Pirsig emphasizes the importance of our choice of terms and our facility in interrelating them, formulating the operation as the use of a "knife" which slices up and connects our experiences of the world.
This knife is "an intellectual scalpel so swift and so sharp you sometimes don't see it moving. You get the illusion that all these parts are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently and organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves" (Pirsig 72).
One of Pirsig's tasks, as Chautauqua orator, is to reveal which terms are fundamental in shaping our way of seeing, disclosing their interrelationships, and then demonstrating that they may be interrelated in another manner. By becoming aware of how our commonplaces have led us into our crisis of Reason, we may begin to see their limitations; and, by altering the places, we may potentially disclose a new way of perceiving and functioning in the crisis.