Hi DMB,
DMB said: > Matt's position is lot more like the positivist's objection than the mystic's > objection. It is just a philosophological fact that the analytic tradition > grows out of this logical positivism and that's exactly where Matt's > intellectual heroes are coming from. Steve: Doesn't Pirsig come out of the same tradition? Pirsig was steeped in but later rejected the "scientific" mindset and so did Rorty. Rorty got really good at using analytic tools before figuring out that the whole game was rigged and rejecting it along with the "scientific" mindset. Pirsig rejected it based on eastern philosophy. Rorty rejected it based on American pragmatism. That's the difference. DMB: "Logical positivism's critera for 'meaningfulness' were pure metaphysics, he thought." By contrast, the MOQ "says that values are not outside of the experrience that logical postivism limits itself to. Steve: No disagreement from Rorty here. Positivism had been licked within philosophy departments long before Pirsig entered the scene. Pirsig's importance is in confronting the fact that though positivism was discreditted as bad philsophy, it continued and continues to be used in other areas of inquiry. DMB: They are the ESSENCE of this experience. Values are MORE empirical, in fact, than subjects or objects." (Emphasis is Pirsig's.) Steve: I understand the anti-Platonism going on here that motivates Pirsig to say this. Radical empiricism is a better more thorough-going empiricism and useful in conversations with empiricists. But once this teaching has taken you across that river, why carry it around with you? Once you've dropped all that "sense data" empiricism, why argue anymore about what is more or less empirical? The Buddha resides as comfortably in a motorcycle as at the top of a mountain. How can anything experienced be more experiential than anything else that is experienced? How can the low quality of sitting on a hot stove be any more empirical than the low quality of a bad idea? DMB: > Before I bring this to bear on the issue, here is a restatement of the issue > as I understand it: There is more to reality than just talk but we can only > talk about reality under a description so all of it is still just talk. Steve: The "just" reveals your distaste. Philosophy is a linguistic practice. It isn't out of touch with reality. It can't take you closer to or further from reality. It is already part of reality. DMB: > Yesterday I tried to show how the assumptions of subject-object metaphysics > could be seen in Rorty's position, even as he was denying the possibility of > objective knowledge. "They [Fish's idea of pragmatists] believe with Richard > Rorty that 'things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not > include mental states' - the world, in short, is 'out there' - Steve: That "the world is out there" bit doesn't sound like Rorty. I've only read him to use "out there" to poke fun at Platonists. DMB: but they also believe that the knowledge we have of the world is not give by it [the world], but by men and women who are hazarding descriptions within the vocabularies and paradigms that arein place and in force in their cultures. Those descriptions are judged to be true or false, accurate and inaccurate, according to measures and procedures that currently have epistemic authority, and not according to their fit with the world as it exists independently of any description." Steve: This bit is the "myth of the given" notion that Rorty (who I think would want to avoid the "of the world" tag on to knowledge) and I assume you would like to dispell. Or did you mean to disagree with that last bit? DMB: "While there surely is such a world, our only access to it, Rorty and Margolis say, is through our own efforts to apprehend it. Margolis: 'Th > e real world ... is not a construction of mind or Mind ... but the paradigm > of knowledge or science is certainly confined to the discursive power of the > human.'" (Stanley Fish quoting Rorty and Margolis and explaining their > neopragmatic position.) Steve: Do you oppose the common sense notion that you are in the world? I think we can keep that notion without falling back into SOM so long as this notion isn't used as metaphysics. If it is a tool for using reality rather than a way of getting at what reality really is there is nothing wrong with saying the above as a denial of idealism as well as scientific realism. DMB: > If Rorty and Margolis are saying that knowledge is confined to the discursive > and Matt is saying that philosophy is confined to the things that can be put > under a description, then they are all saying the same thing. Nobody here > will be surprised by the claim that Matt follows Rorty of course but I'm > trying to show you both why following Rorty means not following Pirsig, > especially on these issues. The demand that everything in our philosophies be > defined is exactly how the "Good" became subservient to the "True" in the > first place. Steve: I have never heard Rorty or Matt making a demand that everything must be defined or saying that anything can ever be definitively defined. In fact, I think that they wold both agree with Pirsig that there are no theoretical limits on what number of descriptions that can be created and that there is no non-arbitrary way to crown any particular one description af the essence of thing. You said, "Matt is saying that philosophy is confined to the things that can be put under a description." Everything can be put under a description, can't it? What is Matt leaving out of bounds for philosphy in saying this? If you say DQ, you've just put DQ under a description. You've paradoxically described it as something that cannot be described. I don't think that you should be disagreeing that Quality can't be described after Pirsig spent so much time describing it. It is undefined because it is inexhaustably describable. No definition can capture its essence. But the only limits to the possibility for new and better descriptions of Quality are our own imaginations. DMB: This neopragmatic emphasis on discourse and vocabularies and their insistence that we can only have reality UNDER a description is very simpatico with the way Plato's dialectics put pressure on the Sophists to define their undefined Good. Steve: We can have reality in all sorts of ways, but we can only describe it with words. (Unless you have another way?) DMB: His demand for intelligibility from the Rhapsodes and other artists was also a way to denigr > ate the ineffable aspects of reality. Steve: What demand for intelligibility? DMB: The dialectic squeezes such things out and thereby eliminates everything that can't be rationally defined. And so does this insistence that we can only talk about reality as it is under a description. Steve: How can you say something about reality without describing it? DMB: It re-asserts the original problem that the MOQ is trying to fix. The MOQ wants the true to be subservient to the good, not the other way around. In terms of the MOQ, that means DQ is the primary empirical reality and static intellectual quality is a species of the good that follows from and is subservient to DQ. Steve: This subservience notion doesn't sound pragmatic to me. I'm not sure it is all that Pirsigian either. DQ and SQ are two sides of the same coin. Quality is an empty jug. Its inside and outside define one another. Neither needs to bow down to the other in "subservience." Best, Steve 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/md/archives.html
