[MD] One Approach to Clearing the Air about MoQ and SOM

[Matt Kundert]

Everyone whose interested,

This was originally prompted by Arlo's comments in "One 
True MoQ," but as I wrote it out, I thought it might have 
a load-bearing capability for a distinct conversation about 
Bo's ideas and just what we are talking about.  There 
have been many attempts, and I have no special claims 
to promote this avenue over any other, but I thought one 
more couldn't hurt (and I promise to commit myself to 
carrying out dialogue in this thread).

Arlo said:

Quite frankly, I simply do NOT understand why this ("A 
metaphysics of
Quality that holds the intellectual level to 
SOM is better than A
metaphysics of Quality that 
considers SOM to be one on many
intellectual patterns"?) 
is so baffling to the SOLists. Doesn't it
capture their 
position entirely? Doesn't it put their argument of firm,

valid, argumentative ground? Doesn't it make the focus 
the Quality of
the ideas at hand rather than "who is 
'intepreting' Pirsig correctly"?



Matt:

Well, I think the entire problem that lays behind the recent 
kerfuffle
is what lay behind it back when Paul Turner and I 
cross-examined the
idea for a while back in (what did I 
say?) 2005.  The issue became for me then (and is still for 
me now) is that it
was never clear what Bo thought SOL or 
SOM _implied_.  I tried many
techniques to make the 
inferential connections explicit (what
committing oneself to 
SOL _also_ commits you to philosophically), but
Bo's 
responses never formed a solid pattern that I could lay 
hold of. 
He would seem (to me) to say yes to a suggestion 
in one breath and no
to the _same_ suggestion in the next, 
without any consistency of response
that I could make out 
to help me think through what Bo was saying.  And
you 
have to do that before you can even contemplate 
_endorsing_ it.



As I see it, the basic problem is in defining SOM/SOL 
EITHER 
by its attachment
to ontological materialism and/or 
epistemological cartesianism, 
OR 
by
defining it as the thought that thinking requires both a 
thinker and a
thought (something that goes before and 
after "thinks about").  

I'm
currently trying to figure out what Craig thinks about 
this.  Because
if it is the latter part of my big OR, then 
SOM/SOL would seem to be
both smart philosophy _and_ 
attributable to Pirsig.  If it is the
former, then it would be 
both bad philosophy (from my point of view!)
and _not_ 
attributable to Pirsig (which is what Horse is acting on).  
(One can, of course, connect both of those thoughts, 
but you still need to distinguish them first before you can 
relate them later.)



So, to be clear, let me provide an ad hoc distinction 
between SOM and SOL for the purposes of this thread 
(getting clear about what people do and do not mean): 
SOM is
ontological materialism and/or epistemological 
cartesianism and SOL is
semanticism (thoughts are 
paradigmatically on the model of declarative
sentences).  
(I don't expect anyone to know what the hell my 
definition
of SOL further implies, but I'm deploying a new 
vocabulary because I hope it makes this local mess 
clearer.  Because if we can at least isolate the pernicious 
strand, and what it means, then the good one can be 
developed by whomever cares to later.)  I argued in 
"Excavating SOM"
(http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/05/excavating-som.html) 
that
Pirsig implicitly defines his argumentative target in 
ZMM as SOM as
I've defined it, _and_ that the passage 
that leads to confusion is this
one: "In cultures such as 
the Chinese, where subject-predicate
relationships
are not 
rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding 
absence
of rigid subject-object philosophy."



I'm not sure if what Pirsig says here is true or not.  It 
requires a
lot more work then I can do, and I'm not familiar 
with enough that
tries to pursue this line (specifically the 
Eastern side of the
equation, though on the Western side 
one would begin with Havelock's Preface to Plato).  
However, what needs to be pointed out is that implicit in

that thought is the _distinction_ between subject-predicate 
grammars
and subject-object philosophy.  In this distinction 
lies evidence
(evidence!) for answering _both_ of the 
outstanding questions: 

1) whether
Pirsig _explicitly_ rejects "intellectual level as 
_SOM_" (as I defined it above) and 

2) whether
Pirsig _implicitly_ endorses "intellectual level as 
SOL" (though a lot
more interpretive work is required make 
this solid).  

I don't know if
(2) _can_ be made to stick, but that'd be 
a good place to start.  I
personally don't find it a terribly 
important question to answer
because when I do 
philosophy I _assume_ semanticism (well, I'm doing so

explicitly for the first time right now, but I've only recently 
become
more clear about what I've been thinking) and 
find it clear enough that
Pirsig doesn't implicitly _contradict_ 
it, even if it is less clear
whether he implicitly endorses or 
rejects it.  (And I've provided a complementary narrative of 
SOM as I've defined it, to go along with the work I take 
Pirsig to have done, in "Towards a Narrative of SOM": 
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/05/towards-narrative-of-som.html.  
What I haven't done is provide a full understanding of 
semanticism, outside of what's implicit in my stuff on 
pragmatism, or a narrative of it.  The best I have 
explicating ideas from it (i.e., explicating Robert Brandom's 
work) is "A Spatial Model of Belief-Change" and putting 
them to use in "Reading Academically": 
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/reading-academically.html
Also, if anyone smells pernicious "linguistic turn" crap that 
you don't want, replace "semanticism" with "experientialism," 
and you'll get exactly the same thing above.  For a defense 
of why I think you get the same thing, replace "semanticism" 
with "psychological nominalism" and "experientialism" with 
"radical empiricism" and read "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and 
the Linguistic Turn": 
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/04/quine-sellars-empiricism-and-linguistic.html)



Does that make sense for anyone on either side?  When 
Bo was the only
one endorsing a position called SOLAQI, 
it was difficult enough, but
now that there are more, it 
becomes even more difficult if we are not
all on the same 
page.  Not that everyone within the

SOLAQI-endorsing-camp need agree (not everyone in an 
ism or field of
inquiry will agree), but the fundamental 
difficulty for other people is
what is _implied_ by the 
endorsement.  And Horse has found it clear
that when 
_Bo_ endorses it, it means committing yourself to thinking

that (as I will now put it explicitly) the intellectual level of

the/thee Metaphysics of Quality is ontological materialism 
and/or
epistemological cartesianism.  So when Bo endorses 
that _and_
attributes it to Pirsig, then Horse attains his 
grounds for thinking
that is obviously not true and 
downright pernicious to dogmatically
assert in an 
intellectual environment committed to thinking through

Pirsig's philosophy.  

If Bo had simply dogmatically asserted it as the
truth of 
himself, who would care?  If Bo had dogmatically asserted 
it
as the truth of Plato, we still probably would not have 
cared.  But
because _this_ particular intellectual 
environment is structured around
Robert M. Pirsig's 
philosophical writings, to consistently promote
assertions 
about what those writings mean that have been 
reasonably
rejected (i.e., for reasons deemed good) as 
attributable to the intentions of the author of those 
writings by the community is to blaspheme in the face of 
intellectual
integrity for not taking up the philosophical 
responsibility to defend
with intelligible reasons 
one's contentious thoughts.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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