[MD] DMB and Me

Wed Mar 17 17:16:37 PDT 2010

Great explaination and nicely put. 
Also it squares with the atheist position..

atheism is a reactionary position, distinct from the rejection of theism.
 the rejection is the ignoring of it or the non account...
in relation to the value it provides...

don't know how it could be put in any better terms...

-Ron

----- Original Message ----
From: david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Sent: Tue, March 16, 2010 5:07:11 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] DMB and Me

Steve said to Matt:
I'm wonderring right now whether Pirsig ended up enforcing a dichotomy of his own. Or was he just making a useful distinction between primary/secondary experience and static/dynamic quality? I'd like to read him as suggesting a useful distinction (within metaphysics taken like Kuhnian science as philosophical problem solving) rather than enforcing a dichotomy (traditional metaphysics).

dmb says:

DQ and sq are ways to divide experience, not ontological distinctions. I mean, that distinction does not entail any claims about the inherent structure of reality or the kinds of substances there are. As categories of experience however, this distinction does refer to empirical realities, to experiences we actually have rather than something hypothetically possible or inferred. It it just a useful idea, like all ideas, but in this case its utility is first and foremost as a working concept within the MOQ, as Pirsig's first slice with the analytic knife. The importance and centrality of this distinction can hardly be overstated. If I defend it vigorously, it's not because I think it's metaphysically or ontologically true but because I think it is conceptually mandatory. 

Steve said:
...I prefer to read Pirsig as saying Quality is reality. DQ/sq is a nice tool for thinking about reality. I always took DMB to be in the second camp, but I can see how his insistence on the primary/secondary dichotomy from which he criticizes Rorty for getting things all wrong may rather put him a version of "Bo" side of the argument--not anywhere that I should think that DMB would want to be.

dmb says:

Well, no. I think one of Bo's central misconceptions is that he thinks metaphysics is reality rather than a set of concepts about reality, which is a direct result of his misunderstanding of the distinction in question (DQ/sq). I think Matt misunderstands it too, but for different reasons and leading to a different result of course. John has different reasons than Matt, but they both dismiss or deny the DQ side of that distinction when they deny or shrug off the nonconceptual experience, the pre-intellectual experience. Pirsig says the "Quality" of his first book is a mystic term because all philosophical mystics share in common the belief that "the fundamental nature of reality is outside language". That's DQ in his second book. This is not some supernatural entity, of course. 

Again, we're talking about a category of experience. Reality is outside language because reality is what you know directly and immediately before you have a chance to think about it or put it into words. Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of experience. The conceptualizations that follow are static quality. 

The trick to understanding this, I think, is realizing that the DQ/sq distinction has REPLACED the SOM distinction and so all this talk about two types of experience can't be rightly understood in the terms of SOM. For a radical empiricist, experience is not the experience OF objective reality BY a subject. The radical empiricist says those are concepts, they are static patterns, they're secondary and derived from something more fundamental. This means that claims about DQ or pre-intellectual experience will be misunderstood unless the basic assumptions of SOM are rejected first.

It seems to me that Matt's confusion about the pre-intellectual experience (DQ) stems from the fact that his intellectual heros make a good case against traditional SOM empiricism and he doesn't see why those same arguments can't or shouldn't be applied to radical empiricism. Let's take Stanley Fish's understanding of pragmatism, for example. In that NY Times commentary Fish quotes Rorty and Margolis, so here we have it from Matt's main hero plus two of his other influences on pragmatism...

"They [pragmatists] believe with Richard Rorty that 'things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include mental states" - the world, in short, is 'out there' - but they also believe that knowledge we have (or think we have) of the world is not given by it, but by men and women who are hazarding descriptions within the vocabularies and paradigms ...in their culture." 
"While there surely is such a world, our only access to it, Rorty and Margolis say, is through our own efforts to apprehend it. Margolis: 'The real world ... is not a construction of mind or Mind ... but the paradigm of knowledge or science is certainly confined to the discursive power of the human."

The radical empiricist wouldn't dispute the constructivist assertion made by Fish and friends. The radical empiricist agrees that our vocabularies and paradigms are socially constructed, the difference seems to be that the radical empiricist extends this idea to subjects and objects. Pirsig and James are saying that the idea of subjects in an objective world is constructed, is the cultural paradigm that we have to replace whereas Fish and Rorty and Margolis are saying "there surely is such a world, our only access to it is" through these constructions. In other words, they reject objectivity and the correspondence theory of truth because they think there is no way for subjects to have access to objective reality. But the radical empiricists rejects objectivity and the correspondence theory truth because he maintains that there is no objective reality, period. Big difference. And many misunderstanding follow from not seeing this difference.

If the basic assumptions of SOM are maintained, as they are by Fish, Rorty, Margolis, McDowell and Kundert , then the radical empiricist's claims about "pure experience" or "direct experience" or "immediate experience" will be mistaken for claims of direct access to an objective reality. "Pure experience" will then be understood as a purely objective view, a pristine picture of thee objective reality as it really is. But, again, the radical empiricist begins by denying that there is any such thing. For a radical empiricist, the primary empirical reality is not experience OF the world in itself. It is just the experience itself that's primary and real. Rather than ontological categories, the DQ/sq distinction refers to two phases or elements in the overall cognitive process, refers the fixity and flux in experience.

You see what I mean? If we reject radical empiricism based on the neopragmatist's rejection of traditional empiricism, we have inadvertently rejected the rejection. 

In other words, my claims about Dynamic Quality and pure experience are not seen as part of this new conceptual arrangement. These claims are about concepts that replace SOM, which has been fired and sent into retirement. But Matt thinks I'm only re-asserting the claims of traditional empiricists. Not so. I'm talking about Quality, a mystic term that refers to a preconceptual empirical reality.

Matt said:I'm not sure I've ever ignored that distinction [whatever it was in the post before], and I'm not sure I'm doing it with James--I _think_ I get what James thought he was doing in Essays on Radical Empiricism, and I'm not sure I much care for it.
Ron said:Why do you not much care for it? The text you supply indicates to me you do not care for it based on universal i.e. (in the standard understanding of the Platonic form) notion of Truth.
Matt:I'm not quite sure what you mean.  "Based on" is doing weird things.  Do you mean, I'm conflating "not liking radical empiricism" with "not liking Platonism"?  Well, that's what Dave thinks I'm doing, and what most of what I'm writing is attempting to disabuse people of thinking.  I guess I'm not doing a very good job.

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