Hi dmb,
> Steve said to dmb:
> ...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.
>
>
> SEP says otherwise:
>
> "Rorty provides this view with a label: "Explaining rationality and
> epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than
> the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call
> ‘epistemological behaviorism,’ an attitude common to Dewey and
> Wittgenstein." (PMN 174)
> Epistemological behaviorism leaves no room for the kind of
> practice-transcending legitimation that Rorty identifies as the defining
> aspiration of modern epistemology. Assuming that epistemic practices do, or
> at least can, diverge, it is not surprising that Rorty's commitment to
> epistemological behaviorism should lead to charges of RELATIVISM or
> subjectivism. Indeed, many who share Rorty's historicist scepticism toward
> the transcending ambitions of epistemology—friendly critics like Hilary
> Putnam, John McDowell and Daniel Dennett—balk at the idea that there are NO
> CONSTRAINTS ON KNOWLEDGE SAVE CONVERSATIONAL ONES. Yet this is a central
> part of Rorty's position, repeated and elaborated as recently as in TP and
> PCP. Indeed, in TP he invokes it precisely in order to deflect this sort of
> criticism. In "Hilary Putnam and the RELATIVIST Menace," Rorty says:
> In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into
> which "THE RELATIVIST" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from
> epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to
> knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should
> try." (TP 57)
Steve:
SEP says otherwise? What it says is that Rorty was accused of
relativism (as James also gets accused of relativism). That is
granted, but that is a separate question from whether he actually is a
relativist.
In the SEP article on Rorty it says...
"Rorty's liberal ironist, recognizing—indeed, affirming—the
contingency of her own commitments, is explicitly ethnocentric. (ORT
"Solidarity or Objectivity") For the liberal ironist,
…one consequence of antirepresentationalism is the recognition
that no description of how things are from a God's-eye point of view,
no skyhook provided by some contemporary or yet-to-be-developed
science, is going to free us from the contingency of having been
acculturated as we were. Our acculturation is what makes certain
options live, or momentous, or forced, while leaving others dead, or
trivial, or optional. (ORT 13)
So the liberal ironist accepts that bourgeois liberalism has no
universality other than the transient and unstable one which time,
luck, and discursive effort might win for it. This view looks to many
readers like a version of cultural relativism. True, Rorty does not
say that what is true, what is good, and what is right is relative to
some particular ethnos, and so IN THAT SENSE HE IS NO RELATIVIST. But
the worry about relativism, that it leaves us with no rational way to
adjudicate conflict, seems to apply equally to Rorty's ethnocentric
view. Rorty's answer is to say that in one sense of "rational" that is
true, but that in another sense it is not, and to recommend that we
drop the former."
Steve:
The MOQ obviously also drops the sense of "rational" that Rorty wants
to drop. So the position from which it would make any sense to accuse
Rorty of being a relativist is not that of the MOQer.
> Steve said:
> 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 says:
> There is more than one way to be a relativist. Rorty's position shows quite
> clearly that the issue does not simply evaporate when we reject SOM. His
> epistemological behaviorism is criticized for being a form of relativism and
> that doesn't necessarily entail any such metaphysical dualism. Again, your
> claim is not only unsupported by evidence, it is contradicted by the
> evidence.
Steve:
And if Rorty is criticized for being a relativist that means he
actually is a relativist?
> Steve said:
> ...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 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.
>
> dmb says:
> Right, since we can't have any objective or absolute truths the alternative
> is to make good arguments about what is good. That's what I mean by
> "all-or-nothingism" and that's what the author of the SEP article is
> pointing to when it mentions the friendly critics who "balk at the idea that
> there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones". The article
> says, "THIS IS A CENTRAL PART OF RORTY'S POSITION".
Steve:
The MOQ has some transcultural, ahistorical skyhook for getting us in
a position to do more than make good arguments for what is good?
dmb:
> Hasn't it ever occurred to you that Rorty's emphasis on conversation and
> language is very much at odds with the MOQ, which is centered around the
> pre-verbal primary empirical reality? This is one of the reasons I keep
> saying that the difference between Pirsig and Rorty is like the difference
> between radical empiricism and no empiricism. Don't you think THAT
> difference would have some impact on the issue of relativism? Of course it
> would. How is that even debatable?
Steve:
I understand that Rorty and Pirsig are different people with different
ideas. I also understand that I don't need to choose one or the other
exclusively to read and understand. Do you understand that the MOQ is
the philosophy or RMP rather than dmb?
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