[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[Matt Kundert]

For fuckheads who like Rorty and beavers and think that Rorty has a bias towards language over non-linguistic experience, I present this passage talking about the distinction between propositional knowing-that and nonlinguistic know-how (with beavers):

"If I understand [Barry] Allen's project, he thinks that we shall only understand 'the value of knowledge, its ecological singularity, the inextricability of its and our flourishing' better than the Greeks did if we set conversation in the context of the production of artifacts and skills.  Such understanding will, Allen believes, be blocked as long as we say, as I did, that 'conversation is the ultimate context in which knowledge should be understood.'  I should be happy to change 'knowledge' to 'knowledge-that' in that over-ambitious remark, but this would not eliminate my differences with Allen.  For I do not see that there is anything about the value of knowledge and its ecological singularity that we do not already sufficiently understand.

"In particular, I do not see why we need to draw any line between the knowing animals and the non-knowing animals other than the line between the sentence-wielding knowers-that and the non-sentence-wielders who only know how.

"Allen seems to want the former sort of line, for he says that plants...do not know how to photosynthesize.  Presumably he would also deny that beavers know how to build dams, for he suggests that 'knowledge is as uniquely human as our neurology.'  Admiring the beavers as I do, I cannot see anything especially human about knowing how to get things done.  Attributing knowledge-that, on the other hand, seems useful only when explaining ourselves, and perhaps our computers.  We attribute knowledge-how wherever telic description seems appropriate, but knowledge-that only when intentional description does."

> Date: Thu, 6 May 2010 16:43:23 -0700
> From: frankbooth66 at yahoo.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: Re: [MD] Pirsig's theory of truth
> 
> Do you know that "biggest" is the middle word in "the world's biggest beaver dam"?
> 
> It's in the news and somehow it gives me hope. Those rascally critters, I tell ya!
> 
> Whatever happened to plains speak?
> 
> It's getting a bit stuffy in here.
> 
> Let's shake things up fuckheads!!!
 		 	   		  
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