From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 02 2003 - 05:16:03 BST
Sam,
Sam said:
Yet what I'm wanting to pin you down on is how you characterise 'some
explanations deal with our causal impressions better than others'. In other
words, you still have a reference point for the theory, whether you call
that Reality or not.
...
I just want to know how to unpack the 'higher quality' that ... you would
agree is a part of the shift.
Matt:
The reference point for the theory is history. The lights by which we
determine which model is of higher quality is our own lights, the lights of
the investigative community. For instance, one of the things historians of
science try and pin down is why the Ancient Greeks didn't fall in with
Aristarchus when he proposed an heliocentric model. The answer they come
up with is that, by Greek lights, it just didn't have the explanatory power
that Aristotle's geocentric model did. The lights the Greeks were using
were the imbedded background assumptions against which theories take on
meaning. As those background assumptions began to change, as the
investigative communities lights began to change from Greek lights to
European Enlightenment lights, the explanatory power of each model began to
shift, the meaning of each theory began to take on new contours. So, when
Wittgenstein says, "What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not
the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view," I say
that it might not even be the case that they offered a _new_ point of view,
it may simply be that they offered a point of view that was previously
infertile, but is now (to mix my metaphors) ripe for the picking.
As for unpacking "higher quality," I won't do it outside of what I just
said. The reason why is because I take the point of doing epistemology to
be unpacking what "higher quality" is _no matter whose lights you are
using_. MoQian epistemology would be offering a general theory of "higher
quality." The MoQ, fortunately, is inherently antagonistic to such an
effort because DQ, i.e. "higher quality," is undefined. I take this to be
one of the good parts of Pirsig's Lila writings. We can't actually say
before hand what "higher quality" is, we only know it when we see it, and
we see it with our current lights, our current static patterns.
Matt
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