[MD] Static latching & faith

[david buchanan]

Ham and y'all:

Ham said:
In "Language, Truth and Logic", Alfred Jules Ayer, argued for the 
verification principle of logical positivism in philosophy.  According to 
Ayer, analytic statements are tautologies because they are true by 
definition, and thus their validity does not depend on empirical testing. He 
also claims that a proposition is analytic if its validity depends only on 
the definitions of the symbols it contains; it is synthetic if its validity 
is determined by the facts of experience.

dmb says:
Interesting that you should bring up the positivists here. Pirsig addresses 
the difference between his kind of empiricism and theirs in several 
places...

dmb quotes:
LILA, chapter 5: (Emphasis is Pirsig's)
"Positivism is a philosophy that emphasizes science as the only source of 
knowledge. It sharply distinquishes between fact and value, and is hostile 
to religion and traditional metaphysics. It is an outgrowth of empiricism, 
the idea that all knowledge must come from experience, and is suspicious of 
any thought, even a scientific statement, that is incapable of being reduced 
to direct observation. Philosophy, as far as Positivism is concerned, is 
limited to the analysis of scientific language. ...Logical postivism's 
criteria for 'meaningfulness' were pure metaphysics, he thought. But it 
didn't matter. The MOQ not only PASSES the logical positivisits' test for 
meaningfulness, it passes them with the highest marks. The MOQ RESTATES the 
empirical basis of logical positivism with more percision, more 
inclusiveness, more explanatoryu power than it has perviously had. It says 
that values are not outside of the experience that logical positiviism 
limits itself to. They are the ESSENCE of this experience. Values are MORE 
empirical, in fact, than subjects or objects."

Robert Pirsig in a letter to Anthony McWatt, August 17th, 1997:
"...The logical positivists fundamental error in my opinion is the 
assumption that because philosophy is about words it is therefore about 
words alone. This is the fallacy of "devouring the menu instead of the 
meal". Their common argumentative tactic is to say that anything they cannot 
feed through their little box of linguistic analysis is not philosophy. But 
if discussion about "the good" (which is fundamentally beyond words) is not 
philosophy then Socrates was not a philosopher since that was his primary 
subject."

Lila's Child page 548
"I think the trouble is with the word, "experience." It is...commonly used 
as a subject-object relationship. This relationship is usually considered 
the basis of philosophic empiricism and experimental
scientific knowledge. In a subject-object metaphysics, this experience is 
between a pre-existing object and subject, but in the MOQ, there is no 
pre-existing subject or object....So in the MOQ experience comes first, 
everything else comes later. This is pure empiricism, as opposed to 
scientific
empiricism, which, with its pre-existing subjects and objects, is not really 
so pure."

Ham continued:
But what are "the facts of experience"?  My dictionary defines 'empirical' 
both as (1): "relying on experience or observation alone, without regard for 
system or theory," and (2): "capable of being verified or disproved by 
observation or experiment."  It seems to me that there is sufficient
contradiction in these two definitions to make 'empirical' an ambiguous 
word.

dmb says:
Ambiguous? Really? I don't see a problem here. I'd say that "empirical" 
simply means that its based on experience. The second part of the definition 
only describes a specific kind of experience, namely observation and 
experiment. As you may have gathered from the quotes above, Pirsig is 
atttacking the standard form of empiricism. Northop's categories are an 
attempt to find epistemic common ground between East and West and the MOQ 
follows this sort of expansion...

dmb quotes LILA, end of chapter 29:
"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was 
independent of pragmatism, was his RADICAL EMPIRICISM. By this he meant that 
subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and 
objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more 
fundamental which he described as the immediate flux of life which furnishes 
the material to our later reflection. In this basic flux of experience the 
distinctions of reflective thought, consciousness and content, subject and 
object, mind and matter have not yet emerged in the forms which we make 
them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical. It 
logically proceeds this distinction."

Ham said:
As a former Science student, I lean toward Scott on this issue; but I would 
also avoid using 'empirical' in any philosophical context where subjectivity 
or phenomenalism is the underlying epistemology.  For one thing, the term is 
commonly associated with verifiable "facts" that are the
bread & butter of experimental investigation.

dmb says:
I imagine just about everyone here understands the ideas behind scientific 
method and such. But as you may have gathered from the quotes above, this 
common sense notion is exactly what Pirsig is attacking. His radical 
empiricism is to be contrasted with the standard scientific and positivistic 
notions of what constitutes empirical data. That you "lean toward Scott on 
this issue" does not surprize me in the least. I mean, he seems to be using 
SOM assumptions here too.

And I must say, Ham, that you seem to be unfamiliar with Pirsig's ideas. 
Have you read the books?

Thanks.
dmb

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