[MD] Another parallel

[X Acto]

Dave,
Boy, captured the view perfectly in that analogy. You could run the guy over with an electric car
and he STILL would'nt accept it. THAT sort of thing just blows me away, especially here.

Thank you, by the way for the clarification of the intellectual level, everything just snapped into 
place after that.

-Ron


 



________________________________
From: david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 2:42:00 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Another parallel


Ron said to Platt (and Bo):
... I do not understand your meaning. Again, what does that statement have to do with teaching the metaphysics of quality in a classroom? what does that statement have to do with it being stated in a classroom setting by a professor?


dmb says:

Well, as one who is currently enrolled at the University of Colorado working on a Master's degree in an interdisciplinary program similar to the one Pirsig attended at the University of Chicago nearly 50 years ago, I can tell you for sure that there are academic professionals who have used their intellectual tools to attack SOM. I named a half dozen of SOM's critics, several of whom I know personally, which prompted Bo to re-assert the idea that the academic world is SOM. That reaction is extremely irrational. I have repeatedly quoted attacks on SOM from the text books that were assigned in those classrooms. Pragmatism itself, in the last 20 years or so, has developed into two rival camps with one of those camps being defined by their insistence that radical empiricism is essential to pragmatism. And since radical empiricism is itself an attack on SOM, there is now an entire school of philosophy in today's academic world that is more or less dedicated to
 overturning SOM and the empiricism of the past. I've produced evidence of this from James, Dewey, Hildebrand, Rosenthal and Stuhr. Since the anti-SOM writings have been published and are presently being taught in the classrooms where I've been sitting, it is just absurd to claim that the Universities must be and always are SOM. That claim has been refuted by these counterexamples and Bo's response to this counterexamples is to simply repeat the refuted claim. I don't mean to be cruel, but man, that's just idiotic.
By analogy, it's as if Bo had claimed that all cars have an internal combustion engine. By analogy, I have refuted this claim by pointing to cars that have a different kind of engine by showing him some cars that run on electricity. Bo's response to that contrary evidence is to just repeat the same claim. Cars can't run on electricity, he reasons, because they all have internal combustion engines. But what about all those electric cars that I just showed you, I ask him. Nope, he says, Detroit is all about the gasoline and always will be. Well, yea, Detroit has a reputation and they had been doing it that way for a long time but look at what's happening now, just look at these electric cars. They're right there in front of you. Can't you see them? Nope, he says, no such thing is possible. But I've been hanging out in Detroit and I'm telling you that I drove cars that don't have an internal combustion engine. Doesn't that mean that your claim has been
 refuted? No, he says, Detroit only makes one kind of car and that's all it can ever make. And if you weren't such a mental midget, he says, you'd understand why its a disaster to think otherwise. 

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