[MD] Taking words Seriously

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
...My understanding of you position is that there is always a discrepancy between primary reality and concepts and that that discrepancy constitutes an important philosophical problem to be solved (this part is under dispute). You are insisting that Matt and I fail to make enough of the discrepancy between concepts and reality to be getting DQ right. In contrast you feel that you have a proper understanding of Pirsig's concept of DQ which helps you constantly keep that discrepancy in mind and in doing so are able to get in touch with DQ in ways that Matt and I can't.


dmb says:

Huh? The discrepancy between concepts and reality IS the distinction between static quality and Dynamic Quality. Understanding DQ and understanding that discrepancy is practically the same thing. That distinction is philosophical and conceptual. I can't know anything about what Matt and you do to "get in touch" with DQ. I only know about the words and sentences you post here and on that basis I'm saying simply, "you don't get it". 


Steve said:
...Here is how pragmatism dissolves the supposed problem of the discrepancy between concepts and primary reality so that no consolation is even needed:... A pragmatist is one who has given up the idea that descriptions ought to be adequate to reality...  The discrepancy between concepts and reality, is only a problem for one who still hopes to find that one set of true descriptions of The Way Things Really Are. ...Now, before you respond with a bunch of quotes suggesting that Pirsig still sees a worrying problem to be solved in the concepts/reality discrepancy. That may very well be the case, but that is a separate question and no _argument_ about whether there is something important that Matt and I are missing in our own philosophies. However, if you have some _argument_, some line of reasoning, for why one who does not think of descriptions as having the purpose of constituting an adequate representation of reality should nevertheless find it problematic and important to constantly say that there is a discrepancy between concepts and reality, then I'd be interested to hear about it.


dmb says:

Like I already said, "You're interpreting the MOQ's first and most basic distinction as if it were a version of the appearance-reality distinction and then rejecting it for being a form of Platonism". Your response only repeats the mistake, as if you were not responding to a post in which I already explained how and why the MOQ's primary empirical/secondary conceptual distinction is NOT equivalent to the Platonic reality/appearance distinction. You're responding as if I didn't just say, "ideas aren't supposed to represent the real reality, but they have to function in reality. They have to agree with reality in the sense that they serve life, in the sense that they have to answer to life as it's actually lived. That is where our concepts and abstractions come from and that's where they are tried and tested. That's what our ideas are about; life as it's lived. As Charlene Seigried says, "The pragmatic stance is that we seek to know, not for its own sake, but to enable us to live better."  Or, as James says, 'The world is surely the TOTAL world, including our mental reaction."


Why are you asking the question AFTER it's been answered? Don't you read the posts you're supposedly responding to?


It makes no sense to push back against this discrepancy or distinction with pragmatism because the claim is one pragmatist approvingly quoting another, namely Pirsig quoting James. At the end of chapter 29, Pirsig says...

" 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing'  Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality." 


You and Matt are reading this as if it were a Platonic claim about the real reality beyond appearances. It ain't. That's WHY you don't get DQ and the MOQ central distinction. You've seen these words many times and you think you know that they mean but I'm telling you that you've attached the wrong ideas to those words and you are fundamentally confused about the MOQ as result.