[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[Ian Glendinning]

Steve, I await a reply with 'bated breath ...

Dave said to you (in the other "all the way down" thread)
"This mystic reality, Pirsig says, is not mysterious because it's
transcendent or complicated but because it's so simple and direct, so
right-under-your-nose. To speak plainly, reality is just what happens
before you have a chance to think about it. And that is the
non-linguistic reality asserted by radical empiricists."

Speaking plainly, I think this is clear.
All I would add is ... at the end of the first sentence

.... so right under your nose, .... until you start to think and/or
talk about it.

Which is what he and Matt and you (and we) are doing ... talking about it.
Why is it remotely surprising that we can find the words to agree the
bit that comes before language ?
Like Matt, I see the ball in Dave's court. What can be agreed seems
obvious, plain and simple. What's left to disagree is unclear (as you
would expect it must be).

Ian

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Steven Peterson
<peterson.steve at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi DMB,
>

> DMB quotes Rorty:
>> "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.
>
>
> Steve:
> Are you trying to say that James or any one of these others DOES offer
> a criterion for knowledge or a standard for rationality that was not
> created in the course of creating a practice? Are saying that certain
> criteria are simply handed to us by reality? Are you saying Pirsig
> thinks so? Surely not. But then what the heck could you be objecting
> to here?
>
> Best,
> Steve
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