[MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt,

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> I will grant you one thing--the sense that there is a reality that sits there waiting for us to split it up is something that Hilary Putnam made fun of as the "cookie-cutter view" of reality, and what Donald Davidson said was the third dogma of empiricism, the scheme/content distinction, which we should give up.  I agree with Putnam and Davidson, so I see a tension between some of Pirsig's empiricism rhetoric and the Quality metaphor he wants to birth (if one focuses on Quality, one can easily dispense with the empiricism).  However, that also means that Pirsig was right that SOM makes the first split of reality with S/O.  On my reading, Pirsig unfortunately agrees with the previous tradition that there is an unconceptualized reality that is waiting there for us to conceptualize it any particular way we want to.  (This may appear, at first blush, as one more "linguistic philosophy fallacy" that DMB shudders at, but I think once one dispenses with this reality/conceptualized-reality distinction in favor of the panrelationalism that is Quality's true progeny, one will treat language/intellect as one facet of reality-interaction, and not as a dirty cousin, as the direct/indirect distinction often leads one.)
>
> If there is any truth to your often weirdly put claim that the MoQ is reality (or, at least, that's how people often parody it), it is that language isn't something we can just put down to interact with reality (Quality) directly.  Language doesn't get in the way of reality, it is just one way of interacting with it.


Steve:
It looks like we are getting to the point of departure for you and the
classical pragmatists. In the above it is clear that you don't like
Pirsig's distinction of an unconceptualized reality "leading edge of
experience" or James' "Pure experience' [as] the name [he] gave to the
immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later
reflection with its conceptual categories." But I'm not at all clear
on why you think we can despense with radical empiricism in favor of
panrelationalism (or what the latter term means). Can you say more?

Regards,
Steve