Hi Marsha, Marsha: > Can I venture an analogy. When one takes off the cultural glasses > they are cleaned to various degrees depending on intensity of the > experience of having them off. Then when one puts them back on, > they are altered by being cleaner and producing a clearer view.
Steve: This is the usual interpretation of ocular metaphors for knowledge as well as for Enlightenment, but it is metaphors such as this for what knowledge is like that pragmatists eschew. Pragmatists want to get philosophers to stop describing knowledge as seeing clearly, as seeing things for what they really are, of gettig our thoughts in proper correspondence with things. Instead they want to substitute the notion of knowledge of X as having the power to use X and to put X in to relation with Ys. That is why I have trouble seeing Pirsig as a good pragmatist in such passages as the cultural glasses one where knowledge seems to be described as seeing things for what they REALLY are beyond the mere appearances of the views filtered through various lenses. I am sure that that is no problem at all for you, but dmb wants to read Pirsig as a pragmatist. That means he wants to avoid reading him in such a way as your analogy above suggests. I tend to agree with your interpretation and see Pirsig as not completely compatible with pragmatism (for better or worse) as a consequence of that interpretation. 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
