Not surprisingly, Marsha said to D. Harding:
... But personally, I prefer to stick with RMP's terminology "static patterns
of value" without the need to assign the term 'truth'. And I prefer to think
of all static patterns of value as hypothetical.
Unsurprisingly, dmb disputes this with quotes from Pirsig and an encyclopedia:
"Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out
of society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic
nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as
dominated by social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological...
As the atomic phsyicist, Niels Bohr, said, 'We are suspended in language.' Our
intellectual descriptions are always culturally derived."
"Descartes' 'I think therefore I am' was a historically shattering declaration
of independence of the intellectual level of evolution from the social level of
evolution, but would he have said it if he had been a seventeenth century
Chinese philosopher? If he had been, would anyone in seventeenth century China
have listened to him and called him a brilliant thinker and recorded his name
in history? If Descartes had said, "The seventeenth century French culture
exists, therefore I think, therefore I am," he would have been correct."
"There is a temptation to say that solipsism is a false philosophical theory,
but this is not quite strong or accurate enough. As a theory, it is incoherent.
What makes it incoherent, above all else, is that the solipsist requires a
language (that is a sign-system) to think or to affirm his solipsistic thoughts
at all. Given this, it is scarcely surprising that those philosophers who
accept the Cartesian premises that make solipsism apparently plausible, if not
inescapable, have also invariably assumed that language-usage is itself
essentially private. The cluster of arguments – generally referred to as “the
private language argument” – that we find in the [Wittgenstien's]
Investigations against this assumption effectively administers the coup de
grâce to both Cartesian dualism and solipsism.
Language is an irreducibly public form of life that is encountered in
specifically social contexts. Each natural language-system contains an
indefinitely large number of “language-games,” governed by rules that, though
conventional, are not arbitrary personal fiats. The meaning of a word is its
(publicly accessible) use in a language. To question, argue, or doubt is to
utilize language in a particular way. It is to play a particular kind of public
language-game. The proposition “I am the only mind that exists” makes sense
only to the extent that it is expressed in a public language, and the existence
of such language itself implies the existence of a social context. Such a
context exists for the hypothetical last survivor of a nuclear holocaust, but
not for the solipsist. A non-linguistic solipsism is unthinkable and a
thinkable solipsism is necessarily linguistic. Solipsism therefore presupposes
the very thing that it seeks to deny. That solipsistic thoughts are thinkable
in the first instance implies the existence of the public, shared,
intersubjective world that they purport to call into question."
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