[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
... 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 (...) we will of course call true, then truth is just that--justified belief.

dmb says:

Well, you're right about my insistence on the epistemology but the pragmatic theory of truth certainly does NOT say truth is "whatever we feel justified in believing". You should know better than that just from what you've read in our exchanges. I guess you're trying to bait me with stuff like this. Or the one where you try to make Pirsig's ghost stories into a pro-slavery position. That kind of thing doesn't get my goat, though. It only makes me think you're being disingenuous and unserious. 



Steve said:
...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.

dmb says:

It means the same thing to simply say that truth is provisional. From the perspective of the new truth (slavery is evil) the old truth looks false and we condemn it as such. Don't we agree that it amounts to the same thing? Isn't that just what provisional means? The point is, I think, that we ought not think of truth as a form of perfection, some ideal we are headed for in the sense of getting ever closer to the way things really are. We want our truths to get better and fuller but they can never be anything more than what's justifiable in a particular context and in concrete experience. That's where the insistence on empiricism comes into it. Truth can't be a utopian ideal in this conception and in fact such a notion is seen as rather empty. I have tried to explain this several times. The emphasis is James' in the original...

"The pragmatist thesis ...is that the relation called 'truth' is thus concretely DEFINABLE. Ours is the only articulate attempt to say positively what truth actually CONSISTS OF. Our denouncers have literally nothing to oppose to it as an alternative. For them, when an idea is true, it IS true, and there the matter terminates, the word 'true' being indefinable."

Compare that sentiment with Rorty's view, wherein truth is "not the sort of thing we should expect to have an interesting theory about". Truth is a semantic issue because of this view but, of course, that's the very thing in dispute. 



Steve said:

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 at getting our sentences to allign properly with a reality that exists independently of our purposes.


dmb says:

Well, I thought the debate was between Rortyism on one hand and on the other James and Pirsig. Pierce fans hate Rorty with a passion that shocks even me. Curious bedfellows get curiouser and curiouser. I'll play along anyway because I can sort of see why you'd go there.

Rorty does say, basically, that since we can't get our sentences to correspond to "the way things really are" and that means truth theories are banned, we can only develop ways of talking that help us cope. And he'll probably add that they DON'T help us cope with reality, they just help us cope. Period.

I think this is incoherent. How are we going to evaluation whether or not a certain vocabulary helps us cope better or not without the ability to evaluation the actual coping part? We test of the semantic prowess how, exactly? And if words help us cope, with what are we coping if not reality? What can "successful action" mean, if not some actual concrete experience in which the proposition is tested? 

Thanks.


P.S.   I bet the very first slave was opposed to slavery, by the way. I don't think the idea of opposition was recently invented. They didn't have abolitionists in Rome, but they had Spartacus and you can see a pretty sophisticated subversive attitude toward it in Roman literature. I think it's probably more realistic to believe that slavery persisted as long as it did simply because the means of resistance were not available to the slave or his sympathizers, not because they were morally or intellectually oblivious.

 

 






 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
The New Busy is not the too busy. Combine all your e-mail accounts with Hotmail.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multiaccount&ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_4