From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Feb 01 2004 - 23:17:52 GMT
"The MOQ says that Quality comes first, which produces ideas, which produce
what we know as matter. ... However, as if to further the confusion, the MOQ
says that the idea that matter comes first is a high quality idea!" LC Note
67
"This knowledge is confirmed by experience in such a way as to allow the
scientist to generate a supremely high quality intellectual belief that
external objects exist. But that belief itself is still subjective." LC p313
Paul, DM, Matt and all MOQers:
David said:
Hard to think that objectivity means little more than intersubjective
agreement.
Paul replied:
Yes, "little more than" is a conclusion arrived at when the only
alternative to objective is subjective. When value enters the picture as
a third category, there is a further reason to accept realism - it's the
*best* intellectual pattern for investigating nature. From this starting
point we can say that intersubjective agreement is created by Quality
and objectivity is then created by intersubjective agreement.
dmb says:
Mmmm. Thanks for the light. For starters, I think these Pirsig quotes also
show that any accusations about the MOQ's "correspondence theory" is without
"foundation". If the very idea of objective reality is a "just" a subjective
belief (intellectual static pattern) and the MOQ can assert both that ideas
preceed matter AND still call the opposite a "high quality idea", its hard
to imagine that any charges of absolutism could ever stick. I think these
quotes show that these neo-pramatists complaints don't pertain to Pirsig's
MOQ. In fact, I think its the other way around: The MOQ's complaints about
amorality and relativism pertain to neo-pragmatism. What really interests me
here are the differences between the neo-pragmatists intersubjective
agreement and Pirsig's social and intellectual patterns, which are roughly
translatable.
"Values provide the only basis for fully intelligible comprehension of
culture because the actual organization of all cultures is primarily in
terms of their values. This becomes apparent as soon as one attempts to
present the picture of a culture without reference to its values. The
account becomes a meaningless assemblage of items having relationship to one
another only through coexistence in locality and moment - an assemblange
that might as profitably be arranged alphabetically as in any other order; a
mere laudry list." Pirsig quoting Harvard anthropology professor Clyde
Kluckhohn. LILA p59
dmb continues:
Here Pirsig is using Kluckhohn to voice his own complaints about value-free
objectivity. More specifically, he is using one of Boas' students in his
attack on value free objectivity in anthropology. In any case, it seems that
there is a striking similarity between the neo-pragmatist's historically
contingent intersubjective agreement and Kluckhohn's "meaningless
assemblage..in locality and moment". All the various webs of belief, from
obsure idiosyncracies to widely held common sense, constitute little more
than a laudry list or more or less useful opinions with no real underlying
coherence. This turns language and culture into a thing we can only measure
by its usefulness like some soul-less machine. Function and fit. There's no
THERE there. The MOQ, on the other hand, manages to escape the gravity of
those dreaded absolutisms without getting so lost in space.
"The greatest benefit of this substitution of "value" for "causation" and
"substance" is that it allows an integration of physical science with other
areas of experience that have been traditionally considered outside the
scope of scientific thought. Phaedrus saw that the "value" which directed
subatomic particles is not identical with the "value" a human being gives to
a painting. But he saw that the two are cousins, and that the exact
relationship between them can be defined with great percision. Once this
definition is complete a huge integraton of the humanities and scences
appears in which platypi fall by the hundreds. Thousands. ..If science is
the study of substances and their relationships, then the field of cultural
anthropology is a scientific asurdity. ...But if science is the study of
stable patterns of value, then cultural anthropology becomes a supremely
scientific field." Lila - end of chapter 8.
David said:
The basis I accept realism is on that of causality and our capacity to
investigate underlying levels of causality, e.g. that the colour green as we
experience it is dependent on the wavelength of light. ...The idea that we
can
have useful knowledge depends on realism, any other idea is a bit stupid
really, despite the pragmatist fear of committing to realism.
Paul:
I would rephrase that last sentence like this - "The idea that we can
have useful knowledge [of inorganic and biological patterns] depends on
realism, any other idea is [of lower quality], despite the pragmatist
fear of committing to realism." - and agree with you,...
dmb says:
There's something comforting about the word "realism". :-) Leaving aside a
qualification or two concerning "causation", I agree too.
"Phaedrus had railed against the conjuror, Aristotle, who invented the term
(substance) and started it all. ...What is it that keeps these properties
uniform if it is not something called substance? That is the question that
created the concept of substance in the first place. The answer given by the
MOQ is similar to that given by the "causaton" platypus. Strike out the word
"substance" wherever it appears and substitute the expression "stable
inorganic pattern of value." Again the difference is linguistic. It doesn't
make a whit of difference in the laboratory which term is used. No dials
change their readings. The observed laboratory data are exactly the same."
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