From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Nov 09 2003 - 02:36:51 GMT
Andy and all:
Andy said:
Yes I did ignore this specific specific criticism of Rorty by DMB (Rorty's
truth is an adjective, Pirsigs is a noun). Shame on me! DMB, I apologize.
As a feeble excuse all I can say is I never really made much of this
distinction made by Pirsig at the end of Lila. It just didn't create this
earth-shatering new perspective, that it seemed Pirsig had intended for it.
dmb says:
Thanks. Apology accepted. At the risk of seeming ungracious, I'd urge you to
avoid ignoring specific points. I mean, if you should choose to respond at
all, its only reasonable to address the points being made. Your reaction to
Pirsig's summary doesn't really surprize. I felt the same way the first time
I really noticed it, which was actually here in the forum rather than the
book itself. Somebody had used it in a post to assert some trivial platitude
and thereby made it seem like a big nothing. But now that we can see Rorty
asserting that it is NOT a noun, the summary has become quite meaningful -
and pretty damn pithy too. I'm sure you can see that its not really about
the parts of speech or grammar, its about the ontological status of things
like truth.
Andy said:
It felt like he just wanted to end the book, somehow and sum it all up
quickly so he could get back to his life and out of the spotlight. But this
summing up felt pretty empty to me. I don't blame Pirsig for this. He
isn't the first author whose work I had admired despite feeling like their
work was somehow left incomplete. In fact, most, if not all, authors leave
me with that feeling.
dmb says:
The last few pages of Lila provides a summary that goes very nicely with
this "good is a noun" idea. It says that mysticism is not alien to American
culture, but rather a deeply hidden root of our culture. It comes from the
American Indians and it was such a person who told us what kind of dog it
is; a good dog. Then we read that good is a noun as opposed to an adjective.
The answer is striking to those of us who are familiar with thinking of
quality as nothing more than a subjective judgement call.
Andy said:
Perhaps, what you (Matt) say about treating morality and nouns as truth
leads us to believe they should be objects of inquiry was the source of my
hesitation towards grasping onto this idea. If this is the specific source!
of DMB's criticism, than this is also good to know. So, if we wish for
first things first, we could also begin here.
dmb says:
Right. The two theories of truth seems like a pretty good place to start. It
is ONE OF the specific sources of my criticisms. (The centrality of
mysticism in the MOQ is another, even bigger beef with Rorty.) But mostly I
followed this line of thought because somebody posted Rorty's theory of
truth. To see this in Rorty's own words made things pretty clear to me right
away. Unlike the slogans that had been tossed around endlessly (Truth is a
property of language or of sentences), Rorty explains what he means in that
quote. These slogans were very misleading. Or at least they mislead me.
Rorty expressed an idea that Matt had only badly abbrieviated with those
slogans. In the quote Rorty goes a bit further and says that truth is not a
property of just any sentence, but of true statements. He goes further and
asserts that there is nothing we can say about this property in any general
sense. This is far, far different than the impression given by the hacked up
slogans. I asked and asked and asked and asked and begged Matt to dump the
slogans and express ideas instead. And when that request was finally and
inadvertantly honored by somebody else, the whole thing clicked. Much thanks
to whoever posted that quote.
To DMB: Rorty rejects a correspondance theory of truth (roughly [very
roughly] translating he rejects SOM, using Pirsig's vocabulary), as have
some other philosophers before him (Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger). Matt
has argued (keeping in mind his caveat)that treating truth as a noun leads
to a correspondance theory of truth. Is this a contradiction? If not,
where does this leave Rorty and Pirsig? How does this leave Rorty
completely out of the discussion, i.e. on Pirsig, quality, values, morality,
truth and the MOQ (which is what we are discussing here at this site)?
dmb says:
I'm still not convinced that a rejection of a correspondance theory is the
same as a rejection of SOM. It only looks like the rejection of objective
truth. I think this constitutes only the most superficial kind of similarity
between Rorty and Pirsig. Rorty's view of things like values, morality and
truth is not different enough from SOM. They both share the view that such
things are not objective, but are properties of "objects" like morally
priaseworthy acts and true statements. This is why I don't see Rorty
rejecting SOM per se, but just one particular permutation of SOM. When it
comes to issues like values and morality, Rorty thinks there is nothing
philosophically interesting to say. This is approximately the opposite of
what Pirsig is saying, which is that values and morality are all there is
and proceeds to build the whole MOQ upon them. I can't imagine what is more
philosophically interesting than that.
Thanks again,
dmb
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Nov 09 2003 - 02:39:41 GMT