From: jhmau (jhmau@sbcglobal.net)
Date: Fri Mar 14 2003 - 20:57:47 GMT
On 13 March 2003 5:49 PM Matt EE writes:
"I am very, very unclear on what you are saying."
Hi Matt,
I am sorry that I wrote in an unclear way. For some time I have been trying
to put together logical elements to show how an intuitive approach to
knowing things is logical. Until those elements are debated I do not know
that we write about the same thing.
"You say I've constructed a strawman, but I'm not at all sure what the
strawman is."
I was using 'the strawman' in the sense of a scarecrow. When I make a
strawman, I make something people are afraid to to scare them away. By
"scaring away" I wish to motivate people to agree with me not from what I
say, but by emphatically denying something they consider true, and hence
making them uneasy in their complacency that they are discussing what the
people around them are considering. A 'strawman' statement is one I don't
think is true, but on the surface looks true so I use it to disturb peoples'
thinking. My reasons for this are hidden.
"In my mind, Quality, is the ultimate metaphor."
As I rember ways of intensifying my writing taught in school, I member
'analogy' and 'metaphor.' I was taught that I make an 'analogy' by stating
that something is 'like' something else. I make a 'metaphor by stating that
something 'is' something else. As you follow "Donald Davidson in thinking
metaphors are indecipherable sounds or scratches," you are not using
'metaphor' in the usual way. You did not say that, "Quality, is the
ultimate indecipherable scratch or sound," because that does not enhance the
sentence at all, it simply makes it cumbersome.
On 12 March: "Metaphors cause us to change our beliefs, they aren't reasons
to change our beliefs."
The impression of 'indecipherable sounds and scratches' is not something I
attach to a basis for dogma. What is the authority for the new dogma? You
seem to be writing to fools.
Your conclusion on 12 March: "This is why I think Quality is an
anti-essence, a poisonous term to put into any system that purports to
correspond to the way things truly are."
My memory of scholastic philosophy was of substance and nine accidents,
quality, quantity, time, place etc. (it was a long time ago) which inhere in
the substance. Quality was the first accident. Color, an example of
quality, does not have its own existence. Only substance exists, and
accidents inhere in the substance.
By abstraction the essence of an image of the substance is separated by the
mind and given intentional existence in the mind as an idea. Words express
that idea. This is the basis of SOM. Quality which is an accident also
inheres in the essence abstracted. I do not conceive in SOM how it can be
conceived of as 'anti-essence.' That would be illogical.
You accept that: "Pirsig seems to strike the view that you don't need
epistemology. It's all intuitive."
You say Donald Davidson's definition of metaphor "fits perfectly well with
Pirsig's attempt to leave Quality undefined." I have a problem. "Metaphors
are indecipherable sounds and or scratches" and "undefined, intuitive" fit
perfectly well together is not 'final vocabulary' or 'recontextualization'
in any way that I understand.
Quality in SOM is never capitalized, since it is not an object. Quality in
MoQ is capitalized since it is intuited to exist. You capitalize Quality
for your own reasons. That seems to me a strawman. Go ahead, beat him up!
Joe
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