Steve said:
[B] Language use is a process of relating things to other things, but language
never bottoms out. The things that are being related by language are bits of
language to other bits of language. Rather than knowledge being a matter of
finding the proper correspondences between sentences and non-language, such
linguistic relations go all the way down. The test of truth for a knowledge
claim is then not correspondence with non-linguistic reality but the
consequences of believing or disbelieving a claim. ... Does Pirsig agree with
Rorty on [B]? The only way Pirsig could be right and Rorty wrong is if Pirsig
denies [B].
dmb says:
Well, the problem is that [B] denies and asserts several different things. And
you've framed the issue as if there were only two choices; either subscribe to
the correspondence theory or say that it's language all the way down. This is a
false dilemma and, as I understand it, the MOQ definitely asserts a
non-linguistic reality. I think the picture of language as a web in which every
term derives its meaning by virtue of its relation to all the other terms and
that proper language use will necessarily involve relating these bits of
language to each other in some intelligible way. Pirsig might prefer mythos or
logos to describe this pile of evolved analogies, but it's basically the same
idea. BUT - and this is a very big BUT, even bigger than your momma's but -
Pirsig also says that this whole conceptual reality was derived from an
non-linguistic reality, which he calls Quality or DQ or the primary empirical
reality.
As far as I know, there simply isn't anything comparable to that in Rorty or
any other post-analytic pragmatist. And this is where they differ. I think it's
a mistake to read Pirsig's claims about pre-conceptual Quality as a relapse
into Platonism or as falling back into SOM-based traditional empiricism. I
think Pirsig and James use terms like pre-intellectual experience in presenting
the radical empiricists ALTERNATIVE to those dualisms. In this picture, the
relation between concepts and reality is never one of correspondence. You can
never use the primary empirical reality as a foundation for any propositional
sentence. It is never true or false, not even in the pragmatic sense. It not
that one is mere appearance and the other is the real reality either. Instead,
the relation between concepts and reality is the relation between two parts of
experience. James used the same exact terms for these two parts of experience;
static and dynamic. This is the heart, the central core
of the MOQ.
"Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something
more fundamental which [James] described as 'the immediate flux of life which
furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'."
" 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the
former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing'
Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic
subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality."
In the MOQ, the slogan "it's language all the way down" would only apply to our
conceptual reality, to the static, secondary type of experience. But that's
only half of the MOQ. The other half is where we find the terms that smell like
Platonism to you. And so I'm trying to explain how and why pre-conceptual
experience does NOT mean a patch of red or raw sense data or some
phenomenological essence. It's much deeper and more concrete. It's the Buddha
you find in the gears of a motorcycle or in the finer cuts of meat. This mystic
reality, Pirsig says, is not mysterious because it's transcendent or
complicated but because it's so simple and direct, so right-under-your-nose. To
speak plainly, reality is just what happens before you have a chance to think
about it. And that is the non-linguistic reality asserted by radical
empiricists.
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