[MD] Relativism

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:


... you will face some uncomfortable questions like, is this truth that objective reality does not exist found or made? If it is found, you affirm objectivity. If it is "MADE true in experience," as you like to say, how is that done? How do we VERIFY (in James's sense of making true) that objective reality does not exist?


dmb says:

The same way we verify that santa doesn't exist. Just kidding. Everybody knows it's impossible to prove a negative. But yes, of course, the radical empiricist is saying that objective reality was made, not discovered. In his essays, James says that the idea of things-in-themselves is one of the transexperiential entities, one of those metaphysical fictions, invented to deal with SOM. He sets the parameters of his empiricism so that such fictions are only ever taken as such. They can be acceptable on pragmatic grounds, if they're useful. But as a general rule, if it can't be known in experience, we should just keep it out of our philosophies and call it what it is; pure speculation about something that, by definition, we can never know. If it's outside of experience, it is outside of reality. There is a nice symmetry here too. If it is known in experience, you better have a place for it in your philosophy. That side of the doctrine opens up a whole range of experiences that had been marginalized, ignored and actively avoided by the traditional empiricists. 


The rest of your reply made even less sense to me. You seem to be offering a wildly incoherent view of truth wherein Rortyism and realism are mixed in with a rejection of everything except SOM.

I'm just stunned by this. I thought you were one of the people who understood the MOQ but it looks like you've got no use for the central ideas and you don't mind taking sides with SOM, its central enemy. It's no wonder this conversation has been so frustrating.


This about these statements, eh? Give them a fair hearing. See how they fit together. Think. Think some more. And then say something SOM and the MOQ that doesn't involve a defense of Rortyism. Forget Rorty for a few minutes and just look at what these other pragmatists are saying. It's not the same thing and you'll only get mixed up if you read it in terms of Rortyism. The authors certainly aren't talking about that. 

"A casual reader may think James is careless in the way in which he shifts from 'experience' to 'reality' but this is NOT a sign of loose terminology or confusion. It reflects James's doctrine of 'pure experience' where the traditional distinctions between 'experience' and 'reality' are broken down." (Burkhardt's emphasis, p. xxvi)

"The story of modern epistemology, which can be written in terms of a refinement of questions concerning what is 'in' the mind and what is 'outside', is the story of implausible answers to a poorly formulated query. The dichotomy which is taken as so obvious between consciousness or mind and what is 'outside' of our minds is completely specious. There is only a continuous reality or experience which we TAKE in different ways." (Burkhardt's emphasis, xxvii)

As you might recall, James says that the first great pitfall from which radical empiricism will save us is a fake idea of the relation between knower and known. His doctrine of pure experience says knower and known, subject and object, are secondary concepts derived from experience and not the ontological ground of experience. This is the very same "copernican revolution" we see even back in ZAMM, where Pirsig finally says that "the very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of Quality!" (ZAMM 239) 


"Now it comes! Because Quality is the GENERATOR of the mythos. That's it. That's what he meant when he said, 'Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it'. ... Men invent RESPONSES to Quality, and among these are responses is an understanding of what they themselves are."  		 	   		  
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