Hi Matt, Matt: >...In this metaphor, DMB has always > thought that radical empricism is part of the meat. And > what I haven't understood is what the connection is > between these different pieces that some people like DMB > perceive as all meat, and I perceive as falling into two > piles, meat (pragmatism) and optional packaging (radical > empiricism).
Steve: I think for Pirsig radical empricism is part of the meat only because he uses it for metaphysics and to argue against tradictional sense-experience empiricism. DMB thinks it is meaty because it is good for epistemology, though I can't see how it could add anything that we don't already have in just saying that some beliefs lead to successful action and some do not. I don't think that Pirsig ever thought of radical empiricism as what gets him out of trouble for having a relativistic notion of truth... Pirsig in Lila: "James would probably have been horrified to find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phædrus didn't see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the Metaphysics of Quality's classification of static patterns of good prevents this kind of debasement." I can't see how radical empiricism could get you moral clarity and any arguments to make against Nazis, and it seems that Pirsig couldn't either. Pirsig thought his evolutionary theory of value patterns rather than radical empiricism is what lends his philosophy moral clarity. But we well-know that even that can be used (twisted?) to support lotsof things we know Pirsig doesn't support. Recall also Pirsig in his intro to LC: "...I've concluded that the biggest improvement I could make in the Metaphysics of Quality would be to block the notion that the Metaphysics of Quality claims to be a quick fix for every moral problem in the universe. I have never seen it that way. The image in my mind as I wrote it was of a large football field that gave meaning to the game by telling you who was on the 20-yard line but did not decide which team would win. That was the point of the two opposing arguments over the death penalty described in LILA.That was the point of the equilibrium between static and Dynamic Quality. Both are moral arguments. Both can claim the Metaphysics of Quality for support...." It makes you wonder to what degree the Nazi could even claim the MOQ for support. 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
