David Morey said to Dan:
...If we adopt a fully antirealist MOQ, I think we lose the best aspects of science, instead of a study of SQ that opens the doors to the great intellectual spaces of cosmology and evolution, it tries to confine SQ to what seems like solipsism,.. dmb says: I've encountered this kind of objection many times. This objection entails an assumption that scientific truths correspond to an objective reality and so it tells me that DM is still haunted by the ghost of objectivity. It's difficult to overcome realism because almost all non-philosophers and non-scientist accepted it as common sense. Most scientists are realists and the vast majority of analytic philosophers are realists too. But it's very important to realize that the MOQ is opposed to this view, not least of all because realism entails SOM. This is the view that Pirsig exposes as "a genetic defect" in rationality itself. To construe the MOQ as a kind of realism is to construe the MOQ as it's own enemy. That would not be merely incorrect or mistaken. It would be a disaster. Pragmatism is an alternative to SOM's correspondence theory of truth so I could point to the last few chapters of LILA to establish the MOQ's rejection of realism - but Pirsig begins his attack on realism very early in ZAMM. It was always there, even before he ever thought to mention William James. On page 41 and 42 of ZAMM, for example, Pirsig says,... "The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized." "...the laws of physics and logic ..the number system ...These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real." "The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton." Much later in ZAMM (page 262), when Pirsig is talking about Poincare and alternative geometries he says it doesn't really make any sense to... "...ask whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois system is false; whether Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. One geometry can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous." If we want the MOQ to be taken seriously, I think it's important to talk about it in terms that are going to be intelligible to people who think about philosophy. That's why I think we should be talking about it in basic philosophical terms. For those who might like to get a grasp of the MOQ it's important to reach out, meet them halfway, and otherwise explain it in terms that are commonly understood - as opposed to dishing it up in Pirsigese or any other exclusive jargon. That's why Ant's formulation would, I think, be unhelpful. A definition of SOM might be, he says,... "any metaphysics that, implicitly or explicitly, DEFINES the Good." I don't think that would be very helpful even to those who are already familiar with Pirsig's work - but more importantly the terms we need to talk about this with the wider philosophical community are already out there and ready to be deployed. There is already a variety of challenges to realism and critiques of objectivity that a MOQer could use. Using a resource like the Stanford Encyclopedia lets people know that the MOQ isn't just some crackpot theory from a bunch of incompetent cranks, you know? I think we owe it to Pirsig to talk about his ideas in a way that will NOT make serious people laugh at it, mock it, or dismiss it with a roll of the eyes. Let's say we want to address the concerns of an uncomprehending realist, for example. David Morey tells us that he's concerned that without realism, "we lose the best aspects of science" and end up promoting "solipsism". To explain why this is not the case we could cite the Stanford Encyclopedia (or any one of a zillion Journal articles) on a anti-realist stance known as "Constructive Empiricism" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/constructive-empiricism/) or the article titled "Challenges to Metaphysical Realism" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-sem-challenge/). The following introductory lines are enough to explain why we don't lose any aspect of science with Constructive Empiricism. "Constructive empiricism is a view which stands in contrast to the type of scientific realism that claims the following: Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the world is like; and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true. In contrast, the constructive empiricist holds that science aims at truth about observable aspects of the world, but that science does not aim at truth about unobservable aspects. Acceptance of a theory, according to constructive empiricism, correspondingly differs from acceptance of a theory on the scientific realist view: the constructive empiricist holds that as far as belief is concerned, acceptance of a scientific theory involves only the belief that the theory is empirically adequate." In other words, scientific theories aren't True, they're convenient. Right? You see? 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
