From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sat Jan 31 2004 - 14:12:55 GMT
Paul,
Matt said:
I have no idea what grounding epistemology and ontology in value is supposed to mean if it doesn't mean something pragmatic (which is how I typically translate such things).
Paul said:
What it means is contained in this sentence from Lila:
"Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also primary empirical experience." [p.418]
Matt:
Trust me, I've been around that MD long enough and read the books well enough to know what one-liner is going to follow most of my facile questions. Its usually not the one-liner I'm interested in, but an interesting explanation of how it is supposed to work. 'Cuz you whipped off a line from Pirsig and, as I just told you I would, I can only interpret it as a pragmatist would. Pragmatists think that saying that value is the "primary empirical experience" is an old-fashioned way of conflating Sellars' "all awareness is a linguistic affair" and a pragmatist "conception" of truth. In other words, saying that value grounds ontology and epistemology, for pragmatists, is basically the same thing as saying that ontology and epistemology are pointless.
This is why your one-line answers to pointless questions look a little odd.
Matt said:
pragmatists take epistemology to be attempting to answer the question, "How do we know what we have is knowledge?"
Paul said:
The MOQ answer: by its value.
Matt:
Uh-huh, and how do you _know_? That, after all, is the question. Once you open the door to epistemology, you will recieve an endless barage of questions like that. "How do you know it has high value? Are you certain? How can you be certain?"
Matt said:
I've always taken ontology to be moreorless synonymous with metaphysics, them both being the attempt to answer the question, "What is real?"
Paul said:
The MOQ answer: value.
Matt:
Uh-huh, right, the redescriptive move. As I said before, how do we interpret it, what are the consequences of the redescriptive move, how does it help us, what does it help us with?
Oh, and since we are playing epistemology, How do you _know_ value has reality? Well, actually, that's the easy question answered by Pirsig. The much more difficult question is How do you _know_ value is the primary empirical reality? How do you _know_ Quality is all there is? How do you _know_ it grounds everything?
And I know the first line out of your mouth should be, "By the harmony it produces," or something along those lines. But, again, I can only interpret such things as _non_answers, as agreement with pragmatists on the futility of such lines of questioning. If you _don't_ interpret them as such, then the "How do you _know_...?" questions will continue faster than you can answer them.
Paul said:
You pragmatists seem to spend more time telling everyone what you aren't doing than what you are. If describing epistemology and ontology this way makes them less upsetting for you then fair enough. :-)
Matt:
We only spend as much time telling everyone what we aren't doing as metaphysicians tell us what we are.
The thing with describing epistemology and ontology this way is that we have no idea why we need to keep saying we are doing them. We want to know what you guys think you are doing, because when we scale the questions back, we are basically saying that nothing very interesting is happening in this area of inquiry. In this scaled back form, a pragmatist's epistemology is so thin as to be transparent. About the only proposition needed is, "There is nothing general to be said about knowledge." Not only that, if you answer with anything that doesn't translate into that, you're ratcheting the question back up to its original form and pumping all of its impossible problems up again.
The reason why we talk past each other and have difficulty translating back and forth between our vocabularies is because, in our respective vocabularies, we each think the other is making category mistakes, we each think the other is doing something they don't realize. Our vocabularies are so similar that we are each trying to get the other to realize the consequences of that vocabulary. Unlike debating with a pure SOMist, we think the other has basically made all the initial moves, they just haven't pushed them far enough.
I mean, I hope you just drop all of those stupid questions from above. I think them quite pointless and my effort in proliferating them is my effort in trying to persuade you that carrying the mantle of epistemology and/ontology is not worth the trouble.
Matt
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