apparent meaning. More generally and loosely, irony is just a form of insincerity, where one doesn't really believe what one is saying. Even more broadly, it's just a pose held by those who want to look hip. If I understand how Rorty uses it, it just means something like tentative, hesitant, uncertain or lightly held beliefs. But by saying that the MOQ shouldn't be taken literally, I just mean that the MOQ is a set of intellectual analogues and not reality itself. As Pirsig puts it in chapter 20, "The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word quality cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
"The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our environment can understand is that `Quality is the response of an organism to its environment' (he used this example because his chief questioners seemed to see things in terms of stimulus-response behavior theory). An amoeba, placed on a plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid placed nearby, will pull away from the acid (I think). If it could speak the amoeba, without knowing anything about sulfuric acid, could say, `This environment has poor quality.' If it had a nervous system it would act in a much more complex way to overcome the poor quality of the environment. It would seek analogues, that is, images and symbols from its previous experience, to define the unpleasant nature of its new environment and thus `understand' it.
"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.
"Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself."

Steve said:
...I think Rorty's project as far as philosophy is concerned was mostly negative. He was calling for an end of Philosophy as the activity of trying to unpack the essences of Truth, Reality, Reason, etc in favor of philosophy as one form of literary criticism. [AND] I don't that even Rorty would say that it was a ridiculous idea. I see it as a project that didn't pan out. [AND] If such nonsense [the essence of reality, eternal truths, etc] is off the table then it's hard for me to see what difference you see in Rorty's relativism and your view.

dmb says:
It's pretty safe to say that Pirsig would agree that the search for the essence of Truth and Reality, whatever that means, is futile. But the way he makes a distinction between Quality itself and our many marvelous analogues, as described in the passage above, marks a big difference between his view and Rorty's. The idea that philosophy is a form of literary criticism, which is consistent with his idea that conversation is our only constraint or that intersubjective agreement is all we can hope for, reflects his brand of linguisticized pragmatism. But it seems to me that Rorty was trapped within those secondary analogs whereas Pirsig is very interested in the Quality, in the immediate experience from which these analogs  are derived.
Think about the difference this way. Rorty rightly attacks Modern epistemology and the correspondence theory of truth (where truth is defined as the proper correspondence between subjective understanding and objective reality) and basically concludes that we shouldn't be doing epistemology. By contrast, the radical empiricist also rightly attacks Modern epistemology or, more specifically, traditional empiricism but he doesn't conclude that we shouldn't be doing epistemology. I mean, radical empiricism is an epistemological position and it happens to be a position that supports the role of immediate experience in the formation of concepts, knowledge and truth with a small "t". 
Does that make sense to you? See what a huge difference there at this crucial point. Adopting radical empiricism is very different from rejecting epistemology altogether. Not to be snarky, but it seems to me that Rorty's view lacks quality because it lacks "Quality" in the Pirsigian sense.
And Quality is what prevents relativism. 
  

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