From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Tue Jul 15 2003 - 17:05:35 BST
Hi Matt,
> Platt said:
> But, as usual in these cases, the solution has been obvious all along,
> obvious after absorbing the MOQ that is but easily forgotten, at least in
> my case. Erin reminded me of it when she responded to DMB's diatribe, "I
> classify ideas as high or low quality, regardless of whose mouth they come
> out."
>
> There's the big leap out of the box, or the "turn" as Matt might say. We
> can argue about the intellectual level until the cows come home.
> Eventually, each of us must decide "That's a good description," like
> "That's a good dog." Or, "That's not a good description," like "That dog
> won't hunt." In the end, Quality rules. Since it's a sense like taste,
> touch, smell and sight, it cannot be intellectually described any more than
> the beauty of a rose. But you know it from experience.
>
> Matt:
> It's been a while since I've, at least partially, agreed with something
> interesting that Platt's written, so I thought I'd say something.
>
> I think it is, on one level, as simple as Platt says: each of us must
> decide if it's a good or bad description. When Platt analogizes a sense
> for Quality with taste and touch, I read it as being that we experience
> descriptions just as we experience the taste of an apple or the smell of a
> rose. While this is true, I also think there is a discrete difference
> between the experiencing of descriptions and the experiencing of roses.
> The difference is that descriptions are linguistic, whereas roses are not.
>
> Reaching back to my readings of Rorty and Donald Davidson, the difference
> between the two is that roses can only be causes for us to believe certain
> things, like, "That rose smells pretty." The rose caused us to make an
> intellectual description of it.
I'm sure you remember how Pirsig treated causes. He flipped them around to
illustrate how values can also explain things. In this case, rather than
the rose caused us to believe that the rose smells pretty, he might say
"Smells prefer roses and other pleasant aromas." And, rather than the rose
caused us to make an intellectual description of it he might say,
"Intellect prefers to describe everything we experience including roses."
I mention this in passing. It has no bearing on the value of your
argument.
> Seperating the rose from its intellectual
> description is a Herculean task, but the uncontroversial fact is that no
> intellectual description of the rose caused us to have a high Quality
> feeling: the physical rose did that. When you watch a sunset, nothing
> discursive is happening. That's uncontroversial. I think it is
> unimportant whether we say, "We felt the high Quality feeling from the rose
> and sunset _before_ we generated any descriptions of it." I think that
> sets up needless quarrels of the appearance/reality kind. All that I think
> it is important to say is that there is a difference between discursive
> causes and non-discursive causes.
I think it's important in talking about the MOQ to emphasize that Quality
is the pre-intellectual, pre-descriptive, pre-discursive reality. That
assumption is not only likely to engender quarrels, I don't see how they
can be avoided.
> Davidson makes the point that there is a difference between reasons and
> causes. Reasons are purely discursive and can be causes. This is where I
> disagree with Platt. On the judging of descriptions he says, "Since it's a
> sense like taste, touch, smell and sight, it cannot be intellectually
> described any more than the beauty of a rose. But you know it from
> experience." I think this is wrong. I don't think it the case that the
> beauty of a rose cannot be intellectually described: the fact is, we do it
> all the time, through poetry and the like. Saying that the beauty of a
> rose cannot be intellectually described I think sets us up for an
> appearance/reality distinction. What I think it better to say is that,
> though we can describe the beauty of a rose, we will never get the
> description _right_ (because, after abolishing the appearance/reality
> distinction, no description is any closer to getting Things the Way They
> Really Are then any other description, though there are descr iptions that
> are better than others), and further, the description is not what caused
> the feeling of beauty. We can use our description of the beauty of the
> rose as a post facto _reason_ to explain to either ourselves or to others
> why we found the rose to be so beautiful, but the description is not what
> caused the feeling.
I would propose that the feeling, the experience of beauty is "Things the
Way They Really Are."
> But in the exercise of the ranking of descriptions, reasons are most
> certainly causes. What else would be the cause?
Ranking of descriptions is not only caused by reasons but by harmony. As
Pirsig says in Note 118, Lila's Child:
"As time went on he saw that not only could it be done, but that it solved
huge philosophic problems that had dogged metaphysics for centuries. It
produced harmony. where there had been disharmony. It had high
intellectual quality."
> It is in fact
> intellectual descriptions that are being experienced and the Quality of
> something experienced is based in part on our past experiences. The most
> applicable experience base are other intellectual descriptions. If this is
> the case, I would forward the thesis that if the ranking of intellectual
> descriptions is the object of analysis, then we should be able to forward
> reasons for why we sense one description as being of higher Quality than
> another.
Yes, but we humans are masters at rationalization. As Ben Franklin said,
"So convenient it is to be a rational creature, since it enables us to
find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." As I've
pointed out before, reasoning carried to its limits results in paradoxes
and dead ends.
> When you first hear an intellectual description, you may not have
> the reasons for a low or high Quality feeling on the tip of your tongue,
> but I would say that they are there. When you hear an intellectual
> description what you are doing is matching it against the other
> intellectual patterns you partake in, what Quine calls your web of beliefs
> and desires, and seeing if they cohere. An initial feelin g of low Quality
> is that first impulse of incoherence, and vice versa for high Quality. The
> test of truth is seeing how it matches with your other intellectual
> patterns. When Pirsig named economy of explanation, logical consistency,
> and correspondence with experience as the tests of truth, he was not
> exhausting the list of tests, he was naming three of the biggest
> intellectual patterns that we hold near and dear, three patterns that have
> proven, over time, their usefulness. They can all be subsumed under the
> broader, wider guise of coherence with your other intellectual patterns.
Suggest that you are also pointing to harmony in judging the quality of an
intellectual pattern although your emphasis is on objective rationality of
the pattern rather than the more subjective harmony of the pattern. Your
emphasis is correct in academe. Outside academic discipline, judgments of
quality are more likely to trend toward "gut" feelings.
> The first thing someone like Platt will want to do is try to catch me in
> some sort of self-referential paradox. But I still maintain that once
> you've made the "turn," you no longer see these things as paradoxes. It's
> simply a matter of, "Well, of course my description of how we judge
> descriptions is a itself just one more description. It's a discursive
> description isn't it?" The point of the pragmatist is that my description
> isn't any closer to the way we really judge descriptions, it just happens
> to be better than the other ones. It fits better with the set of
> intellectual patterns that I hold, my own web of beliefs and desires.
I point out paradoxes because they illustrate the limits of reason. To
break such logical contradictions and regresses, I turn to Quality. I
consider paradoxes important because they are my jumping off point to a
better set of intellectual patterns, the MOQ. So in this regard, although
we come to it from different webs of beliefs and desires, we seem to end
up in the same place.
Platt
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