[Craig] Your thesis may be right, but you can't show what Pirsig means by 'mediated' by showing what he means by 'derived'. (BTW, I think you admitted this.)
[Arlo] The idea of "mediated" versus "derived" came from Ham, who challenged that because Pirsig said intellect was "mediated" by the social-level it does not mean he says it "derived" from the social-level. There are clear quotes of Pirsig using both these words to describe intellect from social. As far as Pirsig's statement about mediation, I don't have to go any further than the surrounding sentences to understand what he means. Still, I think one doesn't even need to do this. Pirsig's MOQ clearly places "social" in between "biological" and "intellectual" patterns. (In the same vein, I would argue that the biological level "mediates" the social and inorganic levels, and the sociality is derived from biology (Tomasello, for one example, writes a great deal about how a "neurobiological particularity" was (and I substitute Pirsig's words) "seized upon the Dynamic forces" in the same way it seized upon the carbon atom which allowed biology to emerge from inorganic stuff. For Tomasello, man's "carbon atom particularity" was a neurobiological cluster that allowed individual biological beings to create a "shared attention".) All this is summed up clearly and without confusion when Pirsig says, "Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic nature." 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/
