[MD] continental and analytic philosophy

[david buchanan]

Just a couple of points....

Matt said to dmb:
...--my trouble is not that I don't realize that retro-pragmatists claim that their radical empiricism avoids, say, Sellars attack on the Myth of the Given, it is that I don't understand why I should be a radical empiricist, and recoup the preconceptual/conceptual distinction, after we've destroyed traditional empiricism. ...I just can't figure out why I should talk about the things you want to. Or as I've put it for years, I don't know where our real disagreements lie because I don't know why I need to use your vocabulary, what the advantages of your's are over the disadvantages of mine. After all--have I ever offered a _critique_ of radical empiricism?



dmb says:

Well, I don't think of this in terms of a vocabulary contest. I'm just pointing out that the term "pre-conceptual" has two very different meanings. Pirsig and James use it in a way that is very different from the way Sellers or Rorty might use it. When the exact same label is used for two different concepts AND everybody involved calls himself a pragmatists, confusion is a real possibility. It doesn't take a freshman to make such a blunder and talking about it here is likely to be helpful to just about anyone. To the extent that I'm only examining the terms used by these philosophers, MY vocabulary doesn't factor into it. Also, my interest in talking about the preconceptual, this term with two meanings that are easily confused, is not motivated by some quirky obsession with some arcane or trivial point. We're talking about Quality. This is about the meaning of Pirsig's central term.

It's nice that I don't have to show you the textual evidence for this discrepancy between concepts and reality and thanks for your kind help against Bo on that point. 

Since you mentioned it, maybe I should say something about the advantages of understanding these different usages of "preconceptual". I've always taken it for granted that you'd want to know what Pirsig's Quality is all about. Except for Bo, possibly, I assume that everyone here sincerely cares what Pirsig means by Quality. Maybe that's a mistake but I'm going to continue as if that were true.


I'll start with the objections to McDowell's denial of the preconceptual by cognitive scientists. As the Wiki article puts it, "One of the hallmarks of McDowell's later work is his denial that there is any philosophical use for an idea that our experience contains representations that are not conceptually structured, so-called "non-conceptual content". Given that other philosophers claim that scientific accounts of our mental lives, particularly in the cognitive sciences, need this idea, this claim of McDowell's has provoked a great deal of discussion." Despite the fact that the nonconceptual experience I'm talking about is, by definition, free of representations (because representations are conceptual), the cognitive sciences do seem to need it. There are a bunch of neurological studies that not only constitute evidence for the Pirsigian version of the nonconceptual, the notion is quite useful in describing their findings. I've mentioned Jill Bolte Taylor's "stroke of insight" and Zen-Brain studies as in the books, "Zen and the Brain" and "The Dali Lama at MIT" and just the other day I heard about this strange syndrome wherein the sufferer thinks their loved ones have been kidnapped and replaced by a zombie duplicate. Turns out the affective side of the brain is somehow getting shut off so that they see mom and understand that she looks and talks exactly like mom but all the mom feelings are gone. And so it just isn't really mom. It can't be. They're so convinced that it's not that they'll prefer to believe really crazy reasons why she's not mom. In short, these scientists are realizing that you just can't think straight without this affective component of the overall cognitive process. Like Pirsig says about Quality, you wouldn't even be able to get out of bed in the morning without it. There was another case that amused me, one that is a result of a similar disconnect between the conceptual and the nonconceptual, but the syndrome has a different name and different manifestations. In this case, it causes an inability to make the simplest decisions. This guy would try to go grocery shopping but he could only evaluate his food choices in rational terms so he'd stand in the cereal isle for hours weighing all the advantages and disadvantages. He had no ability to just say, "Mmmm, that looks good." His rational faculties were working away on the problem but he was intellectually paralyzed by an inability to feel what's good.

You can really see the value and reality of it when it doesn't work at all. Don't know what you've got until it's gone, and all that. But what if people with neurological disorders are just extreme examples of what we all suffer from? What if Plato really was successful in putting the True over the Good, as Pirsig tells it, and we are the inheritors of that? What if the supression of the Good in favor of the True is exactly what led us to dismiss the importance of the preconceptual in the first place? And isn't McDowell just repeating that in his denial of the non-conceptual? And isn't this reading consistent with Pirsig's stated goal of improving and expanding our form of rationality through an integration of the affective domain?  You see what I'm suggesting here? I'm saying that this Pirsigian & Jamesian version of the nonconceptual is very useful in getting the whole story to hang together coherently. I think the whole metaphysical system hinges on it too of course, but this nonconceptual version of Quality also makes sense of his taking sides with the Sophists against Plato and illuminate the nature of the problem and the nature of the solution. One of the consequences of getting the most out of that story about the ancient roots of the problem, is that it puts a very different spin on the meaning of Rhetoric. 


In a way it only means "Excellence in thought and speech" but there is also something more to it. Back in the day, Plato basically attacked the Sophists by painting them as emotionally manipulative pseudo-intellectuals. And it stuck. "Sophistry noun ( pl. -ries) the use of fallacious arguments, esp. with the intention of deceiving.• a fallacious argument." If that isn't a dismissal of the value of the affective domain, I don't know what would be. But the Sophists claimed that they were teachers of excellence and improvers of men, which is exactly what Socrates was always saying about dialectic. Improve me, he dared his opponents in the dialectic. The Sophists didn't teach principles through the dialectic because that is all conceptual stuff and excellence as such includes more than that, not less than that. The Sophists knew how to make a logical argument alright, they were discredited for something they were doing in addition to that. They were attacked for having a fundamentally different sensibility about the whole thing. Plato was a control freak who saw them as unprincipled relativists willing to persuade anyone of anything for a buck. Like the way we see Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck, I suppose. But that's obviously not what Pirsig is defending in taking sides with the Sophists. Integration of the affective domain doesn't give us permission to be emotional instead of rational, but rather it demands that our rationality should be more fully informed by the affective dimensions. Instead the Sophist who's good at dressing up nonsense in pretty words, you get a picture of someone who makes perfect sense but also speaks from the heart, who sings with soul, who doesn't rely on principles so much as he relies on looking at and listening to the particular person or people he's trying to improve. This is not about the power of "persuasion", which is the kinder, gentler, neutral form of "manipulation". He takes the side of the Sophists, I think, because rational, conceptual understandings aren't good enough all by themselves. You need the nonconceptual too. For Pirsig, that's what excellence in thought and speech means and that's what Rhetoric is.


Related to this redemption of the Sophists, this understanding of the nonconceptual experience is also central to the motorcycle maintenance lessons. And those lessons about "just fixing" and getting stuck and getting a feel for the materials and being a motorcycle scientist are all part of an elaborate metaphor that can be applied to any kind of active engagement. I mean, this notion of the nonconceptual is also useful in terms of how to be. It's about the kind of engagement that produces excellence, regardless of what you're interests might be. It's about that overlooked element in the creative process, including the creation of new scientific hypotheses, new ways of thinking and novelty in general. I mean, it's about the improvement of men, or rather as we say today, the improvement of people. 








 
























 		 	   		  
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