[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[Matt Kundert]

Steve said:
We all agree that the law of gravity didn't exist before 
Newton. ... Though the law of gravity did not exist before 
Newton, we can still say that belief in Newtonian physics 
would have been a better belief to have than what they 
had.

Matt:
Heidegger suggested that Newton's laws were neither 
true nor false before Newton dreamed them up.  Rorty said 
this about it in 2000: "I once tried to defend Heidegger's 
audacity, but my defense went over like a lead balloon.  So 
I have resigned myself to intuiting, like everybody else, that 
a true sentence was true before anybody thought it up."  
The paper's only ever been published in German (in 1987), 
and Rorty says Robert Brandom had taken a look at the 
paper, and counseled him "to leave it in the decent 
obscurity of a learned language."

Was Rorty just following the crowd?  Or did he learn, from 
Jeffery Stout's writings on morals and Davidson's on truth, 
that it just doesn't pay to be counter-intuitive in that way?  
Where is the upshot, is Steve's point, in thinking that 
Newton's laws became true?  Because now you need 
something that _makes_ it true.  Now you need a bridge 
between justification and truth, a bridge Davidson doesn't 
think we need because he says "truth" is a semantic notion, 
not an epistemic one.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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