[MD] Food for Thought

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Platt's MOQ]
The fact that Einstein's theory is something that is taught to students puts it
in the social pattern category.

[Arlo]
Of course, Platt's MOP (Metaphysics of Platt) differs completely from Pirsig's
MOQ. Just be clear about that. In the MOQ, intellect originates out of social
patterns, social patterns do not result as intellectual patterns become "common
knowledge" as they apparently do in the MOP. 

"The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent
before philosophy [intellectual patterns] becomes possible. ... This "mythos
over logos" thesis agreed with the Metaphysics of Quality's assertion that
intellectual static patterns of quality are built up out of social static
patterns of quality."

"One can imagine primitive song-rituals and dance-rituals associated with
certain cosmology stories, myths, which generated the first primitive
religions. From these the first intellectual truths could have been derived. If
ritual always comes first and intellectual principles always come later, then
ritual cannot always be a decadent corruption of intellect. Their sequence in
history suggests that  principles [intellectual level patterns] emerge from
ritual [social level patterns], not the other way around."

"The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself
from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of
independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason,
this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social
world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social
mediation whatsoever. It is easy to see the historic reasons for this myth of
independence. Science might never have survived without it. But a close
examination shows it isn't so."