[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[MarshaV]

Steve,

Sure.  Truth is not absolute.  Truth is not relative.  Truth is a static pattern of value - delusion.  Throw it out and you experience divine silence.   


Marsha 




On Dec 15, 2010, at 8:10 AM, Steven Peterson wrote:

> 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
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