[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt, (John, some more Pierce for you at the end)

> 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."


Steve:
Having listened to Rorty a bunch on Youtube, it cool to be able to
imagine his voice saying this.



Matt:
> 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.


Steve:
That is an interesting tidbit on Rorty.

I think that saying "a true sentence was true before anybody thought
it up" is an ugly way of putting it since saying so is
counterintuitive for anyone who thinks that sentences don't have lives
of their own independent of human beings first thinking of them.
Someone could take it as a metaphysical assertion about sentences
rather than a semantic notion about how the word true is used in
sentences. But if we focus on not the truth of the sentence but
instead on what it means to believe that the sentence is true in terms
of ability to satisfy desires I think that it is not so
counterintuitive. With regard to Newton's Laws before there were any
humans around at all, I suppose the truth question involves imagining
the possibility of time travel. I think when we imagine what was going
on in terms of physics or geology or whatever before there were any
people, what we are doing isn't imagining sentences floating around in
space free of ourselves but imagining oureselves floating around in
space to believe and disbelieve the sentences. Does that make sense?

I suppose part of what James was doing was avoiding the odd
metaphysical assertion about sentences having lives of their own by
conflating justified belief and truth. At first I suppose he thought
he was just following Pierce who had said that talk about truth is
talk about belief and doubt. Truth is not the object of inquiry for
Pierce. The object of inquiry is getting rid of doubts and settling on
belief. It goes without saying that what one holds as justified and
can find no reason to doubt is held as true, and the question of
whether or not a belief in question actually IS true is exhusted by
such consideration of doubts.

James took this conclusion to mean that there is no practical
difference between what actually is true and what is merely held to be
true, so he dropped the distinction between truth and justification.
James answered the question "what is truth?" as though the question
had been "how can we know what assertions are true?" he was right in
following Pierce to say that the second question is our only practical
concern, but wrong to think that the two questions are not still
different questions. He was right to think "what is truth?" is a bad
question, and wrong to think that he had answered it nevertheless when
he answered the question "how can we know which assertions are true?"
The pragmatic answer to his question is that the only route to truth
is justification, but how are the two "bridged," as you say? That is
where all the controversy between pragmatists begins, doesn't it?

At first it seems that Pierce was content not to connect truth and
justification since truth is never the real object of inquiry. Then
James jumped on Pierce's ideas and concluded that truth ought to be
simply reduced to justification. Justification is the bridge.For
James, verification is what MAKES a belief true.

Pierce didn't like that answer at all (since many of our justified
beliefs are not true) and tried fairly unsuccessfully to formulate a
theory of truth consistent with his own pragmatic descriptions of
belief, doubt, and inquiry. But his descriptions has already made a
definition of truth unnecessary for inquiry beyond saying as Rorty did
that "to say that a belief is, as far as we know, true, is to say that
no other habit of action is, as far as we know, a better habit of
action." This sentence says how the word "true" is used. For a
pragmatist, to say how a word is used is what it is to say what a word
means. There is nothing more to the meaning of the word than the
pattern of usage of a word, and there is nothing more to believing an
assertion than the pattern of behaviors associated with believing it.
Instead of trying to bridge justification and truth, Pierce would have
done well to stick with his description of truth he ended with in
Fixation: "truth...is distinguished from falsehood simply by this,
that if acted on it should, on full consideration, carry us to the
point we aim at and not astray..." No more is needed to be able to say
that truth is something we ought to want and that truth and
justification have a needed connection. The sort of connection between
truth and justification where beliefs justified in a certain way will
always be true does not seem possible, yet we've done pretty well
without such a bridge. Pierce had already argued that scientific
fallibilism is the best method we have ever come up with and has done
very well for us. He should have recognized that his further attempts
to clarify the meaning of truth where not going to help us have more
true beliefs.

What do you make of this part of Pierce's Fixation of Belief?
"If your terms "truth" and "falsity" are taken in such senses as to be
definable in terms of doubt and belief and the course of experience
(as for example they would be, if you were to define the "truth" as
that to a belief in which belief would tend if it were to tend
indefinitely toward absolute fixity), well and good: in that case, you
are only talking about doubt and belief. But if by truth and falsity
you mean something not definable in terms of doubt and belief in any
way, then you are talking of entities of whose existence you can know
nothing, and which Ockham’s razor would clean shave off. Your problems
would he greatly simplified, if, instead of saying that you want to
know the "Truth," you were simply to say that you want to attain a
state of belief unassailable by doubt. "

Best,
Steve