Hi Magnus,
Matt said:
The crux of our difference, and I side with Pirsig, is that of usefulness--you
seem to think that to judge our metaphysical meanderings by only usefulness is
to not "trust" our meanderings, to basically caveat everything with a big
"Well, maybe." I think on the one hand, that's basically right, but on the
other hand, I don't think it has anything to do with trust--we trust a
meandering, or scientific theory, or a religious explanation all by the same
criteria: its usefulness to our experience of the world. Now, I'm supposing you
have another category apart from usefulness in mind, something like
"correctness." The question for you, as opposed to me (since I've dropped the
extra category), is what the criteria are for detecting correctness as opposed
to usefulness. If you don't have them, you can always claim that civilization
is still working on them. However, if you stipulate that we'll never have these
criteria for correctness (as I believe you suggested as much earlier), b
ut that shouldn't stop us from striving for correctness, then what you still
need to further do is explain how striving for correctness is different from
striving for usefulness. Pirsig laid his cards out when he called DQ
"betterness," as opposed to "correctness."
Magnus said:
Ok, but even *if* I let go of aiming for correctness. I still think the MoQ is
much more useful than what Pirsig gives it credit for, provided he lets the
social level expand to smaller societies than human.
*And* you say that DQ is betterness as opposed to correctness. Then it's not
very far-fetched to claim that SQ (since it *is* opposed to DQ) has quite a few
similarities with correctness.
Matt:
I thought about continuing on in that direction, so since you've also thought
the same thing, it might make sense to explore it. Because I don't want to get
rid of correctness as something we can aim it, just something that we can aim
at _in general_, which is to say that correctness isn't a category that applies
to all areas of investigation (something we've only found out over many, many
centuries of investigation, i.e. the history of philosophy from Plato to the
present).
To be more specific, correctness would seem to apply only to things in
particular kinds of contexts. The identifying marks of these contexts are
something like agreed-upon criteria for the solving of disputes. Does Bob see
water? Well, in almost all contexts, there is an agreed-upon procedure for
solving this: ask him. However, if Bob is in a desert, the procedure becomes
more complicated (though still probably answerable). Now, these criteria are
always worked out in the space of human inquiry. Those looking for absolute
points of reference are, as might be guessed, Platonists. Barring that
thought, because inquiry is an historical product, criteria are proven to work,
be useful, only through the course of use (and disuse).
I would suggest a couple of things about philosophy, Pirsig, and correctness in
this context:
1) what pragmatists think we've learned over the course of philosophical
investigation is that we are never going to find criteria for resolving
disputes in a final, non-circular way over such general things like the nature
of reality.
2) this is partly because philosophy is the kind of field where people are
encouraged to toss over and rethink any particular set of rules and criteria at
will. That's what we've learned "investigation into the nature of reality"
means.
3) Pirsig, I believe, sinks this historicity directly into his philosophy. In
his general account of reality, he distinguishes between DQ and static patterns
and in this distinction we can also see the distinction between betterness and
correctness. Betterness is what you have when you don't have any criteria for
deciding in a manner of agreed-to finality for your sense of betterness. As
these individual senses are overlaid on each other, as more and more people are
convinced that, yes, indeed this way is better, static patterns are formed.
Solidification, staticness, is on my view basically the same thing as saying
criteria are forming as to how to settle disputes over questions within the
area that's becoming static.
So, in my view, you don't have to relinquish the thought that Pirsig's
philosophy is better by relinquishing the hope that it is correct. Correctness
just doesn't make any sense when it comes to grand statements about reality.
How would you know if these statements are correct, by what criteria? This is
basically the question that Descartes set out to settle, and so was born modern
epistemology which centered on trying to rebut the philosophical skeptic who
would always ask, after every metaphysical pronouncement, "How do you know?"
That's a big reason why contemporary philosophy has taken on the kind of cast
it has since Descartes.
Philosophy ended up moving in two directions at once--one that kept moving
forward with metaphysics and the other that kept looking for that knock-down
("correct") epistemological rebuttal. This is basically the difference between
rationalism and empiricism. Descartes said, "hey, we need a foundation to beat
the skeptic." Locke said, "yeah, well, clear and distinct ideas aren't it
because all of our knowledge has to begin with the senses--just look at the
great work the sciences are doing!" The New Science that Galileo and Newton
kept moving forward with lent tremendous credence to the idea of something
called an "empirical claim." Empirical claims were ones we could test the
truth of by corroboration with experience--if X happens, as opposed to Y, then
your theory is correct; if not, guess again. Empiricism, taken to be the
exaltation of "empirical claims," won the day in metaphysics because of all the
success it had in predicting, e.g., planetary motion. But that nas
ty skeptic wouldn't relent: How do you know? How do you know empiricism is
actually correct, as opposed to just useful?
This morphed rationalism into transcendental philosophy: Kant came along and
said, "Ya' know, Locke and his gang are right, empirical claims are the bomb,
but Descartes was right, too, when he realized ahead of Hume that that's not an
answer to the skeptic." Hume woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers because he
represents the dialectical death of empiricism as an epistemology--though not
as a metaphysics. Kant wanted to save empiricism as a metaphysics from Hume
because the kind of stuff that Hume was saying epistemologically about it--God,
he was an empiricist, but if anybody took him seriously, they'd take it to be a
reductio ad absurdum for empiricism! So Kant said that what we need is a
description of how things _have_ to be in reality for reality to be here.
That's what transcendental philosophy is.
Kant began it as an a priori practice of reflection--we could figure out how
reality has to be out of necessity from our armchairs. But actual scientists
kept taking parts of reality out of philosophy's jurisdiction by telling people
how things _are_, which on its face seems to end the need to figure out how
that part _needs to be_. Because if you say it has to be X, and empirical
science with all of its successes tells us that it is, on the contrary, Y, who
are people going to believe? Even the philosophers relinquished X, because
they were pretty much all empiricists-turn-transcendentalists.
This kept narrowing what philosophy could help humanity with, at least as it
comes to the question, "What is reality?" But philosophers are smart as whips,
and they saw that science, with its focus on empirical claims, couldn't answer
_all_ questions--it was these questions they could turn their attention to.
And this is basically what has happened. We are all more or less
commonsensically metaphysical empiricists, just as Pirsig is. But this isn't
the end of it. Rationalism turned into transcendentalism, and this eventually
turned into logical positivism. Pirsig rightly bashes logical positivism in
Lila. However, Pirsig was doing this in the late 80s, whereas academic
philosophers had also started their own bashing back in the 50s. There's
always the task of clearing vestiges of an illness, but for pragmatists like
Richard Bernstein, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and the list goes on, for
these philosophers, the implosion of logical positivism under its own weight at
the hands of Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars marked the eschewing
of epistemology as the answering of the skeptic.
As long as a metaphysical commitment to empiricism comes along with an
epistemology that tries to tell the skeptic why empiricism (which is not
coextensive with science, but science is a big sector of) is _correct_, and not
just the best way of going about our business in the world we've come up with
yet, then we're doomed to repeating the dialectical sequence from Descartes to
Kant to Bertrand Russell and the early Wittgenstein, which just implodes in
Quine, Sellars, and the late Wittgenstein. What these later imploders have
told us is that all empirical claims are stated in a language of some sort. If
you hold that language still, you can answer empirical questions in a correct
way. However, if you ask whether the language you are using to state the
empirical claim is correct, then you're in trouble because the answer will
always be circular, and ends up just pointing at all the empirical claims you
can make with it. But that's just useful, not necessarily correct.
Philosophy is in the process of becoming, in this particular story, metaphysics
without epistemology. Metaphysics is what we do when we start stating big,
broad languages in which to fit smaller, more specific things that we take at
face value, things like physics, democracy, and poetry. The claim that there
are no criteria for the correctness of the language we use to state empirical
claims is the same as the claim that metaphysics is an enterprise in which we
try and give a big broad, general account of reality.
If you want criteria of correctness _in philosophy_, we've learned, you gotta'
do epistemology. This is what I call Platonism (for reasons I didn't link into
the story here, but it is basically Pirsig's reason for hating "dialectic"),
and wanting has nothing to do with actually being able to get. Pragmatists
view Platonism as basically wishful-thinking--yeah, having those criteria would
end a lot of disputes, but.... When you eschew correctness, all you can do as
a philosopher, _all philosophers have ever done_, is show some imagination, a
little ingenuity, and paint a picture that fits everything you'd like to fit
into it that's more beautiful than everybody else's, and hope that others
agree. Beauty, at this point, is very difficult to get agreement on, but
slowly over time people's common sense (i.e., their implicit metaphysics)
changes.
But for many other things, correctness is a thing that can be shot for. We
just don't run into it a lot as Pirsigians because Pirsig keeps telling us to
be Dynamic. Static patterns are where we run into correctness, and in the art
of philosophy, static patterns of thinking, while providing you with a support
group that agrees with you, can just as easily be described as John Dewey did,
as the "crust of convention," as something that signals ossification and the
demand for breaking.
Matt
p.s. I'm going to work on another post for the "static levels" conversation,
which you said you'd like to discuss in "great detail." While my hesitance to
discuss the levels is tied into the above endpoint, lack of criteria, painting
is the hobby that Pirsig prides over all others, though I think you're wrong in
thinking you aren't using any imagination--metaphysicians wouldn't be very good
at their job if they lacked imagination.
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