dmb says: Apparently, I have to provide all the evidence on both sides of this debate. I mean, there is scholarly evidence on my side. When it come to what Rorty does and does not think, you (and Matt) have a lot more attitude than reasons or evidence. If there are good reasons, you're doing a fine job keeping them secret. I can show you what Pirsig says about relativism and I can quote Rorty on the topic too. Have you brought anything comparable to the table? And isn't it ironic that Rortyists are so unpersuasive. Rortyism says conversational constraints are the only kind and agreement is the main goal but I only ever see naked assertions and denials that are not only based on nothing, they're contradicted by basic, solid evidence (from SEP). It's so very unconvincing, Steve, and this is not just me being picky or setting some impossibly high standard.
Steve: Matt and I have provided lots of quotes in the past. Here is an example on one I have quoted to you before. It is Rorty giving the presidential address for the Annual Eastern Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 1979 Excerpt from his speech, Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism: ""Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called "relativists" are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought. Thus one may be attacked as a relativist for holding that familiarity of terminology is a criterion of theory-choice in physical science, or that coherence with the institutions of the surviving parliamentary democracies is a criterion in social philosophy. When such criteria are invoked, critics say that the resulting philosophical position assumes an unjustified primacy for "our conceptual framework", or our purposes, or our institutions. The position in question is criticized for not having done what philosophers are employed to do: explain why our framework, or culture, or interests, or language, or whatever, is at last on the right track -- in touch with physical reality, or the moral law, or the real numbers, or some other sort of object patiently waiting about to be copied. So the real issue is not between people who think one view as good as another and people who do not. It is between those who think our culture, or purpose, or intuitions cannot be supported except conversationally, and people who still hope for other sorts of support. If there were any relativists, they would, of course, be easy to refute. One would merely use some variant of the selfreferential arguments Socrates used against Protagoras. But such neat little dialectical strategies only work against lightly-sketched fictional characters. The relativist who says that we can break ties among serious and incompatible candidates for belief only by "non-rational" or "non-cognitive" considerations is just one of the Platonist or Kantian philosopher's imaginary playmates, inhabiting the same realm of fantasy as the solipsist, the sceptic, and the moral nihilist. Disillusioned, or whimsical, Platonists and Kantians occasionally play at being one or anoeher of these characters. But when they do they are never offering relativism or scepticism or nihilism as a serious suggestion about how we might do things differently. These positions are adopted to make philosophical points -- that is, moves in a game played with fictitious opponents, rather than fellowparticipants in a common project. The association of pragmatism with relativism is a result of a confusion between the pragmatists' attitude toward philosophical theories with his attitude towards real theories. James and Dewey are, to be sure, metaphilosophical relativists, in a certain limited sense. ame el^: they think there is no way to choose between incompatible philosophical theories of the typical Platonic or Kantian type. Such theories are attempts to ground some element of our practises on something external to these practices. Pragmatists think that any such philosophical gounding is, apart from elegance of execution, pretty much as good or as bad as the practise it purports to ground. They regard the project of grounding as a wheel that lays no part in the mechanism. In this, 1 think, they are quite right. No sooner does one discover the categories of the pure understanding for a Newtonian age than somebody draws up another list that would do nicely for an Aristotelian or an Einsteinian one. No sooner does one draw up a categorical imperative for Christians than somebody draws up one which works for cannibals. No sooner does one develop an evolutionary epistemology which explains why our science is so good than somebody writes a science-fiction story about bug-eyed and monstrous evolutionary epistemologists praising bug-eyed and monstrous scientists for the survival value of their monstrous theories. The reason this game is so easy to play is that none of these philosophical theories have to do much hard work. The real work has been done by the scientists who developed the explanatory theories by patience and genius, or the societies which developed the moralities and institutions in struggle and pain. All the Platonic or Kantian philosopher does is to take the finished first-level product, jack it up a few levels of abstraction, invent a metaphysical or epistemological or semantical vocabulary into which to translate it, and announce that he has grounded it. "Relativism" only seems to refer to a disturbing view , worthy of being refuted, if it concerns real theories, not just philosophical theories. Nobody really cares if there are incompatible alternative formulations of a categorical imperative, or incompatible sets of categories of the pure understanding. We do care about alternative, concrete, detailed, cosmologies, or alternative concrete, detailed, proposals for political change. When such an alternative is proposed, we debate it, not in terms of categories or principles but in terms of the various concrete advantages and disadvantages it has. The reason relativism is talked about so much among Platonic and Kantian philosophers is that they think being relativistic about philosophical theories - attempts to "ground" first-level theories -- leads to being- relativistic about the first-level theories themselves. If anyone really believed that the worth of a theory depends upon the worth of its philosophical grounding, then indeed they would be dubious about physics, or democracy, until relativism in respect to philosophical theories had been overcome. Fortunat ely, almost nobody believes anything of the sort. What people do believe is that it would be good to hook up our views about democracy, mathematics, physics, God, and everything else, into a coherent story about how everything hangs together. Getting such a synoptic view often does require us to change radically our views on particular subjects. But this holistic process of readjustment is just muddling through on a large scale. It has nothing to do with the Platonic-Kantian notion of grounding. That notion involves finding constraints, demonstrating necessities, finding immutable principles to which to subordinate oneself. When it turns out that suggested constraints, necessities, and principles are as plentiful as blackberries, nothing changes except the attitude of the rest of culture towards the philosophers. Since the time of Kant, it has become more and more apparent to non-philosophers that a really professional philosopher can supply a philosophical foundation for just about anything. This is one reason why philosophers have, in the course of our century, become increasingly isolated from the rest of culture. Our proposals to guarantee this and clarify that have come to strike our fellow-intellectuals as merely comic." 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
