Steve said:
...But the Pirsig quote wasn't about that. It was about objectivity as
intersubjectivity. Subjectivity is just know-how.
dmb says:
There are places where Rorty and Pirsig agree, but those positions are held by
lots and lots of people. But it is way too much of a stretch to put statements
like, "quality ..is the sole basis for the only reality we can ever know" or
"these reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations". Yes, they are
both contextualists and constructivists but so are half of the serious thinkers
in the Western world. The Pirsig quote you posted does not erase all the other
passages where he tells us that the MOQ is a form of empiricism or where he
identifies with radical empiricism. You can't honestly say it does, can you?
"what guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this
world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications
that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious
reasonings. We know that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same
time we recognize in them, because of their harmony, the work of reasonable
beings like ourselves. And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our
sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the
same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven't been dreaming. It is this
harmony, this quality if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality
we can ever know."
For Rorty, there is no way to make our sentences true by reference to the way
things really are. He assumes there is a way things really are but crossing
that gap is impossible. We can only ever have a causal relationship with the
world, never a rational or logical one, as Rorty puts it. Because this
epistemic gap is impossible to cross, he figures, there can be no empirical
restraints on what we can say. Since the world can't make our sentences true,
the only thing we can do is have a conversation in which propositional
sentences do battle with other propositional sentences. Thus there is not
constraint save conversational ones.
Pirsig and Rorty disagree from the very start. Pirsig assumes there is NO way
things really are and in fact there are no things-in-themselves except as an
hypothesis. The epistemic gap is not impossible, it is fictional. "Our"
relationship with the "world" is immediate and direct, so much so that they are
not two different things. That's what the quote is getting at. The entire world
as we know it, the world of our conceptual understanding, is derived from
Quality, on the sole basis of Quality. Those analogies upon analogies and
ghosts upon ghosts that constitute our static reality were all derived from the
primary empirical reality, as a response to Quality. Rorty is not saying
anything like that. For him, human writing and speech is no different in kind
from the scratches and noises that animals make. He's a physicalist with some
Freudian and Marxist cynicism thrown in for good measure. To compare this guy
with a philosophical mystic is like mistaking Mozart for Motown.
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