From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 00:34:43 GMT
DMB,
DMB said:
..............I think Pirsig is saying that the seperation between morals
and science was never meant to pit one against the other, but to free them
both. I hope this makes sense even to those who have not read Wilber.
Matt:
I genuinely enjoyed the Wilber colligation with Pirsig. This is another
point of entry with respect to Rorty and the pragmatists, because they say
much the same thing: the distinction between the value spheres should be
dissolved.
DMB said:
However, I think the idea that
at some point we'd abandon the idea of provisionality and proclaim the real
truth is an unfair revision of Pirsig's position. I mean, he never said that
it was too early to proclaim the truth or anything like that.
Matt:
I can't make sense of the two sentences together, so I'll focus on the
first one by itself. I'm not sure that its a revision of Pirsig's position
because of the addendum he adds two sentences after the "scientifically
moral" part: "It's true for all people at all times, now and forever...."
This sounds to me like a declaration of "Real Truth." So, when you end
with your series of questions, I can only agree to them, but I'm not so
sure about Pirsig. That's why I say his language implies that everything
(read: all intellectual activities) can be seen as science.
On incorrigible, a person's fundamental incorrigibility comes out of the
fact that, if push comes to shove, some people value certain beliefs more
than life itself. They won't change them no matter what. I hesitate to
call that stupid because some of those beliefs are sacrosanct, such as our
incorrigible belief that democracy is the government of choice, or some
people's belief in God, or, say Pirsig's belief in Quality. In fact, in
America, some of these beliefs are left in the private sphere so that
people's belief in them have no public bearing (like belief in God, belief
in your ability to levitate, belief that orchids are the sexiest plant
alive). This is linked to sincerity when Rorty says that the question of
what types of questions are given priority over others ("Is there a God?"
or "Is democracy good?" or "Is Nietzsche a big jerk?") are, "necessarily,
begged by everybody. Nobody is being any more arbitrary than anybody else.
But that is to say that nobody is being arbitrary at all. Everybody is
just insisting that the beliefs and desires they hold most dear should come
first in the order of discussion. That is not arbitrariness, but
sincerity." ("The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy") When we are
incorrigible about certain beliefs, when we hold a belief so strongly that
it is in our "final vocabulary," that is, when discussing something, we use
a word that any justification of that word is circular, we are just being
sincere when we say that our ethnos should be the beginning of our
conversation. They aren't synonymous, but that are linked. People aren't
being stupid when they are incorrigible, they are being sincere to insist
that the static patterns they've picked up from their historical time and
place are right.
DMB said:
Truth does not exist and the test of truth is solidarity? Are you saying
that the need for evidence has been replaced in favor of majority opinion or
the general consensus?
Matt:
I say "Truth" with a captical "T" to differentiate it from "truth." For
pragmatists, "truth" is a property of sentences. For Platonists, "Truth"
is a goal, a thing hanging "out there," waiting for us to correspond to it.
Pragmatists don't think the Platonic quest for Truth has panned out. We
point out that the quest has been going on for at least 2,500 years and we
don't seem to be any closer. The history of philosophy is a series of
people coming along and saying that everyone else is wrong (with subsequent
followers supporting one or another person). So the pragmatists suggest
that we get a new project, that we end our pursuit of Truth and start on
something more worthwhile, like the alleviation of cruelty.
Saying "the test of truth is solidarity" is a misnomer. Pragmatists don't
suspend evidence if everyone's agreed on what's true. What they say is
that the truth of sentence is decided by individuals, and that when we say,
"All dogs are mammals," we aren't stating something that correctly
corresponds to Reality and Truth, we are stating that almost everybody we
know believe's that sentence is true. Individuals determine the truth of
the sentences they hear and read, and then if a lot of people all think the
same thing, it moves further from opinion and closer to knowledge. In the
West, we have notions of logical consistency, agreement with experience,
and economy of explanation that serve as good bench marks for making our
beliefs useful, and thus improving consensus if a belief gets high marks in
those categories. I talk more about this in the "Solidarity" thread Platt
started.
Matt
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