dmb says:
Because Jon is new, I think it's only fair to point out that Steve did not
answer the right questions. I mean, Jon asked what the moq says about truth and
how the moq avoids relativism but he answered as if Jon had asked what Rorty
says about those things.
Pirsig says, "Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical
reality. The MOQ says pure experience is value." (Lila 365) "Quality! Virtue!
Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not
pristine 'virtue'. But arete. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason.
Before Substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself.
Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were
teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has
been doing it right all along." (ZAMM 377) In is in this sort of context that
Pirsig is an empiricist, a radical empiricist. Our ideas are derived from
experience and experience is the test of truth and so truth is subordinate to
experience in more ways than one.
Anyway, this is all pretty far away from what Steve said. Maybe Jon will like
Rortyism better. I just think he should know there are two kinds of pragmatism
represented in this discussion group and that Steve's answer was giving voice
to Rorty's and not Pirsig's.
Jon asked:
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?
Steve replied:
> 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.
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