From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 12 2004 - 21:32:32 GMT
Paul, Bo, David,
I, too, think Paul has it right. I think I'm beginning to understand how Paul's wielding the terminology, so on this point, Paul (and David) is a good pragmatist:
Paul said:
If the terms objective and subjective, with respect to ideas, methods and knowledge, were replaced with high quality and low quality, I think there would be less confusion. "Objective" would then only be used to describe the patterns of value that create matter and organisms - the patterns available to our physical senses - and would not describe a kind of knowledge. Then, knowledge of cultural patterns and knowledge of rocks would be on an equal footing and would be graded by being good or bad rather than by the ontological status of their respective subject matter.
Matt:
This and the parts where Paul elaborates the point is in agreement with the pragmatist. Pragmatists do not think there is an "epistemologically ... sharp distinction to be made
between subjective and objective *knowledge*." Sure, what causes us to believe that we are seeing a rock is different from what causes us to believe an idea. There _is_ a difference between rocks and ideas, but SOMists have for years been trying to make an interesting connection between our ability to reach relatively easy consensus on rocks and rocks and our relatively more difficult time in reaching consensus on ideas and ideas. What they came up with is the correspondence theory of truth, whereby, because of our ability to reach easy consensus on rocks (combined with stretching the analogy of sight and truth), rocks must be real whereas ideas, because we can't reach easy consensus (and we can't see them), must not be. In Paul's idiom, they were conflating epistemology and ontology.
Now, I think Paul and I still disagree on something, but I'm not sure given the amount I've come to realize that we are talking about the same thing.
Paul said:
Value, itself, is Dynamic Quality, intersubjective agreement is part of static quality, therefore value cannot be "a continuum of intersubjective agreement." If Matt had said that *static* value is a continuum of intersubjective agreement it may have been nearer the mark, although still incorrect.
Matt:
I think the other places where Paul disagrees with me in that post are due to mutual misunderstandings. This, however, I'm not so sure.
First, I'm not sure why you would call "value" "Dynamic Quality." I thought "Quality" was "value." (This might make an important difference, but that's not what I'd like to explore.)
But, the main disagreement I think is that, though I understand where the impetus to call only static patterns a continuum of intersubjectivity comes from, to me the metaphor of Quality is just this continuum, it is the re-addition of the human element that was lost in the soulless SOM. It is what I take Pirsig to mean in Lila's Child note 97: "The fundamental reality is not the common sense or the objects and laws approved of by common sense but the approval itself and the quality that leads to it."
I don't know, making "value" as something different then intersubjectivity feels to me like a reification, a Kantian cut where we don't just keep talking about what we can't talk about, but we give it great and mysterious importance, too. I take the entire value of ZMM to be the insistence that we have to start finding quality and meaning in our lives. Making value something "out there" seems to do the same thing as SOM: it cuts us off from what it is to be human.
But again, I'm not at all sure that this is a disagreement. When Bo of late keeps threatening people with the scary visage of "Mattagoras" (which sounds to me like a long dead dinosaur, something I assume many would like pragmatism to be), I think he's coming to the scary realization that people, whether they know it or not, are closer to pragmatism and my position then they might want. I don't really want to push the issue, but some, like Paul, are coming to suppose that its not such a bad thing. Others, like Mark and DMB, are still violently opposed, though the longer things continue, the less and less difference I see.
Matt
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