Hi Rick, Horse and All:
RICK:
Phaedrus and Socrates meet on the road and sit to debate,
somewhere within their dialogue the following exchange occurs....
Phaedrus: There is an exception to every rule.
Socrates: Oh Phaedrus, you are quite the sophist and even a foolish
old man like me can see that your statement is an absurdity. For your
statement itself is a rule and if its premise is true it violates itself.
Phaedrus: No Socrates, the rule is the exeption to itself and therefore
its premise is totally consistent.
PLATT:
Socrates: Alas Phaedrus, don�t you see that what you call a premise
and what you call a rule are one and the same? You�ve committed the
Fallacy of Equivocation. Logic may be over 2000 years old, but it is still
a necessary precondition of intelligible discussion. Our conversation
has brought me to the conclusion that I have a duty, even if I am a
foolish old man, to help you identify incoherent propositions. Which of
the following do you think are self-contradictory and thus illogical?:
There are no absolutes.
All generalizations are false.
It�s wrong to judge.
Logic is not true.
No one can be certain of anything.
All rules have exceptions.
Truth is relative.
Reality is unknowable.
Words have no validity.
No universal value judgments are possible.
As a rule I�m against rules.
Socratic style aside, Rick, I see no hope of our persuading one another
of our respective views since we have widely different ideas of the
meaning of rhetoric, logic and rules. Any further discussion between us
seems doomed to be a rehash of points already made. So I will
withdraw from the fray, leaving it up to those who may have been
watching our discussion to decide whose argument carries greater
weight.
I see that Horse agrees with you even to the point of saying death is not
absolute. (I wish he or someone would bring members of my family
back to life.) By stark contrast, I claim logic to be indispensable to life; I
will not attempt to assuage my hunger by pushing food in my ear or
stop a baby from crying by bashing its head against the wall. I also
wonder when Horse says, � . . . absolute knowledge is beyond us . . .
whether he believes that to be 100% true, 99.9 percent true, 10 percent
true or what. Finally, I�m dumfounded that both Horse and Rick use
logic in trying to persuade us that logic doesn�t apply. It appears the
postmodernist view of �it�s all relative� has successfully propagated to
the extent that when someone of the intellectual stature of Ken Wilber
writes as follows, many will argue that he just doesn�t get it:
�If the constructivist stance is taken too far, it defeats itself. It says, all
worldviews are arbitrary, all truth is relative and merely culture-bound,
there are no universal truths. But that stance itself claims to be
universally true. It is claiming everybody�s truth is relative *except mine*
because mine is absolutely and universally true. I alone have the
universal truth, and all you poor schmucks are relative and culture-
bound.� (A Brief History of Everything, p. 62-63)
But I�m gratified that we agree that Pirsig is a master of rhetoric and
logic, no matter how we may differ in our definitions of those and other
terms.
Platt
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