Hi Jon, On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 3:08 PM, Jon Bennett <[email protected]> wrote: > So just what does the moq say of honest, truth, and absolutes, or how to > discern them. I know P doesn't like relativism. But how does the moq avoid > it? How do you tell what is true when there are disagreements about the > truth?
Relativism with regard to truth is that position that there is no such thing as truth. We can avoid such relativism even though people disagree about what the truth is so long as we agree that there is something to be disagreeing about. Your second question, "how can well tell what is true?" raises the issue of relativism with respect to justification. Are there standards for justification that we can appeal to that will ensure that if we correctly apply them that we will only ever believe true statements? The universe does't hand us such standards, so we are forced to answer a second order question of justification whenever we believe that we have found a sure fire method for uncovering the truth. That second order question is, how can we justify our particular standards for justification? I don't think that there is anything nonhuman to appeal to here. We are left to hash this out in conversation when we want to convince someone else of what we want them to believe and why we think that they ought to be convinced to believe it. At this point someone who thinks that they do have in hand some method that stands outside of culture and history to uncover the truth will call me a relativist. This is not a charge that we need to accept any more than we ought to feel forced to answer "is the Quality in the subject or in the object?" The charge of relativism comes from the presupposition that we ought to have a philosophical foundation for our truth claims and in not having one we are thought to be somehow suffering for its lack. "Is it absolute or relative?" is a version of "is it objective or merely subjective?" It is one of those philosophical Platypi hat get cleared up once we drop the subject-object picture. We don't need a philosophical foundation grounded in objective first principles to assert that the Nazis were wrong. We just need to offer some high Quality reasons why that is so perhaps based on a story of, say, the evolution of types of value patterns instead of a philosophical system of deductions based on ahistorical notions of Human Nature or Reason. We MOQers have dropped such notions in favor of a Darwinian account of the evolution of language and humanity and intellect. We don't have a way of answering the charge of relativism other than by attacking the philosophical premises from which it makes sense to ask "Is the Quality in the subject or the object?" and "is it absolute or merely relative?", but I think we should deny it nevertheless just as we deny being absolutists. 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/md/archives.html
