[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,


> 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.


Steve:
All you've done is call Rorty a coward (or just not audacious enough).
Everyone has already granted along with Pirsig that the Law of Gravity
did not always exist and was never written into the fabric of the
cosmos just waiting for for Newton to come along and reveal it. Matt
and I (and Rorty and Brandom apparently) were discussing a different
question: whether it is nevertheless reasonable to think of the Law of
Gravity as having been true at some time before it existed. As Pirsig
was saying, we all believe in ghosts. I don't think he was exempting
himself there. The question is to what extent this Law of Gravity is
generally thought of as having some sort of life like a ghost without
even existing and how reasonable it is to think so. Is it not
reasonable to think that the behavior of physical bodies COULD have
been predicted according to Newton's thought before Newton or anyone
else came around? In such terms such a ghost is just hypothetical.
Nothing to be afraid of. What is scary to me is the fact that you
can't even say that slavery was wrong before anyone figured out that
it was. Since the assertion "slavery is wrong" did not exist, the evil
of slavery was just a ghost?

Best,
Steve