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 - horse@wasted.demon.nl
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:00:39 BST