[MD] Replacing SOM

[david buchanan]

In the thread titled "Replacing SOM", Krimel said to Arlo:
I respect the fact that you are not acting as an apologist for Pirsig. I consider apologetics as the lowest form of philosophology. But it is disturbing to see you adopting dmb's style of quotefesting. It amounts to the hermeneutic equivalent of cutting up texts to compose a ransom note. All texts are meaningless. If they were not, forums like this would be pointless. Instead I think your reading of these particular texts, rather than being blindingly obvious, is merely blind.


dmb says:
The use of quotes is disturbing and all texts are meaningless!? I totally disagree. In fact, the question that immediately springs to mind is, "are you daft?" (which I ask with a little note of outrage and an English accent).
There is an important distinction between empirical evidence and textual evidence - but both of them form the basis of their respective domains. Both of them are totally indispensable, presuming you want your assertions to be taken seriously. Basically, empirical evidence is the gold standard in the sciences and textual evidence is the gold standard in the humanities. I thought everybody already knew about this difference. Apparently not. 

Imagine a scientific paper listing rows and rows of empirical data in support of its thesis or claim. Now imagine a critic denigrating that paper as "datafest", one that's equivalent to "cutting up empirical data to compose a ransom note". "All empirical data is meaningless", says this critic. What you're saying textual evidence (quotes), Krimel, is equally absurd. I mean, what you're saying is  downright wacko fringe stuff even to a pretentious sophomore. 

In the Humanities - language arts, history, philosophy, and the like - the text is all you get. That's all there is. The researcher is looking for evidence, but that will almost always be limited to some kind of text; a novel, a poem, documents of any kind and the secondary literature about any of those, etc. You can't verify the truth of a poem or novel of philosophic vision in terms of the sciences, in terms of empirical evidence. Textual evidence is the best you can do. This is a simple matter of respecting the nature of the object of inquiry. The methods of investigation have to be appropriate to the subject matter. 

In the same way, your complaint is just a basic confusion of methods and subject matters. Isn't that it? You imagine that we're supposed to prove the MOQ using scientific methods or empirical data? No, all you can do is use the text as evidence and that is only evidence for the meaning of the MOQ. If you're an English professor and you want to make a case about the meaning of Hamlet, quotes from that play are absolutely the best evidence you can have. The other books about Hamlet would be pretty good too and you'd want to include some perspective with similar plays by other authors or other plays by the same author, but in terms of the quality of textual evidence, there is nothing better that the original text itself. 


Quotes from Pirsig's books are not only the gold standard of textual evidence, they're also specific features of the subject matter. They little pieces of the thing we're supposedly here to discuss. A philosopher who is disturbed by quotes from philosophers is like an empirical scientist who is disturbed by empirical data; in both cases he's very, very confused about what he's doing.