[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[david buchanan]

Friday morning, Steve said:


... to follow DMB in his Jamesian "true for you false for me" relativistic notion of truth where beliefs are made true by verifying them is not what anyone but Jamesians and post-modernists normally mean by "true."


Later that same Friday, Steve said:

Ah, here we go. Part of you still thinks we can have and also need a foundation to "rest on."


dmb says:

So, which is it? Am I a relativist or a foundationalist? 

Neither, actually.

Because truth is provisional, plural, historical, contextual and constructed, it cannot rightly be considered a form of foundationalism. BUT, because truth is empirically based and defined as that which functions within the ongoing process of experience, it cannot rightly be considered a form of relativism either. 



Also, I find it wildly incoherent to insist on the traditional meaning of the word "truth" because that is exactly what Rorty says we can not have. You insist on retaining a failed concept of truth and then insist we can only have "warranted assertability" or practices of social justification.



By defining the issue in terms of what we cannot have, you're trying to understand pragmatic truth in terms of the "truth" that has failed and the "truth" that it opposes. 



The other day you said that radical empiricism might give me something extra in terms of metaphysics but as a theory of truth, you said, it adds nothing. But, you see, the pragmatic theory of truth can only be understood properly when you understand underlying metaphysical shift. It's not that the radical empiricist has given up on trying to get a proper correspondence between objective reality and our ideas. It goes way past that. It says objective reality IS one of our ideas. It's a ghost and so is the subjective self. The MOQ and James both say our experience is not OF reality. It simply IS reality. 


  


 
 
 		 	   		  
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