[MD] The MOQ difference

[david buchanan]

John said to Mark:
Perhaps I miss this point because I'm just SO verbally oriented, but when playing chess or picturing a problem in framing a house, I can see how I'm using a spatial reasoning that isn't dependent on words but uses abstract things like shapes and relations.  But even here, I'm thinking conceptually at least.  For a relation to exist it must involve discrete "things".  And that has a verbal component, even if I'm just thinking to myself, "that thing over there".  Does that make sense?



dmb says:

Yes, things and thoughts. It's hard to tell the difference. Maybe there isn't any difference, eh? Try this on for size, gents.

>From "Pragmatism and Humanism", pages 597-8:

What shall we call a THING anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes. For me, this whole ‘audience’ is one thing, which grows now restless, now attentive. I have no use at present for its individual units, so I don’t consider them. So of an ‘army,’ of a ‘nation.’ But in your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call you ‘audience’ is an accidental way of taking you. The permanently real things for you are your individual persons. To an anatomist, again, those persons are but organisms, and the real things are the organs. Not the organs, so much as their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the cells, but their molecules, say in turn the chemists.We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will. We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions.We create the predicates also. Many of the predicates of things express only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings. Such predicates of course are human additions. Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and was a menace to Rome’s freedom. He is also an American school-room pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings. The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you can’t weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic themselves are fermenting with human rearrangements; physics, astronomy and biology follow massive cues of preference. We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there IS a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation.We build the flux out inevitably. The great question is: does it, with our additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions WORTHY or UNWORTHY?


dmb continues:
In Lila, Pirsig quotes the notion that "we are suspended in language" and in ZAMM he explains that we all inherit a conceptual reality that has evolved over the ages.

""In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." (ZAMM, p251)
Isn't James saying the same thing when he says, "We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we do; what we do again determines what we experience"? I think so.