From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Sun Jan 25 2004 - 16:01:46 GMT
Bo
Paul previously said:
> I think Bo is talking about the epistemological distinction of
> subjective versus objective where "objective" is seen as a synonym for
> "true."
Bo said:
Right, this is how the SOM is described in ZMM. But for the umpteenth
time ...when seen as intellect's value it is not S/O Metaphysics, merely
the VALUE of the said distinction.
Paul:
The S/O distinction is *an* intellectual pattern of value, not *the*
value of intellect.
Bo said:
Will it never penetrate that the S/O does not mean that intellectual
patterns "contains" subjects and objects", merely that they are of the
"search for what is objectively true" ...etc." ROOT.
Paul:
If you cut out the "objectively" then I would agree that intellectual
patterns can be said to "search for what is true." As I have said
repeatedly, "true" and "objective" are not equivalent terms.
Intellectual patterns can only be better or worse than others. A
stumbling block for you in accepting this may be your insistence that
patterns in one level are of identical value. I found a quote on this
subject in Lila's Child:
Jason asks the question, "What distinguishes a high quality intellectual
idea from a lower quality one?" [p.10] Pirsig, in his annotations,
replies, "Its truth, mainly. Also the magnitude of the questions it
answers or problems it solves. Other things being equal, its rhetorical
"elegance" is also important in the mathematical sense of that term."
[p.32]
The ancient Greeks might have been the first to consciously strive for
truth and in doing so placed it higher than the good but the notion of
"objective truth" has been dying for years, science would not have
survived if it couldn't reject old truths for better ones, as Pirsig
notes in Lila:
"It's ironic that although the philosophy of science leaves no room for
any undefined Dynamic activity, it's science's unique organization for
the handling of the Dynamic that gives it its superiority. Science
superseded old religious forms, not because what it says is more true in
any absolute sense (whatever that is), but because what it says is more
Dynamic.
If scientists had simply said Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong
without any willingness to further investigate the subject, then science
would have simply become another minor religious creed. But scientific
truth has always contained an overwhelming difference from theological
truth: it is provisional. Science always contains an eraser, a mechanism
whereby new Dynamic insight could wipe out old static patterns without
destroying science itself. Thus science, unlike orthodox theology, has
been capable of continuous, evolutionary growth. As Phaedrus had written
on one of his slips, "The pencil is mightier than the pen."" [Lila
p.254-255]
Regards
Paul
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