From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Mon Aug 29 2005 - 13:47:54 BST
Hi Ian,
> Nice post, but just a bit too cynical for me, even as a confession.
> I think any of us (even those who recognise the pitfalls) can
> recognise a quality argument. I for one am not prepared to write off
> all intelligent debate about the MoQ as pointless, because the whole
> of everything is a "chimera" anyway.
"Intelligent debate" may be the problem, as you have indicated when you
express doubts about logic and rationality. To me a "chimera" can
sometimes be captured in art -- an illusion used to grasp an illusive
reality. Perhaps we ought to take the MOQ into the realm of the aesthetic
continuum, with emphasis on the aesthetic. I would love to see us try.
In doing so, it would reveal perhaps most vividly the basic difficulty
with Quality -- namely, that no two people can always agree on what it is.
Except maybe they could if they understood it.
> Pragmatically there is a huge amount of quality in using the MoQ as a
> framework on which to hang all the other "incomplete" theories. You
> know I'm a firm advocate of incompleteness, but that does not mean
> that the incomplete knowable world cannot be explained by consistent
> quality arguments.
Again, "arguments" may be the wrong approach, based as they are in SOM.
> I made the sefl-effacing (naive) claim to that crank, hanging out at
> his local internet forum, whio believes he's found the secret of the
> universe, but I'm not naive enough to believe it literally. I'm first
> and foremost a pragmatist. It's all too easy to undermine arguments by
> logical analysis, particularly the mystical arguments, but it's a harder
> matter to synthesise something useful. (This is Pirsig's point about
> philosophologists.)
Yes, that's the challenge.
> I think we put the hoax down to experience and learn from it, but it
> changes nothing about the quality that is (or isn't) to be found in
> the MoQ. I believe with absolute certainty that we can (and must)
> explain more than is currently explicable. The inabilty to explain the
> inexplicable is just a tautology.
Yes. I agree. Again, the stumbling block may be "explain" using the SOM
vocabulary. I'm with you in probing other means of expression. Would that
we could invent a new art form. :-)
Platt
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