Hi Mary, All, The absolute/relative question you raise is a version of the question that sparked the whole thing: "is the Quality in the subject or the object?" Is it subjective (relative) or objective (absolute)?
The answer Phaedrus saw was that it is neither. As Dewey said, reality is an evaluative term. Value preceeds cutting up reality into subjects and objects and is not the property of either one of these categories. Instead Quality is what is being categorized as subjects and objects. The answer is mu. So much for ontological or metaphysical relativism/absolutism. Pirsig denies the context from which it makes sense to ask "is it realtive or absolute?" in metaphysical terms. But what about epistemological relativism/absolutism? Clearly justification for evaluations is relative to the static patterns of the person doing the justifying, but we also share many of the same static patterns. So from an epistemological perspective, Quality is both subjective and objective depending on what we are talking about. For inorganic and biological patterns, we generally have fairly broad agreement on criteria for making evaluations, so we can say that these patterns are objective. We don't have such intersubjective agreement about social and intellectual patterns, so we can say that these patterns are subjective. On the other hand, mathematics is intellectual but objective, and there is no public method available to determine whether it is true or false that I have a headache which then is a fairly subjective biological pattern, so I think Pirsig's clean cut between objective and subjective levels doesn't always work. Anyway, I thought considerring metaophysical versus epistemological subjectivity might shed some light on our ongoing discussions about realtivism and absolutism. What do you think. 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/
