[MD] Apologies for Dropped Threads

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Andrie,

Andrie said:
My opinion about Steve having the right opinion, in an analythikal line 
of reasoning, and you having the correct line in an inductive reasoning, 
and about David on top of the pyramid because he was making the 
correct balance between the two,using them at the same time 
altogether, i have to maintain. I think its a very straight conclusion.

Matt:
That's certainly fair enough, though this "straight conclusion" is the 
exact reason I don't think you have quite a handle on what Steve and 
I are saying.  Mainly I have a hard time figuring out where the 
opinion came from (I have really no clue what you are picking out 
when you say Steve falls into "analytic" and me into "inductive"), but 
partly because it continues that sense that the Rortyan pragmatism 
Steve and I are representing is unbalanced in some vague way I don't 
understand, which is Dave's main point, I take it, against Rorty.  
Similar to my response to Ian, thinking Rortyan pragmatism is 
unbalanced is pretty much the same as thinking that James was 
unbalanced because he didn't write more literary criticism, produce 
more paintings, or conduct more scientific experiments.  It would 
seem to miss the point of what he was doing.

Also, with your story about European gypsies, while I have a hard 
time understanding what you meant in your recapitulation of my 
story about me and my girlfriend (I have no clue what you meant 
when you said my girlfriend said, "let kill some chomo's' on our 
way"--particularly because "chomo" is not an English word, though 
you appear to have attached a definite meaning to it), I do often 
think about the general dynamics of community-inclusion/exclusion: 
who counts, does it matter, and what do we do if it does?  For 
example, with Mormons, they may have their own communal 
discourse for morality, but I think the only way a democracy 
survives is if the legal apparatus of the state trumps all particular, 
local communities (such that Mormons and various modern 
nomadic communities ("gypsies") are, whether they acknowledge 
it or not, subject to the same laws as everyone else).

Matt

p.s.  I agree with you that "Quality is timeless" in the sense you are 
using it, but would emphasize that along these lines, my point was 
that _articulations_ of Quality are not, and that Pirsig's particular 
articulations belonged to a different era (which I would probably 
place in the 19th C. these days were I to make such a 
pronouncement).