Steve said to Mark:
dmb has long been trying to use the term relativism as a way of trying to
criticize certain perspectives including mine, Matt's, Rorty's, and Marsha's,
but dmb doesn't have anything that we don't have that can, say, be used against
the arguments of the Nazis. He doesn't claim any foundation that we can't
claim. Whether are are talking about moral or epistemic issues, there are no
arguments that he can make that the rest of us so-called relativists are
prevented from making. With regard to relativism, there is just no pragmatic
difference between his own philosophical position and the ones he criticizes.
Dmb says:
I disagree. The difference between Rortyism and the MOQ is very much like the
difference between no empiricism and radical empiricism, between zero
empiricism and total empiricism. I've been trying to explain this to you and
Matt for several years and so there are lots and lots of arguments. You can
claim to remain unpersuaded but you can't claim there are no arguments. That
would simply be a lie, one that can be exposed as such by searching the
archives.
Steve said:
Why would an MOQer even want to wield an SOM-laden term like "relativism"? It
is half of the old SOM Platypus, relativism/absolutism. It is a term based on
an SOM premise that we deny. It is just another version of the wrong-headed
question, "is the Quality in the subject or in the object?"
dmb says:
Two points: 1) Marsha is wielding the term and attaching it to the MOQ, not me.
2) SOM is only one of the roads to relativism, but the kind we're most likely
to encounter in the contemporary West will be found among postmodern thinkers.
That's where Rorty fits into the discussion.
Pirsig says "twentieth century relativists ..held that it is unscientific to
interpret values in culture B by the values of culture A... Cultures are unique
historical patterns which contain their own values and cannot be judged in
terms of the values of other cultures. The cultural relativists, backed by
Boas's doctrines of scientific empiricism, virtually wiped out the credibility
of the older Victorian evolutionists... The new cultural relativism became
popular because it was a ferocious instrument for the dominance of intellect
over society.
"When people asked, "If no culture, including a Victorian culture, can say what
is right and what is wrong, then how can we ever *know* what is right and what
is wrong? the answer was, "That's easy. Intellectuals will tell you.
Intellectuals, unlike people of studiable cultures, know what they're talking
and writing about, because what *they* say isn't culturally relative. What they
say is absolute. This is because intellectuals follow science, which is
objective. An objective observer does not have relative opinions because he is
nowhere within the world he observes."
"From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is a completely
purposeless, valueless place. There no point in anything. Nothing is right and
nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like machinery. There is nothing
morally wrong with being lazy, nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft,
with suicide, with murder, with genocide. There is nothing morally wrong
because there are no morals, just functions. Now that intellect was in command
of society for the first time in history, was this the intellectual pattern it
was going to run society with?"
dmb says:There are many paths by which one can arrive at relativism. Scientific
objectivity is just one of them. But we can see what it amounts to, and what it
amounts to is a disaster. Nothing is wrong and nothing is right, it's all just
mechanistic functions. "Is this the intellectual pattern that was going to run
society?" I think Pirsig's question is asked with urgency and alarm. I think
it's quite clear that he's identifying relativism as a problem to be solved.
This is consistent with the fact the he takes the charge of relativism against
the Sophists to be offensive slander. These passages show how Pirsig uses the
word, how I use the word and that's how "relativism" is commonly used. Sam
Harris, for example, is pulling his hair out over that fact that we can't say,
scientifically, that female genital mutilation is wrong.
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