[MD] Misunderstandings are driven by what we value not by the logic we use.

[david buchanan]

djh said to dmb:
... I agree that a philosophy forum is intellectual and the first thing anyone should recognise when they join a philosophy forum is recognise that what they're doing is ultimately degenerate by destroying the ultimately undefinable reality with fixed metaphysical meanings. 


dmb says:
Oh, okay. That probably explains why your assertions are not making any sense. I think this is quite wrong and it is exactly where Marsha goes wrong. This is the bogus move that leads to the anti-intellectualism. As you've just construed, any philosophical discussion is degenerate and it always wrong to have any kind of intellectual conversation. This is the mistake I'm trying to correct.

This mistake confuses DQ with sq in a very weird way. We all know that DQ cannot be defined but somehow Marsha (and you too, apparently) has construed this to mean that definitions cannot be defined. It's not just degenerate to try to define the undefinable reality, in this distorted view, it's also immoral to define philosophical terms. This is why I keep harping on the distinction between concepts and reality. This is the difference between Pirsig's metaphysics and the undefinable Quality that it talks about. DQ is not definable but I'm not talking about DQ. I'm talking about Pirsig's metaphysics. None of these complaint were EVER about defining the undefinable.


"The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be separated from the Dynamic Quality it talks about. Like the rest of the printed philosophic tradition it doesn't change from day to day, although the world it talks about does."

See? DQ is ever-changing, the undefinable reality is ever-changing. The MOQ is not DQ. The MOQ is not reality. The MOQ and the terms it employes are not supposed to be undefinable. Confusing the two is the mistake I hate so passionately. I find it quite disturbing that most MOQers seem oblivious to the outrageous wrongness of this blunder. 
 
"Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics."

Again, Pirsig project is to expand and improve the intellect. This anti-intellectualism is a profoundly bad and bogus misreading of the MOQ, one that deserves contempt.