[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[Ham Priday]

Steve, DMB, Mary, and All --


On 1 May 2010 at 11:09 AM, Matt Kundert 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."

Steve responded:
> It isn't that I don't understand what James is saying.
> I just disagree with him. As for Pirsig, I am not convinced
> that he ought to be read as subscribing to the so-called
> pragmatic theory of truth. It is one thing to subscribe to
> fallibilism--to assert that all beliefs ought to be held as
> subject to criticism and updated in light of new evidence
> and arguments--and another to not be able to say that
> people who once thought that the world is flat were wrong.
> To say that truth is provisional can mean that any belief that
> is currently held as true may turn out to be false. I'd like to
> think that that is what Pirsig means, but I could be wrong.
> Perhaps he does side with James.

DMB added:
> Like I said, this objection entails the assumption that truth
> corresponds with an objective reality, namely a planet called Earth.
> But Pirsig had already rejected that notion of truth in the opening
> chapters of ZAMM, where he tells us that scary, scary ghost story.
> "The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human
> imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized."
> ....The question you pose tells me you're haunted by the ghost
> of objectivity.

Sice there has been more than enough wheel-spinning on this subject, I'd 
like to introduce a different concept of Truth for your consideration.  I 
have long maintained that Absolute Truth is inaccessible to man, that what 
people accept as truth is a pragmatic principle (i.e., what works). 
Navigators of the open seas before Columbus could believe that the earth was 
flat because they weren't circumnavigating the globe.  Once it was 
discovered possible to reach Asia from Europe by sailing east, as well as 
west, man's world-view became three-dimensional.  The "new truth" was that 
the earth was not flat but spherical.

Yes, this demonstrates that what one accepts as Truth is both "provisional" 
(relative) and fallible.  What is pragmatically sound in one generation may 
become unfeasible in the next.  But this does not mean that Truth is either 
ephemeral or a "ghost of objectivity".  Rather, it simply means that we can 
never know the Whole Truth at any given time.  Like beauty, wisdom, and 
justice, provisional truth is a human value that relates to the order of 
existence.  Inasmuch as Matt and DMB have alluded to Heidegger's concept of 
truth, I found this analysis of the philosopher's view in the Encyclopedia 
of Philosophy:

"The truth of being can be defined as the openness, the free region which 
always out of sight provides the space of play for the different 
determinations of being and human epochs established in them.  It is that 
which is before actual things and grants them a possibility of manifestation 
as what is present, ens creatum, and objects.  The truth of being, its 
openness, is for Heidegger not something which we can merely consider or 
think of.  It is not our own production.  It is where we always come to 
stand.  We find ourselves thrown in a historically conditioned environment, 
in an epoch in which the decision concerning the prevailing interpretation 
of the being of being is already made for us."   -- Internet Encyclopedia of 
Philosophy

The relational world is a subsistent continuum; that is, it manifests 
properties that are universally measurable by tools-rulers, microscopes, 
clocks and the like-which are designed to define and quantify the objects of 
human perception so that we can have cosmic truths beyond the self to live 
and work by.  These truths define the "openness of being" that Heidegger 
identifies as "where we come to stand".

Which brings me to the insight captured in Mary's now-familiar tag line: 
"The most important thing you will ever make is a realization."

The value of Truth is not just that useful principles and laws can be 
derived from nature, but the realization that existential reality is an 
organized, self-sustained system rather than chaos.  The exquisitely 
balanced cosmos with its precise planetary orbits, seasonal changes, and 
life cycles suggests a choreographed universe that is imbued with the 
pefection of its uncreated source.  The conformity of creation mirrors the 
integrity and intelligent design of a creator.  Whether you call this 
primary source Potentiality, God, Quality or Essence is a syntactical 
choice.  The tragedy of human existence is not that we cannot confirm this 
truth but that we deny its realization.

Essentially speaking,
Ham