[MD] Does the MOQ invalidate Subjectivity?

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Steve,

Steve said:
For you, Pirsig's pre-intellectual awareness equates to an experience of 
experiencing, which may be a primary subject/object distinction?

Matt:
Well, _I_ don't want to interpret him that way.  Other people would seem to, 
however.  This has in the last year been the main sticky wicket that I go 
around with people on.  (See, for instance, Anthony and I at the end of 
March, beginning of April, in the "Experience, Essentialism, Physicalism" 
thread or, if you want to see two people go impressively around in circles 
for five months, DMB and I, starting in the "Rhetoric" thread in August of 
last year to the "Language, SOM, and the MoQ" thread ending in December--my 
views are expressed best at the beginning of the latter thread, particularly 
when I start talking to Ian.)

But yeah, when people usually start talking about Pirsig's "pre-intellectual 
cutting edge of experience" it usually sounds like something that requires a 
primary subject/object distinction to me.

There is, however, no short way of explaining how I get there.  But let's 
try this: "pre-intellectual" is code for "pre-linguistic".  Pirsig is 
talking about a primary experience that is before language, before it can 
get its dirty hands on it.  The notion that language is something that we 
secondarily apply to a primary experience, language as the making of 
distinctions on a smooth, undistinctioned pure experience, is what Hilary 
Putnam calls the "cookie cutter view" and Donald Davidson calls the 
"scheme/content distinction, the third and last dogma of empiricism".  
Scheme--content.  Person--world.  Subject--object.

That's a really short version.  When I've pressed this on Pirsig by way of 
criticism, most defenses of Pirsig have pointed out all the ways in which 
Pirsig's version is different and dodges SOM.  My problem with these 
defenses has always been that, if taken seriously, they absolutely _do_ save 
Pirsig's pants from the fire, but they do it by undermining Pirsig's own 
notion of "pre-intellectual experience".  I say that's good, but I just wish 
people would follow through and ditch the thing they just ruined.

Matt

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