[MD] Lateral knowledge.

[david buchanan]

Ant, Matt and all MOQers, even the Jesus freaks:

This new topic was extracted from the "physicalism" thread, where...

Matt said to Ant:
Yes, (‘frontal truths’ correspond to static intellectual truth while 
‘lateral truths’ correspond to Dynamic “revolutionary” truth) that's more or 
less what I'm suggesting in agreement with Pirsig.  The frontal/laternal 
distinction is from ZMM, on page 119-20,..

"At first the truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer 
the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, 
but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye.  In 
a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when 
everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected 
results you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking 
LATERALLY emphasis is Pirsig's].  That's a word he later used to describe a 
growth of knowledge that doesn't move forward like an arrow in flight, but 
explands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, 
discovering that although he has hit the bull's-eye and won the prize, his 
head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window.  Lateral knowledge 
is knowledge that's from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction 
that's not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself 
upon one.  Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates 
underlying one's existing system of getting at truth."

Matt elaborated on the quote:
Now, I do have reservations about some of the language used in this section, 
but I think it gets at an important idea, that of overturning old paradigms 
and axioms.  The idea I don't like is the idea of "lateral knowledge" 
(understood in a certain way), and I don't like it for the same reasons I 
suggested earlier in restricting "knowledge" to static patterns to DMB.  I 
should like to think of the lateral and Dynamic as indeed coming from wholly 
unexpected directions and as having to do with overturning underlying axioms 
and postulates, but I don't think we should describe it has "forcing" itself 
on us.  This seems to me to run afoul of the pragmatist suggestion that 
reality doesn't _force_ us, like an authority, to describe it in a certain 
way.

dmb says:
Sadly, I still don't understand what's behind all your reservations about 
language. And the concerns generated by these unarticulated assumptions 
seems to lead you to one bizzare interpretation after another. I mean, where 
did you get the idea that Pirsig was here suggesting that reality forces 
certain descriptions? Where did you get the idea that Pirsig comments have 
anything to do with your linguistic concerns at all? C'mon Matt. He's 
talking about winning prizes for archery while he dreams in the sunlight. 
Don't you think you ought to listen to this with a more literary ear instead 
of the Rortarian tin ear? This is especially frustrating because these 
(weird) reservations basically undo your initial agreement with Ant. And, 
again, I think they keep you from hearing reading rightly.

Its worth pointing out that Pirsig read Northrop during this period of 
drifting. This is where he first encountered the distinction betweeen the 
"theoretic" and "esthetic" components of reality, which he explains a few 
pages after the quote posted here. So, instead of taking this description of 
lateral knowledge as meaning that it "forces" certain descriptions on us, I 
think he's talking about an actual experience, a way of thinking that we 
should all be able to relate to our own experience. I never went to Korea on 
a troop ship, but I have had the experience of thoughts coming at me out of 
nowhere. Haven't we all. Or how about the point I made long ago about the 
creative process in writing, if you remember that? I head this all the time 
from creative types. How the fictional characters take on a life of their 
own and seem to speak for themselves, how solutions to difficult problems 
are triggered by dreams, visions, or some seemingly trivial and unrealted 
source. Over and over again in many different way, we hear about this sort 
of thing. Those sudden flashes of insight are often described as if they 
were gifts from the muses and such. The idea being that these are different 
than the straight-ahead and focused sort of thinking. Anyway, the 
distinction between the theoretic and esthetic components is used to make 
the classic/romantic distinction in ZAMM and the the DQ/sq split in LILA.

Hopefully we can all discuss exactly what that means because, basically, I 
think you're rejecting an assertion made by nobody and your linguistic 
reservations are irrelevant to Pirsig's comments.

Thanks.
dmb

P.S. I search the web to try to find out what a "language game" is. (Since 
it would apparently kill you to answer this thrice repeated question.) As 
far as I can tell, it means "talking". Is that about right? I want to make 
sure I understand this difficult and important concept. Is it correct to say 
that when we talk, we are playing a language game? Or would that narrow it 
down to much? Maybe its better to say any form of communication is playing a 
language game? I wouldn't want to be accused of prejudice against bats or 
anything that would talk if it could.

the "new philosophy" (linguistic turn) "...seems to concern itself, not with 
the world and our relation to it, but only with the different ways in which 
silly people can say silly things. If this is all that philosophy has to 
offer, I cannot think that it is a worthy subject of study. The only reason 
that I can imagine for the restriction of philosophy to such triviality is 
the desire to separate it sharply from empirical science. I do not think 
such a separation can be usefully made." Bertrand Russell

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