[MD] All the way down

[Matt Kundert]

Steve formulated "psychological nominalism" as:
[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.

Matt:
Whether Pirsig needs to deny [B] is a good way of stating the 
problem, I think.  And I do not think there is any need for Pirsig to 
deny [B], though I think if you were to personally ask him, he might.  
However, if one made the right kind of vocabulary massages, I'm 
not sure there's an important problem.

The first objection will be to the restriction of the word "knowledge" 
to something that only comes in linguistic form (as "claims").  Pirsig 
once formulated this using Russell's notion of "knowledge by 
acquaintance."  However, as a way of pulling together epistemology 
and linguistics, some philosophers have argued against it as, in 
essence, a version of one of Quine's two dogmas of empiricism or 
Sellars' Myth of the Given.  This is not an implication Pirsig intends.  
What Pirsig intends, I think (and only in one manner), is a distinction 
between non-linguistic know-how and linguistic knowing-that, such 
that I know how to ride a bicycle even if I couldn't tell you verbally 
how.

There is no reason for psychological nominalists to deny the 
distinction between know-how and knowing-that, and in fact, if 
Robert Brandom is right, they couldn't and still get off the ground a 
working philosophy of language.

The other route of rapprochement is to highlight the similarity 
between Quine's picture of a "field of force whose boundary 
conditions are experience" (that I quoted in the post "Quine on 
Experience") and Pirsig's picture of static patterns surrounded by 
DQ in SODV.  And then one merely needs to highlight Quine's "field 
as a whole" addendum, Pirsig's "only people respond to DQ" clause, 
and compare it to Marsha's recent treatment of static patterns as 
both useful and a delusion, and I think you have how to put the two 
together.  The whole of our static patterns interact with this 
undefinable thing called "experience" (DQ), and the interaction as a 
whole itself can only be described in vague metaphors like "fields of 
force" and "pointing at the moon" and "looking through tears in the 
map at the ground below."  And if you focus in on just the patterns, 
then you can further delineate two ways in which we interact with 
the experience: know-how (inorganic/bio/social) and knowing-that 
(intellectual).

The nice thing about the route analytic philosophy has taken in the 
last 100 years is that they'd isolated on knowing-that, and that now, 
100 years later, we can see clearly--partly through the dialectical 
process of the analytic philosophers themselves--how to reject all 
the metaphysical baloney people like Russell attached to notions like 
"knowledge by acquaintance" and describe the process of 
knowing-that better than we ever have before, without the attendant 
notion that that's all we need to do.  Somebody like Brandom would 
never presume to say that all one needs to know can be found in his 
tome, Making It Explicit, though Wittgenstein came near saying 
something like that at the end of the Tractatus.  Brandom is just a 
specialist, and analytic philosophy just a specialty, to be used for 
certain kinds of things.

Matt