Hey David, Matt had said long ago: But to confront you [who? I can't remember] one last time with Pirsig: you said, "To watch your thoughts without judgement, to see your (human) nature is valuable." Wasn't the idea behind Pirsig's Quality that it is value, i.e. judgments, all the way down to the very core of reality? David said: Interesting, a useful point but I'd suggest some qualification. What we experience and value is generally highly conceptualised. There is always a need and possibility to think again, to sweep aside our current concepts and make a fresh start or going back to possibilities previously set aside. Such is the point of such calls to purity or back to basics. Yes, it looks dubious if you make a call to origins and purity as if such a state can be sustained. Matt: I demur. For philosophical reasons that you are generally aware of, theory-ladenness, denial of the analytic/synthetic distinction, etc., I would say "what we experience and value is [always] conceptualized." This always gets me in trouble, but 1) I don't think it's really all that radical and 2) how else do you get around Quine/Sellars/Davidson and their attacks on the dogmas? I think you're absolutely right that "there is always a need and possibility to think again, to sweep aside our current concepts and make a fresh start or going back to possibilities previously set aside." That may be the point of calls to purity and the like, but I don't think the metaphor of purity is a good one to use for such calls because it proves misleading if pushed (like Kant's analytic/synthetic distinction, or thinking that there are bare, unconceptualized experiences that one could think about). One can never wipe the entire board and start over--you always have to leave something as background. Like Sellars (roughly) said, "science is the greatest thing because it can put any claim in jeopardy--just not all at once." He said it about science, but we can generalize it. So, I take the engine of your point to be from the reminder that we always need to have the possibility to think again. I can agree, but I think it is unconnected to a need to claim that value and experience is _generally_ (as opposed to always) conceptualized and the metaphor of purity, "sweeping aside" and "fresh start." Yeah, you sweep some stuff aside, but you can't sweep everything aside. Matt
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