[MD] humpty dumpty

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[Dan]
It was missed because it is wrong. The MOQ isn't about belief or faith. It says the world begins with experience. Direct experience.

[Arlo]
It does, but that does not make Peirce, or Ron, wrong. For Peirce (and I gather James, although DMB may want to correct me if I am wrong), belief is what enables action outside the immediate moment of experience.

In other words, it is the anticipation built from observation that allows us to go beyond the moment of pure experience and act in purposeful and strategic ways. For Peirce, 'belief' was critical in 'activity' if activity was ever to be more than immediate responses to the ongoing stream of experience. 

So, you are right that the immediate moment of perception, the immediate zen-point, the flux of experience, the NOW! moment does not require 'belief' or 'faith'. But the range of purposeful activity (agency) enabled by symbolic representation (semiosis) required a fixation of 'belief' for that activity to best align with experience. This essay is about aligning 'belief' with 'experience', and I think it's core demonstrations a pre-Pirsigian rejection of S/O reason (a priori) as the best basis for fixing belief. What he calls "inquiry" is sort of an ongoing re-iterative re-adjustment/re-alignment of observation/projection derived from experience.

[Dan]
Belief involves intellect.

[Arlo]
Not always, and this is a key point in Peirce's essay. Belief can fix on intellect (S/O or non-S/O), or on social authority, or on a biologically comforting tenacity. 

[Dan]
By waking up to direct experience we no longer believe the world is this way or that way. We know.

[Arlo]
Well, "knowing" is for Peirce the "fixing". I'd make the argument that 'knowing' and 'believing' are not, from an experiential-pragmatic view, different. Our 'experience' is no more 'knowing' than it is 'believing', Dan, both are secondary to direct experience. Both involve interpreting a symbolically represented history to project an anticipation trajectory of activity. Whether we "know" or "believe" the sun will rise tomorrow, that an apple dropped will 'fall' to the ground, that a motorcycle will propel us from point A to point B, seems to me a difference without a degree. 

[Dan]
A belief isn't knowing. It is an assumption based on opinion. When you know something it is unshakable.

[Arlo]
This troubles me, and it sounds like a nod towards an Absolute I know you aren't arguing for, Dan. I don't want anything I believe to be unshakeable that experience, when divergent, won't rock it towards something better.

And, of course, to Peirce, believing based on 'opinion' is maybe a tenacity fixed belief, but certainly NOT what his idea of inquiry, in the pragmatic tradition, points to.

So, I'll step back for a second, I know Peirce did some distancing from James, but I always felt his core continued without major disagreement from James and the pragmatic tradition that Pirsig aligns his ideas with. Maybe DMB can offer better insight into this, I'll wait to see what he may say.