[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Ian,

> I was going to comment that this (nevertheless interesting) thread was descending into a purely definitional one in terms of the word truth, then I noticed Matt had already said it better (quoting Davidson)  "truth is a semantic notion, not an epistemic one" And therefore not an important one to Pirsig (or any pragmatist), where truth value (quality) is what matters. So abandoning a definition of truth to the obscurity of language - a la Rorty - is ... errr ... pragmatic (if not audacious).


Steve:
Pretty much, except it always has been a semantic issue as far as I am
concerned while DMB has wanted to make it an epistemological issue. He
wants to say that since whatever we feel justified in believing (where
his radical empricism is supposed to somehow ground us by keeping us
from having bad justifications) we will of course call true, then
truth is just that--justified belief.

I agree that it is indeed the same thing to assert that something is
true and to assert that you are justified in believing that same
something--as Pierce said, "we think each one of our beliefs to be
true, and, indeed, it is mere tautology to say so"--it is nevertheless
good to recognize that at least some of the things that we are
justified in believing are probably not actually true. That is to say
that some of the things we now say are true we will come to call false
at some time in the future, and our use of the word "truth" is not
such that we would say that the truth of the belief changed from one
to other but rather our knowledge changed.

Though being justified in believing something is all that is required
to be able to assert that a belief is true, we can still say that a
belief that has led us to successful action may nevertheless not be
true. DMB thinks that we can't say "some of the things we thought were
true turned out to have been false" without reverting to a
correspondence theory of truth. But following Pierce, this sentence
cashes out to something like "certain practices that led us to
successful action for the purposes we had in the past have been found
not to always lead us to successful action for those puposes and/or
for new purposes that we now have. In short, it would have been better
for us to have believed what we now believe all along instead of what
we used to believe." In that chacterization of the situation I see
nothing to suggest correspondence theory--the notion of truth as
getting our sentences to allign properly with a reality that exists
independently of our purposes.

Best,
Steve