[MD] Language and Tigers

[Matt Kundert]

To everyone who get's excited by my massive avoidance 
issues (one might say "intimacy"):

I think someone suggested the other day that I confused 
two different senses of "metaphysics."  There's also, of 
course, the nagging question about the "linguistic turn" and 
lingering SOM assumptions.  I found this about Donald 
Davidson (I use his argument, though he isn't referenced 
here, but the following paragraph), and it has a bit about 
tigers.  I like tigers.  I thought I'd keep the "greatest hits" 
loop going in case anybody cares.  (The whole essay, 
"What Is Metaphysics?," is an extended movement through 
objections and different senses of words and stuff.  It can 
be a pretty tedious, and is not expository.)  It begins a 
little in media res, but hopefully isn't too hard to get a 
handle on.

"The fear of floating down the path laid out by 
metaphysics(1), an investigation into the ways in which we 
understand the world, is roughly the fear of subjectivism 
and of losing touch with the world. On the one hand, can 
we really lay out the basic model of reality by turning inward 
to the way that we, _I_, understand my relation to the 
world?  Wouldn’t that just lay bare, simply and only, _my_ 
relation to the world, leaving dark how everybody else deals 
with it, let alone how reality actually is? And there we have 
the other hand: if we just tinker and toy with our 
understanding of reality, doesn’t that still leave us the 
question of how our understanding relates to reality, and  
the question of how reality is (as opposed to how we 
understand it)?

"The fear of losing touch with the world specifically arises 
with the snide comment: 'You seem to want to talk about 
_how we talk about reality_, but I want to talk about 
_reality_.' This is often punctuated by referencing, for 
example, the difference between tigers and talking about 
tigers. When confronted by a ravenous Bengal, wouldn’t it 
be better to know about tigers, rather than how National 
Geographic talks about tigers? While on the one hand, 
there is a very obvious difference between tigers and talk 
about tigers (one is a tiger, the other is talk) that no one 
is denying, on the other hand, consider for a moment the 
fact that, if you actually did know quite a bit about how 
National Geographic and other professionals talk about 
tigers, you would also, concurrently, know a lot about 
tigers—how couldn’t you? Is it possible to somehow learn a 
lot about the activities of zoologists without learning 
_anything_ about what they study?

"What I want to suggest is that the fear of losing touch 
with reality because we are focused on something other 
than reality, how we talk about or our understanding of 
reality, shouldn’t be all that strong a fear because, under 
normal circumstances, the two will almost always dovetail. 
The reason for this is, in fact, the same reason for why 
the subjectivist fear is misplaced also. The fear of 
subjectivism arises because we take Descartes’ fear of 
solipsism too seriously. The fact of the matter is, though, 
that none of us are isolated monads floating in this soup 
called 'Reality.' There are, in fact, quite a few of us monads 
floating in the soup and we’ve learned how to communicate 
with each other about our hopes and dreams, and more 
importantly for this little dissertation, how we are getting 
on in the soup. As we communicate with each other, 
coordinate our actions and the like, if what I believed about 
reality didn’t coordinate in large measure with what the 
other person believed about reality, then the communication 
would fail entirely. Random anomalous communication might 
be taken to be mistakes (like malaprops), but more 
systematic anomalies might be taken to be different 
languages, with attendant 'difficulties in translation' for 
persistent anomalies (like English’s difficulty with the Greek 
aretê). However, more significant mismeasure between 
people might be labeled 'insanity' and tremendous 
discontinuity is likely to be referred to as 'noise.'"

from
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-is-metaphysics.html

Let me also add how _boring_ it is to read somebody who

self-consciously distinguishes between two kinds of 
metaphysics in
order to get straight about them.  As much 
as I think it would be
easier to ignore the problem (as many 
I think want to), what do we do
about all the persistent 
miscommunications that occur because we
_think_ we are 
using terms the same way?  "This is the MD dipshit,
use'em 
the way Pirsig did," is a common reply to my nagging doubts. 

But what happens when you _see_, _read_ other people 
hiding different
definitions in their terms?  Do we spank them 
for having thoughts of their own?  What about philosophical 
terms Pirsig didn't use, but we want to?  And how do we 
quickly and easily and uncontroversially decide whose 
definition of "how Pirsig defined his terms" to use when Pirsig 
wrote interesting novels and not pedantic tractatuses?  
Should we just king somebody?  Should we promote a 
scorched earth policy?  Is there a reasonable way to do this?  
Who decides what's reasonable?  Am I being unreasonable?  
Are these rhetorical questions unreasonable?  Or just the 
never-ending series of them?

What's the best way to write about Pirsig?

Matt
 		 	   		  
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