A long time lurker who hasn't contributed anything for over two years, I'm rousted out of my passivity by Diana's incisive comments about Pirsig's naivete on the subject of linguistics. She correctly points out the Pirsig is wrong to suggest that Chinese is a language "where subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar"(ZAMM Morrow ed., 349)and so it would be inappropriate to attribute a more closely MoQ orientation among the Chinese to this particular linguistic misperception. Though both Steve Pinker and Noam Chomsky would object to a strong Sapir-Whorf view of language (i.e. that linguistic difference among different peoples entails perceptual/cognitive differences), I'm sure they would have no trouble with a weaker claim, consistent with Pirsig's thoughts, that a specific language will influence(but not determine)perception, and that speakers of different languages will be somewhat sensitized to different aspects of their environment. In fact, Chomsky, who views language as a mental organ, has his own version of linguistically driven epistomology, and likes to make a distinction between aspects of reality that can be understood (he calls them "problems") and aspects which are unfathomable in principle (he calls them "mysteries"), which result from our species specific cognitive organization (Reflections on Language 1975). Chomsky actually celebrates that fact that there are things that are unknowable in principle (because of the way the mind is structured); it follows from this rich structure that other seemingly intractible issues are only "problems" (and therefore we have the capacity to make progress). A rock, which has no cognitive structure, cannot do much with its environment, unlike humans, who are designed to understand the world in a particular, rich, but limited way, which permits them to make progress. This species-specific epistomology of Chomsky (and Pinker) doesn't seem to me to be too much at variance with Pirsig's views. It enlarges the conditioning factors to include biological as well as social sources. 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
