From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Nov 09 2003 - 22:07:13 GMT
Andy, David,
DMB said:
Can you tell me the difference between intersubjectively agreed upon attributes and subjective qualities?
David astutely quoted Rorty:
From Sartre's point of view, the urge to find such necessities is the urge to be rid of one's freedom to erect yet another alternative theory or vocabulary. Thus the edifying philosopher who points out the incoherence of the urge is treated as a "relativist", one who lacks moral seriousness, because he does not join in the common human hope that the burden of choice will pass away. ...we need... ...to think about science in such a way that its being a value-based enterprise occassions no surprise...
Matt:
DMB, as usual, was right when he said that I evaded the question (though I fail to see how I insulted him that time, though I'll try and remedy the situation this time). My point, which I said DMB missed, was that those questions are bad questions. Pirsig says in ZMM that sometimes people ask bad questions, questions that are too small in scope. He says that a legitimate answer to those bad questions is "mu": unask the question. (Mu isn't a legitimate answer for Platonic dialecticians, however.) He says that we should enlarge our scope, such as asking, "Who would ask that question?" My answer was, "Only somebody who bought into the opposing poles of subject and object." Pirsig denies these poles, so I figure this is a keen place to say he and anyone else denying the poles, are denying SOM.
David's "answer" was to explain why "mu" counts: Pirsig and anti-SOMic philosophers are hoping that the people who keep asking these questions will eventually die off and stop bothering us.
DMB said:
Never denied this point of divergence? But, but, but, I've made this same point many times in recent weeks and you denied it almost every time.
Matt:
No you didn't. You didn't once bring up the adjective/noun difference. My point with Pirsig is that he talks like a neo-pragmatist sometimes (like his speech about the ghosts in ZMM, for which I'm glad Steve likes), despite saying things that are Platonic (like saying "Good is a noun").
DMB said:
Further, I don't see how Pirsig's truth as a noun leads to a correspondence theory of truth, which is also SOM.
Matt:
Roughly, if truth is a noun, an object of inquiry, then why would people inquire into it unless they wanted their own idea of truth to converge with the object, truth. Thus the desire to get our truth to correspond with the Truth.
DMB said:
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 t
o whoever posted that quote.
Matt:
Never have I denied my hack status. Rorty's always better at expressing Rorty than I am.
But its funny. You took that quote as a clear indication of Rorty's theory of truth, whilst I read it as a series of slogans, slogans meant to make it look silly for us to ask for a theory of truth. Hmh, that's kinda' funny. Because, naturally Rorty would reply that to say that he has any theory of truth at all is to miss the point of what was in the quote that was taken from the very beginning of the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism. Rorty says somewhere that the point of James' theory of truth was to point out that theories of truth are pointless. That's really all Rorty is reiterating. This is all to say that what Rorty and I will answer when asked what our theory of truth is is: mu.
Matt
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