Hey Dan,
Matt said:
Say Don's in the living room fretting about his dog not getting enough
food because he isn't hovering around the food dish in the kitchen.
Without that direct experience of the food dish, Don worries the dish
won't be there for Fido. Don's buddy Chris gets tired of the moaning
over Fido's fate and goes into the kitchen. Chris then yells out from
the kitchen, "Fido's dish is still here!" Should Don be less fretful?
Why? He, after all, is _not_ directly experiencing the food dish: Chris
is. Don is only directly experiencing the noise coming out of the
kitchen that comes in the form of a sentence expressing information.
If we use the sense of "know" you are using, Dan, then Don will still
be in the same position, fretting over Fido's survival because he is
not directly experiencing the food dish. However, wouldn't we want
to say that his imaginary sense of the existence of Fido's food dish
is _enhanced_ in some way by his direct experience of Chris's
words?
I think we do. This enhancement can be articulated in many different
ways at this point, but to deny an effect on what you called the
imagination in this context is to deny common sense assumptions.
And for what use? (I'll get back to that in a moment.)
I think the best way to stage the enhancement is to first deny that the
primary context of "to know" is the solitary first-person-subject. I
think that is the Cartesian context. To suggest "knowing" something
is to be in an _inter_personal context, to be in a web of other
people's imaginings, if you will. This allows the following response to
your penultimate statement: "Whether or not Don's dog dish exists
apart from the empirical evidence of its existence is a question
rooted in the conviction that there is a real world out there." 1)
"Empirical evidence" should be construed interpersonally, so that
nobody would suggest that a dog dish does exist apart from the
empirical evidence of its existence, though of course some evidence
is indirect reporting from other first-person-subjects. 2) The
"conviction" is one found in every community that has dealt with dog
dishes in other rooms. This conviction is _not_, though, the Cartesian
sense of a "real world out there."
Dan said:
If I understand what you're saying correctly, I agree and I think it fits
into the framework of the MOQ in a proper sense. Replacing the
notion of a reality where a subject exists independently from the
objects that the subject experiences with the notion of a reality
composed of values enhances and expands our point of view.
Intellectual and social patterns are just as "real" as biological and
inorganic patterns, but they are real in a different way.
Matt:
I repeated the long extract from my post above, without your
interstitial responses, because how you end right above encapsulates
the thrust of my dialectical de-construction of the vocabulary you
were using to articulate yourself (as potentially hiding Cartesianism)
and re-construction to show how it would avoid ("to be in a web of
other people's imaginings"). Because you end above by saying that
intellectual patterns are "real in a different way"--doesn't using the
rhetoric of imaginary get in the way of this point?
My new Don scenario was meant to call attention to the problem of
knowledge by testimony in a vocabulary that takes seriously the idea
that what is real is what is directly experienced. What I want to say
is that talking about everything but that which is in your immediate,
direct experience as imaginary seems natural, but weird and
distended when we want to talk about common sense stuff like our
dogs.
I can fully countenance the idea that you don't want to agree with
any of the potential Cartesian implications, and that you nor Pirsig
have to, but it isn't clear to me what the force of questions like "How
does Don know if his dog's food dish exists when he's apart from
experiencing it?" is except for posing the Cartesian problematic.
They seem ill-posed for someone whose goal isn't that problematic,
but rather one that is beyond it. My sense is that Pirsig _wouldn't_
pose those koan-esque questions as you say he would ("what
dish?"), _unless_ he were first confronted by a Cartesian. But I
thought we'd just reached the position in our conversation where
you weren't going to ask questions assuming that, so when I see
one, I take us down the dialectic again.
Matt
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