[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[Matt Kundert]

Steve, Ron, Dan,

Ron said:
It's what the majority of the arguement has been about, the idea of 
DQ being a place holder for the indefineable AND an explanation of 
the Good and the beautiful.

Steve said:
I think calling DQ the Good is problematic given the hot stove 
scenario for explaining it as negative value in that case.
...
RMP: "Yes, my statement that Dynamic Quality is always affirmative 
was not a wise statement."

Ron said:
When the negative face of Quality, emerges as conflicting types of 
Good it most certainly is a wise statement.

Dan said:
Robert Pirsig is not backtracking... he is expanding on his premise 
that Dynamic Quality is synonymous with experience. Experience 
begins as the unguarded moment and static quality evaluations arise 
from there... evaluations of positive and negative, good and evil, 
right and wrong.

Matt:
Dan suggested that Steve took Pirsig out of context (as a form of 
"backtracking"), but I'm not sure he did, for I think what Steve was 
saying is that there is a problematic conflict between the two parts 
of Ron's "AND" conjunction, and that the "placeholder" portion is a 
function of making DQ "synonymous with experience" (more 
specifically, _direct_ experience), which is what the hot stove 
analogy most explicitly brings to bear.  (This becomes particularly 
clear when Dan clarifies that he disagrees, in a manner, with Ron's 
interpretation of DQ as the Good.)  So, in this sense, Pirsig was 
"expanding on his premise" to the detriment of DQ being "an 
explanation of the Good and the beautiful" (in Ron's words, and 
while withholding actual judgement on Ron's words).

Ron's further articulation of what he means by "Good" seems 
thoroughly Deweyan, as essentially "the good is simply a rejected 
evil."  DQ functions as a necessary explanation of the Good, I take it, 
_because_ it is a placeholder.  Dewey's formula defines what we 
take to be good as _solely_ backward-looking, i.e. at rejected static 
patterns in favor of _this_ static pattern (whatever we've demarcated 
as "good" right now).  The evaluative term "good," for Dewey, is then 
implicitly a two-place predicate, where it's shape is always 
determined by what it is rejecting.  Ron's version, however, is a 
three-place predicate: rejected-good/now-good/future-better.

Dan seems to object to this formulation, however, saying "better and 
worse are evaluations made afterwards."  I find this curious as an 
attempt to accurately describe Pirsig's view (which is what Dan 
seems primarily concerned with), for it seems to suggest that 
_valuing_ is not our connection to reality.  Dan does consistently pull 
out this ramification in this context, however, by _reverting_ Pirsig's 
adaptation of Whitehead's formula back to Whitehead, as a "dim 
apprehension of we know not what."  Whitehead says "things too 
obscure," but Pirsig's dim apprehension must be "betterness," 
musn't it?  (Dan's formula, too, seems to reverse the idea that DQ is 
a kind of knowing, in Bertrand Russell's formula of distinguishing "by 
acquaintance" from "by description"--for "we know not what" would 
make sense as static-knowing, but as DQ-knowing, we _do_ know 
what it is: betterness.)

I perceive Dan's response, what I take to be a dialectically produced 
attempt to avoid the problem Steve wanted to highlight in the face of 
Ron's formulation, as further highlighting what Steve sees as the 
problem in holding that DQ is both a placeholder/je-ne-sais-quoi 
"AND" the Good.  The problem might be best put in terms of the 
indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy thesis: if I want to always be 
following DQ as much as possible, how do I know whether I'm dimly 
apprehending Dynamic Quality or apprehending dimly with static 
patterns?

The thesis suggests there's going to be no answer, but what does it 
mean to say, then, that DQ is the Good?  Well, I guess just that it is 
a placeholder necessary to fully explain the evolutionary paradigm of 
Deweyan evaluative experience.  So that, sometimes our experience 
of good is an implicit rejecting of past-evil, but sometimes it's an 
implicit rejecting of now-good.  And we won't know the difference in 
our own experience until much later, for the experience of dimness, 
we might say, is a necessary condition, but definitely not sufficient.  
After all, some people are just dim.

Matt