From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 04 2003 - 05:24:50 GMT
Andy,
DMB said:
Rorty's truth is an adjective, Pirsig's is a noun.
Matt:
Andy is right about pretty much everything else in
his post, but this is a specific criticism and a
significant point of departure between Rorty and
Pirsig that I have adressed and discussed in the
past. Pirsig, at the end of Lila, says that Good is
a noun, not an adjective as we in the West have
treated it (actually, most philosophers in the West,
following Plato's footsteps, have treated Good as a
noun, too, its just the logical positivists and
laypeople who consider Good to be an adjective).
Vicariously, this can be construed to mean that
Truth is also a noun. Afterall, since "the Good" is
basically the same thing as Pirsig's central term,
Quality, Pirsig is saying that Quality is a noun.
Since Quality is everything, that means everything
is a noun. This is how Pirsig gives the same
"concrete" existence to everything, from emotions to
rocks (what concrete pans out to mean is different,
depending on the levels and such).
This is one of those places where I agree with DMB,
where he has actually pointed out a point of
divergence, but reply that this has continually been
a point of criticism for me: I've never denied that
it was a point of divergence. The criticism comes
from the fact that Rorty suggests that if we think
of morality and knowledge (and their operative terms
"good" and "truth") as nouns, we will be much more
likely to think that they should be objects of
inquiry. To do that is to think that we be more
moral and more truthful we need to inquire into "the
Good" and "the Truth". This leads to a
correspodence theory of truth.
One caveat for all attentive philosophers: that was
not an argument. It was a very, very brief
summation of what I've been arguing for over a year.
Matt
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