[MD] Dialectical Knowledge and Nonlinguistic Knowledge

[david buchanan]

Matt and all:

dmb said:
"In his refusal to accept only dialectical knowledge as knowledge, I see 
Matt's version of Rorty doing the same thing as Plato."

Matt replied:
I thought you were contrasting "dialectical knowledge" to "mystical 
knowledge" and that this distinction paralleled the "linguistic knowledge" 
to "nonlinguistic knowledge" distinction, so that it explained why you and 
Hildebrand both think that Rorty's denying we can have knowledge of 
nonlinguistic stuff (and you additionally thinking that he has no room for 
mystical knowledge).

dmb says:
Right. As I understand it, Rorty (or rather your version of him) insists 
that there is nothing outside the text, nothing outside of linguistic or 
dialectical knowledge. Or rather there in nothing meaningful outside of the 
text. I suppose anything outside the text would be considered cognitively 
meaningless, as the positivists used to put it. My point has always been 
that this is the very problem Pirsig aims to solve while Rorty only brings 
the problem up to date.

If you read Gallagher's essay you'll see that he has Parmenides first 
totally destroying Plato's theory of the forms and then refuses to be 
wrangled by Plato's dialectial traps. What I find interesting here is that 
the appearance reality distinction comes from the theory of the forms and 
this is part of what Parmenides the mystic refuses to accept. See, the 
mystical One is unlike the forms in that it is not seperate from appearance 
in that way. Its not a reality behind the experienced phenomenon. It is just 
a different kind of experience, one that can't be defined. This is what 
drives Plato crazy. As Pirsig paints it, Plato's big mistake was trying to 
turn this into a defined and fixed thing, turning into one of the invisible, 
fictional, ridiculous forms. And it was all downhill from there. Dialectical 
thinking took over in the West and mysticism has run as an undercurrent ever 
since.

I guess Hildebrand comes into it when he points out Rorty's failure to 
address SOM as such. Pirsig's point is that this category of experience has 
been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. I see those 
reasons in Rorty's "brutal thrusts" and non-reductive physicalism as well as 
Hildebrand's more sustained arguments. And all this just sort of goes along 
with mysticism being least favorite aspect of the MOQ. To the extent that 
you follow Rorty, mysticism just doesn't fly because its outside of the 
text.

dmb

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