[MD] The other side of reified

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
... Ham's Essentialism seems to be a matter of moving a few pieces around on some metaphysical chessboard and none of those pieces makes contact with actual experience at any point. The game is confined to those 64 squares and none of the moves makes a difference to anyone or anything. That's vicious abstractionism. That's why reification is a real problem. This is an abuse of concepts...

Ham replied:
That's an unfair criticism, David.  Actual experience is the basis of empirical knowledge, not metaphysical conceptualization, as you should know. Metaphysics is always "abstraction". ...

dmb says:
Let me stop you right there because I can already see that you do not understand this criticism. The idea here is not to oppose abstractions. The idea is to stop abusing abstractions and instead use them properly. And what is the "proper" use of abstract concepts according to the MOQ? They come from past experience and their point and purpose is to guide future experience. When they become detached and float free of this experiential reality, abstractions become vicious. When they are used to denigrate the empirical reality from which they are derived, abstractions become vicious. When they are taken to be more real than the empirical reality to which they refer, this is an abuse of abstractions. In the MOQ, metaphysics and truth and ideas are static intellectual quality and these verbal and conceptual static patterns are always secondary. They always exist in relation to experience or when they don't it is like a broken circuit or a wrench in the gears. This is a form of pragmatism, which says true ideas are the ones that function in experience, the concepts that lead you into harmonious relations, that you can smoothly ride upon in experience. Bad ideas will lead you into confusion, isolation or even danger. And then there are ideas that make no difference at all because they're purely verbal, so abstract as to be unconnected to anything known in experience. 
This is what I'm saying about your key terms, especially "Essence". For James and Pirsig, there is no such thing. As James famously said, the essence of a thing is just whatever we find most important about it. It's not an actual entity or an eternal principle. It's just an abstraction, something we carve out of experience. 

Ham said:
 Pirsig had disdain for metaphysics, so he ridiculed it as "names about reality", a "menu without food," etc.  What he really wanted to do was reduce metaphysics to the experiential level. ..Oh well, we'll just equate Quality to Experience and avoid the need for definitions altogether.  It's a nice euphemism, but hardly a metaphysical thesis. For one thing, we don't "directly experience Quality independent of intellectual abstractions."  Quality is an assessment of the aesthetic or moral value of a phenomenon relative to other phenomena experienced or observed.  That involves memory recall, intellectual judgment, and sufficient experience with the type of phenomenon in question to make such an assessment.

dmb says:

Disdain and ridicule? No. Again, the idea here is to stop the ABUSE of concepts. In those quotes Pirsig is saying that metaphysical ideas ought not be confused with reality. The idea is NOT to say that menus are bad, just that it is a mistake to eat the menu. As in the explanation above, the menu is supposed to guide you to the actual food. Eating the menu or thinking it more real than the food is the mistake known as reification. The MOQ is not metaphysical in that sense, in the sense of positing entities or principles that are outside of experience, whether it's supposed to be the conditions behind experience, under experience as a foundation or above experience as some divine principle. The pragmatist will not rule out any idea in advance as long as we take such notions as a working hypothesis and put it to work in experience. If your idea can not be put to the test because, by definition, it represents something that can't be known or tried out in experience, then the pragmatist will say it is an empty, useless idea. 
The intellectual judgements and assessments we make make use of all kinds of static quality but Dynamic Quality refers to something else. Pirsig uses many, many examples of when and where it's likely to be noticeable in your own experience so that you can realize for yourself what the term refers to. It's not a crypto-religious metaphysical abstraction, he says, but an immediately felt empirical event. There is book called "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer that popularizes the scientific findings that support this view. The overall cognitive process totally breaks down without this ability to immediately "feel" the situation. One man lost this capacity for medical reasons and literally could not even choose a breakfast cereal. He'd stand in the grocery store for hours because he could not make a choice, even though his ability to reason logically was perfectly intact. In fact, that's how he'd get stuck on the cereal isle. He'd try to decide on quantitative grounds, price, weight, nutritional value statistics, etc.. He couldn't just says, hey, that looks good. 

Look it up. I'll bet you could read some reviews and get the basic idea in less than an hour. I mean, it's not just a speculative idea. It's a pretty good description of how feeling and thinking function together, are two aspects of the overall cognitive process. William James was a psychologist before he became a philosopher, you see, and even though he died over a hundred years ago a heck of a lot of his work still holds up in this day of neuroscience and sophisticated brain imaging.