Hi Ham, it wasn't meant to be provocative bait, in any negative sense ... the question / the point was serious ...
Why " ...unfortunate, despite ..." ? ie for whatever reason he made the "mistake" ... it was FORTUNATE that he did - in my humble opinion naturally. Since the quest for a metaphysics is the greater error - he was fortunate that what he ended up with doesn't need to be considered a metaphysics in order to be useful / valuable. Now, about taking your bait .... I'll risk it. Definitions ARE an impediment to progress in understanding - that's me talking long before I'd heard of Pirsig, or read any English professors. That's an opinion evolved from 50 years of life experience, 25 years of which concerned with establishing definitions as my day job - writing specs and data models. No-one told me that, though I've seen plenty of re-inforcement since - I usually quote Pepys and Minsky, but I could rattle off a longer list now. Definitions are worth the paper they are written on, and the things that can be written on top of that, but little more fundamentally. The processes of what things do, how they behave is more fundamental than any paper-thin definition. That's not nonsense. It is natural that the closer one gets to a metaphysical core the less well-defined will be the terms. No problems with criticisms of Pirsig. I'm more interested in the value of the MoQ - as a pragmatic model or framework of how the real world really works (I'll let the academics obsess over whether it's a metaphysics or not - who cares ?). Ian Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
