[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Dave,

DMB said:
How do I know when I am following DQ? That's like asking how do I 
know when I'm grooving on it, digging it, in the zone. You just know 
from your own experience.

Matt:
But are we not sometimes wrong about what we feel is going on in 
our experience?  Your answer is, roughly, that we "just know" when 
we are following DQ.  But the reason I've been bringing the thesis 
I've dubbed the "indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy" to bear on this 
issue is because it seems to me that that idea in Pirsig undercuts 
the certainty otherwise endowed to "just knowing it."

Perhaps I have a greater regard for the idea of what Alasdair 
MacIntyre calls an "epistemological crisis," the idea that occasionally 
our understanding of what we have been experiencing during our 
lives has been wrong--radically wrong.  (If you've seen Luc Besson's 
movie about Joan of Arc, that's what she was suffering from at the 
hands of Dustin Hoffman.)  This idea means that what those 
"concrete examples" mean, that you place primacy on, is exactly the 
kind of thing that gets thrown into uncertainty.  All of your responses 
to my rhetorical questions about stuckness were 
_external redescriptions_ of those experiences that don't take 
seriously the first-person judgment of those experiences.  They don't 
take seriously _precisely_ the thing that it seems you want me to 
otherwise take more seriously.  Most prominently in this category is 
your explanation of faith-based religiosity as "usually a matter of very 
deliberately choosing to walk the well-worn path."  That is an 
external judgment about that person's experience.  What happens 
when that person, in all honesty and sincerity, says, "No, I feel God 
in my heart and this is what He wants from me"?  Why is the 
response "Your wrong--you just feel that way because you were 
taught to feel that way" not a violation of the sovereignty of their 
direct experience of their own lives, to which you have no access?

MacIntyre, however, explains these crises as breakdowns in the 
concepts through which we've viewed the world.  And "following DQ" 
is ontologically not a conceptual experience, so-called.  Does this then
make following DQ immune to retrospective revision?

Only, I think, if "grooving," "digging," or "unstuckness" are sufficient 
criteria for telling the difference between Dynamic Quality and 
degeneracy.  But isn't that section of Pirsig punching up the fact that 
the Hippies _thought_ that their groovin' and diggin' was Dynamic, 
but it turns out it was slavish to biological static patterns?  And 
wouldn't your description of the faith-based amount to the fact that 
they _think_ they are groovin' and diggin' the Dynamic as religious 
saints do, but it turns out they are slavish to social static patterns?

It seems to me that grooving and digging _are_ immune to 
retrospective revision, but that does not also make whether one is or 
is not "following DQ" so immune.  I think Pirsig would agree that 
acting like a heretical saint, raging against established forms, does 
not a saint make.  However, the even more difficult problem I am 
trying to highlight is that _feeling_ like one _is_ actually a saint does 
not either make one a saint.

Matt