[Ian]
Hi Arlo - for a while, a few months ago, I thought we'd fallen out ;-)

[Arlo]
? Not that I was aware.

[Ian]
I obviously appreciate (and have said several times) that professional philosophers "may" need to communicate with each other with their preferred nuanced terms, to make progress in academe.

[Arlo]
Not sure if it's just progress in the academy that gains from articulating coherent terms, I'd say its more or less what makes communication possible. My point in looking at how "The MOQ" is defined/used by contributors here is that I think (unarticulated) differences leads to communication problems. Remember Bo's "Pirsig is a weak interpreter of The MOQ" stance? That's quite a different use/definition of "The MOQ" that has really no parallel in any philosophical dialogue I'm aware of. It translates into something like "Peirce is a weak interpreter of pragmaticism", which is also absurd. Mark, I think, has a similar definitional stance evidenced in his comment about "The MOQ" being radically different tomorrow than what it is today. In any event, I think visible coherence and clarity in how one defines words can only improve all communication.

[Ian]
Fitness - in the Darwinian jargon - is much misunderstood IMHO. To my mind fitness = quality (good, bestness of fit) Best fit with the environment, where the "environment" is what is (radically-empirically) experienced. After that it's two-way causation (river and landscape) influencing and being influenced by the environment

[Arlo]
Agree. I think 'fitness' (as used) is a retrospective term, a 'past tense' if you will, that we can define as we examine a context and seek to understand what it was that enabled persistent value. For example, Pirsig describes the bonding properties of carbon as being an "evolutionary stratagem" enabling the persistent value we describe as 'fittest' in this particular context.

I like the word reversal you use to 'best fit' as I think 'fittest' implies (as perhaps you suggest) some acontextual property that exists apart from context. I think of the evolutionary change from reptile to mammal and it often seems that the 'betterness' of mammals is something objectively superior that created this change. But a few million years earlier, the climate was such that reptilian biology was the "fittest". In this case, the biology of neither reptiles nor mammals changed, but the context did.

And, yes, agree to your second point as well. Theories of 'structuration' typically have been about the mutually-constructive relations between human agency and human social practices, but I think this dynamic extends to all levels of value. There is always a mutually-enabling, mutually-constraining, mutually-evolving relationship between "river and landscape". This happens across levels too. Human social practice emerged within the constraints of human physiology, but human physiology (thinking primarily with regard to the brain here) has been transformed by human social and intellectual practices.

[Ian]
Most important it's not the subject (the experiencer) nor the object (the other, the environment, the experienced) that is most significant, but the interaction of the two the fit, the quality.

[Arlo]
Again, agree. This is the rotisserie discussion (as I see it). "The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test." (ZMM)


Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html