Hey DMB, DMB said: But I think proponents of absolute truth are beyond the pale because that is soooooo NOT what Pirsig is saying. To the extent that the concept appears in his work at all, if is usually followed by something like, "whatever that means" or "whatever that is". Its obvious in his attack on Plato's fixed and eternal truth and on scientific objectivity. If the future is anything like the past, the art gallery analogy, the denial of the thing-in-itself or anything like the Hegelian Absolute (whatever that is), the assertion that truth is a species of the Good and the assertion that reality is fundamentally dynamic. In some sense, the main point of his work is to deny that there is any such thing as absolute truth, no? I mean, there is a whole range of reasonable interpretations but some are just beyond the pale. I don't see how its possible to have a "quality conversation" about the MOQ with an absolutist because just don't see how its possible to be a Pirsigian and any kind of abso lutist at the same time. It simply doesn't make sense. But the force of temperament is such that Platt could read every book in your library and it wouldn't matter.
Matt: I think you are certainly right about Pirsig. One of the things I wanted to highlight, though, is that there is a construal of "absolutist," namely Habermas' idea of communicative ethics, that isn't exactly beyond the pale. I'm not sure what Platt believes in his own terms, and it is hard to know what he exactly believes in the terms that I've borrowed from contemporary, professional philosophy. My appraisal, however, yielded the belief that what Platt believes underneath all of the, shall we say, rhetoric, is this disagreement over the nature of assertion. That's based on a conversation we had long ago, and his recent reaffirmation of what we came to agree on during it. Platt continues to create hay out what I would otherwise call a fairly minor disagreement (one that doesn't extend to ignoring what so-called "relativists" say because they are relativists--the relativism only consists in their stance on assertion/truth; everything else is as non-contradictory and absolu te as an absolutist would normally think it and so has to be judged on its own terms) because the fact remains that I had to work Platt into understanding terms I was using to understand the issue. That being the case, Platt otherwise reverts to the, let us say, less refined tools than the ones I had been using. By "less refined" I don't mean useless, I just mean that philosophers have a number of tools at their disposal, including hammer and surgeon's knife. Platt continues to use (and only use) a hammer on an issue that I think can only profitably be discussed if you at least at some point start using the knife. The very idea of being "beyond the pale" is an interesting and sensitive one. (Rorty is often thought to have "gone beyond the pale.") Because as long as we truly believe that all there is is us, us humans together on a rock flying through space, and that morality, ethics, good manners, whatever you want to call it, fundamentally begins with the first choice of persuasion over force, then the effort at conversation is a motivated one. This doesn't mean that force has no place, but it does require us to exhaust our options. When we turn from that idea of how we very generally should behave to philosophy, intellectual discourse, the requirements change a little bit. There are few options that count as "force" in intellectual discourse (the gaveling of a debate would), but the very idea of this kind of discourse is that it continues on, in a certain sense, indefinitely. The other side must always be heard because they might be right--we should hear their case. That's the kind of motivation that underlies Rorty's metaphor of "continue the conversation." A conversation can always be had with another philosopher, even if they disagree over seemingly everything, because you can always just rise to higher levels of abstraction (or, conversely, to lower levels of concreteness, the kind of things everybody agrees on). As long as we remain conversable, we can rest assured that we aren't "fanatic," which is the real villain, not intractability which happens everyday. However, in practical terms, it is sometimes difficult and eventually profitless and pointless to continue a conversation. Choices are always being made. But if we don't try.... There's no outside arbiter, only our own conscience and an audience that is always judging, like some Greek jury. I'm not suggesting that people be nicer to Platt or give him another chance or whatever. I'm not judging anybody who's had enough of his crap. Everybody has their limit and I've cer tainly had to make my own choices over the years. If anything, I guess I had two main motivations for writing the piece: 1) to show through Platt's example that there is often a real philosophical issue worth discussing behind even the lamest attempts at engagement, there's usually a fire if there's smoke, and 2) to lamely try and prod people into a higher level of engagement by trying to get them to be more conscious of why they are here and what they are looking for. DMB said: As I recall, Rorty said that if "relativism" simply means a denial of absolute truth, then yes, he's a relativist. Obviously, I think Pirsig is also a relativist in that sense. But its also true that Lila, among other things, seeks to deny the charge of relativism. The accusation was mouthed by Richard Rigel in the book but he represents actual critics of his first book. There are differences between Pirsig and Rorty but they're not on different planets. I guess I wanna believe our debate is well within the pale. That's my point. Matt I believe it is. I absolutely believe that Pirsig's motivation in developing a systematic metaphysics was intended to rebut charges of relativism. I think the motivation was misguided, because I don't think you need a system to rebut relativism. On the other hand, the system itself doesn't mean a devolution into absolutism, as in the past I've often seemed to intimate. I still think it's _suspicious_, but I think Pirsig's better angels were looking in a much different direction than Plato's. The real disagreement is on the importance of what James called radical empiricism. As I understand the issue now, you, Pirsig, late James, and middle Dewey think it is an important piece, without which damage is done. Myself, Rorty, early James, and late Dewey think it isn't so important, more of an add-on. Because if we construe "radical empiricism" as a non-Platonic description of our relation to the world, then there would seem to have to be a placeholder for that in neopragma tists (as I think there is) because a "description of our relation to the world" is just too general a notion for anybody to not have one, let alone a philosopher. That still leaves the question of how they match up. As I see it generally, James didn't like empiricism because it denied the reality of the relations between particulars. So he made it more radical by suggesting that relations are real, too, but I think in doing so he took out everything that made empiricism an interesting philosophical thesis. Concurrently (but later), in analytic philosophy you have a series of philosophers attacking empiricism for having certain dogmas that are unsustainable. I think the two series dovetail, which is why I think if you are looking for a metaphysical description of our relation to the world that fits where James' radical empiricism does, one needs to look at Sellars' "psychological nominalism." I don't think the "linguistic turn" was any big deal at all--I don't think it was great like the logical positivists did, nor do I think it was the devil like recalcitrant metaphysicians (of which there is a rising tide of in contemporary philosophy). It was just a shift in terminology, and in that sense both sides were wrong. But, that is a big, old ball of twine to unspool. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Keep your kids safer online with Windows Live Family Safety. http://www.windowslive.com/family_safety/overview.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Refresh_family_safety_052008 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
