Hi Ian,
I agree with your point.  We must be careful not to project our
(perhaps previous) veiw to the population at large.  Most people
intuitively understand what concepts are.  Once one enters into the
halls of philosophy one can get lost in the representations of
concepts.  It is for the philosopher to imbue his "understanding" with
some common sense.  Otherwise the lay person can rightfully say that
such philosopher has lost touch with reality and exists in a
conceptual world of his own making.  This has happened to many
philosophers.  I do not believe that James or Pirsig belong to this
group, but many many others do.  This gives philosophy a bad
reputation.  It makes philosophy only comprehensible to those that are
similarly bewitched.

It would appear that dmb has come around to understanding pure
experience, and he rightly wants to express his understanding.  But
this should not be done in a way that demeans the understanding of
others, for that just seems like arrogance.  dmb still has a lot to
learn about this, but he is young and arrogant, which is not a bad
place to be since that begets important writing on subjects.  In time
one can join the group of collaborative philosophers.  One has to
accept that others know more about certain things than oneself.  Only
if this is done can one really learn from this forum.  Else wise this
forum simply becomes a stadium with megaphones and dictates.

A little understanding when professed as wisdom can seem like arrogant
ignorance.
Regards,
Mark

On 2/21/12, Ian Glendinning <ian.glendinning@gmai...> wrote:
> Hi DMB,
> You said:
> " I take Pirsig’s pre-intellectual experience (a.k.a. Quality or
> Dynamic Quality) to be more or less equivalent to James’s pure
> experience."
>
> I completely agree.
>
> You then said:
> "The most common objection is to simply to deny that there is any such
> thing as pure experience.  “All awareness is a linguistic affair” or
> “it’s text all the way down”. Even our basic sensory perceptions are
> structured by concepts or categories of thought we inherit from
> language. etc ..."
>
> I'm not sure there is such a denial, or any denial worthy of any credence.
>
> It seems to me that any denial comes from our difficulty "defining"
> that pure experience, and it's that problem which becomes suspended in
> "language all the way down". The "given" is the undefinability.
>
> Personally I have no doubt the radical, pure, pre-intellectual
> experience is real. And I have no doubt it's easily recognizable even
> in scientific materialist views of the world - Damasio's "Somatic
> Markers" for example, sensing positive and negative responses to
> stimuli, without (prior to) any symbolic or linguistic representation
> of "what" is being sensed.
>
> Ian
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