Hi Matt K Damn fine post, if nothing else, Rorty has taught you how to write.
Thanks David M > Matt: > I'm isolating this to point out that I think you are enacting a bad > dialogue practice, which is fairly endemic of your responses to me. I > understand that the had/known distinction is non-Cartesian. You, however, > have switched in that distinction as the gloss upon "direct/indirect" when > that is not the understanding of the latter distinction that I find > rhetorically objectionable. You will no doubt complain your gloss is > perfectly clear in Pirsig and Dewey and etcetera, but I want you to > consider that people might be wearing differently colored glasses than > you, that they may have different understandings of things, and that the > functional beginning of a dialogue is the supposition that two people > _don't_ see eye to eye and therefore need to talk things over, > communicate. What you are practicing is a kind of communication that > short-circuits the dialogue by imposing your grid of understanding on all > things, which makes everyone else seem very muddled indeed. > > That may seem like what I do, but I'd like to suggest that my practice > (when I'm doing it well) is to show the route between two people's ways of > saying things. > > To reiterate my qualms with the rhetoric of "indirect/direct": the > experience/reality distinction made it possible to say that some > experiences were direct experiences of reality and some were indirect, > cloudy, off, bad. Collapsing the experience/reality distinction makes > that dichotomy lose its old point. You can redesign the significance and > deployment of the distinction: but I'm talking about my qualms (qualms > that have resonance inside Pirsig's texts, I might add). And if I agree > with the "had/known," then who the hell cares whether I accept any of the > other ones, especially considering you were the one that just said: "The > terms used to make that > distinction are of secondary importance at best." Excuse me, but your > argumentative practice begs to differ. And, while I agree with you on one > level, on another level, our dialectical terms--the terms we use in an > argument--do matter because as Pirsig taught us, dialectic rests on > rhetoric. The rhetoric we deploy makes a difference. The rhetoric of > purity, in my estimation, is a bad rhetoric to use and we should be > willing to slap James on the wrists for it. > > Resisting _that_ is what bothers me. A pointless priggery that lovers of > Pirsig's philosophical individualism would do well without. > > > Matt 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/
