LS Re: The four levels


Diana McPartlin (diana@asiantravel.com)
Thu, 9 Oct 1997 03:32:53 +0100


Hettinger wrote:

> > And, fur coats in certain circles are an indicator of high social status, would you
> > consider this to be a social pattern of value?
>
> The status-recognition is a social pattern of value, but only to the extent that it is
> unconscious imitation.
>
> If the wearer has heard from someone else that wearing a certain coat is "cool", and
> makes a deliberate decision to wear that particular coat to enhance his social status,
> then he is using an intellectual pattern of value, one that gives him more control over
> social patterns.
>
> The wearer might also have a DQ inspiration of the rightness of this coat, which
> allows him to evaluate and choose between different social patterns.
>
> Once that decision has been made, the person may have changed his own internal set of
> valued social patterns, and the putting on of that coat may be following a social
> pattern of value again, ie. a habit, an unconscious action, unchallenged until a new
> situation forces or allows re-evaluation.

Your explanation of the situation is far more elegant than mine. But we seem to be on the
same track. I don't mean to argue with you about precisely how the values interact in the
phenomenon of a person wearing a coat. All the values come into play in different ways and
we could be here for weeks trying to analyse the exact situation. I also agree that social
patterns can influence our perception of taste - that would explain why people from
different cultures prefer different types of food.

The main thing is to establish that this is the way that the whole thing works: Any object
can be explained in MoQ terms as a convergence of patterns of any or all of the types of
value.

I'm still not clear about Bodvar's objections to this. (Bo are you listening?)
We can only actually experience the biological value of wearing a coat (ie the warmth)
biologically. But from an intellectual standpoint we can still see that it's there.

>
> The word "evaluation" is tricky here. It comes closer than any other non-MoQ term to
> describing human participation in the DQ event, but I think that "evaluation" is most
> commonly used to describe an intellectual quality event. There may be a social quality
> event that is also included under the term "evaluation". Three different processes,
> hard to distinguish. According to MoQ, they should have predictably different results.
>
> These differences could be important. If I live long enough, I'd like to catalog
> them.

As I see it, we "evaluate" social quality and all the values through our sense of value. At
the biological and social levels and possibly even at the intellectual level it's not a
rational process. Rather it's a process of trying to sense which of two things is the most
dynamic. Evaluation seems like a good word to use at any level because it stems from the
word 'value' - even if that isn't how it's commonly used. One of the definitions my
dictionary gives of 'evaluation' is "to determine the quality of", which describes the MoQ
process of evaluation perfectly. Is this what you're getting at Maggie?

Diana

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