[MD] Taking words Seriously

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
...Pirsig says our peculiar habits of thought prevent us from seeing Quality and your response is simply to say our thought habits don't and can't prevent us from seeing Quality. That's not an argument. It's just an empty, unsupported, nonsensical denial of what the author plainly says.

Steve replied:
...I am explicitly _disagreeing_ with certain parts of Pirsig's texts on this point. I think Pirsig's primary/secondary distinction works against some of the other things he wants to do and doesn't do some of the things he hopes it will do.

dmb says:
Incredible! Now you're confessing to an explicit disagreement with the MOQ's central distinction. Not only that, you think there is no way to get better at following DQ. "The 'squares' of course do see quality," you say, so there's no problem to be solved. "DQ is in good shape no matter what happens to our concepts," you say. So Pirsig's attempt to improve rationality by adding DQ is pretty pointless too.


Do you see what just happened there?


You have very effectively proven my original charge, which was that you (and Matt) read the MOQ in a way that makes the central concept seem trivial, meaningless and inert. Well, there you have it in your own words. The sqaureness problem isn't really a problem, DQ can't be a solution to that fake problem and the MOQ's central distinction works against the MOQ, you say.


Yep. That would certainly explain why you've been dumping one pile of nonsense upon another, why you're always at odds with everything. It doesn't explain your ongoing struggle with the english language but it says everything about your "reading" of the MOQ. You can call it a "disagreement" with Pirsig and you can insist that you have nothing to learn about the MOQ if you and your ego want to, but I don't believe it for second. If that were the case, your "disagreements" would be an actual engagement with those central claims and your criticism of them would make sense. That would be awesome. But it's obviously not the case. When it comes to talking about the MOQ, you've brought nothing but confusion and distortion.