[MD] Intellectual activity

[Scott Roberts]

[Platt [in the On Taxation thread] said]
I've noticed in this and posts by others that the term "intellectual"  is 
tossed
around without definition. My memory is poor, but haven't we tried in the 
past
to agree on a definition? Perhaps you can refresh my memory.

[Arlo replied]
There was a thread that attempted to define it. I didn't participate in that 
at
the time. But I do argue that the term itself is problematic.

Scott:
I've changed the subject line for obvious reasons.

Yes, this question has been discussed many times, so why not again :-). A 
first obvious point is that no one is just an intellectual. We are all 
intellectual, social, biological, and inorganic, so the question is what 
sort of activity counts as intellectual, and then an "intellectual person" 
is just one who does more of that activity than most people.

Pirsig, of course, in LC (#25) said the following:
"In LILA I never defined the intellectual level of the MOQ, since everyone 
who is up to reading LILA already knows what "intellectual" means. For 
purposes of MOQ precision, let's say that the intellectual level is the same 
as mind. It is the collection and manipulation of symbols, created in the 
brain, that stand for patterns of experience."

There are some problems with this statement. In the first place, "the same 
as mind" adds no precision whatever, in fact makes it less precise. Someone 
could say that feelings are mental. However, the last sentence clearly 
eliminates that. But there are problems with that last sentence as well, as 
has been discussed before, and as I will discuss below. Before getting to 
that, though, I think the first sentence provides a good starting point, 
though I would rephrase it as "anyone who is reading LILA is engaging in 
intellectual activity." So the question of "what is intellectual activity" 
becomes "what is one doing when reading LILA that one is not doing when 
reading, say, a romance novel?".

Now the problem with the last sentence of Pirsig's quote is that it doesn't 
address this. That is, it is not clear if it is saying anything more than 
"intellectual activity is occurring whenever one uses language?" And since 
elsewhere Pirsig clearly holds that intellectual activity only emerged about 
2500-3000 years ago, well after there was language, just equating intellect 
with use of language clearly doesn't work. (By the way, a pragmatist might 
object to that last clause "...that stand for patterns of experience", since 
it seems to be invoking a representational view of language. But that's 
another problem. Another side issue comes from the "created in the brain" 
phrase. To me that sounds like a commitment to the mind-brain identity 
hypothesis, which I find objectionable.)

So, then, what are we doing when we are reading LILA? Well, what I would say 
that Pirsig was doing in writing LILA is proposing *changes* to our 
vocabulary. So in reading it, we are being asked if we go along with the 
changes being made. He is proposing that we change the meaning of such words 
as 'substance', 'cause', 'empirical', 'karma'. He is also creating new 
symbols, notably, "Metaphysics of Quality", "Dynamic Quality" and "Static 
Quality". So intellectual activity is not just the collection and 
manipulation of symbols, it is also the creation and modification of 
symbols. That is the difference between reading LILA and reading a romance 
novel, and the difference between social use of language and intellectual 
use of language. At the intellectual level we are engaged in modifying our 
vocabularies, not just using them.

Further, I would say that this view of intellectual activity carries over 
from philosophy (as in LILA) to science and art. In science, what one is 
after is finding ways to account for certain classes of patterns of 
experience. And again, science doesn't just collect and manipulate existing 
symbols. It must create new ones -- indeed new systems of symbols. One then 
tests these new systems in experiments. In art, an artistic creation is also 
a symbolic creation, though here the "new" is more of an invitation to 
educate our senses -- to see/hear in new ways, rather than our language. 
Mathematics is a special case, since in mathematics there is nothing beyond 
the mathematics for it to be tested against, though in all these activities 
(philosophy, science, art, and mathematics) the real test of the changes is 
whether others adopt them.

I think I'll stop here. I should clarify that "intellectual activity" is not 
just the creative acts, but also the testing acts. That is, in writing LILA, 
Pirsig is being creative, and in reading it we are testing it, but in a 
sense that is re-creating it.

- Scott