In Defense of Ambiguity
I'd like to start this post with a quote from Bo (Jan
30) about the question of fuzzy borders:
"
.but the said fuzziness is just around the
borders, when the second or third generation of the
next level's
patterns are established the discretion becomes sharp.
"Family"
is biological in the sense that most higher animals
rear their
young ..etc, but the mafioso family is clearly a
social entity. Tribe
is also a name we use re. primate colonies, but the
Rwandan
"Hutus" and "Tutsis" are social configurations, the
most basic
there is."
Precisely! This 'fuzziness' I was talking about,
is most apparent around the borders of the classes
(levels); towards the cores, as Bo puts it, "the
discretion becomes sharp". The first generations of
the biological level may be considered (in fuzzy
logic) to be also 'inorganic' to some extent; as we
progress within the level some of the patterns will be
clearly biological and there the <A or not-A> holds
well. Then, as we progress to the last generations of
this level, things will get blurred again and the
distinction between biological and social will not be
clear-cut (unambiguous) . The same for the first
generations in the social level. As we progress within
that level, patterns again will appear as more
clearly social and they would gradually loose their
neatness as we approach the intellectual level.
That's the beauty of the fuzzy pattern of
thought. It admits the "to be or not to be" (<A or
not-A>) case as limiting cases without generating a
contradiction. This is similar as a theory of 'real'
gases admitting as a limiting case the theory of ideal
gases.
An important aside Note, so as to avoid sterile
discussions: I am not at all presuming that this is
the way Pirsig thought the four MOQ levels, neither
presuming that this is Right Way of considering those
levels. I am just trying to point out how, in my view,
those levels may be considered within the fuzzy
framework of thought.
As I've said many times, I have a weakness for
pedestrian examples concerning our first-hand
experiences and a distaste for staying confined to the
clouds of abstractions, so, please bear with me while
I go into yet another pedestrian example.
Pullovers: It's a fair assumption that anyone
reading these lines has a number of pullovers (called
'sweaters' in some parts of the world). Some of these
will be thick and some thin. What 'thick' means, as an
abstraction, may be a matter of debate but everyone of
us has a pretty good idea of how a thick pullover
looks like. Suppose that, Winter approaching, we have
to arrange our pullovers into the shelves of our
wardrobes. Suppose also that we have a fair number of
them ( I, for one, do have a lot of them, not because
I buy too many but because I'm reluctant to throw away
the old ones). First we put the 'clearly thick' ones
in one shelf and the 'clearly thin' in another; so far
so good; what is in one shelf (set?) quite clearly,
obviously, irrefutably, does not belong in the other;
thick pullover or not-thick pullover, <A or not-A>. We
may perform with the sets all the operations of Formal
Logic and they'll work perfectly well.
Problem is that we are left with a number of our
pullovers which are neither 'clearly thick' nor
'clearly thin'. Where do we put them? Within
Aristotelian logic we could create another category
called "not too thick" and another called "not too
thin" and if yet another is required, one called
"not-not-too thick nor not-not-too thin". This is more
or less the way of thinking in Science that I outlined
yesterday and, as said, in a case like this it would
work nicely.
In the context of the fuzzy thinking, I'd start by
saying that all my pullovers may be at the same time
both thick and thin; I'd invent something called level
(or degree) of thickness; then I'd place the ones
with the 'highest' thickness in one shelf, the ones
with the lowest thickness in another and arrange the
rest according to whether they are 20% thick, 50%
thick, 80% and so on. You may have noticed that, for
the extremes ( close to 0% and close to 100%) it
doesn't matter much which method we use. It only
matters for the intermediary ones, the ones in the
grey zone. If most of my pullovers are clearly thick
or clearly thin and the intermediate ones are mere
exceptions, it makes more sense (makes life easier) to
use the formal approach. If the exceptions are more
numerous than the "clearly something" the fuzzy
approach makes more sense.
Now we can turn back again to the MOQ levels. If
most of the cases in each level were 'clearly
something' (clearly biological or social, etc) and we
could discern only a few exceptions here and there, we
could comfortably stay with formal categories, that is
'discrete', 'not continuous' MOQ levels. If the
clear-cut cases at the core of each level were much
less than the indeterminate ones, (not-not- too
biological) it makes sense going into fuzziness. We do
not know how many cases there are in each level but,
since the classification presumes of being exhaustive,
we could safely say that the four levels contain all
the cases we can think or imagine in this Universe.
You will all agree that a pretty large number mut be
invoked.
But, we may ask, how many of those trillions of
trillions of cases are clearly, typically, something?
Here enters a particularly 'insidious' remark: most of
those cases are bound to be complex; complexity
entails ambiguity; ambiguity entails lack of
certainty. Uncertainty makes very difficult to be sure
which pattern is clearly biological or which clearly
social.
Pirsig, in Bo's quote, writes: "There has been
a tendency to extend the meaning
of "social" down into the biological with the
assertion that, for example,
ants are social, but I have argued that this
extends the meaning to a point where it is useless for
classification". And what do you do about all the
people that consider ants colonies a typical example
of "social"? And, if ant colonies are not-social, what
do you do about the clans in the times of Homo
Erectus?
I don't want to go into more examples but I hope
I've made myself clear; we might all know how to
distinguish a thick from a thin pullover; very few, if
any, of us, or elsewhere, knows where to draw neat
lines of separation between biological and social and
intellectual. It's not that we are dumb; it's just
that we are dealing with complexity and I'll repeat:
complexity entails ambiguity. Hence, my final question
before I really get into a defense of Ambiguity:
what's wrong with Ambiguity within the context of the
Metaphysics of Quality?
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