[MD] The Relativist's journey

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
...I answered this already. I supplied the answer directly to you, in detail, in this same thread, connecting my use of "relativism" with Pirsig's use of the term. This was all asked and answered about a week ago. ...


Steve replied:
So you keep saying, but I wouldn't keep asking if I could find your answer. What is your definition of relativism? All I know is that you think someone who says "there are no non-conversational constraints on inquiry" is a relativist by your definition, but I don't know what your definition is.


dmb says:

Since I told you when, what and where the answer was already given, it's hard to believe that you couldn't find it. And may I say how irritating it is to constantly repeat myself, to answer the same questions and objection over and over again. Once or twice really should be enough, Steve. Take some memory boosting vitamins or something. I'm tired of compensation for your laziness of handicap, whatever the case may be. Growl, growl, bark, bark, bark! 

Okay, now that I've got that off my chest, here is the bulk of my previous answer:
 
...SOM is only one of the roads to relativism, but the kind we're most likely to encounter in the contemporary West will be found among postmodern thinkers. That's where Rorty fits into the discussion. 


Pirsig says "twentieth century relativists ..held that it is unscientific to interpret values in culture B by the values of culture A... Cultures are unique historical patterns which contain their own values and cannot be judged in terms of the values of other cultures. The cultural relativists, backed by Boas's doctrines of scientific empiricism, virtually wiped out the credibility of the older Victorian evolutionists... The new cultural relativism became popular because it was a ferocious instrument for the dominance of intellect over society.

"When people asked, "If no culture, including a Victorian culture, can say what is right and what is wrong, then how can we ever *know* what is right and what is wrong? the answer was, "That's easy. Intellectuals will tell you. Intellectuals, unlike people of studiable cultures, know what they're talking and writing about, because what *they* say isn't culturally relative. What they say is absolute. This is because intellectuals follow science, which is objective. An objective observer does not have relative opinions because he is nowhere within the world he observes."

"From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is a completely purposeless, valueless place. There no point in anything. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like machinery. There is nothing morally wrong with being lazy, nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft, with suicide, with murder, with genocide. There is nothing morally wrong because there are no morals, just functions. Now that intellect was in command of society for the first time in history, was this the intellectual pattern it was going to run society with?"

dmb says:There are many paths by which one can arrive at relativism. Scientific objectivity is just one of them. But we can see what it amounts to, and what it amounts to is a disaster. Nothing is wrong and nothing is right, it's all just mechanistic functions. "Is this the intellectual pattern that was going to run society?" I think Pirsig's question is asked with urgency and alarm. I think it's quite clear that he's identifying relativism as a problem to be solved. This is consistent with the fact the he takes the charge of relativism against the Sophists to be offensive slander.  These passages show how Pirsig uses the word, how I use the word and that's how "relativism" is commonly used. Sam Harris, for example, is pulling his hair out over that fact that we can't say, scientifically, that female genital mutilation is wrong.