From: Ian Glendinning (ian@psybertron.org)
Date: Sun Jan 16 2005 - 19:50:46 GMT
Matt,
Intersting stuff as usual, so I feel prompted to comment, even though I
wasn't really following your dialogue with Paul. Ignore me if I'm way off
beam.
I guess I'm one of those who see's MoQ as "self-evident" - pragmatically,
empirically so.
Being also a pragmatist, I guess you are also saying people like me need to
recognise the practical need for reasoned argument to back up my "faith" in
the MoQ, if we expect it to get anywhere as a credible philosophy in the
real world. Therefore those pesky skeptics need to have their arguments
addressed ?
Whilst I'm no philosophy expert, I hope you would not see me as
"inattentive" to the history of philosophy.
Pirsig railed against philosophology too. I guess I'm generally looking at
philsophy from an internal pre-cognitive perspective - MoQ seems to have
that indefinable Quality itself - but I am actively looking for the evidence
of others to back it up, philosophical as well as empirical. Until
epiphenomenology (whose arguments for and against are loaded with
pejorative, intentional verbs IMHO) I'd say anything I have read and tried
to understand, just ends up looking like a primitive sub-set of MoQ from a
limited or flawed perspective often with a huge dose of the prevailing
theology (excuse the massive generalisation). Anyway, whatever I'm looking
for I'll see it when I know it.
Whether it's ontology or epistemology being focussed on, one thing I see in
the history of philosophy is the form of argumentation. For me it is the
argumentation that is loaded in terms of objectivity, logic and an
assumption of absolutes to be found, a metaphysics. That's the handicap, the
Catch22 I call it. ie Until I discover a new mode of argumentation, I do not
feel any obligation to "justify" the MoQ in rational terms.
You say - The skeptic's purpose is to make the entire search for absolute
certainty look hopeless.
I say that's interesting - I'm never sure whether the skeptic is not himself
hopelessly in search of those absolutes.
Since I already doubt there are any absolutes, and am not looking for any,
the latter is understandable, No ?
The hot-stove / pain-sensation examples are legion, but surely state of the
art neuroscience is homing in on this stuff fast. I made refrence to
T.E.Lawrence in my review of Sacks (or was it Austin) - "The trick is not
minding" NB - "Minding". Masochist or not, the "mental" and physical
behaviours are mediated by learned (ie evolved) neural processes. Ditto
intuition vs consciouness of having had an intuition. The problem with the
history of philosophy is its knowledge of the physical world (the world
explicable by physics, and its higher levels of evolution) is always less
than now. One of the reasons I feel the need to explore both the history of
thought and the future of science. Old thought is often true, old science
rarely is.
You quote Rorty - "the price of retaining one's epistemological authority is
a decent respect for the opinions of mankind."
Whilst I still feel the inherent Quality in Rorty, I still find plenty of
his words I don't understand. I read that sentence as indicating the there
can be no epistemological "authority". ie there are no absolutes again.
Anyway, now I'm rambling.
Ian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Kundert" <pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Friday, January 14, 2005 7:38 PM
Subject: RE: MD Them pesky pragmatists
> Hey Paul,
>
> I'm not sure that everyone is on the same page. I'm not sure that it's
> quite understood what the full force and significance of the skeptic is
and
> I'm pretty sure that I don't have the power to do that much backgrounding.
> The discouraging thing for me is that, people here constantly claim that
the
> MoQ is the best philosophy they've seen, or that it dissolves all of
> philosophy's problems. I can't see that such claims hold much water if
> people aren't actually attuned to the problems and vicissitudes of
> philosophy, outside of such claims being simply references to what
Pirsig's
> claimed in his books. Inattention to the history of philosophy is a
common
> problem here, which wouldn't be a problem if people were willing to reign
in
> their claims about what they know. I would never claim that people have
to
> do or understand mainstream philosophy. But if you are going to claim
> Pirsig's superiority to mainstream philosophy, it would be nice if it were
> backed up somehow. My interest in Pirsig is in his intersection with the
> history of philosophy, how Pirsig joins in that conversation. But I don't
> know how to express those thoughts if there isn't a general understanding
of
> how the history of philosophy has played itself out. (I'm certainly not
> claiming to be an expert, but I am claiming to have a general knowledge of
> it.)
>
> I'm certainly not ending the dialogue, I simply want to note my
> discouragement and frustration. I'll keep trying to figure out ways of
> saying what I want to say, but I feel like I'm playing with a handicap.
>
> First, let me say that I'm picking up the mediated/unmediated distinction
> from Pirsig. He uses it to describe what he's doing and I do think it
> fairly integral to they way he describes his philosophy. If people want
to
> discard it, that's perfectly fine, great in fact considering I prefer
> discarding it. But I'm not interested in pursuing other people's visions
of
> Pirsig's philosophy at the moment. I'm interested in Pirsig. I'm
> interested in investigating the way Pirsig's philosophy hangs together as
> gleaned from his writings. (As it happens, I don't think moving to a
> differentiated/undifferentiated distinction removes the particular
problems
> I'm currently pointing to, so it currently doesn't matter in our
dialogue.)
>
> Paul said:
> The first thing about this statement is that it is more that Dynamic
Quality
> is 'betterness' itself, rather than - "is better than static patterns."
The
> statement that "this is better than that," to me, is more applicable to
> static quality in which things can be defined by such fixed relationships.
>
> Matt:
> I'm not exactly sure what the difference is supposed to be between
> "betterness itself" and "better than static patterns." If we are talking
> about the relationships between things, doesn't DQ have a relationship to
> static patterns? Didn't you just quote Pirsig at me that said something
> about how everything is relational? (Though this is, I think, what Dan is
> denying, though I doubt both the usefulness in denying it and the denial's
> fidelity to Pirsig's philosophy.)
>
> Paul said:
> The second thing is that, if you accept my modification of your terms,
then
> the statement becomes, "undifferentiated reality is better than
> differentiated reality." In this sense one may say that any response to
> undifferentiated reality is better because undifferentiated reality is
> simple, unambiguous and direct and will 'provoke' a simpler and direct
> response. . By hitting value dead on there is no confusion and no
> comparative reflection about what to do. The Quality of the action, with
the
> right patterns to support it, may result in the latching of new and better
> patterns to be repeated in future behaviour.
>
> Matt:
> This relates to what you say later about Pirsig's stove/pain example,
> kenntnis and wissenschaft, and knowledge by acquaintance.
>
> First, I would like to forward the superficially stupid and obtuse
question,
> "How do you know a 'simple, unambiguous and direct' response is better
than
> a 'complex, ambiguous and indirect' one?" Now I just seem obstinate, but
I
> hope to give force to such a question and some flesh to the conceptual
> difficulties I would like to raise, in relation to the notion of criteria.
> That question, after all, is the next round of skeptical questioning.
>
> Pirsig's deployed distinction between kenntnis and wissenschaft is roughly
> that between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. This
> is a distinction popularized in Anglophone philosophy by one of the
princes
> of logical positivism, Bertrand Russell (e.g., in The Problems of
> Philosophy). I would think that parallel alone would make our hair stand
on
> end, but here are some of the problems as I see in it.
>
> Can we look at a philosophical proposition and instantaneously know
whether
> it is good or not? Isn't this what Pirsig's implying, that the Dynamic
> insight is the one immediately in front of you? But how do we know that
our
> immediate impulse of accepting a proposition as true is Dynamic Quality
and
> not the coherence that proposition has with our other beliefs?
Furthermore,
> how do we know this immediate flash of insight is leading us aright and
not
> afoul? As Wittgenstein said, "If intuition is an inner voice-how do I
know
> how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn't mislead me? For
if
> it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong." (Philosophical
> Investigations, No. 213) How do we know our immediate flash of insight is
> better and not degenerate?
>
> The hot stove example is commonly trotted out to defend the certainty of
> Dynamic Quality, immediate sensation/impression/intuition/etc. If you
touch
> a stove, you will immediately sense it as low quality. Or will you? I
have
> consistently trotted out my own counterexample and I have yet to see it
> answered (and I'm not quite sure how it would be). What if the person
> touching the stove is a masochist? If a masochist touches a hot stove,
> they'll sense it as high quality.
>
> But maybe the emphasis has been wrong when the hot stove example has been
> ushered onto stage. Maybe the emphasis should be on _having_ an immediate
> impression, that we do have privileged access, epistemological authority,
> over our immediate impressions, that we can be absolutely sure that "this
> sucks/is great!" But what if we come across a person who says he's in
pain
> whenever he eats cheese cake? He eats the cake, groans in pleasure, and
> says sincerely, "I'm in pain!" Is he in pain or is he wrong? I think we
> might come to the conclusion that he is simply misusing a word. Which
> raises the question of how we are ever to know with absolute certainty
that
> a person is actually feeling something or misusing the language. At this
> point, we should wonder what this absolute certainty, this epistemological
> authority, does for us. This leads to Rorty's early dictum that "the
price
> of retaining one's epistemological authority is a decent respect for the
> opinions of mankind."
>
> This is how my question, "How do you know a 'simple, unambiguous and
direct'
> response is better than a 'complex, ambiguous and indirect' one?", gains
> flesh. All of the above questions were driven to eliminate the notion of
> absolute certainty, which is the epistemological dream. When I talk about
> "what criteria are you going to give the skeptic" I'm asking you how you
> determine when you've hit upon something safe and solid, how you are going
> to stop the infinite regress of questions. You located it in knowledge by
> acquaintance, but I kicked the skeptical questioning up to the next level.
> The skeptic's purpose is to make the entire search for absolute certainty
> look hopeless.
>
> How do you know the way you've "described" Dynamic Quality is the right
way?
> How do you know when you are experiencing Dynamic Quality? How do you
> know whether you are being Dynamic or degenerate? How do you know whether
> you are following static patterns or being Dynamic?
>
> C.S. Peirce said this many years ago:
> "Now it is plainly one thing to have an intuition and another to know
> intuitively that it is an intuition, and the question is whether these two
> things, distinguishable in thought, are invariably connected, so that we
can
> always intuitively distinguish between an intuition and a cognition
> determined by another.. There is no evidence that we have this faculty,
> except that we _feel_ we have it. But the weight of the testimony depends
> entirely on our being supposed to have the power of distinguishing in this
> feeling whether the feeling be the result of education, old associations,
> etc., or whether it is an intuitive cognition; or, in other words, it
> depends on presupposing the very matter testified to." ("Questions
> Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man")
>
> We feel like we can distinguish between whether our immediate impression
is
> the result of static patterns ("education, old associations, etc.") or
> Dynamic Quality ("intuitive cognition"), but it would appear that we'd
have
> to assume we were able to do it to do it, which does nothing in the way of
> establishing our ability to do it.
>
> So in response to the originally insipid question, "How do you know a
> 'simple, unambiguous and direct' response is better than a 'complex,
> ambiguous and indirect' one?", I think you have two options. One option
is
> to claim that you have an intuition that "simple." is better than
> "complex.," which is another way of saying that it's Dynamic that
"simple."
> is better, or it is better that "simple." is better. These are all those
> bad answers that lead to Peirce's claims, that lead to you having a
> superintuition about your intuitions. The other option, which I think
will
> be the first one that will occur to you (based on how I've seen you
respond
> in the past), is to claim that "simple." has proven to work better in the
> past, so it is a good bet that it will work better in the future. This is
a
> pragmatist answer, but it won't work as a response because it completely
> cuts off the criteria ("simple, unambiguous and direct") from the
contested
> notion of DQ. If you insist on that answer, I would ask what part DQ
plays
> then, what part does the absolute certainty we have from it play?
>
> Another way of pointing to my difficulties is by pointing out that in my
> original post I said that "I
> have been told time and time again that this distinction [between
> static/Dynamic, mediated/unmediated, differentiated/undifferentiated] is
> _descriptive_ and not normative, unlike the appearance/reality
distinction,
> and so does not need an epistemology" and that "this line of defense is
> essentially what all the other particular ones boil down to." In Paul's
> responses to me, I notice that the way he is responding seems to call up
> this distinction between descriptive and normative. For instance, in
> response to the question (from my original post) "you need to explain why
we
> need a mediated/unmediated distinction at all. What part does it play,
what
> work does it do?", Paul said, "It describes two aspects of experience,"
> which is exactly the type of answer I wanted to head off at the pass. In
> response to my use of the mediated/unmediate distinction in describing the
> static/Dynamic distinction, Paul replied that "My preferred distinction is
> undifferentiated/differentiated which I think is also more descriptive and
> meaningful to what the MOQ is talking about," which both calls upon the
> descriptive/normative distinction for aid, comfort, and rhetorical value
> _and_, in good Pirsigian/pragmatist fashion, blurs and ultimately denies
> that very distinction ("My _preferred_ distinction," "more._meaningful to
> what the MOQ is talking about_"). When contesting a notion like DQ being
> neutrally descriptive, as opposed to being normative and having an agenda,
> goes right out the window. We _are_ describing things like the
> static/Dynamic distinction, but we aren't doing it neutrally. We are
> describing them in our preferred to terms (or as close to them as
possible)
> in order to work out the consequences of those descriptions.
>
> I think one other way of putting my difficulties are in response to Dan's
> misguided reply: "To answer Matt's question: The best way I know of is to
> ask oneself, is this a Quality path I am on? Only you will know the answer
> (kenntnis). If the answer is no, then go a better way."
>
> Okay, so I ask myself, "Am I on a Quality path? Is my cross-examination
of
> Pirsig's philosophy going in the right direction? Am I really detecting
an
> appearance/reality distinction unbeknownst to Pirsig or his mainline
> interpreters?"
>
> Answer: "Oh yeah, absolutely."
>
> How does one respond to that?
>
> Matt
>
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