[MD] DMB and Me

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,


DMB said:
> Matt's position is lot more like the positivist's objection than the mystic's objection. It is just a philosophological fact that the analytic tradition grows out of this logical positivism and that's exactly where Matt's intellectual heroes are coming from.


Steve:
Doesn't Pirsig come out of the same tradition? Pirsig was steeped in
but later rejected the "scientific" mindset and so did Rorty. Rorty
got really good at using analytic tools before figuring out that the
whole game was rigged and rejecting it along with the "scientific"
mindset. Pirsig rejected it based on eastern philosophy.  Rorty
rejected it based on American pragmatism. That's the difference.



DMB:
"Logical positivism's critera for 'meaningfulness' were pure
metaphysics, he thought." By contrast, the MOQ "says that values are
not outside of the experrience that logical postivism limits itself
to.


Steve:
No disagreement from Rorty here. Positivism had been licked within
philosophy departments long before Pirsig entered the scene. Pirsig's
importance is in confronting the fact that though positivism was
discreditted as bad philsophy, it continued and continues to be used
in other areas of inquiry.

DMB:
 They are the ESSENCE of this experience. Values are MORE empirical,
in fact, than subjects or objects." (Emphasis is Pirsig's.)

Steve:
I understand the anti-Platonism going on here that motivates Pirsig to
say this. Radical empiricism is a better more thorough-going
empiricism and useful in conversations with empiricists. But once this
teaching has taken you across that river, why carry it around with
you? Once you've dropped all that "sense data" empiricism, why argue
anymore about what is more or less empirical? The Buddha resides as
comfortably in a motorcycle as at the top of a mountain. How can
anything experienced be more experiential than anything else that is
experienced? How can the low quality of sitting on a hot stove be any
more empirical than the low quality of a bad idea?



DMB:
> Before I bring this to bear on the issue, here is a restatement of the issue as I understand it: There is more to reality than just talk but we can only talk about reality under a description so all of it is still just talk.


Steve:
The "just" reveals your distaste. Philosophy is a linguistic practice.
It isn't out of touch with reality. It can't take you closer to or
further from reality. It is already part of reality.



DMB:
> Yesterday I tried to show how the assumptions of subject-object metaphysics could be seen in Rorty's position, even as he was denying the possibility of objective knowledge. "They [Fish's idea of 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' -


Steve:
That "the world is out there" bit doesn't sound like Rorty. I've only
read him to use "out there" to poke fun at Platonists.


DMB:
but they also believe that the knowledge we have of the world is not
give by it [the world], but by men and women who are hazarding
descriptions within the vocabularies and paradigms that arein place
and in force in their cultures. Those descriptions are judged to be
true or false, accurate and inaccurate, according to measures and
procedures that currently have epistemic authority, and not according
to their fit with the world as it exists independently of any
description."

Steve:
This bit is the "myth of the given" notion that Rorty (who I think
would want to avoid the "of the world" tag on to knowledge) and I
assume you would like to dispell. Or did you mean to disagree with
that last bit?



DMB:
"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: 'Th
>  e 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.'" (Stanley Fish quoting Rorty and Margolis and explaining their neopragmatic position.)

Steve:
Do you oppose the common sense notion that you are in the world? I
think we can keep that notion without falling back into SOM so long as
this notion isn't used as metaphysics. If it is a tool for using
reality rather than a way of getting at what reality really is there
is nothing wrong with saying the above as a denial of idealism as well
as scientific realism.



DMB:
> If Rorty and Margolis are saying that knowledge is confined to the discursive and Matt is saying that philosophy is confined to the things that can be put under a description, then they are all saying the same thing. Nobody here will be surprised by the claim that Matt follows Rorty of course but I'm trying to show you both why following Rorty means not following Pirsig, especially on these issues. The demand that everything in our philosophies be defined is exactly how the "Good" became subservient to the "True" in the first place.

Steve:
I have never heard Rorty or Matt making a demand that everything must
be defined or saying that anything can ever be definitively defined.
In fact, I think that they wold both agree with Pirsig that there are
no theoretical limits on what number of descriptions that can be
created and that there is no non-arbitrary way to crown any particular
one description af the essence of thing.

You said, "Matt is saying that philosophy is confined to the things
that can be put under a description." Everything can be put under a
description, can't it? What is Matt leaving out of bounds for
philosphy in saying this? If you say DQ, you've just put DQ under a
description. You've paradoxically described it as something that
cannot be described.

I don't think that you should be disagreeing that Quality can't be
described after Pirsig spent so much time describing it. It is
undefined because it is inexhaustably describable. No definition can
capture its essence. But the only limits to the possibility for new
and better descriptions of Quality are our own imaginations.



DMB:
This neopragmatic emphasis on discourse and vocabularies and their
insistence that we can only have reality UNDER a description is very
simpatico with the way Plato's dialectics put pressure on the Sophists
to define their undefined Good.

Steve:
We can have reality in all sorts of ways, but we can only describe it
with words. (Unless you have another way?)


DMB:
His demand for intelligibility from the Rhapsodes and other artists
was also a way to denigr
>  ate the ineffable aspects of reality.

Steve:
What demand for intelligibility?


DMB:
The dialectic squeezes such things out and thereby eliminates
everything that can't be rationally defined. And so does this
insistence that we can only talk about reality as it is under a
description.

Steve:
How can you say something about reality without describing it?

DMB:
It re-asserts the original problem that the MOQ is trying to fix. The
MOQ wants the true to be subservient to the good, not the other way
around. In terms of the MOQ, that means DQ is the primary empirical
reality and static intellectual quality is a species of the good that
follows from and is subservient to DQ.


Steve:
This subservience notion doesn't sound pragmatic to me. I'm not sure
it is all that Pirsigian either. DQ and SQ are two sides of the same
coin. Quality is an empty jug. Its inside and outside define one
another. Neither needs to bow down to the other in "subservience."

Best,
Steve