Hi DMB, > dmb says: > > No, as a matter of fact I quoted chapter five, where ...BUT EVEN THEN the > assertion that metaphysics is meaningless SOUNDED FALSE TO HIM. .. > > I think this shows that Pirsig's distaste for positivism goes all the way > back to his school days, but that isn't quite the point.
Steve: Yeah, it's beside the point which one rejected SOM at a younger age. My point was that they both come out of a tradition where, to paraphrase Pirsig, society hands us a set of intellectual glasses that presuppose subjects and objects. DMB: I'm trying to explain that Rorty and friends are offering a post-positivist critique of positivism. I'm saying that Rorty and friends are attacking a certain kind of empiricism. They assert the linguistic approach against traditional empiricism in general and logical empiricism in particular. See, this is just the beginning part of a larger argument about the differences between that empiricism and radical empiricism. Steve: No one is saying that radical empiricism is the same as the empiricism attacked by analytic philosphers. > Steve said: > ...Once you've dropped all that "sense data" empiricism, why argue anymore > about what is more or less empirical? 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 says: > > If you're asking about the Pirsig quote, the unloaded question is "how can > Quality be more empirical than subjects and objects?" Steve: The philosophical point for Pirsig in the quote is to debunk a "myth of the given" with regard to subjects and objects. A more thorough-going (radical) empiricism should not take the common sense notion of subjects and objects as "givens" for granted. DMB: That's what the DQ/sq distinction is all about. Conceptual, verbal reality is secondary. That doesn't mean that talking and thinking don't count as experience but this is derived from a more fundamental empirical experience. Steve: The experience that is talked or thought about is conceptualized which means that it is not itself the original experience described. I grant that in that sense it is secondary secondary. But a thought is itself also experienced directly. The experience of a thought is as "direct" as the experience of a hot stove. Neither is more primary or more empirical. That direct experience is Quality whether we are talking about the low quality of a bad idea or the low quality of sitting on a hot stove. In thinking and talking, what is secondary is only what the talk is *about* when we think about ideas as representations of experience. Pirsig wanted to show that subjects and objects fall in the latter category of ideas *about* something rather than directly experienced Quality. But once we get there, this "representations of experience" versus actual experience idea is exactly the appreance-reality dualism that we want to drop, right? So once we drop it, we also drop this primary-secondary experience idea that was helpful in getting us to see that we ought to drop the appearance-reality dichotomy. DMB: Primary and secondary experience are two kinds of experience or two elements in experience. This primary experience is said to be MORE empirical because the secondary concepts are always a small portion, a taking from or an extract of the original experience as it is had and felt. Steve: Instead of kinds of experience I prefer your "two elements in experience" or two aspects of experience--a dynamic and a static aspect. Concepts are "always a small portion." They are not all of reality. But why exclude concepts from reality as mere derivations, an "extract" as you say, from reality--as a separate and secondary reality? This sounds too much to me like the Platonic "mental realm" we want to drop. Once we have come to see intellectual patterns as part of an evolutionary story instead of as a separate "mental realm," it seems to me that we can and should dispense with all the primary/secondary teaching even though it may have helped us to get there. I don't think Pirsig wants his primary/secondary teachings or any teachings to be dogma. Once we cross the river, as the old Buddhist story goes, we don't need to keep carying the raft around with us. I think that your insistence that ideas are "secondary" is doing just that. 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
