[MD] Representationalism

[david buchanan]

Matt and all:

Matt said to dmb:
Is there more than a verbal difference between you saying "all knowledge is 
derived from experience" and me saying (as I later did in this thread) "not 
all linguistic activity is linguistically motivated, though some of it is" 
if 'experience' is defined as including language and non-language (as it 
most certainly does if Pirsig is said to hold the Deweyan equation of 
experience = reality)? ...Probably not, but the difference you want doesn't 
have anything to do with "experience" (which I have no problem with), it has 
to do with the idea of non-linguistic knowledge.  I still don't know what 
that is and I still don't know what is wrong with my account.

dmb replies:
Non-linguistic knowledge? I'm guessing you're refering to the 
"pre-intellectual experience" here? Without bringing mysticism into it, I'm 
just saying that the MOQ claims to be empirically based while your brand of 
pragmatism seems to emphasize language at the expense of just about 
everything else. Anyway, I thought Arlo's very recent post in the 
"Responding to DQ thread" did a pretty good job of showing how 
pre-intellectual experience - or non-linguistic experience if you prefer - 
figures into the MOQ's basic architecture...

"In ZMM, on the amoeba, Pirsig writes, "The easiest intellectual analogue of 
pure Quality that people in our environment can understand is that 'Quality 
is the response of an organism to its environment (he used this example 
because his chief questioners seemed to see things in terms of 
stimulus-response behavior theory). An amoeba, placed on a plate of water 
with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid placed nearby, will pull away from the 
acid (I think). If it could speak the amoeba, without knowing anything about 
sulfuric acid, could say, 'This environment has poor quality.'"

...This is clarified in Lila, where Pirsig writes, "When the person who sits 
on the stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the front edge of 
his experience is Dynamic. He does not think, "This stove is hot," and then 
make a rational decision to get off. A "dim perception of he knows not what" 
gets
him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to 
explain the situation."

Here it is clear that for both the amoeba and the person, the first 
response, the "sense of betterness" is "Dynamic". It is "static quality" 
which comes later, in the building of analogues and symbolic representations 
of the experience."

dmb resumes:
See, I think language is the static quality that comes later, after the 
experience. These analogues and symbolic representations constitute the 
language, are the mythos that we use to interpret experience. And being 
outside that mythos constitutes insanity because that mythos is our reality, 
our static reality. But again, I think this is very different from what 
you're saying.

See, its not that the hot stove "causes" us to say, "wow, that's a hot 
stove" or "I burned my ass". (As in your tiger analogies.) The mythos 
interpets it that way so we see it that way quite automatically. But you can 
see how that it just the common sensical SOM view, eh? Its not about 
pre-existing chunks of iron or the nerve cellls on the posterior end of a 
pre-existing subject. I mean, I think we'd be missing the point of the hot 
stove example is we view it simply as an assertion that the organism is 
responding to an objective reality because the whole thrust of the MOQ is to 
overcome that very assumption as a basis of experience, the pre-requisite 
for experience. He's saying, that's just an interpretation handed to us by 
the mythos and so there's a mighty powerful tendency to see it that way. 
But, as radical as it may be, he's saying experience comes first. We 
constantly interpet it in terms of individual subjects - microscopic bugs or 
philosophers - having some kind of experience. I mean, don't you generally 
think of language as something like another limb or another organ, another 
part of the human organism that we use to cope with the enviroment?

dmb

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