[MD] Relativism

[david buchanan]

Marsha asked Ron:

How does James represent a greater explanatory power for the MoQ?



dmb says:

I don't think James can give the MOQ more explanatory power but I think James and pragmatism in general can clarify the MOQ. Since the MOQ can be aligned with James, just about everything written by or about James can teach a person something about the MOQ. I mean, studying James is studying the MOQ by Proxy. If I were smarter, I'd study Northrop too. That would also work quite well. It just a matter of what available. Not that much has been written about the MOQ but the published work on James, radical empiricism, and the pragmatic theory of truth is practically endless. So why not, right?

What Pirsig adds is the notion that DQ or pure experience is Value, which is to say there is a kind of aesthetic charge, positive or negative, that characterizes the whole situation even before the conceptualizations take hold. There is a overall feel for the situation even before you sort out the whats and whys. But then truth, an intellectual static good, is also Value. One is Dynamic and the other is static but they are both value. And so Pirsig's central term unites pragmatism and radical empiricism "into a single fabric", as Pirsig puts it. 

I think this vision can more or less be extracted from James, but of course I would have never thought to do that without Pirsig's help. Other scholars have made a case for unifying the two into one coherent epistemology and I think that's pretty much just how contemporary scholars have taken James for the last several decades, which only makes it easier.  		 	   		  
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