Hi Marsha,
First, I do not think we have access to 'The Way Things Really
Are'. The
measuring event is the process that creates self and object, and it is
relative to that particular event. Static patterns of value are
relative an
experience.
To characterize our situation as not having access to "The Way Things
Really Are" is to buy into the subjective side of SOM--to say that we
stand behind an impenetrable veil of appearances. This really is
relativism, but it's not what Pirsig is saying. He denies SOM, the
perspective from which it makes sense to ask "is it absolute or
relative."
Rather than wonder whether or not we can know reality as it really
is, Pirsig drops the notion of "The Way Things Really Are"
altogether. The goal of inquiry in creating new and better
intellectual patterns is not to better represent reality or get
closer to the Truth. The goal of intellectual inquiry like the goal
of anything else we do is Quality.
We have to take a very different perspective on inquiry in general
from that of theists and SOM philosophers. We don't want to think of
inquiry as having the goal of unearthing eternal truths since we
could never know when we've achieved it even if we had. So the
question of whether such eternal moral principles exist is one that
pragmatists would prefer to be unasked. But while we can't aim at
truth, we can aim at better justification for our beliefs. If inquiry
is a search for truth as traditionally understood, there is no way to
talk about progress without already knowing what the truth is. But if
inquiry is concerned with justification, then we can measure progress
in terms of assuaging doubts.
As Rorty puts it, "pragmatists hope to make it impossible for the
sceptic to ask the question, 'Is our knowledge of things [whether
scientific or ethical]adequate to the way things really are?' They
substitute for this traditional question the practical question, 'Are
our ways of describing things...as good as possible? Or can we do
better. Can our future be made better than our present?"' In other
words, can we create higher quality intellectual patterns?
Relativism doesn't deny that an event may be of higher or lower
value, and I agree with the MoQ that intellectual patterns have a
higher
value than social patterns.
Another problem with the term "relativism" is that it is pretty
unclear what this word it supposed to mean. Can you give a definition
of what you think relativism is?
The rest of what you've written doesn't make sense to me. Isms, brown
tables, essences, language? These are all static patterns of value
relative
to some experience.
Right, and it's hard to know what experiences we have in common
enough that my attempt at explaining will be helpful, but if it's not
all mumbo-jumbo to you I'm willing to keep trying to explain in other
ways.
In short, my argument is that it is not Pirsig's evolutionary
hierarchy that gets him out of relativism but his (and Rorty's)
denial of the SOM picture, since it is only from within the SOM
picture that such a charge could be made.
Best,
Steve
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/
