[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,


> 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.

Steve:
Then would you please, please, please explain how you would
distinguish justification and truth?



> 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:
What is in dispute is whether or not it is a good idea to distinguish
what is true from what we have good reason to believe (what can be
justified).


> 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.

Steve:
Nope, you don't get to claim Pirsig against Rorty yet. I don't think
Pirsig subscribes to the Jamesian theory of truth.

The debate was whether you can get anything good out of conflating
truth and justification to make up for the absurdity of "true for you,
not for me" and "true then, false now."

As for Pirsig, he weighed in on James when he said,  "The idea that
satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous,
according to the Metaphysics of Quality.  There are different kinds of
satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares.  The Holocaust
produced a satisfaction among Nazis.  That was quality for them.  They
considered it to be practical.  But it was a quality dictated by low
level static social and biological patterns whose overall purpose was
to retard the evolution of truth and Dynamic Quality.  James would
probably have been horrified to find that Nazis could use his
pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phædrus didn't see
anything that would prevent it.  But he thought that the Metaphysics
of Quality's classification of static patterns of good prevents this
kind of debasement."

You should notice that Pirsig doesn't appeal to radical empiricism to
prevent the Nazi from drawing dangerous conclusions based on
satisfaction. Radical empiricism can't do that. What prevents support
for the Nazi (or the slaveholder) is the "classification of static
patterns of good." He doesn't think that James can avoid relativism
with his theory of truth and radical empiricism alone, and I think
Pirsig was right.


DMB:
> 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.

Steve:
It is a shame that you can't say that slavery was wrong wherever and
whenever it was practiced regardless of whether or not anyone was able
to ride the belief that slavery is moral to successful action. If you
could, you would be able to make a better case against relativism.
Your note that the first slave was surely opposed to slavery just
tells is that "slavery is immoral" was probably true for the first
slave while "slavery is moral" was probably true for the first slave
owner.

Best,
Steve