[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[Matt Kundert]

DMB said:
"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 said:
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?

Matt:
The answer to Steve's rhetorical questions for James, I think, can 
be found in one of James's famous definitions of truth:  "The true 
is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of 
belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons" (from "What 
Pragmatism Means").  Stanley Fish once pointed out that people 
often only quote the first half of the sentence, but that you won't 
understand pragmatism without "and good, too, for definite, 
assignable reasons."  It's those "assignable reasons" that puts us 
within a conventional practice.

Matt