From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Nov 02 2003 - 18:17:01 GMT
Scott and all thread followers:
Scott said:
My objection to Pirsig's response is his treating "an abstraction" as
somehow inferior to "concrete". This is the nominalism of Pirsig that I
object to. Basically, Pirsig is adopting the basic nominalist orientation
that the more "sense perceptible" something is, the more real it is, in the
style of Dr. Johnson refuting Berkeley by kicking a stone. Now he (Pirsig}
would expand that orientation to argue that "art and morality and even
religious mysticism" belong in the concrete, and hence "more real" (and so
distinguishes the MOQ from materialism), but would deny that to
"abstraction".
dmb says:
As I understand it, nominalism is the denial of the existence of universals.
It says things like truth and beauty do not exist excepts as an abstract
feature of all true and beautiful things, apart from the particular forms of
the natural world. I think this is exactly what Pirsig is NOT saying. He
saying we ought not treat them as abstractions, but as real things. He's not
even coming close to saying they are material things, only that they are no
less real. And of course, he's only how we ought to TREAT them, that we
should act AS IF they were real.
On Wednesday, Scott said:
I think you're correct on this, though Pirsig first defines empiricism as
"[empiricism] claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the
senses or by thinking about what the senses provide." [Ch. 8], though he
goes on to include art and morality and "even religious mysticism" as
"verifiable". Nevertheless, this attitude seems to me to more than a little
nominalist, since it looks to that which comes from the outside as
privileged over that which comes from the inside.
dmb says:
The outside is privileged in the MOQ? Again, I think this is exactly what
Pirsig is NOT saying. The traditional empiricism that Pirsig describes above
is yer standard SOM position and pretty much defines what objectivity is.
This is the kind of empiricism that priviledges the outside. This is one of
the main problems with SOM, especially the dominant variety: scientific
materialism. Pirsig's expanded empiricism seeks to overcome this problem.
Not only does he add a sense of value, there is also the insistence that
legitimate intellectual knowledge not only comes through, is mediated by,
our biological senses, but also that it should be mediated through the
social level, that we shouldn't even pretend our ideas are produced by
biological brains and nothing more. And unlike SOM it treats the "inside" as
real as the "outside", if you will.
Thanks,
dmb
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