[MD] Is the MOQ static, or a static pattern?

ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR ajb102 at psu.edu
Thu May 17 04:46:19 PDT 2012


[Craig]
Ah, but there is more (see your penultimate sentence).  You're leaving out the agreement! 

[Arlo]
How can I leave out something I said one sentence earlier? Especially when the subsequent sentence (to which you refer) says "its about shared usefulness". How else would you define "agreement"?

"Then one doesn't seek the absolute "Truth." One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along." (LILA)

Since Tuukka juxtaposed "right" and "useful" as being at the least independent if not oppositional ("instead of trying to be useful, I was trying to be right "). Within a MOQ, can you point to a pattern, any pattern, that is "right" but is not "useful"? Pirsig talks about this specifically in his recounting of James and The Squirrel, or in the Polar/Cartesian map segment. In either case, can you find any pattern that meets Tuukka's initial implication, that something can be "right" without being "useful"? 

[Tuukka]
By "right" I only mean that it does not cause trouble.

[Arlo}
Okay, can you give me an example of a pattern of value that is 'right' but is not 'useful'? Can you give me an example of a pattern that is 'useful' but not 'right'?

In fact, I'd argue that within a MOQ, 'right' would mean 'useful'. To the sailor trying to determine which map to use, he'd examine his context, and select the best map to get him where he needed to be, and he might say "that was the right map for that task", but 'right' is being defined and used by virtue of 'usefulness'. I can't imagine any context where he'd say, "well, the Cartesian map was right but not useful, the Polar map was not right but it allowed me to navigate to where I needed to be." 



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