Pirsig finished his first year of college at 15, and his major was chemistry, his principle field being biochemistry. Obviously he was a gifted child, undoubtedly possessing a high IQ.
Teenage years are interesting times in a person's intellectual life. If you are bright, you are capable of understanding any adult concept, and you arrive with a boundless energy and appetite for knowledge. Teenagers often have very stratified views of the world, a strong sense of right and wrong politically, and idealism about the nature of the world. All the problems and mysteries of the universe are attacked afresh by the bold ideas of the teenager at university. I know. I've been there, and I've felt it myself.
What comes along with this idealism is the notion of absolute truth, and the promise that science and philosophy are the instruments for extracting that truth. It appears Pirsig fiercely held this view in his college years, and when he realized they weren't up to his expectations, he rejected them with a vengeance that can only come from the worst kind of betrayal. And the thing that betrayed him so was the method for finding absolute truth: the scientific method.
Perhaps he was interested in chemistry in its own right, but it doesn't seem that way, because he immediately turned his attention to the method for pursuing truth, which is really outside science and belongs to philosophy. He noticed several things about the scientific method that startled him:
1. The source of hypotheses is not nature and not even man.
2. Hypotheses make themselves known through intuition.
3. The number of hypotheses you can think of to explain a
phenomena is infinite.
Of these, #3 caused him the most trouble and caused the break with science that led to his expulsion. But let's start with #1.
He's half right, in my view. Nature certainly does not suggest the hypothesis of their own inner workings. This is obvious. The chemicals don't whisper ideas to the scientist, they only provide data. Maybe this isn't obvious to a precocious teenager, but at least he got it right. His next insight, which he attributes to Einstein, is that even people don't come up with hypotheses:
Nobody who has really gone into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no theoretical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles.This quote is supposed to explain why Einstein thought people are not the source of hypotheses, but as far as I can tell, it says nothing about this.
- Einstein
Let's move on to #2. I agree that hypotheses are arrived at through intuition, particularly your first guesses, where you don't yet have a firm grasp of the phenomena. You are just grasping, but you try anything to get you started.
#3 really threw him for a loop. Based on his laboratory experience he found, to his surprise, that hypothesis making was the easiest job of science and the hypotheses never stopped coming:
As he was testing hypothesis #1 by experimental method a flood of other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, more would come to mind, until it became painfully evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It actually increased as he went along.He grew increasingly distressed by this. He said that the ability to come up with an infinite number of hypothes meant you couldn't possibly test them all, and your results would be forever inconclusive.
- Pirsig
[it] is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. [It] is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method!If this argument is true, then the folks at Xerox, for example, were extremely lucky when they came across the principles required to invent a photocopy machine, stumbling along for decades, trying out thousands, perhaps millions of hypothesis, until they hit on the right ones. Obviously this is not how science is done, but from reading these few pages in Ch. 10, you get the impression from Pirsig that hypothesis making is like spinning your wheels in a muddy bog, with no real progress possible.
- Pirsig
But this is not the case. The scientific enterprise is a lot like playing 20 questions, the game where somebody thinks of an object, and you are given no more than 20 yes/no questions to find it out. Amazingly, you can almost always do it, and the reason is that effective guesses divide the world in such a way that many things are eliminated, so that it is unnecessary and therefore foolish to make future guesses in areas that were rendered impossible by past guesses. In this way you hone in on the answer quite quickly. The same kind of thing is done in science, where the pool of available hypotheses is drastically trimmed by knowledge gained by previously tested hypotheses carefully chosen to maximize the honing process.
It's difficult to imagine how someone could make such an error and yet call himself "classically" trained. It leads me to think he means something else, and I'm missing it. Perhaps what Pirsig means (although this is by no means evident in his writing) is that while progress is made, there are always fresh new questions to be asked at every stage, and so finding absolute truths is unattainable due to the limits of scientific knowledge. It's like the child's game of "why", which bottoms out only after one or two explanations:
Why is the drop of water sticking to the side of the glass? It's not heavy enough to slide down.
Why is being heavy important? So that the gravitational forces overcome the electrostatic forces bonding the water to the glass.
But so little of the overall drop is bonded to the glass. Does that mean electrostatic forces are stronger than gravitational forces? Yes.
Why? I don't know. Ask your mother.
But endless questions are not the same as endless hypotheses, so this is not what he means.
The other thing that bothered him was that there seemed to be no permanence to scientific truths. New theories would pop up to explain old facts, and this hardly seemed like absolute truth, which you'd expect to be true forever. He concludes that "through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories, and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones."
From here he makes a bold, speculative leap:
"The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself...The cause of our social crises is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue." Then he says the whole structure of reason is no longer adequate for our modern times, and "it begins to be seen for what it really is - emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty."
- Pirsig
Wow, that's quite a stretch. With every sentence of this rant, which are separated by only a couple paragraphs, the charges get more and more horrible. Remember, the basis for all these derogatory remarks about science is that he [wrongly] thinks there's an infinite number of hypotheses to be tested for every phenomena and because science can't come up with absolute truths, finding it necessary to correct itself every so often. Near the end of the chapter he laments over the problem:
It's so big-that's why I seem to wander sometimes. No one Phaedrus talked to seemed really concerned about this phenomenon that so baffled him. They seemed to say, 'We know scientific method is valid, so why ask about it?'Indeed, the scientific method works, and the problem seems so big to him because he's talked himself into it being big. The social crisis he's referring to is simply the alienation the DeWeese's feel toward technology, mainly caused by them knowing they are so dependent on technology and having the discomfort of not knowing how any of it works. But somehow he insists on tying the problem all the way back to defects in the scientific method and expectations concerning truth, the former being bogus and the latter being unrealistic.
- Pirsig