On Nov 19, 2011, at 5:12 PM, david buchanan wrote:
>
> Marsha said to dmb,
>
> Would you please present your definition of relativism?
>
>
> dmb says:
> You're changing the subject and asking me to give an answer that's already
> been given several times. It's in the archives, I'm sure. You could find it
> by searching the quotes, which I've already responded to several times.
>
> Here's the idea in a nutshell. Relativism is the view that truth is relative
> to the culture or the individual, that there is no way to say that one truth
> is better than another.
Marsha:
But this has been refuted. Of course an individual, a group, a community can
choose ways to test truth. The MoQ, for instance, uses a evolutionary,
hierarchical structure by which to judge truth.
> dmb:
> This is the kind of relativism we saw in Franz Boas. It is a result of
> scientific objectivity, which says that morals and values are just arbitrary
> social constructions. The MOQ says that some truths are better than others,
> that these harmonious reasonings are formed on the basis of quality and they
> can be judged on the basis of coherence, logical consistency and agreement
> with experience.
Marsha:
You are conflating cultural relativism with an epistemological relativism. I
do not need to check the archives because you have never presented the
definition of 'relativism' that you use. This allows you to over and over
again misrepresent the term and associate it with solipsism.
> dmb:
> Pirsig's intellectual autobiography begins when he's just a teenager, when
> he's tortured over the endless proliferation of hypotheses. Science was
> supposed to get you closer to the truth, he naively thought. But he
> discovered that science was going in the opposite direction. There were an
> infinite number of explanations for any given data set, so how do you know
> which one is right?
Marsha:
Poincare making a choice based on insight does not obliterate all the other
possibilities, and it does not guarantee the Best choice was made.
> dmb:
> That's the context in which Poincare's insights came as such a relief. He
> could see that Quality is what takes the arbitrariness and capriciousness out
> of it.
Marsha:
I don't get this statement. There is Quality(Dynamic/static) in every event.
The less static the event, or process the more Dynamic possibilities are
possible.
> Dmb:
> "Poincaré's contemporaries .. presumed that "preselected facts" meant that
> truth is "whatever you like" and called his ideas conventionalism. ..What he
> neglected to say was that the selection of facts before you "observe" them is
> "whatever you like" only in a dualistic, subject-object metaphysical system!
> When Quality enters the picture as a third metaphysical entity, the
> preselection of facts is no longer arbitrary. The preselection of facts is
> not based on subjective, capricious "whatever you like" but on Quality, which
> is reality itself. ...we know from Phædrus' metaphysics that the harmony
> Poincaré talked about is not subjective. It is the source of subjects and
> objects and exists in an anterior relationship to them. It is not capricious,
> it is the force that opposes capriciousness; the ordering principle of all
> scientific and mathematical thought which destroys capriciousness, and
> without which no scientific thought can proceed."
RMP has stated:
"The reason there is a difference between individual evaluations of quality is
that although Dynamic Quality is a constant, these static patterns are
different for everyone because each person has a different static pattern of
life history. Both the Dynamic Quality and the static patterns influence his
final judgment. That is why there is some uniformity among individual value
judgments but not complete uniformity."
(RMP, SODV)
Is this the 'subjective" you are talking about? Different evaluations
dependent on "static pattern of life history"? Relativism does not necessarily
point to a subject/object point-of-view. Isn't James's pragmatic truth
relative to an individual or group's interest. Satisfaction and success
determined on 'how it works'. What you are protecting is criticism against
James. Criticism like the post I recently sent regarding RMP's criticism of
James pragmatism. The static quality (truth) is relative. In the MoQ, though,
it can be evaluated on the basis of its evolutionary level. As Anthony writes:
“Intellectual values include truth, justice, freedom, democracy and, trial by
jury. It’s worth noting that the MOQ follows a pragmatic notion of truth so
truth is seen as relative in his system while Quality is seen as absolute. In
consequence, the truth is defined as the highest quality intellectual
explanation at a given time."
> We see the same idea in Lila, at the end of chapter 29, wherein Pirsig says
> that Quality is at the "cutting edge of scientific progress itself". All our
> concepts (analogues, ghosts, static patterns) were formed on the basis of
> Quality. People and ideas and cultures grow and change in response to Quality
> or, to put it another way, evolution is guided the track of Quality so that
> arbitrary and capricious truths don't long survive.
Marsha:
The possibilities at the "cutting edge of scientific progress" are relative to
the history of the ghosts, analogues or static patterns and the Dynamics in the
present.
For the sake of "taking words seriously' please present an exact definition of
'relativism' as you are using it.
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