[MD] Intellectual honesty

[david buchanan]

Dan said to John:
I never thought Bo should be banned. But I appreciate what Horse is saying too. It is not about the SOL being right or wrong, which is what Mary seems to think. It is about taking someone's work and denigrating it to the point it is no longer their work, and then claiming that that is what they really meant.
Please. 
If Robert Pirsig meant the intellectual level of the MOQ to be synonymous with SOM, he'd of said so outright. The conclusions the SOL lead to are illogical in the context of the MOQ. Period. And to repeatedly claim that Robert Pirsig REALLY meant to say SOL equals intellect is simply dishonest.



dmb says:

Right. Exactly.

Intellectual dishonesty is usually not the same as lying. In this case it's a matter of ignoring or dismissing the relevant evidence, which has been presented many, many times. Isn't it a perfectly reasonable expectation that people in a philosophical debate should be persuaded by evidence? And isn't it just bizarre to watch as this basic rule of the game is treated as a form of tyranny? 

Citing textual evidence is NOT Pirsig worship. It's just normal practice. And ignoring textual evidence does NOT make you a free-thinker. It just means you can't or won't meet the basic requirements involved is this kind of discussion. It just means your intellectual claims don't have much intellectual quality. At the beginning of chapter 8 Pirsig says, "The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation. The MOQ satisfies these." At the end of chapter 29 he says, "The MOQ also says that DQ - the value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment of a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter altogether. ...Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself." 

The idea I'm trying to get across here is that the intellectual level has certain standards of excellence, has its own aesthetic, if you will. Unlike SOM, the MOQ says that more than one truth can exist. In fact, the quote from chapter 8 is quickly followed by the paint gallery analogy and the quote from chapter 29 comes just two pages after Pirsig agrees with James's pragmatic theory of truth, wherein "truth is a species of the good". Add to this the quote Adrie dished up the other day about the infinite supply hypotheses and those sections from ZAMM about the creation of perfectly valid non-Euclidian geometries.

All of this adds up to the idea that we can have multiple truths, different maps for different purposes. But this does not mean that any truth is as good as the next. Our intellectual descriptions still have to be logically coherent, in agreement with experience, comparatively simple, elegant, efficient and the like. Truth has to be good AS truth, as an idea that functions, that works, that makes sense. And then there's that whole thing about the felt harmony of a good idea. I think the point here is that intellectual quality has to connect up with the existing analogs, the existing static patterns of the culture. The sock gets flipped inside out rather than thrown away. Or as Yogi Berra might have put it, anything that's a hundred percent new has to be ninety percent old or people won't accept it.

Truth is provisional in the sense that it is supposed to always be open new solutions and better conclusions. But as a form of static quality, it has to be wary of degeneration too. In that sense, truth is to intellect as health is to biology. It's the thing you want to maintain, preserve, nurture and support even if the particular meaning of "true" and "healthy" changes over time. Health is a species of the good, but on a different level. "Lobachevski", to cite Pirisg's example from chapter 22 of ZAMM, "constructs a geometry whose faultless logic is inferior in nothing to that of the Euclidian geometry" and "according to the Theory of Relativity, Riemann geometry best describes the world we live in". Like Newton's physics and Einstein's physics, these are examples of alternative truths. After the art gallery analogy in Lila, Pirsig also uses the "Mercator map" as an analogy or example of an alternative truth. "In the Arctic it's the only map to have," he says. 

These examples are not just the opinions of everybody and anybody. These are truths because they can pass the tests, even if they are not compatible with each other. They work in experience. They coherently organize all the relevant facts and data. One thing that does NOT count as an alternative truth would be Bo's equation. It doesn't satisfy these tests of truth. It just doesn't add up and this would be true even if we did not have Pirsig's direct and explicit disagreement on record. But we do and so there is no room for serious debate. It's just too clear to be disputable. And that's why it has become of matter of dishonesty and not just a matter of incoherence. 

If the intellectual level and SOM were the same thing, then all this business about multiple truths and the evolutionary nature of intellect would be impossible. That equation kills the central mission, which is to replace "Objectivity" with the notion that Man is the measure of all things, a participant in the creation of all things. The MOQ insists on a form of rationality that recognizes the central role of Dynamic value in the ongoing process of truth making, that recognizes the key role that creativity plays in our intellectual constructions and it reminds us that the purpose of these constructs is to improve the quality of life. Truth is not value-free. It IS value, a species of the good. 

In that sense, don't you think that being reasonable and persuadable is part of being moral? Isn't morally wrong to ignore evidence? Granted, there is always the possibility of sincere differences and honest misunderstandings but when something so obvious has been presented so many times, that kind of excuse just can't be sustained. 






 		 	   		  
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