peter@pzw1.resnet.cornell.edu
Thu, 19 Feb 1998 06:45:26 +0100
Hey guys and gals...
On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Magnus Berg wrote:
> The day my interest in philosophy is dependent on budget, I hope I have
> the sense to quit. Another thing, budget is social SPoV. Science,
> including philosophy, is intellectual SPoV. So, according to MoQ, it
> is immoral for budget to inhibit science. Of course I realize that much
> of science today is dependent on budget, it is nevertheless immoral.
this is actually something i've been wondering about: is it really always
immoral for a pattern of value on the lower order/level to inhibit the
behaviors of a pattern of value on a higher level? isn't the whole
proposal-budget way of doing science merely a social static-latch that
keeps scientists from going haywire Dynamically and losing pre-established
Static Quality?
> Philosophers don't dare to get emotionally involved because then,
> their so called "objectiveness" gets polluted by their personal
> likes and dislikes, what we call value. And value is something
> that is totally forbidden in all "objective" science.
actually, Value is all that ever matters in science. the problem is that
if you are trying to study inorganic patterns of Value, and you have all
this interference from social and intellectual patterns of value, it's
hard to isolate the inorganic pattern. (of course this begs the question,
"just why do why think we can isolate anything at all?" but that is
another whole can of beans altogether.)
you can also look at it this way: what is "objectivity"? when a physicist
is objective, he/she looks at the inorganic, and only the inorganic, and
tries to find a description of its behavior independent of the
cultural/social and intellectual (and biological) patterns of value. when
a social scientist is being "objective", he/she looks at social patterns
of value and keeps in mind the influences from biological and inorganic
patterns (e.g. considerations of birth rates (biological) and
local geography/environment (inorganic) when investigating the tribal
rituals of a small primitive culture).
but what about people studying the intellectual level? psychiatrists know
they must take into account a person's social patterns (family, childhood,
etc.) and biological patterns (chemical inbalances) in order to understand
or experiment on intellectual patterns. why are psychologists so eager to
get a good cross-section of all sorts of people to do their little tests?
because they want to find data and effects that are independent of social
and biological factors, and are purely intellectual patterns.
so in a sense, "objectivity" is not an evil Subject-Object Metaphysics
construct at all, but can be understood - and used - in the MoQ. in fact,
it MUST be used in the MoQ, if we are to really understand anything. the
Subject-Object Metaphysics has, in a sense, perverted the word to mean
ONLY the minimization of social (and, to a degree, intellectual) patterns
of value in "science", which is ostensibly a study of the inorganic and
biological. the problem arises when people like philosophers and
psychologists and anthropologists try to filter out the wrong patterns of
value in order to "objectify" their data.
i guess a suitable analogy would be with circuits. if you want to
investigate behavior at lower frequencies, then it makes sense to filter
out high frequency "noise". but if you want to study high frequency
responses of the circuit, well, it makes no sense to put in a high
frequency noise filter. so the "evil" lies not with the act of filtering
noise, just with using the wrong kind of noise filter.
however, lots of philosophers probably are trapped in the church of reason
and try to be objective in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons. i'm just
defending the virtue of the meta-philosophical ideal of "objectivity".
> No pun intended, but sometimes I'm beginning to doubt if you
> really read ZMM and Lila. All I said above is there, but much
> clearer than my ramblings. But if you're also trapped in the
> church of reason, I can understand your reasoning. There's no
> way to fit the MoQ within the church of reason.
actually i have very little doubt that donny has read ZMM and Lila.
he has perhaps read it with greater skepticism, which should be applauded
by all of us as more a virtue than a sin. :)
> > But "objective" means "brute fact." Objective-subjective are types
> > of truth not types of things. So, I don't say Pirsig wants to make
> > Quality a (known)object or a Body. I'm saying he wants to give it the
> > truth status of a brute fact. He himself says that this is how it all got
> > started -- How do you assign grades in a rhetoric class? Is it
> > subjective? Dosn't he clearly react against that? Dosn't he out-right say
> > he wants Quality to be absolute?
>
> No again, he said that it was neither subjective nor objective. He avoided
> both horns of his faculty's dilemma by saying that subjective and objective
> are both derived from Quality, *NOT* that Quality was objective!
> The church of reason says that if a truth is not objective, it is subjective.
> That's what SOM is all about. All philosophies in the SOM bag defines one
> and only one truth based on a certain mix of objectivity and subjectivity.
hmm... to perhaps more clearly define the issue here:
Donny said: "But 'objective' means 'brute fact.' Objective-subjective are
types of truth not types of things. So, I don't say Pirsig wants to make
Quality a (known)object or a Body. I'm saying he wants to give it the
truth status of a brute fact. "
Magnus said: "He avoided both horns of his faculty's dilemma by saying
that subjective and objective are both derived from Quality, *NOT* that
Quality was objective!"
i think the issue here is that donny is saying pirsig wants to make
Quality have the "truth status" that "brute fact" has in the
Subject-Object metaphysics, and magnus is turned off by the idea because
"brute fact" is synonymous with "objectivity" in the Subject-Object
Metaphysics. no one is saying that pirsig asserted Quality is objective,
just that he thinks - as, presumably, do we all - that Quality is as real
and as "true" as any "objective" thing in the Subject-Object Metaphysics.
> And about the "brute fact" part. History, relativity and most of all,
> quantum mechanics should be enough to show that there's no such truth
> as a "brute fact" truth. Pirsig snapped *out* of that hypnosis, not into
> another.
hmm... "there's no such truth as a 'brute fact' truth"? what does that
mean? i can somewhat understand the history part, but i'm not so sure i
know what you mean about Relativity and Quantum Mechanics...
Peter
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