Hi All, Much of the debate on this site is not only about how to interpret the writings of Mr. Pirsig, but the trustworthiness of sources used to support a point of view. An example of the problem comes from today's NY Times in an article about the effect of art instruction on learning An excerpt:
"Obama cites sober social-science research on the poor city neighborhoods he knows best. Studies in Chicago have demonstrated, his arts statement reads, that test scores improved faster for students enrolled in low- income schools that link arts across the curriculum than scores for students in schools lacking such programs. "Theres just one problem with this ostensibly hardheaded defense of arts education. The studies invoked as proof that involvement in band or dance or sculpture spurs higher academic performance actually show nothing of the sort. To the consternation of arts proponents wedded to this way of arguing, the instrumental logic has been challenged by a team of investigators affiliated with Harvards Project Zero, an education research group with a focus on the arts. An emphasis on the arts utility in the quest to reach math and reading benchmarks may seem politically smart, but the science it rests on turns out to be shaky." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27wwln-lede-t.html?ref=magazine I guess most of us tend to discount claims made by politicians. But, "scientific studies" have also been known to be suspect. Some of us rely on Wikipedia to provide "facts" to support an argument. Perhaps more reliable than other sources, I've seen criticisms of it, too. There's also a human tendency to discount a source when it doesn't "fit" one's political beliefs. No doubt there's been an "information explosion" since the advent of the internet. But as we all known, advances in technology do not necessarily assure better quality. So what to do? For me, the criteria laid down by Pirsig is the best I know of. "The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation." (Lila, 8) The weakness in this is "experience," as Pirsig acknowledges in SODV: "The reason there is a difference between individual evaluations of quality is that although Dynamic Quality is a constant, these static patterns are different for everyone because each person has a different static pattern of life history. Both the Dynamic Quality and the static patterns influence his final judgment. That is why there is some uniformity among individual value judgments but not complete uniformity." So try as we might, there's no escape from our biases based on our life history. I guess all we can do in ascertaining the reliability of sources is to try to limit those biases as best we can. Which ain't easy I admit. Best, Platt 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/
