Arlo said to dmb:
.... In his article "A Pedagogy for Teachers and Other Educational Decision
Makers" (Journal of Educational Administration, October, 1980), Graham
Patterson writes "The link between peasant villagers in Latin America [as
described by Freire in Cultural Action for Freedom] and students who are
disadvantaged by our educational system is to be found in the decision making
process itself. In order to illustrate that link it is necessary to consider
current educational practice and an alternative model that I as a teacher am
currently using. The model has a close parallel in Pirsig's analysis of the
inconsistencies in Western behaviour, as expressed so completely in his book
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." It's an interesting article,
linking Freire and Pirsig throughout, I'd recommend giving it a read (remember
it was written way back in 1980 :-)).
dmb says:
Wow. Thanks, Arlo. The paper was easy to find and it's free. I've downloaded
and printed it. So cool to see Pirsig's name in an abstract. Looking forward to
reading the thing.
Arlo said:
....this is exactly why Pirsig's expansion of rationality is so important, as
we are drifting, in the wake of the de-objectivism of intellect, backwards
towards social authority over intellect (even when not full blown Victorian
morality).
dmb says:
Exactly. That root expansion provides a way forward that is NOT predicated on
objectivity or relativism, which are two sides of the same essentialist coin.
Did you already see my latest article? The topic of "de-objectification" came
up in relation to Kuhn's work...
As a precocious and idealistic 15 year old college freshman, Robert Pirsig
became obsessed with questions about scientific truth and the problem of
relativism. He was studying biochemistry when he noticed how fun and easy it
was to generate new hypotheses. Rather than focus on his homework assignments,
“he became interested in hypotheses as entities in themselves.” At first he was
amused by the seemingly endless proliferation of hypotheses and he coined a
little law: “The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given
phenomenon is infinite.” (ZAMM, 115.) After a few months, however, he started
to understand the implications of this “law” and his amusement turned to horror.
“If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is
completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general
validity of all scientific method!”
The method can’t be conclusive, he figures, because there will never be enough
time to test an infinite number of hypotheses. As an idealistic teenager, he
had believed that the whole point of the scientific method was to find the one,
true hypothesis. His intellectual hero had an answer to this problem but it was
“incredibly weak,” the young Pirsig thought. ”Evolution has shown that at any
given moment out of all conceivable constructions,” Einstein had said, “a
single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest.” Sympathy
and intuition were strange words to use in relation to the origins of
scientific knowledge, the young Pirsig thought, and “the phrase ‘at any given
moment’ really shook [him]. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a
function of time?” At this point he became interested in scientific truth
itself as “a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything
else”. He saw that “some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others
for less than a year.” Even further, the lifespan of such truths seemed to be
in direct proportion to the amount of scientific inquiry surrounding them –
quite simply because “the more you look, the more you see.”
“The purpose of the scientific method is to select a single truth from among
many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all
about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through
multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and
hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute
truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones.”
These are philosophical issues that cannot be answered within normal science,
and they had no bearing on his biochemistry homework either. So, despite his
170 I.Q., he flunked out of college, waited until he was old enough, and joined
the Army. Upon his return from Korea, as you might expect, he re-enrolled as a
philosophy major. Young Pirsig “discovered that the science [he'd] once thought
of as the whole world of knowledge is only a brand of philosophy” and he “found
in philosophy a natural continuation of the question that brought [him] to
science in the first place.”
Thanks again,
dmb
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