Hi Jorge I think that it would be quite right to argue that the SOM and positivist dominated science of the early/mid 20th century has eased off and is now less open to Pirsig's criticisms, but it is only less so and not completely so. For example, on-going ideas of value-free objective science still hints at a denial of metaphysics as per positivism and a SOM dismissing of values as somehow subjective and contaminating science, whereas values are always present even if unacknowledged.
But some scientists are more free of these particular prejudices than others. Other prejudice is the idea that higher level must be reducible to lower ones, for which there is little evidence for as the philosopher of science John Dupre argues in 'The Disorder of Things'. Regards David M ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jorge Goldfarb" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2008 7:37 PM Subject: [MD] Science and the MOQ I had a sort of insight about Science and the MOQ, or rather "Science, Pirsig, MOQ and History" that I'd like to share with you as a hypothesis for discussion. Ever since I read Z&AMM I've been puzzled about Pirsig's views on Science; later, in the course of discussions in this Forum, I realized that his views had been adopted by many of the people here. What puzzled me more is that the last version of Z&AMM was finished about 1972, close to the end of the 20th century and yet Pirsig's views seem to me closer to Science as presented in the first decades of that century. How come? Considering how radically Science changed in those 50 or 60 years, that's quite a gap. The other day I was rereading Norbert Wiener's book 'Cybernetics'. The book was first published in 1948; Claude Shannon's papers on "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" also date from that year. Wiener's ideas had been making inroads, mainly in Biology, some years before that. By the 1960's the concepts behind "Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine", as Wiener subtitled his book, were the darling baby of both Science and pseudo Science; everyone busy working out how Wiener's, Shannon's (and Prigogine's) ideas and, what became later known as Informatics, could modify their particular fields. Not to mention that statistical treatments for most of Physic's theories were already firmly in place by, say, the 1910's. All the above conformed a true revolution in our understanding of the external world of Science and yet, hardly a word about it in Pirsig's books. His views on Science seemed to have stayed frozen as those prevalent before the 30's. The hypothesis I offer for discussion is roughly this: Pirsig's formative years in Science were precisely the 1930's. Now, one can have his formative years of a discipline in one period and continuously modify what was learnt, 'provided' (and that's an important proviso) one keeps himself close to that discipline; otherwise one's conceptions remain sort of frozen in time. With the help of Ian Glendinning's "R. Pirsig's Biographical Timeline" I tried to retrace what might have happened. Pirsig studied Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1944. I have no idea what Minnesota's Freshman's courses were like then, but a safe bet was the Science they taught was pretty much that of 10 or 20 years before (nothing particularly wrong with Minnesota, 'that was the way it was' in most Universities then). In 1946 he joins the Army and since then, till the time he wrote Z&AMM, there's no indication in the above timeline that he ever came close to Science again. I browsed in the Library through some Physical Chemistry textbooks for undergrads published about the 40's and surely, there it was: - forces and energies and particles. Classical Mechanics all over the place. Forces of cohesion, of adhesion, osmotic forces, surface forces (tensions). Ubiquitous forces and energies and 'tendencies'. Ever wondered where language expressions such as "the forces of cohesion that hold a society together" came from? All the former should not be taken to imply that Pirsig was "Wrong" about Science; he was Right in the criticism of Science as he knew it. As I said, unless you keep very much inside one discipline, it is easy to loose track of innovations. This, needless to say, is no excuse for the younger set of members here that seemed to have adopted Pirsig's views on Science quite uncritically. __________________________________________________________ Sent from Yahoo! Mail. The World's Favourite Email http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html 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/ 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/
