I must say I appreciate Platt Holden's editorial summaries! On the one truth / many truths dichotomy, - I have to admit, I don't see the problem (or at least not clearly!). Surely we are not saying that there is necessarily a 'competition' between the one and the many? (this is this thing about 'absolute' distinctions, again). Why can't they quite happily coexist? That is to say, if we postulate the 'overall' truth as a concept which effectively (to us, at least) has no 'edges' or limits or whatever, then we can easily say that on the one hand it is not, as it were, mathematically divisible, yet it is equally true that one can have a 'bit' of it - a single 'truth', with edges, which we can ostensibly define the is / is not boundaries of, and so conceptually grasp and manipulate. This, to my mind, is what we do when we 'perceive' the world about us; we split the overall "everything-and-everywhere-ness" of our environment into things, and processes, and concepts, and relationships between all of these. (I should say that 'perception' is my field of study). And doing this is what we call 'understanding' the world (as far as we can be said to do so). But it is important to understand that those subdivisions we choose are not the 'units' that the world is made of -it isn't strictly a reversible process. So we could never actually find enough bricks to make an infinite wall! And this of course has implications for the notion that we get our reality from "direct experience") So when we say that two truths are apparently mutually contradictory, we are actually saying that the paradigm which would accomodate both truths is what we are trying to arrive at. And this is what we mean by growth in understanding, or enlightenment or whatever, and the process goes on and on from birth. Now, I sort of assumed that this was the point of a monism, and that's why various philosophers throughout the ages relied on 'God' or suchlike, to validate the rest of their metaphysic. And I must admit, I've lived the last 20 years assuming that this is basically what Pirsig was proposing with "Quality", and further, that it worked fine for me! I have to admit, I've never attempted the sort of precision of definition Pirsig's terms and ideas that this group proposes, even though I'm the first to quote Neville Moray (Listening and Attention, 1969) : "Too many meanings, without sufficient precision in their use, without adequate operational defininition, lead to a concept becoming less valuable the more promiscuously it is employed." , in lectures. Nevertheless, when applying such rigorous analysis to concepts such as 'perception', and 'that which is perceived' (the world about us), - I've found that such concepts become as slippery as live eels, and eventually one has to settle for specifying the margin of error, rather than the exact definition. So I guess what I'm saying is that I've always used the experience of reading Pirsig some twenty-odd years ago as a way of conceptualising an attitude, rather than specific beliefs. So, as soon as an apparent contradiction shows up, this is a 'signpost' toward some interesting new feature of the world, and probably presages another bout of shedding beliefs, rather than accumulating them. This thing about attitudes points to a way in which pre-intellectual processes may act in judgement on intellectual ones (to address another recent thread). And it seems to me to be a fundamental (though rarely discussed) characteristic of human perception (as with 'cocktail party effect, and so on) But am I oversimplifying? regards Peter Lennox Hardwick House tel: (0114) 2661509 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
