From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 21:16:09 GMT
Erin,
On the politics of academia, I certainly lament them as much as you. The
pragmatist position doesn't lead to them, it leads to the things I was talking
about. The connection between the two is one of degrees: when people are about
the standards and are ironic enough to let new thinkers into their discipline,
a discipline grows, expands, and flourishes. If the people get hunkered down
in their own decaying ways and don't admit any new ideas, pass "carbon copies
of themselves," then the discipline constricts and dies off. Either one can
occur, but it has very little to do with whether we accept the pragmatist
conception of knowledge (which I thought you were implying, maybe you weren't).
On folk wisdom, I don't know what else to say other than reiterate, "knowledge
is what people agree on that works." When you ask, "My question was what does
this idea 'knowledge is measured by consensus of opinion' say when a intuitive
folk piece of info conflicts with counterintutive expertise piece of info," I
find it hard to answer because the idea doesn't say anything directly to those
differences. It simply says, "Over time, if the folk piece turns out to be
more useful then the counterintuitive expertise piece, then chances are the
folk piece will live on as folk knowledge, with people still believing in it."
Erin said:
Could you compare for me this knowledge/opinion idea with Pirsig's example
of gravity being a ghost.
Matt:
I love Pirsig's discourse on the ghosts of the West because it seems to me the
perfect counter to Pirsig's own claim for absoluteness "now and forever." The
way I read it, Pirsig's refuting the idea that Knowledge is something "out
there" waiting for us to correspond to it. He's saying that gravity isn't "out
there," it's in our heads, starting with Newton. Knowledge of gravity consists
of us agreeing with Newton's conception of the cosmos, it consists in us going,
"Yeah Newton. I think that works pretty well." Pirsig's flip comment about
education being hypnosis isn't meant to be derogatory (on my reading). Its
meant to point out that education and knowledge are based on tradition, a
handing down of "this is what works" from one generation to another. We need
this education as a starting off point, before we can go, "All right, I have a
better way."
The way I read it, the dialogue between a person who thinks Pirsig wants an
absolute Quality and one who doesn't would go like this (this is from an
endnote in my forthcoming essay):
"It is absolutely moral for a doctor to prefer a patient, always has been,
always will be."
"Was it like that at the beginning of time, before doctors and patients?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"Well, think of it as a moral law or patter of action. Just 'cuz people aren't
around following it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Remember, Pirsig says that
not all things are matter."
"Sure, but Pirsig's entire concept of evolutionary patterns was that the more
progressive patterns sit on top of the lower, antecedent patterns. According
to Pirsig, intellectual patterns didn't exist at the dawning of time and,
likewise, neither do the moral codes between levels exist without the different
levels. To say that, because its true now that a doctor should prefer the
patient over the germ, it was always true, now and forever, seems a little
overly revisionary."
Matt
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