Steve: > dmb says: > there are lots of different kinds of relativism but this little Wiki is very > specific. It defines relativism as the view that justification is relative to > the group and it describes Rorty's position as exactly that. You have both a > definition and the reason for thinking Rorty fits that definition. I think > this is about as clear as it can be.
Steve: Hold on!!! Did you just finally provide a definition of relativism???? Okay, got it, so Rorty is a relativist in your mind because he thinks that justification is relative to an audience. But do you think that that statement does not apply to James and Pirsig? ow could truth be relative to a person or audience for James and Pirsig while justification is not? How could they hold a view of justification as absolute while the truth that is being justified is only relative? I mean, wshat if I simply ask, it TRUE that a a given belief is justified? Aren't we then right back in the territory of the relativism of truth for James and Pirsig? DMB: > Fourthly, the idea that everything is related to everything else simply isn't > what we mean by relativism. To say that justification is "relative" to the > group is not to say it is "related" to the group. That would not really be > incorrect so much as empty and obvious. It means that the standards of > justification depend entirely on the group and will therefore differ from > group to group. We see this in the position that Rorty himself calls > "ethnocentrism" Steve: But standards for justification DO and MUST vary from group to group unless two people have the exact same experiences. Pirsig doesn't call it ethnocentrism, but he has the same idea: "The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they come to it with different sets of analogues. He gave linguistic examples, showing that to us the Hindi letters da, da, and dha all sound identical to us because we don't have analogues to them to sensitize us to their differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking people cannot distinguish between da and the because they are not so sensitized. It is not uncommon, he said, for Indian villagers to see ghosts. But they have a terrible time seeing the law of gravity. This, he said, explains why a classful of freshman composition students arrives at similar ratings of Quality in the compositions. They all have relatively similar backgrounds and similar knowledge. But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well. In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience." It seems to me that if "relativism" amounts to "justification is relative to an audience," and if you find that to be a big problem, then your bigger problem is with Pirsig rather than Rorty. 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
