Hey David (either), >From just reading what was written, I'm not sure there is a clear disagreement, but that's just because whenever people start slinging the "Noooo, YOU'RE stuck in SOM!" stuff, I think that's often time a good indication that the water's still too murky.
I doubt DMB would deny that the possible is real, as you're saying David, but just insofar as its properly explicated. I see what you're trying to suggest, and how it highlights a weakness in SOM, but whatever redescription we use still needs to be able to capture the contrast between possible and actual, which is why, I gather, DMB is protesting. I think the easiest way to try and explain your point is to suggest that by saying that "the possible is real" you're saying the same thing against the tradition that Pirsig was suggesting with DQ and it's relation to Whitehead's "dim apprehension." As I see it, the muddy water is occuring around what it means to "know," as when DMB says, "I think a person has to torture logic and the english language in order to make a case that 'the possible' is a real thing that we can know in experience." I'd first remind DMB that Pirsig tortured logic with his Quality and that torture alone is not an indication of regression or badness. I'm not sure if David mentioned knowing and knowledge in his excursus on "the possible," but DMB is bringing in "what we can know" to curb "what is real," such that, because the possible is, by conventional definition what we don't know because it hasn't happened yet, it isn't real. It isn't hard to see how curbing "the real" with "what we can know" can get out of hand and turn into SOM--such a formulation is how the tradition curbed out values from reality. The solution that Pirsig attempts is to expand our notion of reality, which thereby also expands our notion of what counts as knowledge, "what we know." I'm not saying DMB _is_ regressing, but that that is, I think, the point on which it hangs. I think there is an obvious, commonsensical sense that DMB is right to defend, the idea that we don't _know_ the future (as, for instance, against seers), but I think David might be playing around with a different, broader sense of "know." Who's supporting the MoQ? Both. To use the MoQ with any kind of efficiency requires you to move back and forth between common sense (which, as Pirsig tells us, has some Platonism/SOM built into it currently) and counterintuitive philosophical formulations with a fair amount of agility--good static patterns of the past with breaking the static patterns, with the hope that they are Dynamic and not degenerate. Matt _________________________________________________________________ With tax season right around the corner, make sure to follow these few simple tips. http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/PreparationTips/PreparationTips.aspx?icid=HMFebtagline 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
