From: Paul Turner (paul@turnerbc.co.uk)
Date: Tue Jan 11 2005 - 10:18:24 GMT
Matt
Matt said:
As Sam said, this all revolves around the notion of "pure experience."
"Pure experience," or "unmediated experience," is unintelligible without
its
counterpart "unpure experience," or "mediated experience." The
distinction
between unmediated and mediated experience is Pirsig's distinction
between
Dynamic and static Quality and it is also the distinction that has
traditionally been used to describe the appearance/reality distinction.
Paul:
I said in the last (very long) post that I thought this was, in the case
of Kant, incorrect. Just in case you were in any doubt as to what I
meant, I think it is incorrect to say that Kant equated reality with
unmediated, or pure, experience. Experience, to Kant, was entirely of
and within the phenomenal realm. There was no experience whatsoever of
the noumenal realm, by definition. It was the realm of things as they
are independent of experience. It was neither unmediated nor pure
experience; it was not experience in any definition of the term. In
other words, reality, to Kant, was not something we experience.
Pirsig, on the other hand, equates reality with experience. Thus, in
Pirsig's scheme, there is no noumenal realm, and insofar as it is the
delineation of its counterpart, there is no phenomenal realm either.
There is no distinction. This is a fundamental difference which you
cannot gloss over with any amount of hypothetical absorption of ideas
from a conceptual milieu.
Another point I wish to make is that I fail to see why setting forth an
epistemological proposition necessitates the ad infinitum answering of
the skeptic. You lay down your principles and that's that. If the
skeptic fails to find a satisfactory answer in your principles there is
no Transcendental Court of Acceptable Philosophy waiting to dismiss your
theory. Who is this skeptic? Why should we worry about her?
Finally, as I understand it, the MOQ epistemology is simple. Truth is
defined as a set of high quality intellectual patterns. What is a high
quality intellectual pattern? Generally speaking, it is a theory which
displays logical coherence, brevity, parsimony, breadth of explanation
and/or precision of prediction. The MOQ epistemology rejects the
correspondence theory of truth because it rejects the metaphysical
assumption that there is something objective to correspond to.
I mentioned that the Poincaré section in ZMM proposed something about an
MOQ epistemology. I've copied it here for ease of reference.
"Poincaré had been working on a puzzle of his own. His judgment that the
scientist selects facts, hypotheses and axioms on the basis of harmony,
also left the rough serrated edge of a puzzle incomplete. To leave the
impression in the scientific world that the source of all scientific
reality is merely a subjective, capricious harmony is to solve problems
of epistemology while leaving an unfinished edge at the border of
metaphysics that makes the epistemology unacceptable.
But we know from Phĉdrus' metaphysics that the harmony Poincaré talked
about is not subjective. It is the source of subjects and objects and
exists in an anterior relationship to them. It is not capricious, it is
the force that opposes capriciousness; the ordering principle of all
scientific and mathematical thought which destroys capriciousness, and
without which no scientific thought can proceed." [ZMM Ch22]
Regards
Paul
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