[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[david buchanan]

Matt said:
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."



dmb says:

I think Pirsig is even more audacious than Heidegger and he did not resign himself in the face of that audacity either. 

"What I'm driving at [] is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed."

"Sure"

"Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone's mind because there wasn't anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere - this law of gravity still existed?"

Now John seems not so sure.

"If that law of gravity existed, I honestly don't know what a thing has to do to be NONexistent. It seems to me that the law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is."


Shall we "intuit "the opposite "like everybody else", because defending this audacious idea of "true" doesn't go over well? Doesn't exactly win you medals for bravery, but I guess it would be easier to just go along with what you know ain't so. 

Yea, that's the ticket. 


 		 	   		  
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