From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Sat Sep 27 2003 - 17:56:01 BST
Platt,
[Scott prev]> > In tracing the argumentation of the MOQ, I see the
fundamental error to
> > be one that is shared with SOM, and that is nominalism.
>
[Platt]> My dictionary defines nominalism as "a theory that there are no
> universal essences in reality and that the mind can frame no single
> concept or image corresponding to any universal or general term."
> My question: Is not Quality as Pirsig uses it a universal essence?
In the nominalist/universalist debate, the word "universal" is used in its
logical sense: an essence common to all members of a class. So the concept
referred to by the word "lion" is the essence of lions. It is this that the
nominalist claims has no ontological status, that there isn't an essence of
lion separate and distinct from this lion and that lion.
In practice, nominalism shows up when people (like Pirsig) say that words
are "mere words", that the subject/object scheme of things is "just" an
abstraction we make from experience, that the intellectual level arose
*from* the social level as a way to improve our survival and so on. Of
course, the main evidence of Pirsig's nominalism is placing the intellect,
and thinking -- including, I would presume, wordless thinking -- as a static
level.
> Another question: Isn't it true that we can frame no single concept or
> image corresponding to Quality? If the answers are 'Yes,' then it seems
> the MOQ is non-nominalism.
What the MOQ looks like to me is a nominalism to which God (by the name of
Quality) has been added, much as a theist (like William of Ockham) adds an
extra factor to "explain" where the universe comes from and keeps it moving
and changing. So yes, in the MOQ Quality is undefinable. That doesn't make
the treatment of intellect in the MOQ non-nominalist.
[Platt]> Does not the MOQ say that what we first experience, regardless
> of the object perceived, is value? I think of value as the spirit
> "behind" all perceptions of particulars. For me, that's non-nominalism.
That's what the MOQ says. I disagree with it. For me, value only exists as a
relation between a something that is valued (good or bad) by something else.
So, to be sure, value is not in the subject or in the object, as Pirsig
correctly says, but that should not give him license to say that it exists
prior to the split into subject and object and causes that split. It exists
as a relation along with the perceiving (or knowing).
What I would object to in saying "I think of value as the spirit "behind"
all perceptions of particulars" is that it loses what will be different
behing different particulars. There is value there, to be sure, but also
concept.
[Platt:]> In the MOQ, experience is never experience of particulars, but
pure
> value. Value itself is experience. It is an essence. Thoughts, the
> particulars and the patterning, come after the value.
Your last sentence, "Thoughts, the particulars and the patterning, come
after the value." is, to my ears, pure nominalism, and since similar
sentences show up all through Lila is why I call Pirsig a nominalist.
[Scott prev:]> > For
> > the non-nominalist, a particular, like a word, stands for the concept.
> > Without the concept there can be no particular, for without a concept (a
> > system, a pattern, a language in a more general sense than English) the
> > particular cannot be picked out of chaos.
>
[Platt:]> In the MOQ, particulars are picked out of Quality and become
static
> patterns of value. (Quality is not "chaos.").
(a) What picks the particular out? (b)How does the particular become static
patterns of value? The MOQ cannot answer these. My answers: (a) a particular
is picked out because it fits into a conceptual pattern. (b) it doesn't
become a static pattern. The static pattern exists prior, and the particular
is a symbol of it.
>
> > The nominalist, especially after the nineteenth century, would have us
> > believe that concepts got tacked on to a world of particulars, a world
> > that had no concepts, for the simple reason that there is physical
> > evidence of a world without humans prior to a world with humans, and
> > that concepts happen in human brains. If this were the case, then we
> > also should not talk of patterns of experience before there were
> > physical humans. The non-nominalist view is that what we call laws of
> > nature, and instinct, are concepts, not just in our thinking about them,
> > but as they are actually lived by inorganic and biological beings.
> > Concepts, then, existed before humans walked in the world, and human
> > learning is the recovery of those concepts.
>
> Pirsig would agree. The role of DQ in evolution, long before humans
> walked the planet, is clearly spelled out in LILA. We are learning,
> through Pirsig, to recover the concept of Quality.
I see DQ as being too formless to be able to say it governs evolution. I
would prefer to say that thinking governs evolution.
>
> > To be a pattern, there has to be a change, or a
> > differentiation (feel pain...jump off stove), and in combining these
> > pieces into an entity, one has a concept. Also, to be static, it is
> > repeatable, and that too is a property of concepts, and not of
> > particulars. Hence all SP are concepts, and hence what the MOQ calls the
> > intellectual level is actually all levels.
>
> To be a pattern there has to be value first, then afterwards come the
> concepts. I think you're putting the cart before the horse.
Again, I see your explanation as nominalist, mine non-nominalist. It is that
choice that determines which is the cart and which the horse.
And yes,
> all static patterns are concepts, but it doesn't follow that the
> intellectual is all levels. The Bible is a static pattern of concepts,
> but that doesn't mean it's all intellectual. Symbols--the content of
> the intellectual level--point to experienced value and patterns of
> values but are not those values themselves. You can't satisfy your
> hunger with a menu.
While I say that everything is a symbol. The menu/reality distinction is a
clear sign of Pirsig's nominalism. This does not mean that I think all
concepts are "true". Some are creations that are going nowhere.
>
> > Because we have to revise these as
> > new particulars come into view, we assume that we are trying to
> > correspond to some independently existing reality. But this is also a
> > nominalist assumption.
>
> Then Pirsig is a non-nominalist. He doesn't assume an independently
> existing reality although for some purposes he sees it has high quality
> intellectual value.
Then why the menu/reality distinction?
>
> > Like Pirsig said
> > about SOM, I see the nominalist barrier to be a "cultural immune
> > system", even stronger than that of SOM, since it caught Pirsig as well.
>
> I think I've presented sufficient evidence to show that nomialism did
> NOT catch Pirsig as you suggest.
Then why does he classify thinking as a static pattern of value?
>
> > Note to Platt:
> >
> > First, I agree about the existence of wordless thinking. However, I see
> > that as something that fits into a non-nominalist metaphysics much
> > better than the MOQ. It is where one sees concepts being born in human
> > intellect (whether they are completely new, or just being discovered, I
> > won't get into). It is pure thinking, or on its way there, a concept
> > central to Steiner and Kuhlewind.
>
> I think wordless thinking--or shall we say "intuition" -- fits very
> well into the MOQ. We might say that wordless thinking gets you off a
> hot stove before word-thinking comes into play..
We might say that, but I disagree. In fact, the whole hot stove example does
not make sense to me. Here it is (ch. 9):
"When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality
situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think,
"This stove is hot", and then make a rational decision to get off. A "dim
perception of he knows not what" gets him off Dynamically. Later he
generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation."
He seems to be ignoring his own warning about confusing the MOQ meaning of
"dynamic" and "static" with the way the words are used in physics. There is
nothing Dynamic, in the MOQ sense, in jumping off the stove. Instead, it is
the body following the static biological pattern, called a reflex. In fact,
the only way the Dynamic could come into play in this situation is if
someone highly disciplined in mindfulness is so focused on the here and now
that he could block the reflex and stay on the stove. So (in the next
paragraph) where Prisig guesses that the mystic will get off sooner than the
subject-object scientist, I think he has it backwards. In practice, of
course, they will get off at the same time, since they will both obey the
reflex, but it is the mystic who has the possibility of choosing to get off.
Pirsig's use of this example, it seems to me, is to make a nominalist point:
that "pure experience" (the particular) is the really real, and our concepts
about it are derivative.
> > On Pirsig's objections to SOLAQI, that there are non-S/O examples of
> > intellect, I responded to that at length to DMB a week or so ago. In
> > brief, the objections are valid if one adopts Pirsig's restriction of
> > "object" to the inorganic and biological levels, but I consider that
> > restriction to do more harm than good. Rather, I would say that Bo is
> > correct to see the value in thinking to lie in the distinction between
> > subjective and objective. Further, though it starts with objective as
> > the sensorily perceived, one of the advances thinking makes is to learn
> > to treat social and intellectual SQ (to revert to MOQ) as objects as
> > well.
>
> We can treat non-nominalist essentialist concepts as objects just as
> well as we can social and intellectual patterns.
> It depends on one's
> view point, doesn't it? I can view my thoughts as objects while you can
> view my thoughts as the subjective wanderings of a madman.
Not in the MOQ. In the MOQ, a thought is an intellectual static pattern, and
therefore not an object (the word "object" has been limited to inorganic
and biological static patterns).
In the
> postmodernist Rorty/Fish view, all truth is subjective, ie. that which
> one can get away with -- except their own truth, of course, which is
> solidly, historically objective.
Here I agree with Matt. How does the MOQ (or any metaphysics) make truth
objective? Only by assuming that its assumptions are objective truth. By
what criteria does one assume those assumptions, or allow one to distinguish
objective from subjective truth?
Rorty wants to get rid of the idea that there is objective truth beyond
just plain truth. When you accuse him of thereby stating an objective truth
you are trying to force him into your language game (in which the phrase
"objective truth" has value) that he no longer wishes to play in. In his
language game, by the way, the phrase "all truth is subjective" also has no
value.
- Scott
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Sep 27 2003 - 17:58:07 BST