Arlo said to dmb: ...I think too many people are too hung up on getting "the MOQ" to say such-and-such, as if there is This One MOQ and the most important thing one can do is to get "it" to say "what I think it should say". ..Let me explain it this way. The "global" camp would likely balk at restating the question "what does the MOQ say?" as "what does Pirsig say?". For them, these are two distinct questions. The "local" camp would see them more as asking the same question, and queries about "what does the MOQ say" are invariably answered by the use of Robert Pirsig's words. But this is just one basic split, and I think further problems arise in the global camp when, rather than trying to group many voices into a coherent whole, they are trapped in a battle of "which voice wins, and receives the honor of speaking as 'the MOQ'". This is what I've called the "interpretative legitimacy" crowd, where it is more important to assert "The MOQ says X and not Y" than it is to say "X is a better idea t han Y".
dmb says: I'm not as nice as you. I think you give "the interpretative legitimacy crowd" too much credit by giving them such a respectable sounding name, as if they have some fancy interpretive theory on their side. I think there is just a natural tendency in every one to hear what we want to hear and we can only understand new things in terms of what we already know. In some people this tendency is very strong, even dominant, and the result is that the MOQ or anything else just becomes a kind of Rorschach test. What's revealed and illuminated by this kind of "interpretation" is not the MOQ so much as the interpreter. This is true for everyone to some extent and pretending otherwise can certainly distort things too. But we are not reading ink blots and it's pretty clear that some "interpretations" of MOQ are demonstrably wrong and they're wrong for obvious reasons. To cite the most obvious example, the Seventh Day Adventists "interprets" the MOQ as compatible with theism and he wants D Q to be equivalent to the Absolute. Yea, big surprise there. And what does Marsha's "interpretation" say about Marsha? Guess what the Rorty fan is going to find? What does mine say about me? Yours about you? Etc., etc.. I don't know exactly where to draw the line but it seems pretty clear to me that some interpretations are just plain bad. And these "interpreters" will persist even when their vision is clearly at odds with the textual evidence. You don't see this sort of thing published in the journals and such and rightly so. People are allowed to press any interpretation they like, so long as it doesn't defy reason or evidence or otherwise fail the basic standards of competence. As I understand it, the wider discourses (where the MOQ might be engaged) are just a slightly formalized version of what we do in ordinary life. If you can listen to the conversation well enough to understand what's being said, then you're ready to join that conversation. In the old days they said children should speak only when spoken to, should be seen and not heard. In old days they'd ask the women to leave the room so men could talk politics. We don't really talk like that that anymore, thank god, but those they had a point, especially with respect to kids. They're simply not capable of having certain kinds of conversations and allowing them to participate would be bad for them and for the conversation. There are a million stories about the hilarious and tragic misunderstanding that occur when kids hear abstract or figurative speech. You know, because they understand everything in such literal, concrete terms. This analogy probably sounds a lot more condescending than I want it to be, but the idea here is simply that nobody is going to say it's unjust, unfair or unreasonable to believe that 3rd graders couldn't possibly have anything helpful to say about the Federal debt ceiling or the nuclear meltdown in Japan. Similarly, newspapers expec t their journalists to know something about journalism and academic journals expect their contributors to know what they're doing too. These things have standards and they're far from perfect but the goal is simply to filter out the unprepared and the incompetent, to maintain a standard of quality. Some people take this as oppressive and restrictive because, apparently, they just don't appreciate the point or purpose of such standards. (Insert game show sound FX: disqualifying buzzer with sympathetic groan from audience.) I know, you're in the middle of conversation and I'm just butting in with certain points that then talking those points in a slightly different direction. Sorry about that. Arlo said: ...Its certainly, again, NOT that I find anything wrong per se with the poetic and/or rhetorical use of this narrative device. Although personally I encounter far more usage of this when it refers to a "foundation" or "framework". When I hear someone say "pragmatism says" I generally expect a foundational tenet that ALL pragmatists agree on, rather than hearing it used to specifically refer only to what Peirce or James has said. So it'd be "pragmatism says" followed by a "Peirce says" when I move beyond the general foundation and into the specifics of one particular author. But that's just my experience. dmb says: Right, the phrase "pragmatism says" shouldn't be followed by anything too specific. It should be followed by something almost any pragmatist would agree upon. In fact, James described pragmatism as a new name for some very old ways of thinking. By their fruits ye shall know them. He said pragmatism was about fruits, not roots. But I do tend to think of it in terms of American philosophers, starting with Pierce, James and Dewey. And I think James, Dewey and Pirsig are all close enough that their pragmatism and radical empiricism can be referred to in the singular. There ARE differences but I don't know of any important differences. I think it's perfectly fine to be more or less specific with terms like "pragmatism", so long as you specify what you mean. But for some people "the MOQ" doesn't have anything to do the vision presented in Pirsig's books. What happened, you see, was a bunch of people went looking for "[email protected]" but they got lost on the way and landed here instead. 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