Hey Dan,
DMB said:
And if it seems to be where we left it every time we care to check,
then I think we have to move to a very unreasonable level of
skepticism to have any serious doubts about it's existence.
Dan said:
What the dog dish scenario serves to illustrate is whether or not the
world exists before we personally exist, and whether the world will
continue to exist when we pass back. Call me unreasonably skeptic...
but how do we know?
Ron said:
Well, we can empirically verify and it is only reasonable say that 21st
century western culture exists therefore "I am" and I think here is
where the weak point in this point of view exists. In addition, the
"lone unattached expeince" isnt really an idea held to in Pirsigs MoQ
therefore that skeptical doubt is leftover emotional baggage from our
cultural assumptions of scientific objectivity I would suspect.
Matt:
Dave and Ron are both, I think, articulating the trouble I'm having
with your, Dan, "unreasonable skepticism." What Ron and Dave are
both pointing at with "cultural assumptions of scientific objectivity"
and "unreasonable level of skepticism" is that your pressing of the
question "but how do we know?" just seems to turn into the
Cartesian position which you, at the same time, wish to abdicate as
we three do.
Going back to my suggestion that we think about the problem of
testimony, you responded to Dave's suggestion that "there's no
empirical reason to believe that the dish disappears when you leave
the room" with "but on the other hand there's no empirical reason
to believe the dog dish exists when we leave the room, either."
This response on your part assimilates "empirical" with "direct
experience" in a way that leaves out the possibility that indirect
testimony from other people can be counted as "empirical"--Dave's
suggesting (I think) that we do so expand "empirical" to include this
kind of thing, and he does so on the basis of Pirsig expanding our
notion of empirical from the SOMist basis.
Dave and my explanation for how this expansion works might be
different, but we do agree (it would appear) that you are
re-narrowing the notion of "empirical" in a way that is unPirsigian,
and distinctly Cartesian. The way I would explain this happening in
your articulation is that while we are used to understanding
SOMism as overemphasis on the Object (as in notions of "scientific
objectivity"), what you are rather doing is overemphasizing the
Subject. This creates the same problem, however, because when
you put it to work in the knowing-process it becomes the
Subject-as-it-Directly-Knows-an-Object. All other objects outside of
direct experience are, therefore, unreal ("imaginary," as you were
putting it). But why isn't this as absurd as the flipside SOMic
attitude of thinking that everything in the mind is unreal?
If we expand "empirical" the way I think Pirsig in the end wants, we
should drop most of our attempts to use the rhetoric of
imaginary/illusion when talking at the wholesale-reality level. Cases
where it still becomes relevantly useful might be when confronting a
SOMic dogmatist, and you want to confuse them by confronting them
with an aporia. But that's not all Pirsig intends to do, and those two
intentions require us to differentiate between two different contexts
of appropriate application.
Matt
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