Hi All, 20 years after Lila, I wonder how it would be read by someone new to Pirsig. Would the ideas seem relevent? As we get more and more distance from the positivists, I wonder how young people today would read Pirsig's attacks on the fact-value dichotomy. Would they wonder just who it is Pirsig thinks he is arguing against? Maybe this aspect of SOM that attracted most of us to the MOQ is a straw man. If Pirsig and the other antiSomers are successful, at least at some point it will be a straw man, right? Someday young people just won't even know what Pirsig was going on about. At the time I got into Pirsig, I really felt like the notion of objectivity was being used to push values into some realm of noncognitive babble. Is that still happening today?
Here are some examples of the views that Pirsig attacks with regard to the dichotomy between facts and values taken from an article on Hilary Putnam who also made such critiques on SOM: http://www.philosophy.su.se/texter/putnam.htm (1) No statement is both evaluative and factual. (2) There is no logical connection between evaluative and factual statements. (3) Factual statements are true or false independently of any value judgments. (4) Facts can, and values cannot, be established beyond controversy. (5) Evaluative statements are neither true nor false. Are these dogmas ones that people still adhere to? Or have Pirsig, Putnam, and the other critics of the fact-value dichotomy been successful? 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
