Hi Steve,
There're two bits to this post: the first long bit is an
extrapolation of an idea that Steve has. I think Steve
has a powerful new interpretation of Pirsig (and I'm not
sure he knows it). The second short bit at the end is
about stories and theories (and the desirability of not
just the latter, but the former, too).
Steve said:
Intellectual patterns could never eliminate social patterns
since if we had to first justify every action before acting
we would be paralyzed.
Matt:
My problem with the social/intellectual distinction has
always been unhappiness with the proposals for
distinguishing the two. I think you have a fairly radical
interpretation on your hands, more radical than I think
you think. Your sentence is fairly blithe, in an
argumentative pattern that suggests we have a lot of
this area locked down and we just need to extrapolate a
few well-known things and clarification will ensue. If ever
it were so simple.
However much I don't think Pirsig is clear on any of this,
the second half of your sentence suggests a very cunning
idea that I've never seen applied to Pirsig before. If
intellectual patterns are patterns of inference (used to
justify), the implications of your simple statement, I think,
look something like this:
1) actions occur at the biological level.
2) thoughts occur at the intellectual level.
3) a train of thought can continue on indefinitely.
4) for actions to walk out at the end of a train of thought,
the train must at some point terminate.
5) because trains of thought can continue on indefinitely,
something must be able to intercede.
6) what intercedes are social patterns.
7) social patterns are to be interpreted as "terminals of
satisfaction" on the track of thought.
8) a well-used terminal (where trains stop) accrues what
we call "authority" the more trains it is able to stop.
There are a lot of other things we might pile on top of
this skeletal interpretation, but I think it is fairly radical
when it comes to how I've seen most people interpret the
MoQ. 1) it adds a tremendous amount of missing flesh on
how the patterns interact on an individual level; 2) it
electrocutes the too-simple comparisons of cultures via
MoQ-levels by showing that all individual people function
at all levels all the time--cultural troubles are complex
interrelations of _particular_ tracks of thought,
_particular_ terminals of authority, and _particular_
walkways of action; 3) it gives a lot to think about to
those who think others think "too socially" or "too
authoritatively"--on this interpretation, these epithets
have to be handed in because we all think intellectually
(thinking being defined as inference), and all thoughts
must pass through a social-authority matrix to turn into
action (every action our bodies produce speaks to it), but
bad patterns at any particular level can be replaced by
better ones (at least that would be the pay-off for using
this interpretation--handing in sterile Enlightenment
intellectual patterns of "reason v. tradition" or "reason
v. passion"). I made some overtures towards
interpreating "social as authority" and "intellectual as
inferential" in an essay some years ago, but I never made
the connection of action-output as biological pattern,
which completes an interaction-model (it was "Pirsig
Institutionalized" in endnote 6 as part of my specialized
application of it to the idea of "philosophology":
http://www.moq.org/forum/Kundert/pirsiginstitutionalized/pirsiginstitutionalized.html#_edn6).
I think you should strongly think about developing a
systematic rendition of your interpretation. You've lately
been on the warpath for enforcing correct readings of
what Pirsig means (or at least, recognition of which is
which), and doing the latter would greatly aid us all, in
addition to providing the needed contrast for the former,
which I think would aid Pirsigian interpretation generally.
Steve said:
Intellectual patterns are copied unconsciously but can
also be copied consciously. I think that the unconscious
copying is how intellectual patterns become widely
followed within a community. When justify our behavior,
we are consciously thinking (a near tautology by your
assertion that rationales are the paradigm of conscious
behavior) but unconsciously applying patterns of thought
that were copied unconsciously.
...
We don't generally think about whether this pattern of
thought called the transitive property is actually justified.
We just apply it and jump from premise to conclusion and
behave accordingly.
Matt:
I think you might have two slightly different insights on
your hands here. In the first part, I think you're talking
about the assumptions we make in motivating inference.
In your example, an unconscious assumption would be
"'Bob' refers to that funny looking dude standing next to
Ann." That's assumed in the actual inferential thought
"if Bob is taller than Ann and Ann is taller than Jane then
Bob is taller than Jane." This, I think, is right and
well-enough referred to as "unconscious," though it could
also be referred to as "habitual" (and dare I say, I think
it might also count as "pre-intellectual").
The second part after the ellipsis, though, is slightly
different, though still "unconscious" in the requisite
sense. First we take inferential thought to be epitomized
as "thinking about X," where whatever the object of
thought is (which is a symbol for whatever it is your simply
thinking about) jumps into the X. The steps in any
inferential pattern might be visualized as points on a
graph. The points at the outskirts of the pattern we think
of as "assumptions," points with lines extending inwards
(to form the pattern), but not outwards (which would
thus enlarge what we are seeing as "the pattern"). The
assumptions form the unconscious barriers, or outline, of
what we are able to conceive conceptually/inferentially.
This is the first kind of unconscious part of thinking. There
is a second, though, and that's the _form_ of the
inferential pattern, the particular kinds of lines that are
drawn between various points within "the pattern." Not
all lines that _could_ be drawn are legitimate, we say,
based on the rules of logic we've been learning through
the centuries. (E.g., Point "P" cannot have a line drawn
to Point "not P" because that would violate the law of
non-contradiction.) The form of inference, like the
assumptions that motivate inference, can itself become
an object of thought. In this case, "thinking about X"
becomes specifically "thinking about thinking."
So I think I understand what you mean by the
unconscious picking up of intellectual patterns now. It's
the copying of an intellectual pattern because it does
something satisfying, though the particular intellectual
pattern you are copying was not itself the object of
thought. This distinction can be dizzying, but we can
think of it with the form/content distinction I used above.
The points are the content that are the objects of thought
(all within the outline). The lines between them are the
form of the pattern. The form is not simply a function of
logic. Rather, as Pirsig taught us, logic (or dialectic) is but
one part of rhetoric. The form is rhetorical in nature (which
makes inference itself generally rhetorical). And as a
simple example of an unconscious copying of intellectual
patterns, we can just think of the picking up of habits of
speech or turns of phrase. An unconscious emulation of
the _style_ of writing of a thinker we admire happens
often, particularly with the young (at heart). (One can
simply point to the abysmal writing of a cadre of American
English professors who'd read too much Heidegger and
Derrida when they were in graduate school back in the
70s and 80s.)
We might add another example that is probably even
more common: conscious copying would be picking up of
the internal points of content _because_ of the lines
drawn between them--copying based on _argument_.
However, what is not argued for are the assumptions--they
have to be taken as given for the discourse to begin (as a
shout-out for Ron, this would be what Aristotle probably
meant by "arche"--not ahistorical "principles," but
pragmatic "starting points"). These assumptions are the
"frame" around which "things" (the points) are seen--quite
literally: without the frame there are no things. So, in a
lot of ways, to pick up thoughts based on arguments is to
unconsiously take on the frame the arguments are based
on (this is not bad, but just a fact of life). And even
further, this "frame" might become habitual for a lot of
one's other thinking, even when not based out of the
consciously picked up points/arguments--it might, based
on the utility of the points/arguments, eventually become
your frame in general.
Steve said:
I'm not saying that the date of emergence question
needs to be unasked because the answer is mu. I'm
saying that the question needs to be unasked or not
asked so frequently or obsessively since the answer is
probably unknowable and because there is a more
relevent way to think about the evolution of patterns of
value.
Matt:
I don't think I understand why you want to say this.
First, I concede about avoidance of obsession. But
"probably unknowable" doesn't make sense to me on
pragmatic grounds--all narratives of making sense of the
past are constructed from whatever materials we have
lying around and all of them are justified in the same way.
Our levels of _certainty_ may differ, but too it matters in
judging the utility of these narratives what we want out of
the narrative. And in the case of when we moved from
being merely social to additionally intellectual, I see it as
neither mystifyingly unknowable or distractingly useless.
In fact, I think these narratives are extraordinarily
important in defining what the hell we are talking about
with the phrases "social patterns" and "intellectual
patterns." Because if you can't tell a Darwinian story
about how these things you've demarcated as subsisting
were created, then you are in the dangerous territory of
having created an entity like "consciousness" (which
philosophers have had trouble in explaining just how that
light switch gets turned on).
In addition, explaining what you are talking about with
reference to when it arose can help immensely with
demarcating just what you are talking about. For
instance, saying that symbol manipulation began in
Greece around the 5th century BCE tells us an awful lot
about what phenomenon is being referred to. (It also tells
us an awful lot about what is possibly lacking in such a
definition of "symbol manipulation.") So when you say, "I
also think that if we all agree that the first intellectual
pattern occurred on such and such a date, we would still
have little idea about what is meant by a social pattern as
opposed to an intellectual pattern," I disagree entirely. I
think telling a story about an X is just as important to giving
life to an X as explicitly defining an X. And with reference to
Pirsig, putting the story together with the theory gives us a
definition of intellectual pattern as coinciding with the slogan
"symbol manipulation is philosophy." This creates enormous
headaches for people trying to fit in where "language" fits in
the theory.
You also say that you "don't think that picking a moment in
time for the occurence of the first intellectual pattern is
important especially since this same evolution of patterns
occurs every day as biological babies begin to participate in
social patterns and later begin to participate in intellectual
patterns." This inference, between how babies learn, say,
language to how language evolved historically isn't
necessarily a safe inference. An advanced culture might
have learned quite a few new tricks in reproducing itself
that weren't available when it was climbing out of the muck.
I suspect it has.
Matt
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