[MD] Psychology and Philosophy

[Matt Kundert]

> dmb says:
> My suspicion is that Mark's problem with 
psychology is personal, not philosophical. I suspect Mark is here 
largely because he is sympathetic with Pirsig's criticisms of psychiatry
 and/or Pirsig's defense of insanity as a kind of adjustment period. 
It's between the lines, but the man is complaining about his own 
personal encounter with psychology. 

Well, that's what we all do, to a certain extent, right?  It all begins 
personally.  Pirsig's philosophical journey began personally.  I find it 
hard to negotiate such personal encounters philosophically for that 
exact reason.  Ultimately, we are all thrown back on our first-person 
encounters with the world.  So what's the right mode to negotiate at 
the philosophical level that neither violates the experience we've 
accumulated nor is limited to the single window we've been 
granted...?

I know while reading Mark I've thought about, for example, how I 
would treat Pirsig's description of psychologists as not "kin."  
Something about Pirsig's mode of transforming the personal into the 
philosophical still scans in those sections, even if I don't have Pirsig's 
personal apprehension about psychologists  (I should rather say "the 
narrator's," I suppose).

> From: dmbuchanan at hotmail.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:44:44 -0700
> Subject: Re: [MD] Psychology and Philosophy
> 
> 
> pirsigaffliction said to Mark:
> My suspicion, which puts us at odds, is that you have a reductionist view of the discipline of psychology, one that only focuses on reductionists.  But I don't know.  ...The problems you want to talk about seem to me much more discussable only when we don't talk at such an abstract level as you do.  But I'm likely in the minority here, as Pirsig does discuss these problems at that level of abstraction.  But either way, your conditional claim that "the intent of psychology to 'understand' the mind through rigorous data collection" doesn't seem right to me as history or conceptual substance. ...