Bo: Yes had Pirsig said that truth is "intellectual reality" all would have been OK, but he proposes a neutral 4th. level that can contain all kinds of ideas, some of absolute truth, some of relative truth and some of God knows what, and this is untenable. Only the SOL with the 4th. level THE TRUTH (and its many repercussions) works.
Ron: Pirsig states that TRUTH is experience before the 4th level Interpretation. That it is more empirical than "intellectual Reality". SOL with the 4th. level THE TRUTH (and its many repercussions)does NOT work, or you would have figured out the 5th level dilemma. Your SOL does have Explaining power but it lacks the essential Ingredient that changes everything, you miss the biggest revolution Of all, that truth is immediate experience repeatable and verifiable. Pirsig: " The Metaphysics of Quality restates the empirical basis of logical positivism with more precision, more inclusiveness, more explanatory power than it has previously had. It says that values are not outside of the experience that logical positivism limits itself to. They are the essence of this experience. Values are more empirical, in fact, than subjects or objects. Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an ably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description o experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. I is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least ambiguous, least mistakable there is. Later the person may generate some oaths to describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the oaths second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow. The reason for hammering on this so hard is that we have a culturally inherited blind spot here. Our culture teaches us to think it is the hot stove that directly causes the oaths. It teaches that the low values are a property of the person uttering the oaths. Not so. The value is between the stove and the oaths. Between the subject and the object lies the value. This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any "self" or any "object" to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed." 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/
