[MF] MOQ: valuable or not?

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Marty,

Matt said:
But the only difference between "God is Love" and "Quality is undefined" is 
that the latter slogan has been used by only one person, so the context is 
easy to find, no less because this forum demands that everybody have that 
context in the back of one's head.

Marty replies:
Yes, I agree with all you've said, but my point is that this site is 
designed for the discussion of ideas, concepts, etc, and if someone throws 
out a statement like "God is Love" within that context I think it's 
perfectly reasonable to ask for a definition of what that means.  The fact 
that there are other statements, like "Quality is undefined" that also need 
explanation doesn't change the situation.

Matt:
Well, the rhetoric you were using to cloak your point was a little misguided 
then.  I mean, you're right that there probably isn't much more to this 
conversation if only because we basically agree on the only point I wanted 
to discuss: the use of the epithet "philosophically meaningless."  You've 
since seemed to drop it.  But in the original post that caught my eye you 
opposed "conversational senses" to "philosophical senses."  You said, "It 
may mean something to someone in a conversational sense, but 'God is Love' 
is very ambiguous at best; BOTH those terms have so many meanings that the 
phrase, in a philosophical sense, is meaningless."  I wanted to break down 
that distinction between a "conversational sense" and a "philosophical 
sense."  It was using _that_ distinction to make your point, that to discuss 
"God is Love" is going to need some more ink, that I thought misguided, not 
you wanting some more ink.  The only reason I would nitpick a point like 
that is because that exact distinction, between roughly a "conversational 
sense" and a "philosophical sense," is the kind of rhetoric used by 
anglophone philosophers, specifically in the past logical positivists, to 
disbar all this poetic, mystical _metaphysics_.  Pirsig thinks that's a 
little lame on their part and, this being a site dedicated to Pirsig, I 
thought it only appropriate to point out that disparity.  I applaud your 
right to ask for reasons, I would simply suggest laying off that kind of 
speech pattern to ask for it.

Matt

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