Courses:

Keep going. Prepare for some rough passages through here! Hard problems will be raised; tough questions will be asked; go slow, but keep going!
a) What is a motorcycle?
b) What is a system?
c) What is the scientific method?
d) At the start of this section of the book the Chautauqua picks up on some earlier remarks about "the machine" and proceeds through a component systems analysis (what is that?) and a discussion of the scientific method. This leads back into the history of the development of scientific ideas. The section ends with a passage in which Pirsig has his narrator recall an episode from Phaedrus' past in which we find his former persona (and alter ego, the youthful university instructor he would have us believe he once was) pondering a puzzling remark that has just been made to him by a senior academic colleague. This leads him to put the question to his students and leads us directly to our own confrontation with the book's ultimate question: "What the hell is Quality? What is it?"

The answer that Pirsig puts in the words of his narrator and alter ego - is the very same one that Plato caused to come out of the mouth of the fabled Socrates - namely that truth and beauty are human social constructs; and that we recognize "quality" through an cognitively unknowable, inscrutable, unconscious and indescribable affect-laden mental/behavioral process of evaluation. The compellingness of the validity (psychological reality) of this process is comparable to that of Descartes' "cogito ergo sum."

In sum, the psychological reality of the fact of our affective experience is unquestionable. Accordingly, the importance of (e.g. "values") deserves to be acknowledged and inquired into -- notwithstanding its ultimately incomprehensible and indescribable character. Of course, it is precisely within the limits imposed by this affective process that we are able to rely upon ourselves in endeavoring to comprehend the world and its contents including ourselves. And it is thus the process of comprehension itself that we are aiming to explore in this class in a scientifically credible, pedagogically sound and educationally effective way.

Keep these concepts and pertinent questions that they raise (and your answers to them) "in mind" as you prepare to participate in and reflect upon the upcoming MFA Field Trip.

Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

It was our former MIT colleague, the late Thomas S. Kuhn who is generally credited with first using the word "paradigm" (from an Ancient Greek word meaning bothpattern and exemplar) to denote a core set of beliefs, values and practices prevailing within scientific communities at particular points in their organization and development. This core set is conceptually and materially composite, mentally and behaviorally compound, and neurobiologically, psychologically and socioculturally complex, and all the members of a scientific community are perforce expected to subscribe to it.

Both an historian and a philosopher of science, Kuhn saw the scientific enterprise as a process evolving through successive cycles in which experiments/observations predicated on those core beliefs, values and practices begin to generate findings that simply do not fit within the prevailing conceptual and material framework (paradigm). This disparity leads, in turn to a moment or period of "crisis" in which the anomalies come to be taken seriously and participants cast about for an alternative to the prevailing framework.

This is not uncommonly a bitterly contested process. For our purposes, however, an important point to consider is whether and in which respects scientific paradigms (which are themselves human social products) exhibit cognitive, affective and expressive modes of organization and development having their counterparts in the organization and development of other human systems at neurobiological, psychological and sociocultural levels. By now it should not surprise you to learn that the answer to be arrived at generally is affirmative.

C. P. Snow on "the two cultures"

Almost two decades before Pirsig's book appeared (1974) the British scientist and academic administrator, C. P. Snow famously introduced an obvious precursor and counterpart to Pirsig's "classical" and "romantic" perspectives. The notion that the paradigm prevailing in our own society, in its education system and its intellectual life, is seriously flawed is demonstrated, according to Snow, by the associated splitting and fragmentation of experience, sensibilities, paradigms and cultures. Plainly Pirsig's opposed "classical" and "romantic" perspectives thus owe a debt to Snow's view of the split between the arts or humanities on one hand, and the sciences on the other. And the public debate is still raging in the media (and to some extent in the academy) today.

For those of you who wish to pursue the matter further, please be advised that there is a recent reissue of Snow's "The Two Cultures" and a successor piece, "A Second Look" (in which Snow responded to the controversy four years later). The introduction by Stefan Collini, does a good job of charting the history and context of the debate, its implications and its afterlife. The importance of science and technology in policy run largely by non-scientists, the future for education and research, and the problem of fragmentation threatening hopes for a common culture are just some of the subjects discussed. 'Probably the most important statement on the role of science in society yet available.' - Discovery; 'One cannot fail to take Snow seriously or to recognise his commitment to the cause of peace, intelligent action and human betterment.' Scientific American; 'Obvious authority and moral intelligence.' The New Yorker 'Effective because of its obvious generosity of mind and basic sanity.' The Sunday Times.