[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[skutvik at online.no]

Matt, DMB possibly David M.

On 19 Oct. Matt wrote to DMB:

> Your stance looks to me like a pro-experience-talk position, and you
> then paint me as being pro-language/anti-experience. (snip)

Da foreign professor wil naw expond:

All philosophy's quest is about finding THE truth. In moqspeak 
this search is an intellectual - or SOM - fallout, I know of no (in 
moqtalk) "social" culture that has this urge. No Muslim or Jew or 
Christian question God as existence's  ground, it doesn't cross 
their minds, if they doubt it's about another God being stronger.

What Pirsig finally saw was this context that intellect = search for 
objective truth and that it emerged with the Greeks. However, 
Pirsig lived in SOM-land and had to follow its rules and find a still 
deeper truth which he had found with Value. He saw a likeness in 
William James Reality=Experience thus Experience=Quality.

Now, it's not difficult to point to other candidates to reality's most 
fundamental fundament and one such is Language. It's 
impossible to counter the assertion that all is language - all of it, 
every last bit (except that it is language too, but let that be) 
Another candidate is Consciousness (remember Scott Roberts?), 
it is unassailable and just as credible - as Quality - as reality's 
ground and some metaphysics could have been built on. 

But as I have pointed out several times a MOL or a MOC (I once 
made a list of the various MOXs that have been suggested up 
through the years) divided the D/S way with similar S levels 
wouldn't add anything. Whether Reality= Quality or 
Reality=Reality does not matter so much as the Dynamic/Static 
divide in contrast to the Subjective/Objective one.      

> With regards to radical empiricism, this isn't quite right. As I see
> it, once we become radical empiricists, it _doesn't matter_ whether we
> talk about what we experience or we talk about what we talk about. It
> simply doesn't matter. 

Matt is right and if Rorty (I know that David M compares Hegel 
with Pirsig) and whoever had suggested the D/S split of their 
fundamentals and S-levels of X they would have transcended 
SOM, but Pirsig stands alone. Had he just seen his own 
enormous achievement. 

Bo