[MD] Wanted: A proper foundation

[Steve Peterson]

Hi Ham, DMB, All,

> Steve said to Ham:...You can accept it and see where it takes you, or 
> you can leave it be. This forum is concerned with seeing where this 
> intellectual postulate takes us. If you are unwilling to accept it for 
> the sake of argument and at least try to understand what Pirsig means 
> by it then your posts will be of little interest to most people here. 
> ...
>
> Ham said:To me this is saying that anyone who does not accept Quality 
> as a monism has no right to criticize it.
>
> dmb says:Well, he did use the word "accept". I'll give you that much. 
> But it's also quite obvious that you've unfairly characterized his 
> helpful remarks as some kind of demand for compliance. I mean, how can 
> you fail to notice phrases like, "see where it takes you", "for the 
> sake of argument" and "you can leave it be". He's NOT saying you have 
> no right to criticize. He's saying you've shown no willingness to 
> engage with the actual ideas.

Steve:
I did say that one should be willing to accept the Quality postulate 
(for the sake of argument, not necessarily because you think it is a 
good one), but I went too far with that statement. I wasn't trying to 
say that Ham should not be here, I only said that most of us probably 
won't be interested in what he has to say if he doesn't want to talk 
about what we want to talk about. But even that is going a little too 
far, in that I think it is worth talking about Pirsig's justification 
for equating reality with Quality.

At any rate, that is something that I'd be interested in hearing what 
others have to say about. Why should we (even Ham?) accept Pirsig's 
Quality postulate? For many of us, we've been on this road so long, we 
may have forgotten why we chose it to begin with.

Best,
Steve