I can sense the weariness in people's sentences. Since I've been gone so long, with my fresher legs I'll tag myself in for a moment (though with my own axe to grind).
Bo said: James suggested a metaphysics of a dynamic something ahead of static subjects and objects, Phaedrus (of ZAMM) did the same but called the first part Quality, the second (S & O) part he called "intellectual Quality" (the first MOQ's only level). Matt: This is your own interpolation, Bo. I have no problem in people taking a machine and fixing it up to their own specifications, and you've up front before about your desire to rectify a shift from ZMM to Lila (in favor of ZMM), but as a simple scholastic issue, this is wrong as a reading of ZMM, and therefore any perceived authority you derive from Pirsig's earlier text is fallacious and any sense in which this might serve as an agreeable premise for getting people to follow your line of thought suffers until you unpack why you should deviate from Pirsig's own sense of what he was doing in the first book, let alone the second. I might be mistaken--it has been awhile since I've done scholastic digging in Pirsig. But the prima facie rebuttal is that, if the "first MOQ" had a level it was the classic/romantic one. Bo said: >From this "diagram fallacy" the mis-conception of a Quality/ MOQ metaphysics >springs, where Quality is the real thing with the MOQ some theoretical play >with words. This is positively wrong Quality is intrinsically part of the >MOQ. Another "fast one" is Pirsig's statement that SOM splits a pre-existing >reality the S/O way. Matt: I will grant you one thing--the sense that there is a reality that sits there waiting for us to split it up is something that Hilary Putnam made fun of as the "cookie-cutter view" of reality, and what Donald Davidson said was the third dogma of empiricism, the scheme/content distinction, which we should give up. I agree with Putnam and Davidson, so I see a tension between some of Pirsig's empiricism rhetoric and the Quality metaphor he wants to birth (if one focuses on Quality, one can easily dispense with the empiricism). However, that also means that Pirsig was right that SOM makes the first split of reality with S/O. On my reading, Pirsig unfortunately agrees with the previous tradition that there is an unconceptualized reality that is waiting there for us to conceptualize it any particular way we want to. (This may appear, at first blush, as one more "linguistic philosophy fallacy" that DMB shudders at, but I think once one dispenses with this reality/conceptualized-reality distinction in favor of the panrelationalism that is Quality's true progeny, one will treat language/intellect as one facet of reality-interaction, and not as a dirty cousin, as the direct/indirect distinction often leads one.) If there is any truth to your often weirdly put claim that the MoQ is reality (or, at least, that's how people often parody it), it is that language isn't something we can just put down to interact with reality (Quality) directly. Language doesn't get in the way of reality, it is just one way of interacting with it. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®: Chat. Store. Share. Do more with mail. http://windowslive.com/howitworks?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_hm_justgotbetter_howitworks_012009 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/
