From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 26 2005 - 02:07:56 BST
Matt,
(Firstly - error - when I described "rational logic" as the most
"offensive weapon", that's what I meant - offensive, the worst, not
the best - the exact opposite. Effective in confounding arguments by
others, yes, but lousy at getting near truth.)
Back to the point - I would certainly agree the philosophy vs
philosophology distinction is not very helpful. I can't see how you
could do one without the other.
But I can see a distinction - a class of philosophological writing
that intends to do nothing other than summarise, compare and contrast
previuous philosophies (as written), without any attempt to introduce
the authors own philsophy - "the critic" style. Even that has value to
other would-be philosophers.
I can see how any "new" philosopher could live life and dream up his
own philosophy, but I can't see how he could get far propounding it
without knowing something of previous attempts. For me Pirsig is
"disingenuous" for precisely this reason - he had studied (some
philosophy) prior to explaining his own - I don't see how he could do
otherwise. In fact for this reason I never saw it as a big deal that
he'd raised the philosophology subject - he couldn't actually be that
serious about it - except to have something to write about. Not a
major part of the meat of MoQ, so why all the fuss ??
I can indeed see that your piece goes on to "undermine" Pirsigs case
about philsophology, but I'm not sure why, and as I said my impression
was it perhaps went a bit too far (rhetorically, selectively, etc.)
It's part of my illusory binary opposites rant - a point of interest
yes, but hardly two fundamental things to have to argue about. We keep
setting-up windmills to tilt at, for reasons which baffle me, when
there are so many more important things to debate - IMHO.
Ian
On 4/26/05, Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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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