[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[Matt Kundert]

Arlo, Mike,

Arlo said:
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.

Mike said:
I remember saying something similar to this to Paul in our last discussion. 
He rightly pointed out that I was bringing a kind of representionalism, a 
SOMish view of language, into the MOQ. It's not much different from saying 
that intellectual patterns are subjective representations of objective 
social/biological/inorganic patterns. In any case, you're perilously close 
to saying that all language is intellectual. To make sense of Pirsig's 
levels, we need to keep language as a social basis from which the 4th level 
arises.

Matt:
It is true, Arlo runs dangerously close to representationalism here, but I 
think Arlo understands the dangers, and has no truck with them, and is 
getting at something else here.  The difficulty pragmatists have had in 
purging representationalism is in getting rid of the appearance/reality 
distinction (which creates an invidious subjective/objective distinction) 
against the Realists without thereby becoming Idealists.  Realists would 
like to claim that they're trying to get in touch with reality, whereas the 
idealist reaction seems to suggest that it's all in our heads.  Pragmatists 
would like to stay away from both claims (review, for instance, Pirsig's 
rejection of both scientific realism and subjective idealism in the S/O 
Dilemma in the middle of ZMM).  Against the realists they'd like to say, 
with Pirsig, that we are everywhere and always in touch with reality, we 
could never be globally "out of touch", but, against what the idealists seem 
to say, that there is a difference between the word "chair" and a chair.  
Arlo is reminding us that everything under a description is an intellectual 
pattern (assuming for the moment that language is the currency of the 
intellectual level).

I have never been able to fully grasp where Pirsig places the creation of 
language, social or intellectual.  I think trying to drive a wedge between 
the non-verbal cues we identify as "anger" (let alone far more complicated 
non-verbal interactions that would make up a "family"; how much of a family 
do we have if there are no linguistic exchanges?) and verbalizations like 
"Jackass!" are doomed to failure, or at least philosophical insignificance.  
I don't think there's anything much discrete between them which is why I've 
advocated the collapse of the social/intellectual distinction.  I'm not sure 
that distinction is doing much.

Mike said:
[Arlo's] suggesting that by naming things, such as "family", we create an 
intellectual pattern. I have a suggestion for keeping things fairly simple 
while staying away from representationalism. I suggest that it is by naming 
"family" that we individuate it _as a pattern_.
...
Now, "habit" is another word for a pattern, isn't it? And some of these 
habits surely pre-date human language. So the problem for this theory is: 
how are these primal habit-patterns individuated and perpetuated? More 
precisely, how do they become patterns or habits in the first place?

Matt:
That indeed would be a problem, but I think in the focus on language (which, 
as linguistic creatures, is easy to do) you've accidently glossed over what 
I take to be Pirsig's Quality thesis.  Pirsig doesn't make this 
exceptionally explicit, but I take to be a consequence of Pirsig's idea of 
Quality as reality the idea that _individuation itself_ (or as I've called 
it "differentiation") is the basic fact of reality.  If Quality is reality, 
and reality is value, that means that better and worse are basic existents 
of reality, and the differentiation between better and worse is also basic 
(if not logically prior to there actually being better and worse).

The nugget of insight I think you're reaching towards is that _naming_ 
something does individuate it, it enters it into a nexus of relations to 
everything else that is, logically speaking, "not family".  I think the 
nonrepresentationalist picture of language that we can extend to Pirsig (or 
find there latent in him) is the notion that language is just another tool 
of differentiation that has evolved in the course of evolutionary history.  
Instead of language being "over here" representing other stuff "over there", 
language and all the other patterns are in one big heap of differentiation.  
The laws of physics are inorganic patterns of differentiation.  Biological 
patterns created new ways of differentiation.  All the creation of language 
did was to create a new way to differentiate.  Now we differentiate by 
naming stuff, alongside having sex with sruff or falling off of stuff.

Mike said:
Turns out my memory is a bit foggy - Paul charged me with using a 
correspondence theory of truth, not representationalism.

Matt:
The correspondence theory and representationalism are basically the same 
thing.  As a theory of truth, the correspondence theory engenders an 
epistemology of representationalism, i.e. SOM.  Eschewing one means 
eschewing the other.

Matt

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