Re: MD Begging the Question, Moral Intuitions, and Answering the Nazi, Part II

From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 14 2003 - 23:18:54 BST

  • Next message: Steve Peterson: "Re: MD Begging the Question, Moral Intuitions, and Answering the Nazi, Part III"

    David,

    David said:
    Not consistent on its own terms in dealing with experience, Platypus as Pirsig says.

    Matt:
    One of Rorty's points about argumentation is that "not consistent on its own terms in dealing with experience" doesn't make any sense. Sure, Godel says that we can have either completeness or soundness (or something like that), but Rorty's point is that if SOM wants to explain stuff that comes to it, it does. It just so happens that we find it lacking. That doesn't mean that it hasn't explained it, or that it is inconsistent in its own terms, it means we have checked one half of our beliefs against another half and found a discrepancy, a tension. This is what Dewey means when he says that the creation of a new vocabulary is a muddle. Anomalies pile up not because we are using one vocabulary and it happens to suck, but because we are constantly checking beliefs against the backdrop of other beliefs, either our own or somebody else's. We are constantly on the move from one vocabulary to a better one.

    Pirsig found the idea that value was solely subjective and not really real to be completely ludicrious. For whatever reason, it didn't seem like it to him. So he set out to create a new vocabulary in which to house his insights. The muddle that Dewey points out, however, says that we won't succeed in creating a completely new vocabulary, it will always contain a few parts of its predecessor. If it didn't, we wouldn't understand it because we would have no reference point, no common ground whatsoever (don't say experience, because to "understand" experience is to talk about it (which mystics rightly point out is to not understand it at all)). Pirsig is Hegelian in this fashion, he says we evolve dialectically, thesis-antithesis-synthesis. My biographical work on Pirsig is an attempt to show the two vocabularies at work in Pirsig, the old Platonic/modern one and the new pragmatist one. My philosophical work on Pirsig is an attempt to use Pirsig's purified suggestions ab
    out the way think and act.

    Matt

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