[MD] Food for Thought

[Laird Bedore]

> Case said to dmb:
> You did a fine job in the Kant's Motorcycle thread of stating what you 
> saw as the difference between Pirsig's bike and Kant's scooter but it 
> all just looked like a paint job to me. Throughout the thread I became 
> increasingly convinced that Pirsig's Quality is indistinguishable from 
> Kant's TITs. I don't recall you doing much to disabuse me of this view.
>
> dmb says:
> Indistinquishable? But, but ,but there are no Kantian 
> things-in-themselves at all in the MOQ. It simply makes no sense to 
> equate the two. I offered an explanation of Radical Empiricism so you 
> could begin to see why this is so but you just brushed it off and 
> declared that you were still thinking about Kant, rememeber? In fact, 
> according that that brand of empiricism, TiTs are ruled out. Asserting 
> them is against the rules, so to speak. I finished the paper I was 
> working on. It doesn't mention Kants TiTs, but it should provide a 
> pretty clear picture of Radical Empiricsim. If you're interested I 
> could send it to you. But the short answer is that Radical Empiricism 
> does not allow a metaphysician to posit any entity or cause that can't 
> be known in experience. As you very likely already know, this would 
> exclude metaphysical entities such as God and Kantian 
> things-in-themsleves.
>
[Laird]
Just to be an interjecting pain-in-the-ass (woo hoo!), if you were to 
treat the MoQ the same way as Kant's TITs when looking through radical 
empiricism, you'd have to throw out static patterns of value, since 
they'd also be "against the rules". I'm not sure that gets us anywhere 
with comparing Kant's TITs with the MoQ.

I'll leave the rest of the coffee talk to you guys!

-Laird