[MD] Capitalism: my experience

[John Carl]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 12:32 PM, <craigerb at comcast.net> wrote:

>
>
> [John]
> > By what mechanism does a social level create intellectual patterns?
>
>
> Pirsig gives the example of how from social rituals, intellectual meaning
> arises.
>
> Also Wittgenstein's builder example in "PI".
> Craig
>

Sorry Craig, never read Wittgenstein, just Pirsig.  But Pirsig thinks ideas
occur to individuals, and I pretty much agree with that.  It is usually an
individual thinking of a social problem or pattern, but the philosophical
and metaphysical tool set given to the individual was passed to him through
social libraries and schools, the ideas are the work and patterns of
individuals thinking.  Exposure to this thinking produces more thinking, but
the thinking can't be said to be a purely social phenomena.

In fact, my bone of contention with orthodoxy is that there's no such thing
as any human society without intellectual and social patterning going on
simultaneously.    I agree with Pirsig as to the usefulness of analyzing
each pattern as distinctive, but I disagree there is any evidence for one
ever existing without the other.  It certainly doesn't exist today, except
on tv shows imaging the past.


John the empirically stubborn