Sam,
The "black box" observation comes (as far as I know about it) from a post by Diana McPartlin, from about a year or two back, in which she ran down a laundry list of previous criticisms of LILA which had never found satisfactory resolutions. I'm not sure what the post was called, I'll search for it in the archives and send it to you if I find it.
rick
----- Original Message -----
From: Elizaphanian
To: moq_discuss@moq.org
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 3:25 PM
Subject: Re: MD Be thankful it wasn't your sister
Greetings Rick, thanks for the clarification. My point about prima facie credibility was simply that people participate in this forum because (I imagine) they give Pirsig some status as a thinker; I don't think that implies that we are just a fan club. If the evidence shows that he is wrong on something, then clearly we've got to establish that - and more power to our elbows. On that subject, is there somewhere you could point me to that talks about the philosophy of mind issues (black box) that you mention. It's a major interest of mine, and I'd like to see what's been said about Pirsig.
Sounds like I *have* missed something very large, anyway....
Sam
----- Original Message -----
From: Valence
To: moq_discuss@moq.org
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 6:32 AM
Subject: Re: MD Be thankful it wasn't your sister
SAM:
I may have missed something very large, but doesn't Pirsig himself make the point that the US constitution was influenced by the Indians? And doesn't that - at least in this forum - give it a certain prima facie credibility? Isn't it about time we discussed this in the MF forum?
RICK:
I remember the founder of this forum, Diana, used to love to point out that Pirsig was also suckered in by "the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" (remember that bit about all the different words for snow).... that his thoughts on perception and the mind use a "black box" model that clashes with what is currently known about the brain..... that biologists do not "rank" the evolutionary states of different biological forms as Pirsig does in LILA (ex. It's immoral to eat meat when vegetables are available b/c animals are more highly evolved than plants)...etc.
If the fact that Pirsig says something or agrees with it gives it a prima facie validity in this forum then we are basically just a fan club... Examining, evaluating and debating Pirsig's ideas is what gives this forum its value.
Besides, even if it had a prima facie credibility, that credibility has now been challenged (actually, this particular issue has come up quite a few times in the past). In my studies on Constitutional Law for the last few years I have seen the "Indian Influence" theory debated by numerous scholars in many different settings. Unless I missed something very large, the general feeling of legal academia is against the theory. This is not to disregard author's like the one quoted in Oisin's post from a few days ago, it's just to say that supporters of the theory are generally a very small minority.
Unfortunately, whether a particular version of history is revisionist, or whether the historians simply got it wrong the first time, is usually an impossible debate. However, if you think this is worth discussing as a topic in the other forum, propose it, and if it's chosen, then we'll really get into it.
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