Re: MD Philosophology comments, 1

From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Apr 25 2005 - 20:32:16 BST

  • Next message: Erin: "Re: MD Creativity and Philosophology, 2"

    Ian,

    Ian said:
    You were in fact (initially) making a plea for balance, rather than setting
    up of philosophy and philosophology as black and white, good and bad
    opposites. A message close to my own pragmatic heart as you know.
    ...
    If your aim really was to balance the books pre-loaded against
    philosophology then, you may have gone just a bit too far in appearing to
    discredit Pirsig's motives, just as Pirsig did himself. (Actually it's that
    good old Catch-22 again - arguing a balanced case never wins an argument -
    the best defense is offense, and the most offensive weapon is logical
    analysis.)

    Matt:
    You think (and many others would agree) that I'm trying to balance
    philosophy and philosophology. This isn't what I view myself as doing.
    What I think of myself as attempting to do was undermine what I view to be a
    bad, artificial distinction between philosophy and philosophology. My
    analysis at the beginning of the paper was intended to show how the only way
    to hold the distinction as Pirsig lays it out was to be a Platonist, which
    no Pirsigian in their right minds wants to be. Because many don't see the
    Platonist in Pirsig, the middle part, the one dealing with motives, was
    intended to supply a context with which Pirsig's Platonist tendencies make
    sense. Anybody catching the general thrust of my writings (let alone what I
    said at the beginning of that section) would realize that I think the
    "Cartesian Anxiety" is a bad trap to get into. I didn't say a lot in the
    "Antiestablishmentarianism" section about what I thought of it, though, but
    mainly because I hadn't thought it all through. Since then, I have a bit
    more, which is what "Pirsig Institutionalized" was all about. The third
    section was intended to balance the two views of what Pirsig thinks
    philosophy should be, with the structure of the presentation soliciting
    affirmation for one and scowls for the other.

    You say that "logical analysis" is the best weapon, but I don't think it is,
    at least not categorically. Sometimes it is, but I think its better as a
    softening up move. Depends on how far you diverge from your opponent. The
    problem with logical analysis is that it reaches back and stops at
    assumptions. Once you've reached those, the only thing to do then is to
    suggest why those assumptions are bad ones to have. One way is to show the
    motivation for those assumptions, which is what I did and what Wittgenstein
    did in the Philosophical Investigations, the unasked question in the
    background being, "Do we really want to think this way?"

    For instance, this "Catch-22" you keep piloting around. I think it's a bad
    way to characterize pragmatist tendencies. On my reading, pragmatists don't
    really think there are philosophical Catch-22s. Reaching one just means you
    haven't thought of a way of characterizing the presuppositions of _both_
    positions, with the attendent idea that you are willing to toss the
    presupposition, get rid of the problem, and redescribe the surrounding area
    of dispute. The history of philosophy is littered with them, some of the
    more recent ones being idealism/realism and antirealism/realism. I think
    thinking that Catch-22s are around commits you to a bit of Platonism because
    the only thing that could stop an imagination from getting around a
    dichotomy in the rarified air of philosophy is someting like a brute fact,
    which is a Platonic myth.

    I think your touting of Catch-22s gets you into some trouble, like thinking
    I'm trying to balance philosophy and philosophology when I have no idea what
    is left for the term philosophology to refer to after I've gotten done with
    it. (Maybe "philosophy that refers to the history of philosophy" and
    "philosophy that doesn't," but I think that's a pretty artificial
    distinction, too. Besides, the word "philosophology," as Pirsig says when
    he first uses it, has degradation built right into it.) Or thinking that
    rhetoric and logical analysis are opposed, which you've suggested a couple
    of times recently in various posts. Good Pirsigians and pragmatists don't
    think that. _Everything_ is rhetoric, which _doesn't_ mean that
    argumentation is a wasted effort as some alarmists think (and as I may have
    once foolishly intimated), but rather that there are a number of tools at a
    person's disposal when conversing, various ones being appropriate to various
    purposes of conversation (persuasion not being the only purpose). Logical
    argumentation is a tool that is only appropriate under certain circumstances
    (just as all tools are only appropriate under certain circumstances). I
    think one way of putting what these circumstances might be is that for two
    people to have a logical argument, they must hold certain premises or
    assumptions in common. If they don't, the arguments will eventually whittle
    down to the assumption that they don't hold in common, displaying it for all
    to see, and then the arguments will be forced to stop. It is at that point
    that other tools become much more useful for continuing the conversation,
    such as hunting down motivations for assumptions.

    So, in relation to my paper, the question I wonder about is what you think
    philosophy and philosophology are (though I am, of course, curious as to
    what you think I thought they were)? What's left for philosophology to be
    and why should we hold on to that curiously denigrating word to keep some
    people on the left and others on the right?

    Matt

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