[MD] humpty dumpty

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[Ron]
If I understood Peirce correctly, he suggests alining beliefs with natural order along with inquiry, aligning with natural order is alignment with direct experience.

[Arlo]
Yes, I think this is his emphasis in this essay.

[Ron]
The question of HOW is an interesting one, what I have noticed and I think why others have a problem with associating Pragmatism and Bhuddism is that Pragmatism lacks the inducement of an "aporia" effect that has the same sort of impact as a Bhuddist aporia or the same mystique it holds in popular culture.

[Arlo]
I am not versed on Buddhist aporia, but I think this "inducement" is what Peirce would later to call "abduction". "Where" this comes from led Peirce down the same path as Poincare and Einstein, as a "flash of insight". In his essay "Pragmatism and Abduction", Peirce writes that abduction is intuitive, and mirrors Einstein's comment about "sympathetic intuition". Abduction, as Peirce develops it, is the process of generating hypothesis. It is a creational act. And I think this ties nicely in with Pirsig's comments on hypothesis-generation in ZMM.

Umberto Eco, a scholar of Peirce, wrote about Peirce's abduction that "is an instinct which relies upon unconscious perception of connections between aspects of the world" (The Sign of Three). Peirce himself wrote in a manuscript (Ms.692), "It is evident that unless man had had some inward light tending to make his guesses . . . much more often true than they would be by mere chance, the human race would long ago have been extirpated for its utter incapacity in the struggles for existence."

I am not familiar enough with James to offer how he would respond about aporia in pragmatism.

[Ron]
My experience with Bhuddism was via the martial arts and it was a guide to action not inaction...

[Arlo]
I can't make a claim either way, but I can say that activity derived from the terra firma of experience is more interesting to me than, say, meditative inactivity in and of itself. The Hindu mystics Pirsig mentions in ZMM that bury themselves alive for days to reach a state of physical and mental quietness, may escape "belief" entirely, but its what they do when they come out of that, how they affect change in the world, how this shapes their interactions, guides their activity and allows them to achieve goals that I find more interesting. Yes, you need that Zen NOW! moment, where experience IS, first, but unless you are going to stay buried forever, or stay in a meditation chamber forever, you're going to need to talk about activity, and hence belief, and hence how those beliefs come to be fixed, and that takes us to Pirsig's expansion of rationality.