[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[david buchanan]

Hi Steve:

Steve said:
...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 says:
I guess this is one of those places where Rortyism doesn't translate very well. You're pitting "adequacy to reality" against our "given purposes" and saying never to the first. But for a radical empiricist those are not two different things. The pragmatic test of truth does want to argue about whether or not our descriptions are adequate to reality, but reality is equated with experience itself. Concepts and truths work within this reality or they are inadequate. 



Steve said:
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 says:
Huh? But Pirsig IS saying that language is inadequate to capture the mystic reality. He says so explicitly and repeatedly. But again, this "reality" is experience itself and not an objective, physical reality or some Kantian world of things-in-themsleves. It is the immediate flux of life, an undifferentiated awareness. And the idea of inadequacy follows from the idea that the stream of experience is too rich and thick and overflowing to ever be conceptualized. All conceptualizations come from the handful of sand we select from the surrounding landscape. To mix James's metaphors with Pirsig's. 



Steve said:
The problem is that the charge [relativism] 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?"


dmb says:
Well, yes. In both cases the dilemma can be avoided if you can find a way to reject both options. I agree that absolutism could be described as the view that truths are objectively true while the relativists say that truth and morality is just subjective. But you've framed it as if the charge against Rorty MUST depend on buying into the subject-object picture. You seem to think that SOM is the only basis on which to level such a charge. I disagree.


"What ties Dewey, Foucault, James and Nietzsche together", Rorty says, is "the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criteria, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions."

How does that NOT count as relativism? Isn't that practically the definition of relativism? I think so. 

P. 83 OF ZAMM (Emphasis is Pirsig's)
"There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in the pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask that question is to look in the RIGHT direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. About the Buddha that exists independently of any analytic thought much has been said - some would say TOO much, and would question any attempt to add to it. But about the Buddha that exists WITHIN analytic thought, and GIVES THAT ANALYTIC THOUGHT ITS DIRECTION, virtually nothing has been said, and there are historic reasons for this. But history keeps happening, and it seems no harm and maybe some positive good to add to our historical heritage with some talk in this area of discourse."

p. 98 of ZAMM
"Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of a "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. I said yesterday that the ghost of rationality was what Phædrus pursued and what led to his insanity, but to get into that it's vital to stay with down-to-earth examples of rationality, so as not to get lost in generalities no one else can understand. Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.
"We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately...and this is an important way of seeing it...and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form...and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example...this wrench...has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It's designed to change the underlying form of the machine."


p. 102-3 of ZAMM
"That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind — number three tappet is right on too. One more to go. This had better be it — .I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this...that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes...pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts...all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all out of someone's mind. That's important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone's mind. There's no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There's nothing else there. But what's "potential"? That's also in someone's mind! — Ghosts."