David Harding said to dmb:
...Yes, american pragmatists like Dewey and James reject SOM and yet they
provide the general solution (pragmatism). But do they specifically say that
good should be placed before truth? ... James gets caught out by not having a
Metaphysics from which to make his argument. James underestimates the problem
and says that what's good is what's practical because social and intellectual
quality in the victorian period in which James grew up were very confused.
See the problem isn't just that truth ought to be a species of good - but the
problem is a whole metaphysical outlook which places truth first. If you
remove truth you need to replace it with something else. And once you replace
truth with something else then who's to say that the way we break up truth is
the best way to break up that new thing? That's what Pirsig saw. He could see
that once you replace truth with quality a whole new perspective can be found
and this is a fundamental shift in the way we have thought in
the Western world for the last two thousand years.. So, there are huge
metaphysical strengths to the MOQ which James never mentions: ... But he
claimed that (according to Pirsig) radical empiricism and his pragmatism were
separate.. He never combined them because he never placed quality first in his
Metaphysical outlook. So with this in mind, does either James or Dewey
specifically say that good is best left undefined fundamentally? No. ...These
are huge strengths of the MOQ and when things are viewed in this way things are
made incredibly more coherently than when not. James and Dewey, while they are
correct in the general area of philosophy which is the solution and James
specifically, mentions the fact that truth is a species of good and that our
concepts can never match a 'dynamic and flowing' reality, the lack the clear
Metaphysical outlook which the MOQ brings.
dmb says:
It seems pretty clear to me that you raised all of these objections before you
even finished reading the post. I can address everything you say here by simply
reposting what I said the first time. If you'd continued to read carefully, you
might have noticed that your main objection (that James's pragmatic truth lacks
the metaphysical framework of the MOQ) simply isn't true. Look, I haven't
changed a thing about it, except delete the irrelevant stuff.
----------------It is totally unreasonable to expect complete agreement between
any two philosophers and nobody ever claimed that Pirsig and James were
identical in every way. But they are so similar that it's downright spooky,
especially considering that he never even mentioned James in his work until it
was pointed out to him after his first book was published. Amazingly, Pirsig
tells us, James had even adopted the terms "static" and "dynamic" to describe
the relation between concepts and the immediate flux of experience. For both
James and Pirsig, not to mention Dewey, truths exist within a larger entity.
Pirsig calls it DQ whereas James calls it Pure Experience but both of their
terms refer to the primary empirical reality, refer to cutting edge of
experience. The objective truth of SOM is nowhere to be seen in their pragmatic
theory of truth. Truths are true in relation to experience, not in relation to
objective reality.
...In fact, Pirsig's idea of getting James two doctrines together, of fusing
the pragmatic theory of truth with his radical empiricism, was already taking
shape in James's mind and there are contemporary scholars who also think it's
best to view pragmatism as "a special chapter" within radical empiricism.
------------------
That is the metaphysical framework, right there. Let me repeat the crucial
moment for you: "For both James and Pirsig, not to mention Dewey, truths exist
within a larger entity. Pirsig calls it DQ whereas James calls it Pure
Experience but both of their terms refer to the primary empirical reality,
refer to cutting edge of experience." They both have lots more to say, of
course, but this shows that they share the same basic framework wherein static
concepts are always secondary and are meaningful in relation to experience as
such, in relation to DQ or Pure Experience, which ever term you prefer. Pirsig
tells us that they mean the same thing, that James was talking about the same
thing. That's why it's so useful to learn about James or Dewey. It illuminates
the MOQ because you get to see the same ideas in a different terms, get to hear
the same song with a different voice and tempo. That's the point, you know? I
don't quote James and Dewey for any reason except to illuminate a
nd clarify the MOQ. I've NEVER suggested that any one them should be subsumed
by the others, reduced to the other, or anything like that. It's just a matter
of following through on Pirsig's own self-descriptions to see what they mean in
greater detail.
Frankly, I find the resistance to this line of inquiry to be totally bogus and
even a bit bizarre. This is just what thinkers do. Like the headline in the
Onion (a parody of newspapers) said, "Scholar compares idea to other idea!"
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