[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[david buchanan]

Gav said:
hey dmb, how are ya kiddo? and a howdy to all you fine people out there in moq land. i have been on hiatus, whatever that means

dmb says:
Yea, I took a break too. Just came back a week or two ago after a few months off. 

gav said:
 and now for the point. what is of value to the intellectual level? is it truth? i don't think it is - truth seems more like a social pattern, in keeping with ideology etc...or maybe we need to define 'truth' a bit more precisely

dmb says:
They both have their versions of truth. I mean, as far as I can see the critiques of ideology don't make the social-intellectual distinction. As it happens we were reading Terry Eagleton's "What is Ideology", wherein he discussed a whole range of theories and they all seem to construe the social-intellectual distinction as a matter of power versus truth rather than social values versus intellectual values. I think Pirsig's distinction would be tremendously helpful in this area. But anyway, around here truth is the pragmatic truth. It's provisional, self-correcting and grounded out in actual experience. Truth and falsity are what happens to an idea in the course of experience. It's contextual and perspectival but reality, which is to say experience, has a way of keeping us honest and that's what prevents the MOQ from being a relativism. 

Gav said:
 a la hesse in glass bead game, the highest activity of reason seems to be the most elegant demonstrations of conceptual interrelatedness. at the intellectual level truth becomes the truth of relativity.

 i think there is another function too. at the intellectual level the search for truth becomes internalised. at the social level, truth is the truth of society - one size fits all. at the intellectual level, via the nullifying effect of relativity, the search for truth becomes personal.

dmb says:
Well, I just spent a week making a case against relativism so I gotta disagree. Disagree with the personal thing too. Kuhn, for example, who is usually cited in support of the revolutionary scientist, says that innovations actually come out of science teams and the history of science shows that very little progress occurs except when there is first a long sustained period of consensus when everybody is more or less on the same page. As he would put it, successful divergent thinking almost always springs from successful convergent thinking. In other words, it takes a lot of discipline to be creative in the sciences.  		 	   		  
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