[MD] in defence of the "relative"

[X Acto]

----- Original Message ----
From: Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com>
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Sent: Sat, November 21, 2009 4:55:51 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] in defence of the "relative"


Hey Matt,
Ron said:
What has me disagreeing about "all" being relative is the 
universal basic response to the hot stove/ analogy Pirsig 
makes

Matt said:
That used to be Platt's favorite line when trying to 
self-destruct relativism (might still be for all I know).  I 
asked once about the masochist, though: he doesn't feel 
low quality.  So what's so universal about the stove, 
except for causality (which we already knew about)?

Ron said:
Thats what I mean, the causuality of response. still has 
me hesitant about saying "all" is relative.. I'm still 
mulling this over..

Matt:
Well, that's good at least.  Because Platt used to mean 
the "low" response was universal, which would then 
supposedly allow you to construct, as I believe Platt at 
least used to want to, an actionable universal ethics 
irrespective of time and place.  I'm not sure Pirsig 
thought he was deploying the hot stove example simply 
to describe causality (after all, you could use the 
example of _anything_ to give an example of causality), 
but I've always been suspicious of the example.

Ron:
It does seem as if Pirsig is heading in that direction when invoking the "more empirical"
meaning in relation to it.

Matt:
But to the case at hand, I'm not sure how causality 
would intercede into the case of relativism, insofar as 
I'm not sure why a relativist would feel the need to deny 
it.

But how about this: Pirsig seems to take a Kantian line 
in ZMM about causality.  Kant said that causality was 
something that our minds added to the data: it was one 
of his a priori categories of understanding.  Hume gave 
a very convincing argument in An Enquiry Concerning 
Human Understanding that causality could not be proven 
to exist in nature, for we can never move from the 
contiguous succession events given through our senses 
to a demonstration of logical causal neccessity: we can 
never prove that the white billard ball caused the black 
one to fly into the corner pocket, only that one moved 
up next to the other and then both flew in two different 
directions.  Kant said, okay, fair enough, but causality is 
how the world is seemingly ordered, so it must be 
something our minds add--and so the transcendental 
deduction of how the world must be like because of the 
concepts of the mind.

Ron:
I'm reading Aristotles Metaphysics at the moment and thats the sort of 
direction that is taken.

Matt:
I haven't closely analyzed those passages in ZMM in a 
long time, but at that stage of the book, he seems to 
accept that general drift--the classic/romantic distinction 
takes on the Kantian flavor of the concepts/intuitions 
distinction.  What happened after Kant is the rise of 
something like "conceptual relativism": what if there are 
more than one set of concepts that can give order to the 
world?  Falling back to the power of Hume's argument, it 
seems to be an open possibility, at the least, that some 
minds _don't_ bring causality to the table.  After all, part 
of Kant's argument is that the world _is_ relative to the 
concepts of understanding.  What if there are--and this 
became a dominating thought for a while in professional 
philosophy--alternative conceptual schemes?

I don't see that a relativist needs to deny causality, but 
a certain kind might just insofar as noticing that the 
world takes the shape it does--up to and including 
notions of causality (notice how Pirsig's argument does 
_not_ help us here: it is based on the empirical 
succession of events)--because of the particular shape 
or cast of our minds.

Ron:
You are quite right about that, which really has me questioning the validity
of Pirsigs empirical notions of dynamic quality in relation to immediate experience.
A universal foundation is hinted at and it's this that has me grasping at the pragmatic
 "concrete" in regards to the relativism of meaning and correspondance.

Matt:
Personally, I don't think "conceptual relativism" of the 
kind I outlined above (which takes seriously the idea of 
radically different alternative conceptual schemes) is in 
the end viable for transcendental reasons similar to 
Kant's (Donald Davidson's kind of transcendental 
deduction of the possiblity of communication).  But it 
might be important to mull over.

Ron:
Well it certainly has me scratchin my noggin.


                        
_________________________________________________________________
Bing brings you maps, menus, and reviews organized in one place.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=restaurants&form=MFESRP&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_MFESRP_Local_MapsMenu_Resturants_1x1
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/