Matt, Ron, Bo and all MOQers: Ron quoted Pirsig: "Any philosophic explanation of quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into words, into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word quality cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because quality is so mysterious but because quality is so simple, immediate and direct."
Ron said to Bo: This is what's confusing the shit outta me...the pre-conceptual/pre-intellectual distinction... I think I need some help in understanding. dmb says: I can't help explain Bo's distinction (As I understand it, the terms are interchangable) but David Hildebrand's paper "The Linguistic Turn" contains a great explanation of the problem Pirsig presents in the quote above. I learned that Douglas Browning calls it "the phenomenological paradox". The paper quotes Browning. Here he is talking about Dewey's "pre-reflective experiences" but it could just as well be James's pure experience, Mead's primordial prereflective experience or Pirsig's quality.... "How can [Dewey] adequately describe our immediately lived, pre-reflective experiences without assuming a stance for surveying them which, being reflective and retrospective, cannot help but disclose them, not as they were experienced in the imtimacy of our living through them, but as 'objects' which we are viewing externally." In other words, how can you verbalize the pre-verbal without being verbal about it? Hildebrand puts it like this (the emphsis is his)... "Being itself a reflective (linguistic) act, description must color any pre-reflective subject matter it describes; since philosophy - pragmatism included - comments ONLY by means of reflective symbols it CANNOT illuminate this level of experience (if it can even be shown to exist). ...This accusation strikes at the core of Dewey's pragmatism and may be the most important issue to clarify and defend." Hildebrand even quotes Dewey acknowledging this predicament. The "incommunicability of the non-linguistic", as Dewey says,... "is inherent, according to genuine empiricism, in the derived relastionship of discourse to primary experience. Any one who refuses to go outside the universe of discourse ...has of course shut himself off from understanding what a 'situation', as directly experienced subject matter, is." I should point out that this is the central point of contention in the dispute between Matt and me. As Hildebrand and Rosenthal paint it, this is also central to the distinction between classical pragmatism and neopragmatists like Rorty in particular and linguistically inclined postmodernists in general. I mean, radical empiricism doesn't entail a rejection of the idea that language powerfully shapes our world but its emphasis on experience won't allow that fact to trump everything else, so to speak. As we see here, Pirsig, Hildebrand and Dewey acknowledge the problem but its not enough to stop them from including the pre-intellectual in their intellectual descriptions. In doing this they are also acknowledging that reality is too big, rich and fluid to be stuffed into little conceptual boxes and that seems right as rain to me. Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102225181033.aspx?pid=CL100626971033 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/
