[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,


> Matt said:
> Hey, you smell scientific materialism all over analytic philosophy.  I smell Platonism over a lot of the formulations of mysticism.  Both of us want to say that, for the most part, those smells are wafting from adjacent compartments to the ones we're actually interested in.
>
> dmb says:
> I don't think that's fair. I only described Sellars and Rorty using the terms they use for themselves and those labels don't just "smell" like scientific materialism, they declare it quite openly. (Verbal behaviorism, non-reductive physicalism, eliminative materialism are terms they use. Again, these are not my cups of tea and I think that's a very different perspective but it's not slanderous to point this out.)

Steve:
It's pretty easy to formulate materialism in a non-reductive
un-scientistic way. Rorty can say that everything CAN have a material
description while denying the scientistic view that everything ought
to only ever have a material description. Rorty of course would never
want to argue about whether or not material descriptions are adequate
to reality. The issue for the pragmatist is adequacy for given
purposes. Rorty would point out that material descriptions are
inadequate to the purposes for which we write love poems but very good
for predicting and controlling things.


dmb:
Platonism, on the other hand, is explicitly attacked in all kinds of
ways by Pirsig. He even goes after Plato personally, by name.

Steve:
Huh? Obviously Platonism is a favorite punching bag for Rorty too.


dmb:
> In this case we have one pragmatist who says the fundamental nature of reality is outside of language and another who says it's language all the way down.

Steve:
And it would be just as wrong to read Pirsig's statement as implicitly
saying that reality has a fundamental nature of which language is
inadequate to capture as it is to read Rorty as saying that that
kicking a rock is the same as kicking a sentence.



dmb:
See, I don't quote Rorty's critic's to use "relativism" as mere
slander. And it doesn't even matter if it's exactly true or not.
That's the sense that I get from reading his texts and from reading
about his text and relativism does not suit my tastes in philosophy. I
think that relativism is a charge against which Pirsig and James have
to be defended.


Steve:
I'm glad you finally recognize that Pirsig and James are likewise open
to charges of relativism just as Rorty is.

The problem is that the charge can't be answered directly. The
question, "are morality and truth absolute or relative?" is a version
of the question, "is the quality in the subject or the object?" Both
Rorty and Pirsig need to attack the premises underlying the question
rather than take one side or the other on the question. Unfortunately
for both of them, anyone buying into to the subject-object picture
will see them both as relativists until they can be convinced to stop
asking the question, "is the quality in the subject or the object?"

Best,
Steve