From: Kevin (kevin@xap.com)
Date: Tue Jan 07 2003 - 00:41:00 GMT
Steve quotes from the Dancing Wu Li Masters:
³Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not,
however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our
endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to
understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the
moving hands, even hears the ticking, but he has no way of opening the
case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which
could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be
quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his
observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the
real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning
of such a comparison.²
Kevin:
Around here, some people seem to be convinced that they know exactly
what's in the watch and violently shout down anyone trying to offer
another analogy.
Still others seem to be convinced that Pirsig "traveled beyond the veil"
to see inside the watch and now it only remains for us to decode his
precious vision from the pages of his books.
A few people around here feel that the Pirsig analogy is a great step in
the right direction but that an even better analogy could be realized.
One incorporates Pirsig's great thoughts and refines or ignores what
might be his bad thoughts.
I wonder what prevents some from realizing that choosing the best
analogy from available data is NOT the same as Finding The Immutable
Truth. Would this be an example of what Matt (quoting Rorty) calls
"incorrigibility of final vocabularies"?
With frustration,
Kevin
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