Hi Dan, Matt, It seems that your conversation and mine with dmb have converged to a similar place. DMB has long seemed to me to be confused about what Rorty means by intersubjectivity and conversational constraints on knowledge as if there is something dangerously relativistic about his notion of justification. At the same time, he insists that "truth" needs to be disentangled from the notion of objectivity in favor of the pragmatic theory of truth which says that saying something is true means no more nor less than that the belief is justified in a particular time and place. Justification cannot be distinguished from truth, he says. Otherwise, the only alternative is the SOM correspondence notion of truth. Obviously I disagree. Just as Pirsig's calling inorganic and biological patterns "objective" and social and intellectual patterns "subjective" was an attempt by Pirsig to continue to get some mileage out of the terms after dropping the subject-object picture, "intersubjectivity" is Rorty's attempt to make some pragmatic sense of objectivity. And I think these two moves amount to pretty much the same thing in preserving usage of truth as distinguished from justification. In Pirsig's cosmology, what supports the superiority of biological over inorganic patterns and so on is there place in an evolutionary hierarchy. So Pirsig's moral structure depends on thinking that inorganic patterns existed before anyone existed to verify them. For Rorty, (and also obviously for Pirsig), "what guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious reasonings. We know that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same time we recognize in them, because of their harmony, the work of reasonable beings like ourselves. And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven't been dreaming. It is this harmony, this quality if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality we can ever know." Of course we know that this is also how Pirsig sees the situation as well since he wrote that bit in ZAMM. Apparently Pirsig didn't see any non-conversation constraints on knowledge, either. I would add here when Pirsig says that the piles of analogues upon analogues is the only reality "we can ever know," that that reality is all we ever mean by "reality." We only get into SOM when we think of comparing that reality to some more real reality.
By the same token, to say that the dog dish exists whether or not anyone is there to verify it, just as to say that the world was roundish even before people were in any position to justify that belief, is _not_ to backslide into SOM. It is merely to value some reasoning that harmonizes well with our sensations and other valued sets of reasonings. It is not to assert (nor to deny) a _real_ reality compared to which our conceptions are mere shadows. Like pragmatism, based on the above from ZAMM, the MOQ is neither realism nor anti-realism (such as idealism), but a third way. On the other hand, I think in LC Pirsig more recently identified the MOQ with idealism, so I could be wrong. When I have time, I'll try to dig up more quotes that might answer whether the MOQ is, like pragmatism, a "neither/nor" with respect to realism/anti-realism. In the mean time, I'd be interested in your thoughts. 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
