[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Steve]
I like that quote too, but I don't see how you could take it to mean that 
we can no longer talk about whether something is true or false. You can 
still have truth even after you leave "Truth" behind.

[Arlo]
Although we must accept that we are governed by analogies, that does not 
mean they can't be useful, powerful and formational aspects of our thought. 
The key is to never confuse what is "provisionally true" with some Absolute 
Hegelian Truth (as Pirsig calls it).

Thus we can say that "2 + 2 = 4" is a "true statement", but only 
provisionally (and including the context of a particular mathematical system).

[Steve]
Truth is that which is good to believe. My point is that we don't believe 
or disbelieve social patterns, we only do that with intellectual patterns.

[Arlo]
Let me take a tangent and say, I think that social patterns described *are* 
intellectual patterns. "Family" is an intellectual pattern used to describe 
particular social habits, but it is not the social habits it attempts to 
represent. This is true too of biological and inorganic patterns. "H20" is 
not the inorganic pattern it attempts to symbolically represent. And as an 
intellectual pattern it is only ever "provisionally true". Science, 
someday, may in fact tell us that this inorganic pattern is NOT composed of 
two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms, but composed on 2.5 newly discovered 
G-Waves and half of a P-resonance curve, just as past science told us that 
water is a indivisible, foundational entity.

In this sense, we can believe or disbelieve social patterns the same way we 
believe or disbelieve the intellectual-symbolic patterns used to describe 
inorganic and biological patterns.

Believing or disbelieving, I'd go so far as to say, ARE intellectual level 
activities. But since our understanding of "it" is always symbolically 
mediated (except in the pre-intellectual, aesthetic), the moment we think 
about inorganic, biological or social patterns we are in the realm of 
intellectual level activity, and we can in fact believe or disbelieve how 
we've codeified these patterns we experience.

Arlo