Hi dmb,
> Steve said to dmb: > I'll admit to being a "math nerd" philosopher. Now, can you explain how the > response of the "neurotic artist" philosopher with regard to > realism/anti-realism is superior? I understand that to you my response feels > nerdy, but I don't know what you find wrong with my argument if anything, and > you haven't made an alternative case for a MOQer/pragmatist position on > realism/anti-realism. > > > dmb says: > Like I already said, that is a debate in analytic philosophy and it's hardly > relevant to pragmatism. I'm not offering a superior position on the issue. > I'm saying that pragmatism is beyond that debate. That's the title of > Hildebrand's book, in fact; "BEYOND REALISM AND ANTIREALISM". (Yes, Rorty's > paper by that title is included in Hildebrand's bibliography.) Steve: I agree that pragmatism is beyond debating realism and anti-realism. That was my point, and why I kept wonderring what the hell you were complaining about. But the whole issue is "not relevant to pragmatism," then why would Hildebrand write such a book? Presumably because it needs to be made explicit, especially if someone asks, how pragmatism _gets_ us beyond realism and anti-realism. I attempted to do that in my post to Ham since Ham asked. Apparently your issue is mostly this... dmb: I was making a larger point about being a "math nerd" philosopher. > > To put it roughly, as Pirsig says, squareness can be defined as an absence of > Quality, as an inability to perceive Quality. Squareness is the disease in > philosophy that Pirsig is trying to cure. As you may recall, Pirsig conducted > a little thought experiment to test the reality of Quality. What happens to > the world if you subtract Quality from it, he asked? Grocery stores were > radically altered, art disappeared, etc.. The world became unrecognizable, > not to mention bleak as hell. The only things that remained the same were our > forms of rationality, things like math and formal logic were unaffected by > the absence of Quality. Why should that be, he wondered? Math nerd philosophy > is exactly what's wrong with philosophy. Steve: This is just a terrible analysis of Pirsig on the squareness of philosophy. The problem was a discord between him and his friends--"An underlying reason for this trouble was that they saw it from a kind of ``groovy dimension'' that was concerned with the immediate surface of things whereas I was concerned with the underlying form." It is as though you only read half of ZAMM. Pirsig's early definition of squareness as the inability to perceive Quality was later soundly rejected in favor of two different Qualities--a romantic and a classic one (and then _that_ answer was also rejected in favor of keeping the analytical knife away from Quality. It was not until Lila that Pirsig settled on an alternative "first cut" of Quality.) What remained of his exploration of hipness-squareness by the end of ZAMM is the notion that (in contradiction to what you just claimed) squareness is _not_ the inability to see Quality but just a different sort of aesthetic. One sort of person tends to be more tuned in to Quality on surfaces and the other is more tuned in to Quality in terms of underlying form, but so what? We can get along. The Buddha resides as comfortably in the gears of motorcycle as at the top of a mountain. The problem Pirsig was writing about was not that philosophers were too nerdy. Philosophy will always be a "square" endeavor from the perspective of the "just dig it" hippies. What is ironic about your complaint as a complaint about Rorty is that he was loved more by the hippies than the squares. The analytic philosophers were suspicious of how much the literary folks dug him, and he was too much of a hippie for the tastes of the "squares" you like to quote as evidence of problems with his philosophy. Best, Steve "Instead of one single, uniform Quality now there appeared to be two qualities; a romantic one, just seeing, which the students had; and a classic one, overall understanding, which the teachers had. A hip one and a square one. Squareness was not the absence of Quality; it was classic Quality. Hipness was not just presence of Quality; it was mere romantic Quality. The hip-square cleavage he'd discovered was still there, but Quality didn't now seem to fall entirely on one side of the cleavage, as he'd previously supposed. Instead, Quality itself cleaved into two kinds, one on each side of the cleavage line. His simple, neat, beautiful, undefined Quality was starting to get complex. He didn't like the way this was going. The cleavage term that was going to unify the classic and romantic ways of looking at things had itself been cleaved into two parts and could no longer unify anything. It had been caught in an analytic meat grinder. The knife of subjectivity-and-objectivity had cut Quality in two and killed it as a working concept. If he was going to save it, he couldn't let that knife get it. And really, the Quality he was talking about wasn't classic Quality or romantic Quality. It was beyond both of them. And by God, it wasn't subjective or objective either, it was beyond both of those categories. Actually this whole dilemma of subjectivity-objectivity, of mind-matter, with relationship to Quality was unfair. That mind-matter relationship has been an intellectual hang-up for centuries. They were just putting that hang-up on top of Quality to drag Quality down. How could he say whether Quality was mind or matter when there was no logical clarity as to what was mind and what was matter in the first place? And so: he rejected the left horn. Quality is not objective, he said. It doesn't reside in the material world. Then: he rejected the right horn. Quality is not subjective, he said. It doesn't reside merely in the mind. And finally: Phædrus, following a path that to his knowledge had never been taken before in the history of Western thought, went straight between the horns of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma and said Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter. It is a third entity which is independent of the two." 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
