Hi Dan, Don and Chris with the Dog Dish: 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.
Matt said: My route through is to suppose that the evidence for New York and the evidence for dog dishes come from the same general area (first-person sincere reporting), and the fact that only two people have ever experienced Don's dog dish versus the billions that have experienced New York should not persuade Don or Chris that they should doubt the dog dish's existence more than New York. Dan said: If I suppose a skyscraper fell in New York City and no one was around, would it make a noise? We are not concerned if two people experience an occurrence or if a billion experience it... the question before us is if no one experiences an event, does it occur? What I sense in the route you take is a subtle shift in context. You're presupposing first person sincere reporting to an event that no one has witnessed. Matt: Hunh. I did not think the question before us was "if no one experiences an event, does it occur?" I would've fielded a different battery of MoQ-explanations about how trees can still fall in forests even if humans aren't around (following out from, e.g., "do inorganic patterns need intellectual patterns to exist?"). What I'm presupposing is first-person sincere reporting to events that people _have_ witnessed. The difficulty of testimony for epistemological positions that use notions of directness and immediacy isn't, I would suggest, on questions about whether or not trees or dog dishes are around and have eventful lives when we aren't there, but what _our_ status is in making knowledge-claims about events we are not directly experiencing. In my example, Chris _did_ directly experience the bowl being still in the room when he went back into it and reported to Don that it was still there. However, what should Don be _allowed to know_ when he is not directly experiencing stuff? That's a task for an epistemology to sort out. Dave, in his reboot, gave Pirsig's kind of answer. What I still can't figure is how New York and dog dishes in rooms one isn't in have different epistemological statuses when it comes to the kinds of implicit agreements we need in place to say "I know New York exists though I've never been there" or "I know my dog's food dish is still in the other kitchen though I haven't seen it in 30 minutes." Matt said: That seems almost like the reverse of the sentiment implanted in Pirsig's texts, which emphasizes direct experience over indirect testimony, meaning that even though Don's never been to New York, he has directly experienced his dog's dish, so isn't that something he shouldn't discount even though he's only one of two? Dan said: Yes, the MOQ emphasizes direct experience over indirect testimony. But Matt... you're asking me to accept indirect testimony that Don's dog dish exists independently of anyone verifying its existence. This is hearsay evidence at best. Matt: No, I'm requesting an articulation of why, on your account, Don should feel fine about his dog getting enough food, despite the fact that he isn't constantly directly experiencing the dog dish. Don frets; Chris goes into the kitchen, yells "it's still here numbnuts!"; Don feels better. That's Don getting indirect testimony _dependently_ of Chris's verification (bad grammar, but it mirrors your formulation). But what do we do when Chris leaves the room again? Should Don start fretting again? On the account Pirsig gives that Dave brought forward, no, we should not because we should've installed static latches, patterns of inference based on the fact that--typically--spatialtemporal objects do not just *poof!* out of existence when you stop looking at them. Matt said: Think of what you said on the analogy of how many people directly experience mystical enlightenment. Pirsig's saying we _should_ include in our account of reality experiences that only a low volume of people have experienced--and you should particularly do so if you're one of the few. Dan said: Again... it is the kind of evidence submitted and not the number of witnesses. If I see Matt breaking into a bank late one night and I go around telling a hundred of my friends what I saw... not one of those people I tell about the crime can testify... it is hearsay and totally inadmissible in a court of law. It is low quality evidence. And if I hear from a hundred different people that Don has a dog dish, it is hearsay evidence unless Don directly exhibits the dog dish. Matt: Right, the "kind of evidence." I see that high bar appear again. Because, as I tried alluding to, it appears that your high bar has made all mystic experiences "low quality evidence," since they are near-unanimously declared pure private events that only can get indirect, analogical corroboration from others. On your scheme, why on earth should I take seriously any reporting of a mystical experience? Why should I take all that work James did in the Varieties of Religious Experience seriously? I would've thought a Pirsigian would've treated the lone experiencer with a little more epistemological respect. Dan said: But even if I accept Don has a dog dish on hearsay evidence, there is no one who can testify if that dish exists when no one is around... not even Don. Isn't that what we're discussing here? I thought so... Matt: But shouldn't our static patterns latch us into place? Suggesting that we shouldn't _worry_ about whether the dish exists when no one is around? Dave and I have been trying to articulate, in different ways, what the theoretical justification of these presuppositions are for supposing that spatiotemporal objects exist after we stop directly experiencing them. Granting that these are presuppositions based on inferences is the assumption of the philosophic idealism you keep pressing. Once you grant the idealism, however, you still need to rig your system to explain how common sense works. While we've been looking on to that stage, you keep pressing questions that only make sense to people who _do not_ grant the idealism. This makes it appear that _you_ are Don: but I'm guessing that you don't fret over physical objects out of your line of sight, so where's your reconstruction of common sense? Dan said: I purposely chose a bizarre example to (hopefully) better elucidate the fallacy of presupposition. We are all familiar with dog dishes and trees that fall in forests so it is easy to accept the notion that there are real dog dishes and real trees that exist independently of any observation. But they are imaginary. We make them up in our minds and believe they exist apart from us. Matt: Ah, see, you say "fallacy" and Pirsig, as Dave has outlined, says "if you don't make these presuppositions, we might suppose the baby will be mentally retarded." (Notice, I have revised Pirsig's account. I'm not sure how much hangs on it, but I'm supposing that rather than ignoring DQ, it is the inability to form static patterns that produces different notions of mental deficiency. Given the state of the argument, this seems to be the parallel with Dan's case, and the hiccup Dave and I have been having. It might be a side curiosity about what this revision means more generally to Pirsig's metaphysics.) What Dave, Ron, and I have been struggling with is why you want to call this a "fallacy," which suggests "don't do this," even after we've granted that common sense is "imaginary" in the I'm-granting-Pirsig's-idealism sense. So, when Dave says (later, as the conversation moved on), "The idea of objects works so unproblematically and so automatically that we don't even think of it as a deduction," to explain Pirsig's theory of object-construction and you say, "Yes, that is the difficulty I seem to be running against in discussions with Matt and yourself," we want to say, no, that is not the problem you've been running into. We've wanted to _grant_ the demystification of "unproblematically and so automatically" to show its root in chains of inferences, which you call "imaginary" and idealism (why are inferences unreal, though?), and then to offer a _better_ description of how we come to believe things in an unproblematic way. You, however, seem to want to leave nearly _all_ knowledge as _problematic_. But why? I'm guessing you negotiate the world quite successfully, which is to say unproblematically--and _that_ fact is a performative contradiction to your insistence on the problematic status of, e.g., dog dishes in empty kitchens. Matt 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
