Matt, I have a few questions about your post to Magnus. I am fine with the idea that whether correctness is possible or not it probably not possible to know it with confidence. That's the skeptic in me. But the criterion of usefulness troubles me even more. We have every reason to suspect that the universe at large is non-Euclidian and thus that Euclidian geometry is not correct. But it is useful for 99% of the activities that anyone would need to use geometry for. Likewise Newtonian physics is incorrect but still incredibly useful. I know that there are not little people inside the television set but I find it useful to think they are there. It may be true that by applying useful ideas I will obtain desired results but I can do that without reference to whether or not the ideas are correct.
When you say, "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." Isn't that what comes of just talking about reality without actually making contact with it? When you talk about Pirsig's philosophy relating betterness and correctness to DQ and SQ I don't see the connection at all. Equating betterness and usefulness sort of makes sense except that betterness seems to have the same problems as usefulness, while at least usefulness is actually a word. In your analysis of the history of philosophy how does Hume produce a reductio ad absurdum that threatens empiricism? When you say rationalism morphed into transcendental philosophy isn't it just as fair to say that Kant was attempting to synthesize rationalism and empiricism? Also you have rationalism morphing into logical positivism which seems to me to be rather like empiricism on steroids. How'd that happen? -----Original Message----- From: Matt Kundert [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2008 7:50 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [MD] Correctness and Usefulness 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), but 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. _________________________________________________________________ Spell a grand slam in this game where word skill meets World Series. Get in the game. http://club.live.com/word_slugger.aspx?icid=word_slugger_wlhm_admod_april08 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/
