Steve, Matt, n'all ... Matt had said that it "isn't clear to me how the distinction between know-how and knowing-that gets what some people seem to want out of the notion of "pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality."
I agree, but it's clear that it is an interesting distinction to work with, to see if we can clarify some useful notions. In fact this whole response from Steve, I sympathize with: "I was hoping this distinction might be helpful in understanding Pirsig's intellectual level from a different angle than symbol manipulation, and I think it does help. For example, John has been saying that intelligence is not only something that applies to intellectual patterns but also to biological patterns as well. I disagree, but I would at this point say that knowledge-how occurs at all levels but knowledge-that is what we mean by Pirsig's intellect. Of course knowledge-that is a sort of knowledge-how because it enables new behaviors, so we don't need to distinguish between knowledge-how and knowledge that within the intellectual level. But if we are taking about knowledge-that we are definitely talking about the intellectual level. (As I've said many times before, if we are talking about rationales for behavior rather than about a behavior itself, we are also most definitely talking about intellect even though rationalizing is itself a behavior.)" It's that circularity in intellectual (rationalizing) actions actually being behaviours that has always intrigued me (and prevented total agreement with Bo on the "SO" level interpretation). It's my memetic evolution (Hofstader & Dennett) angle - thinking behaviour needs level-shifting circularity to evolve ... otherwise it's static. A how-that cycle. In fact the intellectual is about the behaviour of thinking "how we know that" ... where know-how meets know-that. That is "how we know that" as a question, not a rhetorical construction, with the emphasis on the "do" .... very like the title of my blog, it occurs to me .. spooky. There is something in this, and I do believe that the radical empiricist (cutting edge) has something to do with know-that ... in this context. Regards Ian PS, I'm interested again Steve ;-) Circularity is BETTER than logical definitions. 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
