From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 11 2003 - 18:55:57 BST
Sam,
Sam said:
You called it a 'Wittgensteinian reading of the structure of the MoQ' but I'm not sure it qualifies for such a grand title. In truth I haven't fully worked through the implications of the one 'system' for the other in my own mind - there has been no 'colligation' to use your term. Wittgenstein didn't feel that metaphysics did what they claimed to do - in some ways, he felt they were more akin to poetry - so his overall outlook, I would say, radically undercuts much of the sort of discussion that we have here in the forum. Which isn't to say that what we do here is wrong - I think Witt. was sometimes too harsh - just that, despite a number of intriguing similarities, the basic perspective is really quite different. If we can talk about the 'later Pirsig' as much as a 'later Wittgenstein', then I would say that the two thinkers have travelled in somewhat opposing directions - Witt from an intellectualist, ultra-Platonist position, to the later rejection of Platonic style syste
ms in toto; Pirsig almost the reverse journey (to my mind). One of the commonalities, though, is seeing the pursuit of metaphysics as a 'degenerate activity' - and on that note, a few comments.
Matt:
Ah, but remember that I prefer the early Pirsig to the late one. I don't think Wittgenstein was harsh enough in some cases (hence my preference for Rortyan and Davidsonian treatments of language). When I say "Wittgensteinian reading," attendent with that is Wittgenstein's eschewment of metaphysics and his conception of philosophy as therapy, something the later Pirsig doesn't agree with. Pirsig wants philosophy to do something constructive, while Wittgenstein wanted it to cure us of our (largely) Platonic madness. Pirsig wants to make a positive point, while Wittgenstein wants to make a purely negative point, following in Locke's conception of philosophy as underlaborer, clearing away the conceptual debris.
So, on this count, when I make a mess of Pirsig's project, I really make a mess of it. Hell, people can read my proposal metaphysically if the want. I say steal whatever good ideas you want and do with them what you will, and don't look back. But just as clarification, I read the MoQ, not as an ontological role call, but as an ad hoc taxonomy, kinda' like the kingdom-phyllum-etc. thing.
Sam said:
I'm quite happy with moving away from four to five levels (or more - as is Pirsig), but I think there needs to be some system or rationale behind how the levels are described or structured. As I see it, the key question is how to describe the observable behaviour (that isn't to presume SOM) - in other words, what static levels are necessary, with the addition of DQ, to provide a full explanation. So, the laws of physics plus DQ account for all observable inorganic phenomena, at least in theory, and the laws of biology (ie genetics), plus physics and DQ, account for all the organic behaviour. I see no fundamental distinction between the behaviour of an amoeba and the behaviour of the gorilla here - both can be fully described by the two static levels. I think there is room for exploring the complexity of the biological level, as there does seem to be a step change from plants to animals, but as they can be fully described through DNA/physics/DQ I see no reason why there shoul
d be a separate pattern. However, I'm aware of making some possibly unjustified assumptions there. It could be that the higher primates DO display social level behaviours - I would follow the advice of the relevant zoology professors on that score. (I don't know if Jonathan has any comment on that). What are you proposing as the distinction between your biological and social levels? (In other words, what are the values, and what are the 'units', the stable patterns of value, on which those scale values operate, or through which they are expressed?
Matt:
I definitely think there needs to be a rationale, and I certainly didn't offer that much of one. The difference I see between the lower complexity celluar organisms and the higher order ones is that you can't explain the behavior of ants and lions (let alone humans) by reference to their cells. I think that would be the point most evolutionary biologists would make. I think there's a nice, distinguishable change with the movement from particle talk to cellular talk to "herd" talk (or something like that). So, maybe my choice of contrast between amoeba and lion was poor. More like cells and lions.
Sam said:
Seems to me that Quine and Davidson are trying to intellectualise and formalise Wittgenstein's method - when that is precisely the last thing that he would have wanted. Witt wanted you to change how you looked at a problem, ie gain the 'perspicuous representation', and that essentially involved letting go of obsessive intellectualisation and becoming more at home in the human body. Do you actually agree that "translation is simply a matter of predicting which marks, noises, or movements a langauge user will make next"?!? Pushing a bit more deeply, the whole notion of 'translatability' is what Witt was trying to get away from - it perpetuates the mentalist picture that we are opaque to one another, and if there was one image that Wittgenstein wanted to abolish, it was that one.
Matt:
Formalize Wittgenstein's method? No, not at all. If Wittgenstein had a method, it was therapeutic, and that's what certainly Davidson (in his better moments) wants (Quine's another story, I'm sure). A formal method would be something like Chomsky's generative linguistics, a form of Cartesianism that is best left to itself. For Quine and Davidson, the only linguist we need is a field linguist, somebody out there translating languages by the only method we know how - trial and error. So, yeah, I do think that translation is simply a matter of prediction. And this means that language is certainly _not_ opaque. Language and society are open, not closed. Translation and the attendent problems of learning another's social mores are entirely a practical matter, no intellectualization at all. That's why I think Quine and then Davidson are the right kind of update of Wittgensteinian philosophy of language.
Matt
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