[MD] The Relativist's journey

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
Your "argument", such as it is, amounts to very little. Since I can't reason with an unreasonable person any better than Rorty can, empiricism doesn't matter. Huh?

Steve replied:
.. I am saying that there is no context in which empiricism has pragmatic value. When exactly do you think empiricism makes a difference when it comes to relativism? What sorts of disagreements about facts or ethical truths will appealing to empiricism settle? What sorts of arguments can you as an empiricist make that the people you are accusing of relativism are constrained from making?

dmb says:
The pragmatic theory of truth is a form of empiricism and it says that truth is a form of the good. So your assertion, that "empiricism has no pragmatic value", strike me as pretty bizarre. It's just one more unexplained and unsupported blanket condemnation of empiricism.
And isn't it totally obvious that having epistemological standards would prevent relativism? Any kind of empiricism is going to include such standards and this is certainly true of radical empiricism and pragmatism. Of course empiricism matters. You'd have to have some mighty powerful arguments to dismiss the authority of experience, wouldn't you? You haven't even begun to convince that this point is really even debatable.
Empiricism would help to settle all kinds of debates, like global warming, creationism, or weapons of mass destruction. Empiricism rules out all kinds of nonsense. Without it, atheism and science become just another faith. As Ken Wilber puts it, relativism equalizes science and religion by shooting them both in the head. They become merely different vocabularies, like chemistry and poetry. 
More specifically, the MOQ does give us a framework wherein we CAN distinguish social level cultural values like fascism and fundamentalism from intellectual values like democracy and human rights. Like I said, philosophy is not about forcing Nazis to become liberals through the sheer force of persuasion anyway. No philosophy can do that and it's a completely unreasonable way to measure the value or veracity of any idea.

Steve:
Dude, you are the one who brought up the Nazis (as Pirsig did in Lila)


dmb says:
Well, no I didn't bring up the Nazi's and that's not the part I was objecting to anyway. (Although it is objectionable for being hyperbolic and barely relevant.) Again, I'm objecting to your framing of the issue of relativism. You seem to be saying that if I can't convince the NAZI with arguments, then I'm a relativist too. If I can't reason with an unreasonable NAZI, then empiricism hasn't helped me. But of course reason and evidence only ever persuades reasonable people, not Nazis or fundamentalists. As I just mentioned, Pirsig does address the conflicts and differences between 3rd and 4th level values. We get a naturalistic moral hierarchy wherein evolutionary advance is the vaguely defined goal of everything, a yardstick against which we can measure everything - but only very generally. I mean, there is endless room for debate about what is and is not conducive to the ongoing evolution of life but we get a neat, orienting framework, a moral compass. There is nothing to prevent an unscrupulous nazi or bible thumper from simply distorting and twisting any philosophy but the MOQ does handle these issues and he does so very differently than Rorty does. I thought we were talking about relativism, but since somebody brought it up, there's my two cents.


dmb:
...This is the kind of philosophical ethno-centrism I mentioned last time. On this same principle, Rorty says he can't get anything over on his fundamentalist students either. All he can do is try to get them to switch tribes, so to speak. This is what I mean when I say he is a relativist. He thinks there is no way to adjudicate between tribes because, he thinks, would entail stepping outside of both or otherwise getting some god's eye, objective view. He has lots of fancy reasons for this, of course, but the point is that he does land on a relativist's position, one that is not very different than the relativism of Boas and his contemporaries. Like Rorty, the "twentieth century relativists .. held that it is unscientific to interpret values" because "cultures are unique historical patterns which .. cannot be judged in terms of the values of other cultures." Obviously, Rorty's relativism is NOT, "backed by Boas's doctrines of scientific empiricism" but it just as thoroughly denies the ability to interpret or judge.


Steve replied:
.. His [Rorty's] point was only that Philosophy can't provide a Foundation which can be used to prove that Nazism is unnatural and democracy is what is demanded by the universe. .. You are making huge unsubstantiated leaps here from Rorty's inability to "get anything over on the Nazi" to relativism as the doctrine that we shouldn't make judgments or that cultures can't be judged. Of course they can. Rorty says they can and are judged ethnocentrically. Do you have a non ethnocentric way of judging them. If you do, please provide it.



dmb says:
Dude, how are you failing to see this. You said it yourself. If Rorty says philosophy can't provide a foundation to prove the Nazis can be judged only ethnocentrically, then how is my claim a leap? How is my god's eye objective view different from the foundation demanded by the universe? How is my "cannot be judged by the values of another culture" different from saying they can be "judged ethnocentrically"? There is no difference at all. They mean the same thing and yet you assert one in order to deny the other? And how can you fail to see how this adds up to relativism? It's the like the perfect Platonic form of relativism. Are you kidding me?