Matt; You said that "objectivism defines 'certainty' intellectually, whereas Pirsig places 'certainty' pre-intellectually." I'd like to first point out that the phrase I asked for expansion on was about "truth-finding" and in doing so, you moved to talk about "certainty." This isn't inherently bad, all one needs to do is connect the two. However, I think very traditional, philosophical problems will arise when you do, problems we Pirsigians know of as "SOM."
Ron: Hello Matt, Typing left handed so all I am able to muster at the moment Must be short and to the point. What you state, the reservations of how objectivism relocates it's foundation On which it bases it's certainty, Renovating the structure of truth finding to have it Originate in the first person is not as unreasonable as one might think. You bring up hallucinations. The first person experience Is "true" it may not be verifiable but the experience Is real. That part is certain. Whether or not it's Verifiably certain seems to me another matter. One Which may involve objectivism to establish. The pitfall To avoid intellectually is one of objectifying experiences To define truth or certainty itself. Matt: Pirsig does, indeed, locate "certainty" pre-intellectually. This is the same move Descartes made to inaugurate modern philosophy, part of the move I called earlier the shift from talking about reality to talking about experience. I would contend that Pirsig, in Platt's most beloved passage to quote (if only because he perceives a lot of people perjuring it), is taking a stance similar to Descartes. All depending on how you perceive Descartes' relation to SOM, this could be bad. I'm going to skip this relationship because I've spent a good amount of time elsewhere exploring different angles and move straight to the problem, which is problematical whether or not Descartes is seen as the beginning of or paradigmatic of Pirsig's SOM. So, is this stance good or bad? I think the stance itself, of noting the difference between the first-person and third-person point of view (and that we all begin irrevocably from it), this was a step forward in the history of philosophy. Plato accused the Sophists of relativism for noting that "man was the measure of all things." The Greek skeptical tradition that extends out from the 5th-century BCE, beyond the Sophists, continued this opposition to what it perceived as Platonic pretensions of absolute certainty in our knowledge. Descartes performed one of the great reversals in intellectual history by taking the skepticism of the Pyhrronian tradition (whose final exemplar was Montaigne, before it lapsed in the face of the modern revolution) and turning it into a method designed to prove the existence of what it was kept around to deny--a foundation for knowledge that certified our certainty. This method involved turning inwards, to our own experience of the world, what Arlo called "the vantage point of that particular person." Descartes thought that our knowledge, _all_ of our knowledge--including God and much else--was certified because we could not doubt that we were thinking. Everybody after Descartes thought that was a stretch. But they were quite taken with this new avenue, there did seem to be something to Descartes' suggestion that everything has to begin with our own experience of the world, that there is nothing the mind knows better than itself. But what does this pan out to? Pirsig agrees with Descartes that we have absolute certainty about our experiences--when we experience the stove, we cannot be wrong that we experienced it. How far does that certainty go? After all, the person dying of dehydration in the desert is absolutely certain that he sees water. The trouble with the absolute certainty conferred by the first-person point of view is that it seems to maintain it, you also need to allow for the possibility of being wrong about that which you _were_ absolutely certain of. So what does that do for our knowledge and the truth finding process? No doubt, we cannot doubt our experience of the world in the moment of experiencing it. And it is agreed by most philosophers (and all laypeople) that knowledge and process of finding truth begins with our experience of the world. But what is the utility in placing truth in the moment of presentness if it might be false when it becomes the past in the next moment? Ron: To me, there seems to be a discrepancy from certainty and whether or Not it is true or false. Experience is experience, whether it is True or false depends on the tools you employ and therefore the Paradigm in which they operate to define the experience. The conflagration of the two seems to me to be the problem. Ron said: What greatly interested me about this was that the first cultures To develop grammar were the first to develop logic and philosophy, The Indic culture and the Greek culture respectively. Matt: I don't know about "rules" in relation to grammar or language or the intellectual level, but if you just mean that language is the DNA of the intellectual level, then I would say you are right and that understanding more about how languages function in the world, and their development and histories, will tell us something interesting and important about how we exist and function in the world. Ron: In short, I do mean that language is the DNA of the intellectual level As you say, but I'm being specific to our language and culture when I say how we create nouns influences how we intellectualize experience, Namely the abstract/concrete distinction and consequently how logical Arguments are created in our culture from this. So the two concepts do merge In this aspect and do support each other in the case I'm building. Thanks for the conversation Matt, after two weeks of being immobile This exchange is most welcome. And of course any and all suggestions On developing a case and therefore an essay on this topic is most welcome. I am prepared to demonstrate why I feel this understanding works Well with how MoQ functions to (use a Bo term) provide greater explanatory Power in practical terms to our cultural understanding. I really feel That this grammatical distinction is the functionality and keystone Of MoQ understanding. -Ron 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/
