From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 01 2003 - 01:31:52 BST
Sam,
Sam said:
Let me come at this from a slightly different angle. I imagine that we would
agree that our understandings can improve - that some understandings of the
world are of higher quality than others. Let us take the difference between
Copernican and Ptolemaic astronomy as the paradigm example. When the
conceptual leap from the earlier to the later conceptions was made, there
was an increase in quality of worldview.
The question is - how best to characterise this shift? Can we do it without
making reference to a concept of reality (or Reality) at all? What is the
status of the 'new' - that is, how are we to describe it epistemologically.
Matt:
As you might guess, I follow Kuhn's description of the paradigm
shift. That is to say, I wouldn't describe it epistemologically at all. I
would descibe it socio-historically. The shift from Ptolemaic to
Copernican astronomy is a community's shift from one set of explanations to
another. They don't make any reference to how reality really is at
all. They simply note some explanations deal with our causal impressions
better than others.
One thing I think I disagree on now is when Sam says, "I think that it is
important that Pirsig leaves DQ indefinable. Another way of putting that is
to say that it cannot be talked about. As soon as we start to talk about
something, it is no longer dynamic." At one time I think I subscribed to
that line, but now I think that DQ, though still undefined, can be a
metaphor, following Davidson as an indecipherable sound or marking. So, DQ
would be something that's incoherent against our "background against which
you judge true and false." Making it a static pattern means literalizing
the metaphor, incorporating it into our vocabularies.
Matt
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