[Dan] There are not many MOQs. There is one, as far as I am concerned. Any other theory should be called by another name, otherwise it leads to confusion.
[Marsha] RMP knows that there cannot be an absolute MoQ. [Arlo] I've mentioned this before, but am going to chime in again. The problem here, I am convinced, is that we confuse a philosophical school (e.g., "pragmatism"), with the view of a particular author (e.g., "Peirce"). If we equate "A Metaphysics of Quality" as a larger school encompassing, say, all philosophical ideas derivative from the idea that Quality is the primary empirical reality, then of course we can look at the competing thoughts of authors working within that tradition. But if we equate "The Metaphysics of Quality" with the specific ideas of Robert Pirsig, then, no, there is not more than "one" MOQ. In the former case, we see competing ideas born of agreement and disagreement (not all "idealists" agree, e.g.) and we can talk about which author makes better points, and which author's overall theories are better than others. In the latter, we seek clarity into what Pirsig was saying, the overall goal should be to speak with precision about what Pirsig wrote, and what he meant. This is the same in any philosophical dialogue, a Peircian scholar will want to speak with as much precision as possible about what Peirce wrote and about extracting his intentional meaning from his writings. A pragmatics scholar will be more interested in first getting a large picture of all authors who could be classified as "pragmatists", and then comparing and contrasting and contextualizing their ideas, their disagreements and their agreements. The problem, to clarify, is that many here use "MOQ" to refer to both. I wrote before that a large part of the confusion comes from the moment Pirsig went back over his pages and swapped out "I say" for "The MOQ says", a rhetorical device he felt would hold the narrative better, but I think has resulted in these problems. I suggest everyone who has an electronic copy of LILA goes in a changes the text back to Pirsig's original by replacing all instances of "The MOQ says" with "I say" (or "Pirsig says", if you prefer third person narratives). In this light, arguing over one MOQ or many MOQs becomes easily dismissed. In the sense that we are talking about Pirsig's ideas, we are talking about one, in the sense that we are talking about competing ideas within the framework of a Quality-based theory, we are talking about many. In other words, Pirsig said one thing, but he is not the only voice speaking. 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
