From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Dec 07 2003 - 22:55:36 GMT
David, Matt and all:
DMB said:
Right. The moral codes are not like formulas or laws, they're more like
principles or governing ideas.
Matt said:
I think the main problem with how people understand my interpretation of
Pirsig is that they give different meanings to certain key words. That my
be a duh statement for DMB, but this is a case in point: I take "principle"
to be equivalent to "hard and fast rules". So do a lot of other people.
When I said a while back that we should eschew principles for rules of
thumb, I think it sounds a lot like what DMB is saying. The Kantian read on
moral philosophy was that we needed princples, that we needed an algorithm
for churning out answers to our moral dillemmas. Rorty's turn to "rules of
thumb" is the turn away from treating morality like mathematices.
dmb says:
We can see both meanings in the dictionary so the writers task is to make
the intention clear from the context of the remarks, which is why I couple
it with "governing idea". Contrasting it with "rule of thumb" achieves the
same effect. Since so few words in english have just one meaning, I think
its important to write with this potential problem in mind. Or to put it
another way, words are just what we use to paint ideas. I suppose we're all
bored with my complaints about jargon and such, but please understand that
all I'm trying to get across with such complaints is that your ideas are
unclear to me. Its just too hard to see the ideas behind your words. And
when and if I manage to hack my way through it all, it hardly seems worth
the effort. The ideas usually end up being fairly simple and so I find it
kind of hard to believe that you can't just describe the idea in a more
direct way, like you did here. I don't know what else to say about that.
Either you want me to understand or you don't. Its up to you.
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