[MD] Intellectual and Social

[Matt Kundert]

I just have a few scattered, fairly uninteresting remarks 
on posts from Steve, Mary, and Ian--

Matt said:
The question is: since inferential thinking can continue on 
indefinitely, how is it that we stop?  Habits of satisfaction, 
conclusions to problems we are pleased with, was my 
answer--these habits take on something we could call 
"authority."

Mary said:
Excellent!  For example, at the Social level, the patterns 
stop where the priests say they do.  At the Intellectual 
level, the patterns of inferential thinking continue until 
we reach a logical conclusion based on best evidence.

Matt:
That's still not quite what I'm suggesting.  On the view 
I'm suggesting, the authority of the priests and the 
authority of "evidence" are on a par.  One, however, 
works better than the other for a lot of things, and so 
one "terminal of satisfaction/authority" has been on the 
rise as a well-used train station (since about the 17th 
century).

On the view I'm suggesting, the intellectual level is 
identified as "thinking," and additionally "thinking" is 
taken to be paradigmatically as inferential.  There is no 
"thinking" at the social level on this model, and perhaps 
my saying "inferential thinking" was leading to this 
confusion.  One could blur the sense of "inference" I'm 
using (as I think you did earlier Mary) to extend it down 
to what animals do, too, but this model only works if you 
don't.  I don't have anything in particular against 
suggesting that animals make inferences, except that 
this is an attribution on our part to them and that what 
we are doing is so excessively more complex that it's 
handy to have a few distinctions in place between the 
kind of thought-process a tiger has and the kind a 
language-user has.  

On this model, social patterns become patterns of 
satisfaction, or "thought-stopping."  Because of the 
nature of inferential thinking, in which one could continue 
on indefinitely any series of thoughts 
by--for instance--asking for definitions of individual terms 
used so far in the thought-process, the idea of a "logical 
conclusion" is a shibboleth:  we could _always_ continue 
the train of thought.  Yet we don't--we stop, become 
satisfied to call something a "conclusion."

The example of asking for definitions of words, a process 
that just leads you to more words that could have 
definitions asked for, is a clear illustration of something I 
think is internal to inference generally.  If one thinks 
about how formal logic works, or geometry, you can't 
make any kind of argument without first premises to 
deduct conclusions from.  These premises, however, are 
assumptions, assumed without argument.  One could 
turn to these assumptions, each individually, and ask 
what reasons form the pattern of why we should 
understand them to be true and used as assumed 
premises.  But, then, to give those reasons would involve 
one in another argument--instead now what was formerly 
an assumption is now the conclusion you wish to reach: 
and this means you are required to have premises.  (For 
a brief attempt to explicate this general line of thought 
about inference and how it works, see my "A Spatial Model 
of Belief Change": 
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html).

Let me also add that I think this model as at 
cross-purposes with Steve's account of the levels as 
intellectual-as-rationale-for-behavior and 
social-as-behavior.  I like Steve's approach, but the 
above model is restricting "behavior," or action, to the 
biological level.  And I have no definite thoughts about 
integrating them, conflict between them, or the relative 
utility of either of them.

Steve said:
I have read others to be taking intellectual patterns that 
become a part of the dominant worldview to have actually 
become social patterns and to have ceased to e 
intellectual patterns, while in fact ALL intellectual patterns 
are social. I think a better reading of Pirsig's MOQ is to 
think of such intellectual patterns that become widely 
accepted as having gained a certain sort of social quality 
that other ideas may not have, and I think a good "quality 
word" in this case is indeed "authority."

Matt:
I think the model I'm suggesting wouldn't admit to "all 
intellectual patterns are social."  I think what is at issue 
between Steve's account and the one I'm kicking out there 
is two different understandings of the distinctness clause, 
two different understandings of how the levels fit 
together.  To supply spatial metaphors for them, Steve's is 
a circle structure, in which--to vary Pirsig's model in the 
SODV paper--DQ is the "negative space" (in the artistic 
term's sense) outside the whole apparatus, then we get 
the biggest circle inside of which is Inorganic, then a little 
distance in we get a second circle (inside the first) inside 
of which is Biological, then a third Social, and a fourth 
Intellectual, so that the Intellectual is a small circle inside 
of Social, which is a slightly larger circle inside of Biological, 
inside of Inorganic, all floating in the unbounded space of 
DQ.

My model's metaphor would be a chain, in which the 
Inorganic link hooks to the Biological link which hooks to 
the Social link which hooks to the Intellectual--and notice 
that the Intellectual link hooks neither to the Inorganic 
or Biological.  The upshot of this is a focusing on Pirsig's 
thought that you can't leap levels--it offers a specific 
interpretation of what that means.

On the other hand, a perfect integration of the two 
would be on the spatial metaphor of a circular 
pyramid--the circular model (which I think is more faithful 
to Pirsig's vision) would be seen that way because one 
was directly over top of it, looking down, whereas if you 
just shifted your perspective, you'd see a climbing 
pyramidal staircase.  Now, I think the accounting Steve is 
offering makes moves to this 3-D picture (though I can't 
recall the specific kind of verbiage used), but my account 
is definitely focused on a specific perspective of accounting.

The trick for everyone, whether they like Steve's model or 
not, is to be able to integrate two seperate thoughts: 1) 
the levels participate in each other and 2) the levels are 
seperate from each other.  This is an interesting 
balancing act.  One was an account like this (one I 
offered years ago, influenced by Scott Roberts):

Inorganic level - non-replicating persistence (e.g., rocks)
Biological level - replicating persistence (e.g., cells)
Social level - non-linguistic semiotic behavior (e.g., tigers)
Intellectual level - linguistic semiotic behavior (e.g., humans)

Because I've only occasionally be concerned with getting 
Pirsig's vision straight before extending a few core 
principals of his (and mine), there was also a fifth level 
(based on the principle of distinctness, and influenced by 
Sam Norton):

Eudaimonic level - autonomous behavior (e.g., citizens of democracies)

To get this model to work, I think you might have to 
tinker with it a little (for instance, I think I would now 
want to rename the fifth level and describe it as 
"autonomous linguistic semiotic behavior (e.g., strong 
poets)," but that's neither here nor there at the moment).  

The upshot is that the first four levels are, I think, roughly 
what Steve is suggesting: "semiotic" is roughly a stand-in 
for "symbolic," which means that when Steve, following a 
principle of Pirsig's in the "Letter to Paul Turner," identifies 
Social with "symbols" and Intellectual with "manipulation 
of symbols," he's saying something very similar to the 
above.  The only sticky-wicket is what to do with language 
(which is pretty much the wicket we all have different 
ideas about): Steve's stipulated language as Social in 
origins (if I'm not mistaken).  Even if he hasn't, it is 
something I'm partial to in other moods--we have to 
understand language as inherently social in some sort of 
manner.  Clearly I stuck language in the Intellectual Level 
above (and the idea of "semiosis" was supposed to 
integrate sociality), but I also have no qualms about 
endlessly adding levels based on demand--four is nicely 
symmetrical, but as Pirsig said in ZMM, just because a 
metaphysical triad is awkward doesn't mean it isn't true: 
symmetry isn't everything.

There are many ways (I'm seeing them proliferate before 
my eyes) of registering Wittgenstein's insight that 
language-use is a social phenomenon and not a Platonic 
bit of magic with Pirsig's metaphysics of levels: that's 
another thing I would insist on for all gerrymandering 
Pirsigian metaphysicians.  You have to account for the 
fact that language is social and shared, and not a 
private tool of picturing your own mind.  If you don't, I 
think one falls into Platonism, the kind Pirsig wanted to 
avoid (just picture the Subject trying to match up with 
the Object).

Steve said:
As I understand and agree with you, authority may be a 
good word to describe the interaction between the social 
and intellectual level since it is a social pattern that 
applies to socially well-accepted justifications (intellectual 
patterns) as well as to social role-playing patterns. 
Intellectual patterns that get translated into action must 
have the social value pattern of authority.

Matt:
The last sentence gets my account exactly right.  (The 
really mind-boggling thing comes in when I also stress 
that "action" includes "noises humans makes," i.e. 
language.  This means that the words we say are 
bio-actions--indeed, dare I say, the neurons firing in our 
brain that parallels every thought are _also_ bio-actions.  
This makes my simple chain-metaphor much messier, 
though it makes strides towards the interrelatedness 
that the chain picture tries to avoid.)

I also think "social role-playing patterns" is a very good 
locution.

Steve said:
Another perhaps more Pirsigian and certainly simpler 
answer to your question--"since inferential thinking can 
continue on indefinitely, how is it that we stop?"-- is 
simply that that some arguments get selected over others 
and acted upon based on undefined quality. I think this is 
what he was getting at with the talk about how the 
number of hypotheses to explain a given result keeps 
expanding. How do we generate new ones, where do 
they come from, and how do we select from among all the 
possibilities to decide which ones to test? I think his 
answer was simply undefined quality.

Matt:
I'm not so sure about this.  I think we need to think of 
DQ as an initial burst of inspiration, but not as an 
always-explanation.  It's mystifying, for one thing: "Why 
did you do that?" "Oh, I was following an undefined 
quality."  You can _always_ answer that way, and you 
can _always_ think it was true, even though your 
conversation partners will eventually come to think 
you're full of shit and don't think about why you do 
anything.  So I would hold from saying "more 
Pirsigian"--it's simpler, sure, but not always true.  Pirsig 
wanted to get at why we can't always trail back in our 
heads to why we do something--sometimes, you just 
can't.  Sometimes you want to test a hypothesis, 
though you aren't really sure what gave you the idea 
or what it's quality will be--that's the DQ-inspiration.  
The static-latching is what happens when, upon 
repeated use through continued experimentation, the 
initially inspired, out-of-nowhere experiment pulls 
through and continues to be useful, continues to show 
its quality through merit.

What is unstated in Pirsig is the difference between 
self-description and third-person-description.  We are not 
always right about ourselves--self-description can only 
get you so far, and just because someone says, "I have 
no idea why I did that" while truly meaning it, does not 
mean that they are right--other people always have the 
option of describing their behavior differently.  So, from 
the first-person point of view, we seem to be constantly 
having DQ-inspirations, and that because there's only 
so much we can know about ourselves.  But from the 
point of view of others--including historians and 
biographers painting stories about behaviors of 
individual people for many millennia to come--we can 
sometimes know much more.  I find this idea in Pirsig in 
his Indeterminancy of DQ thesis--the idea that only with 
the passage of time will we find out if a given, inspired 
action like the Brujo's is Dynamic Quality or degenerate.

This ambiguity in Pirsig is enough that we should posit a 
distinction between two kinds of Dynamic Quality: 
Individual-DQ and Historical-DQ.  The former is what we 
as individuals respond to, but the latter is what the 
historians describe in their stories of the evolution of the 
species.

For example, one of the questions that "undefined quality" 
is to answer was "how do we select from among all the 
possibilities to decide which ones to test?"  From the level 
of scientific hypotheses, sometimes it seems quite 
pertinent to say "undefined quality," because sometimes 
you just have a flier of an idea, but most of the time your 
choices are severely contained and restricted by the kind 
of experiment you've already decided to do (Pirsig glosses 
over this kind of restriction in ZMM in order to pursue a 
distinctly philosophical question).  However, when the 
"possibility" we are deciding on is the form of life known 
as "modern science," when it's the choice between 
Aristotle and Galileo, then it seems _very_ pertinent to 
say Dynamic Quality _even though Galileo had a lot to 
say about why his way was better_.  

The thing historians of science like Thomas Kuhn have 
found is that Galileo's answers weren't demonstrably good 
answers at the time--they only _became_ good answers 
through passage of time, as the experiment of "modern 
scientific experimentation" continued to deliver the goods.  
What's more, we've come to find that the explanations 
about why the New Science was better than Thomistic 
understandings of the universe--with a lot of talk about 
the faculty of Reason--are _not_ very good reasons at all, 
that there was in fact, unbeknownst to most at the time, 
something else going on.  _Why_ everybody individually 
jumped on board isn't why we should _stay_ on board 
today.  There are different reasons now, and we often 
say in retrospect that our predecessors only glimpsed 
dimly what we see clearly (as Pirsig pays homage to 
Whitehead).  We can look back and see all sorts of 
figures that had very little Individual-DQ (because they 
had a lot of definition to their quality), but quite a bit of 
Historical-DQ: the mystery of History and how a lot of 
people can be Agents of Quality (or Spirit, as Hegel 
would have said) without even knowing it.

Ian said:
Firstly the fact that social and intellectual are NOT simply 
distinct and hierarchical is not any one person's idea (all 
ideas evolve - Pirsig).

Steve's original point about one paralysing the other IF 
that were the case, whenever we needed to make any 
decision is the origin of my whole agenda incidentally - 
it was dubbed "analysis paralysis" many decades ago - 
not something I or anyone else invented.

Matt:
I'm sorry, Ian, but I'm really yawning at this comment.  
When I attributed a "first time I ever heard that" to 
Steve (who graciously passed it to Wim), I was being 
much to specific to refer to something called "analysis 
paralysis"--I was talking about the narrow field of "Pirsig 
studies," not the whole course of intellectual history.  I 
have no idea sometimes why you feel the need for 
saying things like this, like to become metaphilosophical 
and suggest "no idea is any one person's idea."  Because 
I'm pretty sure Steve and I, at the least, are well aware 
of the theoretical point about process and the sociality of 
thinking.

And I, for one, still find utility in the notion of "invention."  
Knowing too much history can give a person a sense that 
"there are no new ideas," but this is just a lie bred by the 
mind's ability to assimilate the new into the old (and the 
old into the new).  All ideas evolve, sometimes old ones die 
and new ones are born, and we all put our own unique 
impress on an "idea" as "it" is passed from person to 
person through communication, but in my line of work, I still 
feel the need to use a notion like "genius" to refer to 
people who left a bigger impression on ideas than the 
other people.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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