[MD] Definitions.

[Ant McWatt]

Dave Thomas said to Dave Buchanan, February 20th:


All your ranting to about this issue is what James characterizes as
"vicious intellectualism." Because if "static patterns of value" or
"deductions" change, it is misleading or confusing to "characterized [them]
by a fixed or stationary condition", "static."  Additionally it is Pirsig's
error not Marsha's.
 
That was all I was trying to establish.
 

Ant McWatt comments:

Dave,

Pirsig is usually quite careful in our PhD correspondence (which Marsha enjoys quoting here) to prefix his (occasional) use of the Dynamic, World of the Buddhas viewpoint of the MOQ.  As I was trying to say at the beginning of this thread, if you don't do that, it will lead to confusion especially for contributors only familiar with ZMM and LILA (two texts nearly exclusively written from the static, everyday world perspective).

Regarding the issue of stable/static, the benefit of the term "stable" is that it avoids connotations of Newtonian mechanics i.e. physical movement. Of course, any metaphysical term is going to be a compromise of some sort so - as a philosopher at least - I don't think Pirsig is in error with anything conceptual here.  

Hope that helps,

Anthony




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