I just have a few scattered, fairly uninteresting remarks on posts from Steve, Mary, and Ian--
Matt said: The question is: since inferential thinking can continue on indefinitely, how is it that we stop? Habits of satisfaction, conclusions to problems we are pleased with, was my answer--these habits take on something we could call "authority." Mary said: Excellent! For example, at the Social level, the patterns stop where the priests say they do. At the Intellectual level, the patterns of inferential thinking continue until we reach a logical conclusion based on best evidence. Matt: That's still not quite what I'm suggesting. On the view I'm suggesting, the authority of the priests and the authority of "evidence" are on a par. One, however, works better than the other for a lot of things, and so one "terminal of satisfaction/authority" has been on the rise as a well-used train station (since about the 17th century). On the view I'm suggesting, the intellectual level is identified as "thinking," and additionally "thinking" is taken to be paradigmatically as inferential. There is no "thinking" at the social level on this model, and perhaps my saying "inferential thinking" was leading to this confusion. One could blur the sense of "inference" I'm using (as I think you did earlier Mary) to extend it down to what animals do, too, but this model only works if you don't. I don't have anything in particular against suggesting that animals make inferences, except that this is an attribution on our part to them and that what we are doing is so excessively more complex that it's handy to have a few distinctions in place between the kind of thought-process a tiger has and the kind a language-user has. On this model, social patterns become patterns of satisfaction, or "thought-stopping." Because of the nature of inferential thinking, in which one could continue on indefinitely any series of thoughts by--for instance--asking for definitions of individual terms used so far in the thought-process, the idea of a "logical conclusion" is a shibboleth: we could _always_ continue the train of thought. Yet we don't--we stop, become satisfied to call something a "conclusion." The example of asking for definitions of words, a process that just leads you to more words that could have definitions asked for, is a clear illustration of something I think is internal to inference generally. If one thinks about how formal logic works, or geometry, you can't make any kind of argument without first premises to deduct conclusions from. These premises, however, are assumptions, assumed without argument. One could turn to these assumptions, each individually, and ask what reasons form the pattern of why we should understand them to be true and used as assumed premises. But, then, to give those reasons would involve one in another argument--instead now what was formerly an assumption is now the conclusion you wish to reach: and this means you are required to have premises. (For a brief attempt to explicate this general line of thought about inference and how it works, see my "A Spatial Model of Belief Change": http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html). Let me also add that I think this model as at cross-purposes with Steve's account of the levels as intellectual-as-rationale-for-behavior and social-as-behavior. I like Steve's approach, but the above model is restricting "behavior," or action, to the biological level. And I have no definite thoughts about integrating them, conflict between them, or the relative utility of either of them. Steve said: I have read others to be taking intellectual patterns that become a part of the dominant worldview to have actually become social patterns and to have ceased to e intellectual patterns, while in fact ALL intellectual patterns are social. I think a better reading of Pirsig's MOQ is to think of such intellectual patterns that become widely accepted as having gained a certain sort of social quality that other ideas may not have, and I think a good "quality word" in this case is indeed "authority." Matt: I think the model I'm suggesting wouldn't admit to "all intellectual patterns are social." I think what is at issue between Steve's account and the one I'm kicking out there is two different understandings of the distinctness clause, two different understandings of how the levels fit together. To supply spatial metaphors for them, Steve's is a circle structure, in which--to vary Pirsig's model in the SODV paper--DQ is the "negative space" (in the artistic term's sense) outside the whole apparatus, then we get the biggest circle inside of which is Inorganic, then a little distance in we get a second circle (inside the first) inside of which is Biological, then a third Social, and a fourth Intellectual, so that the Intellectual is a small circle inside of Social, which is a slightly larger circle inside of Biological, inside of Inorganic, all floating in the unbounded space of DQ. My model's metaphor would be a chain, in which the Inorganic link hooks to the Biological link which hooks to the Social link which hooks to the Intellectual--and notice that the Intellectual link hooks neither to the Inorganic or Biological. The upshot of this is a focusing on Pirsig's thought that you can't leap levels--it offers a specific interpretation of what that means. On the other hand, a perfect integration of the two would be on the spatial metaphor of a circular pyramid--the circular model (which I think is more faithful to Pirsig's vision) would be seen that way because one was directly over top of it, looking down, whereas if you just shifted your perspective, you'd see a climbing pyramidal staircase. Now, I think the accounting Steve is offering makes moves to this 3-D picture (though I can't recall the specific kind of verbiage used), but my account is definitely focused on a specific perspective of accounting. The trick for everyone, whether they like Steve's model or not, is to be able to integrate two seperate thoughts: 1) the levels participate in each other and 2) the levels are seperate from each other. This is an interesting balancing act. One was an account like this (one I offered years ago, influenced by Scott Roberts): Inorganic level - non-replicating persistence (e.g., rocks) Biological level - replicating persistence (e.g., cells) Social level - non-linguistic semiotic behavior (e.g., tigers) Intellectual level - linguistic semiotic behavior (e.g., humans) Because I've only occasionally be concerned with getting Pirsig's vision straight before extending a few core principals of his (and mine), there was also a fifth level (based on the principle of distinctness, and influenced by Sam Norton): Eudaimonic level - autonomous behavior (e.g., citizens of democracies) To get this model to work, I think you might have to tinker with it a little (for instance, I think I would now want to rename the fifth level and describe it as "autonomous linguistic semiotic behavior (e.g., strong poets)," but that's neither here nor there at the moment). The upshot is that the first four levels are, I think, roughly what Steve is suggesting: "semiotic" is roughly a stand-in for "symbolic," which means that when Steve, following a principle of Pirsig's in the "Letter to Paul Turner," identifies Social with "symbols" and Intellectual with "manipulation of symbols," he's saying something very similar to the above. The only sticky-wicket is what to do with language (which is pretty much the wicket we all have different ideas about): Steve's stipulated language as Social in origins (if I'm not mistaken). Even if he hasn't, it is something I'm partial to in other moods--we have to understand language as inherently social in some sort of manner. Clearly I stuck language in the Intellectual Level above (and the idea of "semiosis" was supposed to integrate sociality), but I also have no qualms about endlessly adding levels based on demand--four is nicely symmetrical, but as Pirsig said in ZMM, just because a metaphysical triad is awkward doesn't mean it isn't true: symmetry isn't everything. There are many ways (I'm seeing them proliferate before my eyes) of registering Wittgenstein's insight that language-use is a social phenomenon and not a Platonic bit of magic with Pirsig's metaphysics of levels: that's another thing I would insist on for all gerrymandering Pirsigian metaphysicians. You have to account for the fact that language is social and shared, and not a private tool of picturing your own mind. If you don't, I think one falls into Platonism, the kind Pirsig wanted to avoid (just picture the Subject trying to match up with the Object). Steve said: As I understand and agree with you, authority may be a good word to describe the interaction between the social and intellectual level since it is a social pattern that applies to socially well-accepted justifications (intellectual patterns) as well as to social role-playing patterns. Intellectual patterns that get translated into action must have the social value pattern of authority. Matt: The last sentence gets my account exactly right. (The really mind-boggling thing comes in when I also stress that "action" includes "noises humans makes," i.e. language. This means that the words we say are bio-actions--indeed, dare I say, the neurons firing in our brain that parallels every thought are _also_ bio-actions. This makes my simple chain-metaphor much messier, though it makes strides towards the interrelatedness that the chain picture tries to avoid.) I also think "social role-playing patterns" is a very good locution. Steve said: Another perhaps more Pirsigian and certainly simpler answer to your question--"since inferential thinking can continue on indefinitely, how is it that we stop?"-- is simply that that some arguments get selected over others and acted upon based on undefined quality. I think this is what he was getting at with the talk about how the number of hypotheses to explain a given result keeps expanding. How do we generate new ones, where do they come from, and how do we select from among all the possibilities to decide which ones to test? I think his answer was simply undefined quality. Matt: I'm not so sure about this. I think we need to think of DQ as an initial burst of inspiration, but not as an always-explanation. It's mystifying, for one thing: "Why did you do that?" "Oh, I was following an undefined quality." You can _always_ answer that way, and you can _always_ think it was true, even though your conversation partners will eventually come to think you're full of shit and don't think about why you do anything. So I would hold from saying "more Pirsigian"--it's simpler, sure, but not always true. Pirsig wanted to get at why we can't always trail back in our heads to why we do something--sometimes, you just can't. Sometimes you want to test a hypothesis, though you aren't really sure what gave you the idea or what it's quality will be--that's the DQ-inspiration. The static-latching is what happens when, upon repeated use through continued experimentation, the initially inspired, out-of-nowhere experiment pulls through and continues to be useful, continues to show its quality through merit. What is unstated in Pirsig is the difference between self-description and third-person-description. We are not always right about ourselves--self-description can only get you so far, and just because someone says, "I have no idea why I did that" while truly meaning it, does not mean that they are right--other people always have the option of describing their behavior differently. So, from the first-person point of view, we seem to be constantly having DQ-inspirations, and that because there's only so much we can know about ourselves. But from the point of view of others--including historians and biographers painting stories about behaviors of individual people for many millennia to come--we can sometimes know much more. I find this idea in Pirsig in his Indeterminancy of DQ thesis--the idea that only with the passage of time will we find out if a given, inspired action like the Brujo's is Dynamic Quality or degenerate. This ambiguity in Pirsig is enough that we should posit a distinction between two kinds of Dynamic Quality: Individual-DQ and Historical-DQ. The former is what we as individuals respond to, but the latter is what the historians describe in their stories of the evolution of the species. For example, one of the questions that "undefined quality" is to answer was "how do we select from among all the possibilities to decide which ones to test?" From the level of scientific hypotheses, sometimes it seems quite pertinent to say "undefined quality," because sometimes you just have a flier of an idea, but most of the time your choices are severely contained and restricted by the kind of experiment you've already decided to do (Pirsig glosses over this kind of restriction in ZMM in order to pursue a distinctly philosophical question). However, when the "possibility" we are deciding on is the form of life known as "modern science," when it's the choice between Aristotle and Galileo, then it seems _very_ pertinent to say Dynamic Quality _even though Galileo had a lot to say about why his way was better_. The thing historians of science like Thomas Kuhn have found is that Galileo's answers weren't demonstrably good answers at the time--they only _became_ good answers through passage of time, as the experiment of "modern scientific experimentation" continued to deliver the goods. What's more, we've come to find that the explanations about why the New Science was better than Thomistic understandings of the universe--with a lot of talk about the faculty of Reason--are _not_ very good reasons at all, that there was in fact, unbeknownst to most at the time, something else going on. _Why_ everybody individually jumped on board isn't why we should _stay_ on board today. There are different reasons now, and we often say in retrospect that our predecessors only glimpsed dimly what we see clearly (as Pirsig pays homage to Whitehead). We can look back and see all sorts of figures that had very little Individual-DQ (because they had a lot of definition to their quality), but quite a bit of Historical-DQ: the mystery of History and how a lot of people can be Agents of Quality (or Spirit, as Hegel would have said) without even knowing it. Ian said: Firstly the fact that social and intellectual are NOT simply distinct and hierarchical is not any one person's idea (all ideas evolve - Pirsig). Steve's original point about one paralysing the other IF that were the case, whenever we needed to make any decision is the origin of my whole agenda incidentally - it was dubbed "analysis paralysis" many decades ago - not something I or anyone else invented. Matt: I'm sorry, Ian, but I'm really yawning at this comment. When I attributed a "first time I ever heard that" to Steve (who graciously passed it to Wim), I was being much to specific to refer to something called "analysis paralysis"--I was talking about the narrow field of "Pirsig studies," not the whole course of intellectual history. I have no idea sometimes why you feel the need for saying things like this, like to become metaphilosophical and suggest "no idea is any one person's idea." Because I'm pretty sure Steve and I, at the least, are well aware of the theoretical point about process and the sociality of thinking. And I, for one, still find utility in the notion of "invention." Knowing too much history can give a person a sense that "there are no new ideas," but this is just a lie bred by the mind's ability to assimilate the new into the old (and the old into the new). All ideas evolve, sometimes old ones die and new ones are born, and we all put our own unique impress on an "idea" as "it" is passed from person to person through communication, but in my line of work, I still feel the need to use a notion like "genius" to refer to people who left a bigger impression on ideas than the other people. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390709/direct/01/ 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/
