[MD] All the way down

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
 
[B]  Language use is a process of relating things to other things, but language never bottoms out. The things that are being related by language are bits of language to other bits of language. Rather than knowledge being a matter of finding the proper correspondences between sentences and non-language, such linguistic relations go all the way down. The test of truth for a knowledge claim is then not correspondence with non-linguistic reality but the consequences of believing or disbelieving a claim. ... Does Pirsig agree with Rorty on [B]? The only way Pirsig could be right and Rorty wrong is if Pirsig denies [B].


dmb says:

Well, the problem is that [B] denies and asserts several different things. And you've framed the issue as if there were only two choices; either subscribe to the correspondence theory or say that it's language all the way down. This is a false dilemma and, as I understand it, the MOQ definitely asserts a non-linguistic reality. I think the picture of language as a web in which every term derives its meaning by virtue of its relation to all the other terms and that proper language use will necessarily involve relating these bits of language to each other in some intelligible way. Pirsig might prefer mythos or logos to describe this pile of evolved analogies, but it's basically the same idea. BUT - and this is a very big BUT, even bigger than your momma's but - Pirsig also says that this whole conceptual reality was derived from an non-linguistic reality, which he calls Quality or DQ or the primary empirical reality. 

As far as I know, there simply isn't anything comparable to that in Rorty or any other post-analytic pragmatist. And this is where they differ. I think it's a mistake to read Pirsig's claims about pre-conceptual Quality as a relapse into Platonism or as falling back into SOM-based traditional empiricism. I think Pirsig and James use terms like pre-intellectual experience in presenting the radical empiricists ALTERNATIVE to those dualisms. In this picture, the relation between concepts and reality is never one of correspondence. You can never use the primary empirical reality as a foundation for any propositional sentence. It is never true or false, not even in the pragmatic sense. It not that one is mere appearance and the other is the real reality either. Instead, the relation between concepts and reality is the relation between two parts of experience. James used the same exact terms for these two parts of experience; static and dynamic. This is the heart, the central core of the MOQ. 


"Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which [James] described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'."

" 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing'  Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality."

In the MOQ, the slogan "it's language all the way down" would only apply to our conceptual reality, to the static, secondary type of experience. But that's only half of the MOQ. The other half is where we find the terms that smell like Platonism to you. And so I'm trying to explain how and why pre-conceptual experience does NOT mean a patch of red or raw sense data or some phenomenological essence. It's much deeper and more concrete. It's the Buddha you find in the gears of a motorcycle or in the finer cuts of meat. This mystic reality, Pirsig says, is not mysterious because it's transcendent or complicated but because it's so simple and direct, so right-under-your-nose. To speak plainly, reality is just what happens before you have a chance to think about it. And that is the non-linguistic reality asserted by radical empiricists.