From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Jul 01 2005 - 04:49:46 BST
Platt, you said in there ...
Postmodernists dismantled positivism by asserting that truth was
relative and that the "important reasons" for our beliefs are all
culturally determined. To me that's a lot of hooey.
That's a generalised (political) put down of a conveniently
pigeonholed phantom enemy called "Post-modernists"
But it clearly not "hooey". It's patently true and exactly what MoQ
says, amongst other things. The issues are "relative to what" and
"what kind of relationships" - Pirsig gave us one candidate framework.
Why attack when you can build ?
Ian
On 6/23/05, Platt Holden <pholden@sc.rr.com> wrote:
> Matt,
>
> > When you say that "any reality based on the subject/object split is going
> > to be inconsistent or incomplete" "because it makes no provision for
> > values," I think you're wrong. I think its this particular issue that got,
> > way back in the day, Struan Hellier's panties in a bunch most often. I
> > think Pirsig makes a mistake if he says that SOM leaves out values. Much
> > like my redescription of the fall of positivism recently, I think SOM
> > _does_ include values, it just doesn't produce consequences that look any
> > good to us. A world without values _would_ be unrecognizable, but that
> > should be your first indication that nobody has ever seriously suggested
> > it.
>
> I know you're familiar with the following from Lila, but maybe it's worth
> repeating:
>
> "But having said this, the Metaphysics of Quality goes on to say that
> science, the intellectual pattern that bas been appointed to take over
> society, has a defect in it. The defect is that subject-object science has
> no provision for morals. Subject-object science is only concerned with
> facts. Morals have no objective reality. You can look through a microscope
> or telescope or oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never
> find a single moral. There aren't any there. They are all in your head.
> They exist only in your imagination. From the perspective of a subject-
> object science, the world is a completely purposeless, valueless place.
> There is no point in anything. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong.
> Everything just functions, like machinery. There is nothing morally wrong
> with being lazy, nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft, with
> suicide, with murder, with genocide. There is nothing morally wrong
> because there are no morals, just functions." (Lila, 22)
>
> > What SOM says is that values exist in someone's mind. Pirsig's
> > description of the S/O Dilemma in ZMM is a good description of what happens
> > with SOM that he doesn't like. It says values are subjective, that they
> > are "whatever you like," and therefore of little consequence. This is A.
> > J. Ayer's logical positivist ethical doctrine of emotivism (it is truly
> > irony's twisted sense of humor that Struan should accuse the _MoQ_ of being
> > emotivist). There is no rational reason to believe any particular value or
> > moral rule because they are all just irrational impulses in your head. Now
> > _that_ just sounds dumb, and very few people became emotivists. The
> > consequence of emotivism was another big reason why people started
> > dismantling positivism in the academy. We do believe things for very
> > important reasons. They aren't just impules. Pirsig's MoQ tries to
> > rearrange philosophy's furniture to allow that intuition about the way we
> > function.
>
> Postmodernists dismantled positivism by asserting that truth was relative
> and that the "important reasons" for our beliefs are all culturally
> determined. To me that's a lot of hooey.
>
> In a later post you state:
>
> . . . the MOQ puts at the center of its reality 'valuing' which (I think)
> is another way of saying 'the act of differentiation.' . . . the act of
> differentiation is at the bottom of reality.
>
> Seems to me that before you can differentiate there must exist something
> to differentiate from, i.e., direct experience from which the experience
> of value is inseparable. Later (although it appears simultaneous) we
> differentiate in order to name and thus deal with the experience. As
> someone once put it, "Thinking is the waste of time between seeing
> something and knowing what to do about."
>
> Best,
> Platt
>
>
>
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