[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[X Acto]

experience is truth

throwing out truth

is throwing out experience



----- Original Message ----
From: MarshaV <valkyr at att.net>
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Sent: Wed, December 15, 2010 8:25:23 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Philosophy and Abstraction


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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