With Ant confusing me with David M I guess I should follow dmb's example and start signing with djh...
> dmb said: > Wow. You just will not let go of it, David. Arlo and I have repeatedly > objected to this notion but each time you simply repeat it. Look, at what > just occurred. Arlo responded to the notion that Marsha follows her own logic > by saying that "logic" is rendered meaningless by that notion. And what is > your response? To make exactly the same claim, except with respect to > yourself instead of Marsha. "If you'll read my post," you said to Arlo, "of > course what I deem to be logical - others do not - and vice versa." Logic is > rendered meaningless in exactly the same way by either statement. In both > cases, you are making a wildly bogus claim about the nature of logic. > dmb also said along the same lines: > Value is universal, logic is based on value, "and thus so is the quality of > one logic over another." Huh? > > And how does Marsha's lack of logical consistency get to be some other kind > of logic? It's not. It's just a lack of coherence. Incoherence is NOT an > alternative form of coherence. To equate terms that Pirsig opposes is NOT an > alternative interpretation. It's just a contradiction in terms. It's just > nonsense and nonsense is NOT an alternative form of sense. > > You repeat this several times more, David. It's pretty clear that you're not > seeing the criticism being offered by Arlo and myself. Your responses just > breeze right past the objections and amount to little more than a repetition > of the bogus claim: "Marsha has her 'own logic' which is created by the > value she sees in the MOQ. The key thing here is that what we call 'logical' > *follows* our values. If we have different values then we are going to have a > different logic. How good or bad that logic appears will depend on our > values." > > That's what we're complaining, right there. To say that logic follows from or > depends upon on our values, and so we're all going to have our own logic is, > as Arlo calls it, "undiluted subjectivism". I'd even call it solipsism and > sophomoric relativism. It's an extremely bad idea, David, for many reasons. > Please pay attention to those reasons. djh responds: I disagree that logic is rendered meaningless from my statements.. Hopefully I made myself clearer in my response to Arlo. That we may disagree about what is and is not logical - and that we may each have our own unique set of cultural values and logic to go with them - doesn't mean there aren't cultural values we all share.. In other words - even though intellectual values are culturally derived that doesn't mean they can't do their own thing and have a beauty of their own. Thus we should have no qualms about calling a spade a spade and that which is logical, logical or vice versa. Please tell me you agree dmb.. I'd be surprised if you didn't. > dmb explains culturally transcending logic: > Its value is intellectual and consists in NOT varying from person to person. > It's a tool used to check the validity of both math and language - to check > the consistency and integrity of equations and sentences and it simply > doesn't matter whether you love opera, go to church, or rob banks for a > living. The values involved he > re are intellectual. What possible reason could anyone give for saying that > they DON'T think validity, consistency, integrity are very important > intellectual values? How could these standards be altered by one's personal > history? Pirsig doesn't pretend to have his own tests of truth but rather > claims that the MOQ meets the standards that already exist in our language > and culture - and logical consistency one he lists specifically. > > This is not even debatable. To have your own brand of logic is to reject > logic. Like language and math; logic is a public property. djh responds: But we all *do* have our own brand of logic… We have all been raised differently - with different values and have had different life experience so we will find that what is and is not logical will differ between us. I mentioned previously the following Lila quote.. "'You're sort of another culture,' he said. 'A culture of one. A culture is an evolved static pattern of quality capable of Dynamic change. That's what you are. That's the best definition of you that's ever been invented." To which you'd responded: dmb wrote: " And it's quite fitting that he's talking about Lila, the title character, who interprets the Captain's questions and inquiries as a personal attack. She evades the questions and then simply refuses to answer at all. I'm nobody, she says, you can't get to me. Of course this is because she is intellectually nowhere. She just cannot rightly read the situation. He's trying to help her but she's afraid him and doesn't understand him, assumes he just like all the others who used her and discarded her.. " On reflection now - I think this misses the point. Phaedrus at that point in the book had no idea Lila was crazy.. He was seriously just asking her questions because he was writing a book and thought it would be interesting to jot down all the values of someone and write about how this person is, actually, what they value and how those values have come to them from generations before.… '..You may think everything you say and everything you think is just you but actually the language you use and the values you have are the result of thousands of years of cultural evolution. It's all in a kind of debris of pieces that seem unrelated but are actually part of a huge fabric. Strauss postulates that a culture can only be understood by reenacting its thought processes with the debris of its interaction with other cultures. Does this make sense? I'd like to record the debris of your own memory and try to reconstruct things with it.' In other words - by calling Lila a culture of one - he is speaking of the *uniqueness* of Lila and her *particular* values which she has acquired over her life and form the 'debris of her *own* memory'.. So - further to this - that we are all 'cultures of one' doesn't mean though that we can't communicate or agree about the logic or illogic of something.. It is our *shared* cultural values which allow us to do that.. But beyond even that - as you like to point out to me - the quality of logic is an intellectual quality all of its own. So while we may disagree about what is logical - Or that 5 people might agree about the logic of something and only 2 don't doesn't imply that this quality is 'Culturally Relative' and thus doesn't exist. > dmb looks into djh's logic: > Neither you nor I get to decide what the term means or how that tool works. > And how did you arrive at this bizarre notion, anyway? > > "Because logic is based on values and value is universal," you say, "and thus > so is the quality of one logic over another." > > What? > > Every part of that seems quite wrong AND it doesn't add up either. > > Logic is BASED on values? No. It IS value. Period. Intellectual quality is > just a certain kind of value, a certain kind of quality. Logic is one of many > standards in the realm of intellectual quality. In the same way that theft > and murder are violations of social level morality, incoherence and > inconsistency are violations of intellectual morality. In both cases, the > violations are destructive of those particular values, constitute a > degeneration of those values to a lower level. djh responds: I'll try and be more precise for you dmb. I must say - I doubt anyone has ever said this to you but I do enjoy a good disagreement with you. The way you very *logically* go about things makes this disagreement a pleasure.. So that said.. [Being a *standard* of intellectual quality] what we call logical is based on our [cultural] values. For an example of this - please see the Law of the excluded middle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle As mentioned in ZMM - Western logic rejects the Mu state whereas it is far more commonly accepted in the East. Does that mean that logic is meaningless? No. Logic is a beautiful thing. Yes - I'm using the beauty of something for a justification for why it exists.. Because Quality, Morality, Harmony, Value is the ground-stuff of all things.. including those good things we call logic and truth. > David H said: > Disagreements about the MOQ aren't so much about what is and isn't logical - > but about what does and does not have value. > > dmb said: > At this point, I'm frustrated and a little angry. It looks like you're > letting a bunch of bizarre metaphysical entanglements get in the way of > seeing the obvious. > > This is a philosophical discussion group. We're talking about a philosophy > that says logical consistency is one of the tests of truth and it claims to > meet that test. How can anyone dismiss the value of logical consistency in > such a context? How could contradiction or inconsistency ever be a good thing > in such a context? > > "The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and > economy of explanation. The Metaphysics of Qaulity satisfies these." (Pirsig > in Lila, chapter 8.) > > "A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any > metaphysics." (Pirsig in Lila, page 64.) > > "Definitions are the FOUNDATION of reason. You can't reason without them." > (Emphasis is Pirsig's. ZAMM, page 214.) djh responds: And this speaks to my broader point and the reason why I brought all this up to begin with. Clearly I have never said that contradiction or inconsistency is a good thing. In fact I have said the opposite to that many times. Your misunderstand of what I'm saying speaks to my larger point - how what we [personally - culturally] value affects the logic which we use. Seeing the world directly rather than through the narrow lens of logic allows us to understand people, who they are and even the logic they use.. As I said at the start - I think it's so easy to neglect the important role our values play in our thinking - especially in a philosophical discussion. The only way you can understand someone who has a different logic to you isn't by applying your own set of logic.. but by casting aside your logic and looking at what they value.. Then you'll understand why they say what they do. "Trying to understand a member of another culture is impossible without taking into account differences in value. If a Frenchman asks, 'How can Germans stand to live the way they do?' he will get no answer as long as he applies French values to the question. If a German asks, 'How can the French stand to live the way they do?' he will get no answer as long as he applies German values to the question. When we ask how could the Victorians stand to live in the hypocritical and superficial way they did, we cannot get a useful answer as long as we superimpose on them twentieth-century values that they did not have. If one realises that the essence of the Victorian value pattern was an elevation of society above everything else, then all sorts of things fall into place." And by all means - once you understand what they value - feel free to call them illogical and point out how their thinking could be better. But not before - that's my point. So - all that said - can you please respond to my discussion about what Marsha values and where her *logic* is wrong? I'd be interested to see what you think.. 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
