In the "perceptions" thread, Adrie said to Marsha:
...l have to say Dmb was correct that you took an indeterminate knife to
undercut an indeterminate philosophical approach as were the debate
determinism/indeterminism already was clear, not only in Pirsig's statements,
but also in the mainstream today's commons understandings of the issue. Your
mistake was to make the undercut using a double negation, not so uncommon.
dmb says:
Thanks, Adrie. It's good to know that somebody gets the point even if poor
Marsha can't see it. It's sort of interesting to watch her obliviously repeat
this same mistake - this problem of undercutting the MOQ by using Pirsig's
criticisms (of SOM, Platonism, etc.) against the MOQ itself. This time it's
about the turtles. Notice how she equates Pirsig's analogies with the
proverbial turtles, as in the phrase "it's turtles all the way down"?
In the thread titled "perceptions," Marsha said:
"It's analogy all the way down and all the way out, and not a problem if we
cannot always understand each other."
In the thread titled "turtles, or fun with metaphysics," Marsha said:
"Being that it's turtles all the way down, it is interesting to see where one
draws the line. .... But in the end the line is drawn like the spinning seed
pods of the maple tree, self-generating whirlybirds drifting on a lazy, lovely
breeze.
This looks like another instance of Marsha using philosophical terms and
concepts that she doesn't really understand. In this case, she is ignorantly
and inadvertently using anti-foundationalism against the MOQ, which is already
a form of anti-foundationalism. Once again, this makes everything too slippery
and loose by about 100%. This poisonous double dose - wherein anit-foundational
criticisms are used against the MOQ's analogies or static patterns - coverts
the MOQ from anti-foundationalism into full blown nihilism and relativism.
The same arguments that I made in criticizing Marsha's use of concept of
"indeterminate" could be used against her use of turtles without hardly any
modification. Like the determinate concepts of truth rejected by the MOQ,
foundational philosophies want to ground their truth in something certain and
eternally fixed. If you look up anti-foundationalism in an encyclopedia, you
find familiar names like William James, John Dewey, Nietzsche, Nagarjuna and I
think it's pretty clear that Pirsig fits right in with such thinkers.
Pragmatism is an anti-foundational theory of truth. But Marsha wants to use
anti-foundational critiques even against Pirsig's pragmatic truth. Thus Marsha,
foolishly mistaking the cure for the disease, administers the poisonous
double-dose. Good thing she's not a doctor, eh?
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