Hi dmb, On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 11:42 AM, david buchanan <[email protected]>wrote:
> > dmb said to Ron and Steve: > I'd certainly agree with Ron about the MOQ's ability to judge cultural > values,.. I think that this ability is much less limited than the > ethno-centric judgements to which Rorty's view would confine us. I think > the MOQ's evolutionary morality is the non-ethnocentric way of judging that > Steve is asking for. This ability doesn't depend on ultimate foundations of > the kind that Rorty denies, and yet it escapes the paralyzing confines of > one's ideological tribe. > > Steve replied: > Sure, the MOQ can be used to judge cultural values, but to call the MOQ a > non-ethnocentric way of doing it is extremely naive. ...What Rorty is > saying is that philosophy cannot offer us a foundation upon which to create > mathematical-type proofs of the superiority of one culture over another. We > can certainly supply lots of reasons why the Taliban sucks, but philosophy > can't offer us a way of saying how the Taliban doesn't conform to reality > while democracy does. There is no way to adjudicate between such provincial > sets of values that does not depend entirely on some set of provincial > values. Pirsig certainly understood this fact. He was not giving us a way > to step out of our own skins to make moral judgments. His goal was the more > modest yet manageable one of demonstrating that we could apply reason to > morality and that reason is a moral process. > > > dmb says: > Philosophy can't offer us mathematical-type proofs or foundations that > tell us which society conforms to reality. Okay. We can agree on that much. Steve: Then we ought to be able to agree that Rorty is no more of a relativist than you or I for denying that philosophy can do that. dmb: > Rorty is denying the kind of foundation that were sought in his own > positivist tradition. These denials are meant to exorcise the demons that > haunt his own school. Steve: In The Mirror of Nature, Rorty was showing how the two main branches of the Western philosophical tradition were doing similar things and making similar moves in moving away from foundationalism and converging on a sort of pragmatism. dmb: > Pirsig attacks the aims of assumptions of scientific empiricism too. But > Rorty comes to very different conclusions. I think they are drastic and > paralyzing. To say, as you just did, that there is no way to adjudicate > between sets of values, is a very neat description of the relativist's > position. Steve: I never said that we can't adjudicate between values. What I said was that we have no way to stand outside of history and culture to do it. That doesn't mean that judgment can't be done at all. (This is YOUR "all or nothing-ism" It just can't be done in the way that would satisfy those who buy into the SOM premise behind the absolutism/relativism false choice. Again, I am still amazed that an MOQer like yourself would still think that absolute/relative which is just one more version of subjective/objective is salient. dmb: > Apparently, Rorty thinks this adjudication is impossible without > philosophical foundations and so rejecting foundations can lead only to > this kind of ethnocentric relativism. I like to call this way of thinking > "all-or-nothingism". Pirsig doesn't think we need any fixed, eternal, > objective truths to avoid relativism. That was Plato's mistake too. > Steve: It is you who is doing the "all or nothing" thing here. You are saying that Rorty's denial of the power of philosophical foundations amounts to saying we are left with nothing. Rorty also didin't think that the alternative to relative was anything fixed, eternal, or absolute. The alternative is to stop demanding what philosophy never should have promised (i.e., a Foundation that would enable us to step out of our skins). The alternative is to make good arguments about what is good and to occasionally hold our assumptions for such arguments in question. The only bad news that Rorty had was that there is no way to hold all of your assumptions in question at once. That doesn't leave us with nothing. Though we can't step outside of history and culture, but we can still think critically about our own tradition. 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
