[MD] in defence of the "relative"

[X Acto]

Hey Matt,

Matt:
You said about Pirsig and the stove and, if I read you right, 
causality: "It does seem as if Pirsig is heading in that 
direction when invoking the 'more empirical' meaning in 
relation to it."  And then about the world taking on the 
shape it does because of the shape of our minds: "You are 
quite right about that, which really has me questioning the 
validity of Pirsigs empirical notions of dynamic quality in 
relation to immediate experience."

I'm not entirely clear about the particular struggles here, 
but I can tell you that I have _never_ been comfortable 
with Pirsig's "more empirical" claim.  If everything is 
experience, what could it possibly mean for something to be 
"more empirical"?  How can we drive a metaphysical wedge 
between the experience of low quality associated with the 
hot stove and the hot stove itself (a distinction you need in 
order to say the former is "more empirical") when the "hot 
stove itself" is nothing more or less than a set of static 
patterns of quality, meaning that "the experience of low 
quality" is not _associated_ with the stove, but rather _is 
the stove itself_.  Right?

I've never been happy with any explanation given of what 
Pirsig means in that passage.  

Ron:
You said a mouthful, just what kind of meaning is Pirsig crafting?
It seems as if he's after the kind of Pragmatic correspondance
as Aristotle was, that of the primary first principles of the senses
and their meanings with the reduction of assumptions. Long and
short, a restatement of book Alpha. Which, arguably needed
restatement.
The art of measurement was the focal point, the link from Plato's
Protagoras to Aristotles work on first philosophy. As with all measurement
the most important art is the craft of points of beginning, of first
principles of the measurement of the senses for there is where
meaning, if there is any at all, resides as the beginning of explaination.