[MD] 42

[david]

Arlo said to dmb:
.... In his article "A Pedagogy for Teachers and Other Educational Decision Makers" (Journal of Educational Administration, October, 1980), Graham Patterson writes "The link between peasant villagers in Latin America [as described by Freire in Cultural Action for Freedom] and students who are disadvantaged by our educational system is to be found in the decision making process itself. In order to illustrate that link it is necessary to consider current educational practice and an alternative model that I as a teacher am currently using. The model has a close parallel in Pirsig's analysis of the inconsistencies in Western behaviour, as expressed so completely in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."  It's an interesting article, linking Freire and Pirsig throughout, I'd recommend giving it a read (remember it was written way back in 1980 :-)).

dmb says:
Wow. Thanks, Arlo. The paper was easy to find and it's free. I've downloaded and printed it. So cool to see Pirsig's name in an abstract. Looking forward to reading the thing. 


Arlo said:
....this is exactly why Pirsig's expansion of rationality is so important, as we are drifting, in the wake of the de-objectivism of intellect, backwards towards social authority over intellect (even when not full blown Victorian morality).



dmb says:
Exactly. That root expansion provides a way forward that is NOT predicated on objectivity or relativism, which are two sides of the same essentialist coin. 

Did you already see my latest article? The topic of "de-objectification" came up in relation to Kuhn's work...

As a precocious and idealistic 15 year old college freshman, Robert Pirsig became obsessed with questions about scientific truth and the problem of relativism.  He was studying biochemistry when he noticed how fun and easy it was to generate new hypotheses. Rather than focus on his homework assignments, “he became interested in hypotheses as entities in themselves.” At first he was amused by the seemingly endless proliferation of hypotheses and he coined a little law: “The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.”  (ZAMM, 115.) After a few months, however, he started to understand the implications of this “law” and his amusement turned to horror.
“If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method!”
The method can’t be conclusive, he figures, because there will never be enough time to test an infinite number of hypotheses. As an idealistic teenager, he had believed that the whole point of the scientific method was to find the one, true hypothesis. His intellectual hero had an answer to this problem but it was “incredibly weak,” the young Pirsig thought. ”Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions,” Einstein had said, “a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest.” Sympathy and intuition were strange words to use in relation to the origins of scientific knowledge, the young Pirsig thought, and “the phrase ‘at any given moment’ really shook [him]. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time?” At this point he became interested in scientific truth itself as “a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else”. He saw that “some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year.” Even further, the lifespan of such truths seemed to be in direct proportion to the amount of scientific inquiry surrounding them – quite simply because “the more you look, the more you see.”
“The purpose of the scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones.”
These are philosophical issues that cannot be answered within normal science, and they had no bearing on his biochemistry homework either. So, despite his 170 I.Q., he flunked out of college, waited until he was old enough, and joined the Army. Upon his return from Korea, as you might expect, he re-enrolled as a philosophy major. Young Pirsig “discovered that the science [he'd] once thought of as the whole world of knowledge is only a brand of philosophy” and he “found in philosophy a natural continuation of the question that brought [him] to science in the first place.”

Thanks again,
dmb