Gav said:
hey dmb, how are ya kiddo? and a howdy to all you fine people out there in moq
land. i have been on hiatus, whatever that means
dmb says:
Yea, I took a break too. Just came back a week or two ago after a few months
off.
gav said:
and now for the point. what is of value to the intellectual level? is it
truth? i don't think it is - truth seems more like a social pattern, in keeping
with ideology etc...or maybe we need to define 'truth' a bit more precisely
dmb says:
They both have their versions of truth. I mean, as far as I can see the
critiques of ideology don't make the social-intellectual distinction. As it
happens we were reading Terry Eagleton's "What is Ideology", wherein he
discussed a whole range of theories and they all seem to construe the
social-intellectual distinction as a matter of power versus truth rather than
social values versus intellectual values. I think Pirsig's distinction would be
tremendously helpful in this area. But anyway, around here truth is the
pragmatic truth. It's provisional, self-correcting and grounded out in actual
experience. Truth and falsity are what happens to an idea in the course of
experience. It's contextual and perspectival but reality, which is to say
experience, has a way of keeping us honest and that's what prevents the MOQ
from being a relativism.
Gav said:
a la hesse in glass bead game, the highest activity of reason seems to be the
most elegant demonstrations of conceptual interrelatedness. at the intellectual
level truth becomes the truth of relativity.
i think there is another function too. at the intellectual level the search
for truth becomes internalised. at the social level, truth is the truth of
society - one size fits all. at the intellectual level, via the nullifying
effect of relativity, the search for truth becomes personal.
dmb says:
Well, I just spent a week making a case against relativism so I gotta disagree.
Disagree with the personal thing too. Kuhn, for example, who is usually cited
in support of the revolutionary scientist, says that innovations actually come
out of science teams and the history of science shows that very little progress
occurs except when there is first a long sustained period of consensus when
everybody is more or less on the same page. As he would put it, successful
divergent thinking almost always springs from successful convergent thinking.
In other words, it takes a lot of discipline to be creative in the sciences.
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