[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[david buchanan]

Matt said:

.., if justification is our only route to truth, then it does seem an add-on to then say it is justified _and_ true.  Call the endorsing use "the use of truth from the first-person standpoint." .. Another use of true, which is what Steve wants to emphasize is different and needed--we shouldn't assimilate all uses of truth to the endorsing use (like in our theories of truth)--is the "cautionary use of truth."  This is the impetus of somebody, having heard you slide from justification to a complimentary extra endorsement of "and it's true, too" to say, "well, you might be justified, but it still might not be true."  Call the cautionary use "the use of truth from the third-person standpoint."



dmb says:

Right. It is an add-on to say "I'm justified in believing it" AND "it's true". James defines truth the way he does precisely BECAUSE justification is our only route to truth. So the pragmatist doesn't ADD truth to justification because truth is only ever going to be what's justified and they are the same thing. If that third person cautions me that my justified belief might not be true even though it's justified, I'd point out that his objection is predicated on a distinction I've already rejected prior to making my truth claim. 

When he insists on retaining the distinction between justification and truth because of historical evidence, I'd point out that we don't need to retain the distinction to recognize and accommodate the provisional and evolutionary aspects of truth. In fact, defining truth in terms of what can be justified makes it concrete and particular. Since it rejects the correspondence theory, pragmatic truth is also plural, perspectival, and generally far more flexible than the kind of truth that is distinct from justification. In other words, this definition of truth drops all pretenses of a single right and real truth toward which we are headed. Instead, truth is more modestly defined as what we can have right now, in our context and in our particular situations. You know, pragmatic truth is not an abstraction or an ideal goal. It is "what works" in the sense of actual practical value. Truth is a species of the good in the same way that health is a species of the good. Fitness is for the living of life, intellectually, socially and biologically. 


"James said, 'Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it.' He said, 'The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.' TRUTH IS A SPECIES OF GOOD. That was EXACTLY what is meant by the MOQ. Truth is a static intellectual pattern WITHIN a larger entity called Quality." (Emphasis is Pirsig's)

Pirsig goes on to explain how his distinction between intellectual quality and social practicality could defent this theory of truth from the kinds of charges made by James's critics, could prevent the NAZIs from using it to justify their aims, etc.. And when you look at what James says in the fuller context of his remarks, his notion of truth did most certainly entail its fitness with respect to logical coherence, agreement with the evidence and the usual standards. We are talking about a Harvard scholar who's writing in the age of positivism, after all. I think the criticism that his truth was just a matter of marketplace practicality was always just a misinterpretation of the empirical constraints and limits built into James's definition of truth. James is saying "truth MUST work" in actual experience or we can't call it truth, not "hey, whatever works for you, man". 


Can you imagine a definition of health where we could say health is whatever works in the way of biological fitness and then go on to argue that the meaning of fitness is up for grabs, that there really is no such thing as perfect health so we should just drop the whole notion? Can you imagine the assertion, "health is not the sort of thing we should expect to have an interesting theory about"?  I think it's just as absurd to say that about truth.



Thanks.








 		 	   		  
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