From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Wed Sep 03 2003 - 18:29:47 BST
Hi Matt
Thanks for the below.
No real problems with the below, but I strongly feel that when Pirsig starts
talking about MoQ he builds into it a clause that you can't speak the
language of Being/Quality, it is elusive, that Being/Quality does not speak
to us, and this is the same clause Davidson is pointing to. Whether you then
say, hey, this is non-sense: a clause pointing to something beyond reason is
abandoning metaphysics and cannot be a metaphysics, - well I don't really
care which you say. I cannot distinguish between pragmatism and Pirsig over
this issue. The non-reason problem simply seems to emerge when you switch
from synchronic to diachronic analysis as has been noted by some
post-modernists. And Persig calls it dynamic/static. Where Persig is
different from pragmatists is when he points to the primordiality of value
and pragmatists are happy with a sort of suck it and see approach to reason.
I think there is a possibility of re-gaining some kind of eco-sacredness
about Being/Quality with Pirsig that pragmatism can't reach -but this may be
a matter of value/taste. By the way I am more familiar with Heidegger's
3-some i.e. Man/Language/Being and this then allows world to emerge.
Regards
David Morey
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 8:35 PM
Subject: Re: MD Pirsig and Peirce
> David,
>
> Davidson is Rorty's favorite philosopher of language and the creator of
the coherence "theory" of truth (its not really a theory anymore, but that
depends on when you read Davidson). His analogy of triangulation is that
what propositions we call true is triangulated between us, others, and the
world. Davidson says that the world causes us to believe certain things,
but it does not give us reasons. Reasons are internal to linguistic
practices. When you think of the world as giving us reasons, you start
thinking of the world as talking to you, which makes you think that Nature
has a special language that it speaks and that our job is to figure it out.
That quickly leads to thinking in the key of correspondence, which
pragmatists suggest has caused enough philosophical illness already.
>
> On the inescapability of metaphysics, that begs the question in your
favor. Pragmatism, when its careful, doesn't say that metaphysics is
impossible, it says that we've spent a lot of time on it with nothing we
could call progress because we can't even agree on what that progress would
look like. It changes the assumption the "metaphysics is inescapable" to
"metaphysics is optional" and sees where that leads.
>
> Pragmatists agree that you can't demonstrate your assumptions, that all
such reasoning is visciously circular. But that doesn't mean anything
metaphysical unless you think that all assumptions are metaphysical, which
pragmatists don't. They think of assumptions as contingent starting points
for thinking, starting points that are as malleable as the world and other
people will let you get away with.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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