To everyone who get's excited by my massive avoidance issues (one might say "intimacy"):
I think someone suggested the other day that I confused two different senses of "metaphysics." There's also, of course, the nagging question about the "linguistic turn" and lingering SOM assumptions. I found this about Donald Davidson (I use his argument, though he isn't referenced here, but the following paragraph), and it has a bit about tigers. I like tigers. I thought I'd keep the "greatest hits" loop going in case anybody cares. (The whole essay, "What Is Metaphysics?," is an extended movement through objections and different senses of words and stuff. It can be a pretty tedious, and is not expository.) It begins a little in media res, but hopefully isn't too hard to get a handle on. "The fear of floating down the path laid out by metaphysics(1), an investigation into the ways in which we understand the world, is roughly the fear of subjectivism and of losing touch with the world. On the one hand, can we really lay out the basic model of reality by turning inward to the way that we, _I_, understand my relation to the world? Wouldn’t that just lay bare, simply and only, _my_ relation to the world, leaving dark how everybody else deals with it, let alone how reality actually is? And there we have the other hand: if we just tinker and toy with our understanding of reality, doesn’t that still leave us the question of how our understanding relates to reality, and the question of how reality is (as opposed to how we understand it)? "The fear of losing touch with the world specifically arises with the snide comment: 'You seem to want to talk about _how we talk about reality_, but I want to talk about _reality_.' This is often punctuated by referencing, for example, the difference between tigers and talking about tigers. When confronted by a ravenous Bengal, wouldn’t it be better to know about tigers, rather than how National Geographic talks about tigers? While on the one hand, there is a very obvious difference between tigers and talk about tigers (one is a tiger, the other is talk) that no one is denying, on the other hand, consider for a moment the fact that, if you actually did know quite a bit about how National Geographic and other professionals talk about tigers, you would also, concurrently, know a lot about tigers—how couldn’t you? Is it possible to somehow learn a lot about the activities of zoologists without learning _anything_ about what they study? "What I want to suggest is that the fear of losing touch with reality because we are focused on something other than reality, how we talk about or our understanding of reality, shouldn’t be all that strong a fear because, under normal circumstances, the two will almost always dovetail. The reason for this is, in fact, the same reason for why the subjectivist fear is misplaced also. The fear of subjectivism arises because we take Descartes’ fear of solipsism too seriously. The fact of the matter is, though, that none of us are isolated monads floating in this soup called 'Reality.' There are, in fact, quite a few of us monads floating in the soup and we’ve learned how to communicate with each other about our hopes and dreams, and more importantly for this little dissertation, how we are getting on in the soup. As we communicate with each other, coordinate our actions and the like, if what I believed about reality didn’t coordinate in large measure with what the other person believed about reality, then the communication would fail entirely. Random anomalous communication might be taken to be mistakes (like malaprops), but more systematic anomalies might be taken to be different languages, with attendant 'difficulties in translation' for persistent anomalies (like English’s difficulty with the Greek aretê). However, more significant mismeasure between people might be labeled 'insanity' and tremendous discontinuity is likely to be referred to as 'noise.'" from http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-is-metaphysics.html Let me also add how _boring_ it is to read somebody who self-consciously distinguishes between two kinds of metaphysics in order to get straight about them. As much as I think it would be easier to ignore the problem (as many I think want to), what do we do about all the persistent miscommunications that occur because we _think_ we are using terms the same way? "This is the MD dipshit, use'em the way Pirsig did," is a common reply to my nagging doubts. But what happens when you _see_, _read_ other people hiding different definitions in their terms? Do we spank them for having thoughts of their own? What about philosophical terms Pirsig didn't use, but we want to? And how do we quickly and easily and uncontroversially decide whose definition of "how Pirsig defined his terms" to use when Pirsig wrote interesting novels and not pedantic tractatuses? Should we just king somebody? Should we promote a scorched earth policy? Is there a reasonable way to do this? Who decides what's reasonable? Am I being unreasonable? Are these rhetorical questions unreasonable? Or just the never-ending series of them? What's the best way to write about Pirsig? Matt _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/210850552/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/md/archives.html
