David Morey said to Dave Buchanan:
I'll take incoherent back for a second, you say DQ is full of content, I say
it is full of pattern, let's say it is full of X, now why is content so much
better a word than pattern, what rules it out? Is there a better word for X? I
have tried the split between DQ and SQ as pre-conceptual patterns and
conceptual patterns, you don't like that, what about dynamic patterns versus
static patterns?
[Ron says]
Dave Morey, I believe Dave B. to be maintaining the arguement which centers
around
the meaning of terms within a particular context, that context being MoQ. It
seems
that you want to question if that meaning also can extend to the arguement of
percept/
concept and still maintain a high degree of explanitory power while keeping its
contextual
meaning within MoQ.
The problem of percept/concept is an old one, it resembles the one/many problem
and we
can glean some insight into the topic by looking at what ancients have said
about it as well
as contemporary minds who have recognized the problem and then compare that to
how
Pirsig addressed the problem.
Lets start with the premise you have supplied below.
"Is the moon (a concept) round (a concept)? Let us look and see, well it is
white (a percept)"
"white" or "white-ness" is commonly understood as a concept, a universal as
well as black
and the reason why is that percepts are constantly changing, coming to be and
fading away
as the ancients stated the meaning (Heraclitus is known for this observation of
experience)
Dave continues:
but does it fill all my experience? No. The white is surrounded by black (a
percept). So the moon has a shape (a pattern caused by the percepts not the
concepts) and this shape is round (a concept). For you the shape-pattern of the
moon is a concept, for me round is a concept but the perceived shape in our
experience is not a concept it is just a specific shape that we then come to
notice and describe as round and the moon...
[Ron]
I see that in this arguement you are making certain assumptions in regards to
what you are
presuming to be percepts and that they posses a certain unfiltered purity and
that this
purity renders form independant of the human minds ability to understand it.
Plato thought that too and that is why the theory of forms was his attempt to
explain
why things fall into kinds it was his answer to Heraclitus, it was his attempt
to account
for recurrent elements of our experience as well as such general ideas as
"white" "black"
"justice" "beauty" and "good".
Aristotle disagreed, to him universals (forms) were artistic assembly of many
particular
unintelligible percepts into wholes, that the process or the act of making
distinction,in
your example experiencing a shape, is a complex process of placing limit on the
limitless.
Aristotle asserts that the terms limit and Good become synonomous in meaning
in this context. Which kinda boils down to the idea that experience exists
because
its intelligible, to understand is to experience. Human experience would not be
human experience if it was unintelligible.
I think the best answer is the Pragmatic one, universals; or types or classes,
(forms)
{shapes}distinctions in experience, are not so much part of the dynamic flux
but more
part of the human framework of concepts, they suggest what possibly "is" and
what may
"be" but all distinction is part of the past, made by memory and always half
emerged
in what was or we would never be able to experience the "now" in any kind of
meaningful
way.
Dave M. concludes:
we can point to it before we call it the moon or describe it, other people can
see where in this common experience we are pointing and see this pattern in
their experience too, if it is not a pattern how can they turn to see
something and suddenly realise it is there, if concepts are required to turn
percepts into patterns how do we experience new things that come along and
surprise us? Do concepts require work to make them or do you think they just
pop into existence prior to culture and language? I just cannot make sense of
what you think concepts mean?
[Ron]
New things come along and surprise us precisely because we are turning percepts
into
patterns, remember we are talking about meaning not what really is and is not
and I can
understand Dave B.'s frustration because you seem to insist on the primacy of
an external
independent prime creator of pattern that human concepts correspond to and
mirror when
the Pragmatic assertion is the primacy of human imposition on experience.
I think alittle backround reading on the central problems of philosophy and how
philosophers
throughout history attempted to explain them and how Pirsigs explains them
would help
tremendously in this situation and I think you would understand what Dave B. is
saying
with alittle more clarity too.
Dave Buchanan is simply framing the MoQ in context to these philosophical
problems
and how Pirsigs work answers, accounts for and explains them within that
historical framework.
That is why he hammers on the correct and accurate meaning of MoQ terms because
they
hold the most meaning in refference to this history.
It's what we all should be concerned with on a philosophy forum.
..
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