Hi Craig, Matt,
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:00 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > "The MOQ says that Quality comes first which produces ideas > which produce what we know as matter." > > Perhaps this refers to "theoretical" matter (such as quarks) & > not things like apes. Steve: Whether there are separate sorts of things like apes and ideas is an ontological question rather than an epistemological question. I think for Rorty as well as for Pirsig, quarks are as real as apes. Neither is "just an idea" more than the other or anything else. Ideas are different sorts of things than are apes, but they aren't thought of as of a different ontological kind (for Pirsig, they are both static quality), pragmatically they just have different purposes and uses and different relations to human interests. I mentioned sorting out epistemology from ontology as far as realism, and I think the issue is something like this. Idealism is an answer to an epistemological ratherthan an ontological question. It concerns how we can know what it is real. For idealists, ideas come first (epistemologically) among the things that can be known, and we never actually know an ape as anything other than an idea of an ape. For Pirsig, Quality is known even before ideas, so he isn't a true idealist. But he isn't a realist since he certainly doesn't think that matter or anything else nonhuman "comes first." I suspect Rorty just isn't too interested in the "what comes first" epistemology game because it doesn't do much in helping us figure out which sentences are true for issues that might be more likely to make our lives better than "what comes first" considerations. He's happy to say that we DO know quarks and apes and ideas because we can use quarks and apes and ideas for whatever purposes we can make them useful. That sort of "using" is all that "knowing" means to a pragmatist. 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
