dmb said to Steve:
...I answered this already. I supplied the answer directly to you, in detail,
in this same thread, connecting my use of "relativism" with Pirsig's use of the
term. This was all asked and answered about a week ago. ...
Steve replied:
So you keep saying, but I wouldn't keep asking if I could find your answer.
What is your definition of relativism? All I know is that you think someone who
says "there are no non-conversational constraints on inquiry" is a relativist
by your definition, but I don't know what your definition is.
dmb says:
Since I told you when, what and where the answer was already given, it's hard
to believe that you couldn't find it. And may I say how irritating it is to
constantly repeat myself, to answer the same questions and objection over and
over again. Once or twice really should be enough, Steve. Take some memory
boosting vitamins or something. I'm tired of compensation for your laziness of
handicap, whatever the case may be. Growl, growl, bark, bark, bark!
Okay, now that I've got that off my chest, here is the bulk of my previous
answer:
...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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