From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 00:16:18 BST
Sam, Scott,
Nice to hear from you again, by the way.
Matt said:
Well, part of holding a position is making sure you realize its consequences. Absurdity is achieved when one belief is in tension with another belief in your web of beliefs. Its a clear sign of incoherence. You have two options when this happens: 1) Choose the old belief or choose the new belief. From the angle of people who choose that new belief, watching a person choose the old one is like watching a person shrink back in fear of something distasteful. From the angle of people who choose that old belief, watching a person choose the new one is like watching a person go insane. (The Pirsig connection should be clear.) Today's absurdities are sometimes tommorrow's common sense.
Sam said:
Is there an option 2) missing here?
Matt:
Uh, yah, but the two options I was thinking of were simply "choose old" or "choose new". You, however, made me think of a new option which I don't really consider a live option:
Sam said:
I would have said it's always possible to hold two opposing beliefs in tension, with a hope of one day resolving them at a higher level (ie to de absolutise each belief). It's about being provisional in our metaphysics - something I would have thought you'd be sympathetic to? And it's also about putting the intellect in its place - rational consistency is not the highest good.
Matt:
I completely agree when you say, "it's always possible to hold two opposing beliefs in tension, with a hope of one day resolving them at a higher level." (Except I still don't like the vertical metaphors that you, Scott, and Pirsig use to describe the resolution of tension.) What I was thinking of when I described the choice is that you've walked down the road of being convinced of one or the other: meaning you've already arrived at that "higher" place. I think what you are getting at is, for instance, the "dilemma" faced by first year philosophy students when they have to choose between having free will and having physics. The way through the forest usually taken is a third option, that of finding a different choice to choose, i.e. resolving the tension between the two original beliefs. Resolving tension in this way still involves a choice because all that is happening is that you find an assumption further back behind the original dilemma and you end up affirming it or
rejecting it, staying old or going new. This third option is a stalling action, which we simply call "inquiry". This is what happens when a pragmatist deals with the "problem" of free will: they go back and find the appearance/reality distinction. This is how Pirsig, in fact, deals with the problem of free will: he goes back and finds it in one of our assumptions, embedded in what he calls SOM (there, just for you DMB). What Pirsig and the pragmatists help us see is that you aren't discovering anything about reality, you are making a choice when you resolve that tension. That's partly why I don't like vertical metaphors: it seems to unduly privelege one position over another. The emphasis is on "unduly" because we cannot help but privelege one position over another: ours. But after you affirm your own beliefs, which is as natural as daisies, it seems like rhetorical overkill to say that you've "ascended to a new level of Being" or "it’s true for all people at all time
s, now and forever". But whatever vocabulary floats your boat, I know how to read it.
However, when you say, "And it's also about putting the intellect in its place - rational consistency is not the highest good," I see that as completely different from "with a hope of one day resolving them". I don't think there is anyplace to put the intellect. Like language, its just one of those things we use. There are no problems of the intellect or language which retain any force as long as we remain nonmetaphysical. "Rational consistency", which I read as "coherence of beliefs", is one of the ways which has proven over time to maximize our ability to cope with our environment. We don't have to have our beliefs coherent, but its one of those beliefs that sit at the bottom of most people's vocabularies.
Scott offers an alternative to this in which beliefs are purposefully left in tension. This is the new option that you made me think of. But I don't understand the point in this. I say, if you find a tension and a way out, take the way out. I do understand, however, that Scott doesn't think the pragmatist has found a way out, based on his materialism. I accept that. But Scott takes a way out the doesn't seem to be a way out at all to me. From the standpoint of someone who thinks that tensions are meant to be relieved, Scott's way out, his relief of Platonic tension, appears to say that tension's not all that bad. Scott can offer no criterion for which tensions are bad and which are good because the notion of criterion is one of those icky Platonic notions.
Self-referential paradox, sure, but that's not what concerns me (it rarely does). If Scott says that we choose to relieve tensions based on whether we think it more valuable to relieve them or not then, well, he starts to look like a pragmatist again, just with a weird and seemingly pointless twist. Why contradiction, why tension? The ways I've seen him lead it, to me, look like Platonism, metaphysics, icky philosophy. But if it doesn't lead to metaphysics, then it seems to, as I alluded to before, lead to the loss of the "hope" addendum. If you lose the hope of alleviating the tension in your beliefs, if you think it hope-less, then I see that as the end of inquiry. I don't see why inquiry would continue. As I see it, it is because we continue to hope to make our beliefs coherent that we continue to inquire, continue to revise our beliefs. And the idea that revision of beliefs will never end, that there is no set of beliefs that is correct, is the idea of an ironist
. Scott wants to be an ironist, as I do. Yet I'm still not quite sure why retains "metaphysics". It would appear to have this debilitating effect in practice. The only way "metaphysics" as a term wouldn't have this effect is if you thought it meant "system of belief" rather than "what is real?" And I've already talked ad nauseum about what I think about that (I consider it a bait-and-switch).
So, those are the consequences of the tension between the belief in ironism and the belief in metaphysics (as Platonism) as I see it. I choose irony. What remains to be seen is whether we can unearth an assumption that, once reversed or changed, makes the choice appear as silly as the choice between free will and physics. I haven't seen it yet, but, as an ironist, its why I continue to inquire.
Matt
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