[MF] A thirty-thousand page menu with no food?

[Matt Kundert]

Kevin,

Kevin said:
Re: Pirsig's historical mystics' take on metaphysics and the restaurant, 
menu and food metaphor.  A re-read of chapters 8, 9 and 10 in Lila, the 
exposition of Dynamic Quality, would appear to lead to a different 
conclusion.

Matt:
DMB mentioned the same passage about empiricism, but I'm not sure how its 
supposed to figure into my reading, how it controverts or otherwise changes 
the reading I offered, or the point of the passage I suggested.  As you say, 
"it may take another metaphor," which is to say, Pirsig's talking about 
something a little different in this passage.

I will, however, express my dissatisfaction with that section.  One source 
is when Pirsig says, "They [art, morality, religious mysticism] have been 
excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is 
composed of subjects and objects and anything that can't be classified as a 
subject or an object isn't real."  This is where Pirsig gets hit with the 
strawman charge and I don't blame the accusers.  Art and morality and 
mysticism _can_ be classified: they are in the subject.  Pirsig then wants 
to say that SOMists think that anything that is subjective is unreal--that's 
not true.  There aren't many (if any) that suggest that, though various 
philosophers working in the S/O problematic do give many different 
suggestions for how the subjective differs from the objective, some of which 
denigrates the subjective to a large extent.  For instance, the logical 
positivists, whose most famous ethical position was emotivism (from A. J. 
Ayer).  Emotions are _real_, though.  They are just irrational.  I don't 
think Ayer ever called them unreal.

Barring Pirsig's continued short shrift of his enemy (one can get over that 
easily enough by constructing better Pirsigian answers out of his tools), 
there is something even a little more insidious going on.  Reading the 
passage, we find that Pirsig's metaphysics (the MoQ) subscribes to 
empiricism, which says, "all legitimate human knowledge arises from the 
senses or by thinking about what the senses provide."  Pirsig says that his 
metaphysics varies from this.  We can already predict in what way based on 
his suggestion that values=reality=experience.  Everything is value (of 
various forms), everything is empiricial because it is all experienced.  
That means a _metaphysics_ is empirically based (in some way).

But look how Pirsig attacks the positivists: "the values of art and morality 
and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have 
been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons."  Pirsig 
attacks the positivists because they have been excluding art, morality, 
mysticism, etc. because of a metaphysical _assumption_ and "there is no 
empirical evidence for this assumption at all.  It is just an assumption."  
Pirsig, after dissolving the distinction between metaphysics and the 
empirical, reintroduces that distinction.  It is _just_ an assumption.

We have to ask, then, is Pirsig's metaphysics _more_ empirical?  Pirsig says 
it is.  But how?  Pirsig made a distinction between metaphysical reasons and 
empirical reasons.  Presumably Pirsig's metaphysics contains some 
metaphysical reasons, and these reasons would _just_ be assumptions.  Or if 
the difference is between metaphysics based on evidence and metaphysics not 
so based, how can we tell a good metaphysical reason based on evidence from 
a bad metaphysical assumption not so based?  Especially if Pirsig's 
Copernican revolution was a metaphysical change in assumptions?  Was 
Pirsig's switch from S/O to Q based on empirical evidence?  What evidence?  
That values are, in fact, real?  How would SOMists have missed such an 
obvious fact?  Can a metaphysics really blind us to obvious facts?  Or is it 
the case that a metaphysics will shape what the facts are?  And so SOMists 
missed it because it isn't, for them, a fact.  And Pirsig's revolution was a 
whole change in thinking about the facts so that we could make our way about 
the world better, by being able to acknowledge the reality of values (and 
all the attendent good changes in behavior that would bring).

What I'm getting at is that Pirsig faces the same problem with "empiricism" 
that the logical positivists faced.  The logical positivists' "verifiability 
criterion" claimed that for something to be real, it had to be empirically 
verifiable.  Postivism began to fall apart in the 50s when philosophers 
began to ask if the verifiability criterion was itself verifiable.  
Positivism, they said, claimed to have excoriated all metaphysics, but this 
here looks like pure metaphysics.  This is the sentiment that Pirsig is 
playing off of, this is the real life history of logical positivism that 
Pirsig is alluding to.  And Pirsig _attacks_ the postivists because they're 
doing metaphysics, when they claimed they weren't.  But _why_ would Pirsig 
attack the positivists for doing metaphysics when _Pirsig_ thinks that we 
can't help but _do_ metaphysics?  Why not then acknowledge the metaphysics 
of the postivists and deal with it?

_And_, more importantly, how does Pirsig answer the question: how is the 
verifiability criterion verified?  He takes it on, so how does he answer the 
questions?

The answer that turned the postivists on their ear was Rudolf Carnap's.  
Carnap was one of the big boys, one of _the_ logical postivists from the 
Vienna Circle (who'd probably been at the roundtable in Austria when 
Wittgenstein suggested offhandedly the principle of verification).  Carnap 
suggested that we shouldn't ask if the principle of verification is 
verifiable because it isn't in the right category for that.  He suggested 
that the principle was _pragmatically_ justified, that the success of using 
it produced the reasons for using it.

_This_, in fact, would be Pirsig's answer.  What Pirsig doesn't see is that 
the story of the logical positivists' principle of verification doesn't end 
there.  It doesn't just stop with Carnap's proposal.  It continues on to 
Quine and Davidson and others who then suggested that the pragmatism that 
Carnap invokes eats away other positivist distinctions, such as that between 
theoretical and empirical.

And what is Pirsig's distinction between metaphysical reasons and empirical 
reasons other than a distinction between theoretical and empirical?  And how 
does that not get eaten away by the pragmatism that Pirsig will invoke, the 
pragmatism that gives us the equation values=reality=experience, the 
pragmatism that makes metaphysics as empirical as anything else, thus 
disbarring a metaphysical/empirical distinction?

In other words, just as Pirsig had a problem with the word "just" in "its 
just whatever you like" in ZMM, I have problems with the word "just" in "its 
just an assumption."  Pirsig isn't allowed that "just."  If the positivists 
are _just_ using an assumption, then so is Pirsig.  Both of their respective 
defenses are going to be pragmatic defenses.  So Pirsig should ditch the bad 
arguments, which don't help, and stick to describing the kind of world we'd 
live in should we follow Pirsig's assumptions rather than the logical 
positivists'.

Matt

_________________________________________________________________
Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! 
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/