Greetings,
Nice idea Horse, I almost wish you were right. However, you are wrong. A
strawman is a specific, if unusual, philosophical term with precisely the
definition I gave it. Unusual, mainly because serious philosophers do not
indulge in it. Your definition of a strawman is, in fact, a definition of a
misrepresentation; a rather more simple, less interesting, but excusable
fault.
I suppose you still need corroboration so I give you Nigel Warburton's
definition from his book, 'Thinking':
"Straw Man: a caricature of your opponents view set up simply so that you
can knock it down. Literally, a straw man is a dummy made of straw for
target practice. Setting up a straw man is the opposite of playing devil's
advocate. It involves a degree of wishful thinking stemming from widespread
reluctance to attribute great intelligence or subtlety to someone with whom
you strongly disagree. While it is often tempting to set up and topple easy
targets, this activity has no place in critical thinking."
Now to any reasonable analysis, this is precisely what Pirsig does at every
turn. Being a fan of rhetoric, I would have expected him to be pleased with
his excellent strawmen and suspect that he secretly is. I can now see that
your misunderstanding caused you not to recognise the strawman critique as
valid, Horse. Unless bloody-mindedness intervenes, I'm sure that you will
now be able to accept it.
Some of the most outrageous strawmen from Pirsig are (references are from
the Black Swan Edition, 1991) :
1) 'All the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that
can't be classified as a subject or object isn't real' (pg121) - Again,
nobody has ever believed this. Gravity is seen by almost everybody as real
ESPECIALLY the 'man in the street'. Likewise time.
2)'(SOM) . . insist(s) upon a single exclusive truth' pg122 - Rubbish. It is
'true' that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. It is also 'true' that
water is wet. In another sense, it is 'true' that 2+2=4 and it is also true
that 3+1=4. That H20 is water is a scientific truth and, while the genesis
story is not a scientific truth, it is a religious truth. A fictional story
is not literally true, but it contains a kind of truth. Of course SCIENCE
insists upon one TYPE of truth, funnily enough this is known as scientific
truth, but you will not find a scientist who doesn't recognise the truth of
her love for her husband - unless she doesn't love him. And, of course,
science is not a metaphysics, it is a tool and so this is not a metaphysical
position. I have 'taught' this one to 13 year olds. The majority find it to
be stark staringly obvious and usually 'taught' me instead.
3) 'Because they can't classify it (the platypus) experts have claimed there
is something wrong with it' (pg125) - ??????????? Pah, Humbug!!!
4)'It has to make this fatal division because it gives top position in its
structure to subjects and objects' (pg184) - Time? again!
5)'Free will v Determinism' (pg186) - This is a strawman as determinism and
free will are widely seen not to be logically exclusive. Likewise
indeterminism is no guarantor of free will, nor does it even make free will
more likely. The 'mythos' of the 'man in the street' is that we have free
will, so that alternative defence fails.
Pirsig makes it far too easy so I shall stop.
Bo. Naughty, naughty, I deliberately pointed out that no credit was due to
me for the demise of Lila in the UK (as it obviously wasn't and I would be a
total twat to claim that it was) and yet you still claim that I claimed it.
No matter. I will also forgive you for following your master and inventing a
couple more strawmen, in order to put me down, (that I don't differentiate
between subject and object or recognise life and society). As yours is a
metaphysics of misrepresentation, this is only to be expected. I also admire
your SOM understanding which places the laughter as subjective and the
facial contortions as objective; you really do have a very bad dose of
subjectobjectivitis. Indeed, just reading it gave me an excellent experience
of the wholeness of laughter - which is odd considering your claim that this
wholeness can never be experienced. Well so be it, our brains work in
fundamentally different ways; if the moq cures your own rather particular
metaphysical angst then I congratulate you on having found it and hope that
it helps you to enjoy a great Christmas.
Boas Festas
Struan
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