"...if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes
possible for more than one set of truths to exist. Then one doesn't seek the
absolute Truth.' One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation
of things... There are many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we
can perceive some to have more quality than others, but that we do so is, in
part, the result of our history and current patterns of values." (LILA)
Marsha said:
And why I consider your opinions, as well as mine, hypothetical (supposed but
not neccesarily real or true.)
David replied:
...Truth is provisional and taken as useful until something better comes
along! That is quite different than hypothetical. If you cannot see that then
please look at a dictionary.
dmb says:
Yes, as I keep trying to explain, Marsha's view of intellectual static quality
amounts to anti-intellectualism. It turns intellectual quality into a fleeting
and whimsical "opinion". And this turns the MOQ's pragmatic theory of truth
into the worst kind of relativism wherein everyone's opinion is equally
hypothetical.
But this view of truth puts Quality at the center, at the front end of our
practices and modes of inquiry and the static intellectual quality has to make
sense within our culture's "current patterns of values" too. As James says,
pragmatic truths are wedged and controlled like no other, they have to agree
with the sensual flux (Quality) and the conceptual order (current static
patterns). I mean, Pirsig (and James) rejects absolute Truth and Objective
truth, etc. but this does not mean we're supposed to abandon our respect for
excellence in thought and speech or pretend that nothing is ever true in any
sense. The MOQ's root expansion of rationality leads up to the MOQ's conception
of truth, so Marsha's blunder is pretty epic and undermines the MOQ's most
basic purposes and misses the most fundamental points.
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