Hi Dave,
Dave said:
It's about bringing all your faculties to bear and a deep engagement
with whatever you're doing. It is aimed at down to earth stuff, which
a lofty and worthy goal. It's also exceedingly sane, because that's
where we live; practical, everyday reality.
And that, gents, is why I object to the neo-pragmatic slogan.
Matt:
This is the crucial transition, but I have to confess to not have found
anything objectionable in the Pirsig passages, or your gloss on them,
so I don't quite follow the move from the first to the second
paragraph here that you find to be perspicuous. I don't catch the
force of the "and that."
Following the transitional sentence above is this
Dave said:
Pirsig agrees that our understanding of the world is a pile of
analogies BUT he also says that Quality is the generator of this
mythos, guides the train that pulls the boxcars full of analogies. The
important idea here is that this central term (Quality in the first book
and Dynamic Quality in the second book) is outside of language and
outside of the mythos. This value-force is pre-intellectual and yet
he's asserting "the formal recognition of Quality" within intellectual
operations. That's what radical empiricism does. It makes the
dynamic a crucial phase in the overall cognitive process. It explains
the relations between the dynamic and static phases of experience
as aspects of a single, co-operative process.
Matt:
I again don't find anything objectionable granting the prior
extirpation of Platonism. Perhaps there's an ambiguity in saying
that "this central term ... is outside of language," but that's easily
relieved by saying that the term _refers_ to something outside of
language, something pre-intellectual.
I'm just not sure, for example, how Rorty denies the bits after
"BUT," like the dynamic being "a crucial phase in the overall
cognitive process" or Quality as generator of the mythos. Maybe,
though, I don't understand the extent to which you mean "guides."
Dave said:
Again, I take the slogan ["it's language all the way down"] to be a
negative epistemological statement. It doesn't say the universe is
made of words. It says that we can't get outside of language in an
epistemological sense. It says our truths can only be justified
within language and by language. But Pirsig is saying there is
something outside of language that IS epistemologically important,
that is the generator of language and this is a part of experience too.
Matt:
I'm not sure, given your use of "epistemology" here, that Rorty
wouldn't say that "something outside of language" is
epistemologically important. For example, Rorty subscribes to
Davidson's notion of our situatedness in the world as being one of
triangulation between person/community/world. I'm not sure how
that doesn't likewise account for the "generator of" and "part of
experience" bits. Perhaps you're placing extra emphasis, in your
recapitulation of Rorty's account, on "and _by_ language" in the
justification process, and that you think that radical empiricism
suggests that more than language is involved in justification. If
this is the case, I think that bends out of joint the point that is made
by the Sellarsian account of justification as "the game of giving and
asking for reasons." Because it is perfectly legitimate (as I think
Steve pointed out, too) to gesture linguistically to nonlinguistic
elements to justify one's beliefs (or to just gesture physically). But
perhaps you weren't suggesting that with "by language."
Matt
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