[MD] Relativism

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
... What makes your conception of relativism seem so strange to me is that you say you are a pragmatist and a Pirsigian, yet you still find it interesting to ask, "is it absolute or relative?" which amounts to asking "is the quality in the subject or the object?"


dmb says:

Nobody is offering the absolute instead of the relative. And SOM should have nothing to do with this debate and it wouldn't have anything to do with it except that you keep bringing it in. It is irrelevant and it is confusing you. 


Steve said:

... It is easy to see how an SOMer would call Rorty and James relativists since they deny ontological objectivity, but I can't see how you can give a pragmatic account of relativism that condemns Rorty and not James and Pirsig.

dmb says:

I doubt that Rorty denies that there is an objective reality. He just thinks we can't have access to it. That's why, for Rorty, justification strictly discursive and has nothing to do with experience per se. But that doesn't matter because the pragmatic theory of truth rejects the idea of objective reality WITHOUT also rejecting the epistemic value of experience. It is empiricism without SOM. So, if you understand what empirical restraints are and you understand what conversational restraints are then you should be able to understand how James and Pirsig differ from Rorty.


Steve said:

I don't think that there is anything to fear about any of these philosophers whether or not you think the term "relativism" is something dangerous that we ought to accuse people of. ... For all your demonizing of Rorty, he has the same political views as you. Do you think that he came to have his views in some different way than you came to have the same views? 


dmb says:

I'm not afraid of Dick. I just think his position on truth and epistemology is very different and much worse. Rorty is a physicalist and verbal behaviorist who more or less reduces the mind to the brain. Pirsig attacks those views as part of his criticism of SOM, scientific materialism and the metaphysics of substance. Rorty's discursive bias is Pirsig's least favorite kind of Platonism. Yes, Steve. These are very different guys and they aren't on the same wavelength at all. That's what Rorty told Matt when the latter asked the former about Pirsig's work. Postmodernism and mysticism overlap in some interesting ways and Pirsig is both while Rorty is no mystic. The mystics and postmodernist can agree that our reality is constructed and that it could be constructed differently. For Pirsig, this reality has been built on the basis of quality. For Rorty, it's just about power. 

Freud and Jung (and James) both explored the unconscious and more or less made it their life's work. But if you know anything about that kind of psychology, you know they are very, very different. Opposites, in many ways. Freud thought religion was a form of mental illness and Jung thought the very opposite. 



Steve said:
Is his position against slavery somehow on shakier ground than yours? I can't see how.

dmb says:

He tells us that his position against slavery, fundamentalism and Nazism has no ground whatsoever. It would be a significant improvement for Rorty to be a shaky ground.




 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail has tools for the New Busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_1