Hi DMB, Matt, > dmb says: > There's nothing wrong with dissolving bad questions. What concerns me is your > sincere and earnest attempt to avoid accidentally giving answers to old > riddles. As I understand it, you're reading Pirsig's claims through the lens > of Rorty's particular strain of anti-Platonism and anti-representationalism. > By doing so the key terms are put into a different context, where they have a > very different meaning. That particular recontextualization doesn't work > because the meaning of the terms is dramatically altered in the process. Like > I said, this is just a plain, old-fashioned mix up. > A Jamesian term like "pure experience" and a Pirsigian term like "primary > empirical reality" comes to look like claims about "perfect correspondence" > or some kind of direct realism. I think that Rorty's targets are positivism > and traditional empiricism and they all subscribe to some version of SOM and > he's right to tell them that they cannot have what they seek. James and > Pirsig are also saying that traditional empiricists and the positivists > cannot have the kind of truth or knowledge they think they can. They reject > the correspondence theory and the metaphysical dualism underlying it and then > go on to make claims involving terms like pure experience and direct > experience. So I think this Rortian lens leads you to misread the alternative > to the correspondence theory as if it were essentially re-assertion of the > correspondence theory. The alternative to Platonism is taken as more > Platonism.
Steve: Matt has said in the past that he doesn't think that Platonism is something that we become cured of and never need concern ourselves with it again. It is something that we have to make a continual effort to avoid if we wish to stay clear of it. While "direct experience" and "primary empirical reality" need not be taken as a sort of Platonism and may be useful teaching tools for getting out of Platonism, it is easy to nevertheless construe them as more Platonism, so Matt and I see such terms as best dropped. Consider the following from Lila: "Phædrus thought that of the two kinds of students, those who study only subject-object science and those who study only meditative mysticism, it would be the mystic students who would get off the stove first. The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past." The anti-Platonist in me gets concerned when he talks about this primary reality as something that we can get closer to or further from, as something that the mystic is in touch with and the rest of us are not. Are we non-enlightened folks out of touch with reality? Are there two realities, a primary and a secondary one where one of these is the _real_ reality and the other mere appearance? You'd rather we not read such statements as Platonism, but Matt and I wish that he wouldn't say things that can be so easily construed as Platonism. Or rather we think it's just fine that he said such things as scaffolding to teach anti-Platonism, but once we understand anti-Platonism better we ought to drop such scaffolding. 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
