[Mati] What happens when Phedrus meets Reet the complete package. Krimel answer "can only be an intellectual formation" and you suggest only social values. Personal I think both of you missed the mark and that she has both. Joe went down and listed social or intellect.
[Krimel] My point was that in speaking Reet is intellectualizing. Whatever she is talking _about_ she is intellectualizing. She is examining her internal states and trying to express them in such a way as to create intersubjective understanding with her audience. I think part of the problem is that we do not experience "value" intellectually. We may express our "values" intellectually but that is not how we experience them. Here is an example from the fourth episode of a program call the Secret Life of the Brain which if you are interested can probably be found somewhere on the internet. It describes the fate of a man whose stroke damaged the pathway between his limbic system and his frontal lobe. As a result he is no longer aware of his emotions. He can no longer "feel" joy or sadness, fear or empathy even though in some instances his body expresses the autonomic reactions that emotions produce. Among the problems this creates for him is an inability to make decisions. Since he has no emotional investment in the outcome of his choices he is unable to make them. I think this illustrates beautifully the fallacy of the idea that science or any other human discipline can be value free and function at all. Again Pirsig points in the right direction but misses the mark when he says: "For years we've read about how values are supposed to emanate from some location in the 'lower' centers of the brain. This location has never been clearly identified. The mechanism for holding these values is completely unknown. No one has ever been able to add to a person's values by inserting one at this location, or observed any changes at this location as a result of a change of values. No evidence has been presented that if this portion of the brain is anesthetized or even lobotomized the patient will make a better scientist as a result because all his decisions will then be 'value-free.' Yet we're told values must reside here, if they exist at all, because where else could they be?" It is emotional valance, attraction or repulsion, which ultimately tells us whether something is good or bad, right or wrong. The recently evolved intellectual functions serve mainly as a check and balance against acting on emotion alone. The expansion of the human cortex gives us not so much "fee will" as "free won't". It allows us to override our emotions and act based on a more thoughtful analysis of past experience. I realize this is a bit tangential to your point but I wanted to get it off my chest anyway. [Mati] That by introducing MOQ as a metaphysical foundation as a better metaphysical approach, would not spill into fields such as anthology, and that MOQ should have application potential in the academic research world. [Krimel] Here I don't think the MoQ is necessarily going to give us a set of new methodologies so much as is gives us a better understanding of how our methodologies work. But again I am afraid Pirsig points, but misses the point. If we begin to see the world in terms of stability and flux rather than in terms of the mental and the physical a lot of platipi die. Pirsig's mistake here is in painting DQ as "good". More often than not is the opposite of "betterness". [Mati] Reet by most standards was receptive to the question and shared her answer as a whole. What she shared was a potential blueprint of the values that make her up in response to that specific question. If I doing a more objective approach using the methodology as you suggested, my fear is that we don't get as accurate of a picture of who she is. She then is reduced to responding to a set of preordained criteria of values that may or may not represent who she really is, our quality of responses is potentially lowered, and that might be ok depending what you want to learn from Reet. But by doing that Reet fades in the objective reality, which to me is a personal disrespect to who she as a whole human. [Krimel] I think a big part of your problem here is a poorly defined question. Are you interested in Reet or in Estonia? If you are interested in Reet then the case study method is a tried and true scientific methodology. Your vaguely worded question certainly produced free association which has a long history in the psychoanalytic tradition. But how is an in depth portrait of any individual supposed to tell you much about the future of a country? How many such individuals will you need to personally "respect" in order to have data that can generalize to the population at large? It is hard to argue with statistical methods that do disrespect hordes of individuals in an effort to see commonalities in their opinions or better yet ignores them altogether and looks at what they actually do in terms of rates of employment, patterns of purchasing, and other economic indicators. If you want to come up with new methods that is a beautiful thing but it is only going to work if you can show that the new methods produce better results than the old ones. On that score I would have to say your committee was right. 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/
