[MD] knowledge

[Ham Priday]

Greetings, Matt --

[Matt to Steve on May 15]:
> ... I'm not sure that anybody really has read "pre-intellectual"
> as "social/bio/inorganic."  Thinking about it that way, however,
> does tend to make us face what exactly we mean by DQ.
> Pirsig did not say "DQ is pre-static experience."  There may
> or may not be an important reason behind this.  However,
> it does cause us to face up to the idea of what it means to be,
> say, pre-subatomic particles. ...
>
> But what could it mean to be pre-electrons?  We might be
> able to extend our understanding of "pre-" to "pre-social,"
> getting back to biological instincts, but pre-lightwaves?
> What does it mean to be in touch with something that is
> before any "thing"?  Why is it we don't melt away when
> this happens?  How come we only talk about the
> nothingness of our culturally constructed "self" rather
> than the brief, or permanent, obliteration of our bodies?
> Why are descriptions of enlightenment not accompanied
> by on-looker reports of how the person faded away
> before their eyes?

Well stated, as usual Matt, and the questions you pose are worthy of 
discussion.
As a follower of this forum with no special reason to patronize the Quality 
thesis,
I'd like to address two of the issues you've raised.

Although Pirsig did not say "DQ is pre-static experience," he did call 
Quality
"the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality" and he equated it with "pure 
experience".
Perhaps the reason he didn't posit this pure experience specifically as 
"dynamic"
is that it would contaminate the "unpatterned" nature of his primary 
reality.

As for "what it means to be" something other than human, such as
a sub-atomic particle or lightwave, I think it's important to realize
that "being" is not intrinsic to self-awareness--even in "human beings".
Organic being is a contingency of cognizant life, not its essence.
We borrow beingness from an external reality in order to exist
as an individuated self with the capacity to "be-aware".
There is no rational justification (outside of fantasy) for imputing
awareness to inanimate objects. This is where the Quality (value)
thesis falls apart, in my opinion.

Awareness of Quality or Value is the core self of man.  Although I'm
willing to accept human value-sensibility as "pre-intellectual",
it  happen to
agree with Pirsig jat

In fact,


 no.
>
> Matt said:
> If you're not saying this above, Steve, you come close to
> using this formula in the third paragraph: "knowledge-that
> = intellectual know-how".
>
> Steve said:
> What I was trying to set up was knowledge-that as the
> static aspect intellect and knowledge-how as the dynamic
> aspect of intellect. By analogy, on the biological level, the
> static aspect is DNA encoding while the dynamic aspect is
> biological know-how.
>
> Matt:
> Hunh.  I guess I would need to know what, exactly,
> intellectual know-how is, as distinguished from
> knowing-that.  For instance, in your analogy, I have no
> sense of what "biological know-how" stands for.  Static
> latching is DNA encoding, dymanic bio is _____.  You
> gestured, but I don't know what the gesture was to.
> Similarly, I would prefer propositional knowing-that to be
> equated to a "knowing-how-to-use-sentences."  I don't
> know what it means to distinguish the two as different
> aspects.  I have a feeling, though, that if one approached
> the philosophy of language with the distinction, it would
> reintroduce thickets we don't want (like Saussure's
> synchronic/diachronic distinction, which produces his talk
> about "conventional arbitrariness" that has infected
> literary theorists to this day, and constantly baits them
> for relativism charges).
>
> Steve said:
> I would say that knowledge-how is DQ and knowledge-that
> is the intellectual sq static latching of DQ
>
> Matt:
> So: intellectual know-how might be "using sentences" and
> latching knowing-thats might be "true sentences"?
>
> The work of Robert Brandom--which I take to be a
> "rhetoric all the way down" philosophy of language--suggests
> that the inferential pathways between sentences, which is
> to say the network that supports a sentence's
> taking-to-be-true, is never static, but always in use.  We
> might say that to truly take the semantic, non-epistemic
> turn with respect to truth, one needs to turn in all notions
> of "static" with respect to lifeforms: a latch is less a latch
> than a rubberband.  Inferential moves between sentences
> are always potentially in flux.  The word "true" is static and
> absolute with respect to how it functions in a language,
> but that tells you nothing about which sentences are true,
> which is to say, which ones to latch.
>
> Better than rubberband even is Quine's self as a web of
> belief.  Web is nice because if we visualize "life" as instead
> of a river, but an open space of air with a nice breeze
> blowing through, picture the web in that space, unattached,
> and how it undulates in the breeze, maintaining a unity, but
> not static, always flexing.  That's the picture of the
> linguistic self that happens in post-pragmatic philosophy of
> language I think.  And with this picture, I think we need a
> revised notion of what "static" could mean.  For when you
> say, "the give and take between dynamic and static," what
> could that mean if, strictly speaking, "dynamic" is a stand-in
> for "no-thing"?  And think about "give and take"--isn't _that_
> the dynamism?
>
> I think it might be better in general to drop the notion of
> "static" entirely.  What works better for Pirsig's purposes is
> a "pattern-pattern" tension, with the undulating tension
> being the dynamic bit.  We can isolate patterns, but the
> purpose of isolation will always be directed towards
> "where's the tension here?"  Finding the tension will be
> finding the dynamism, finding the sweet spot that can be
> broken.  Mark/Squonk liked to talk about coherence, but I
> think that conceptualizes the area in the wrong way.
> Your yin/yang reference, and the non-existence of a
> dynamic or static "in and of itself" is, I think, spot on, but
> once we reach that point, I think it might be time to hand
> in our "static" cards.  Dynamic Quality and patterned
> quality.  That's all we need.
>
> Matt
>
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