[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[david buchanan]

Ian said to Steve:
No, I think I do get DMB, he said exactly what I said he'd say ... ie he "does NOT say truth is "whatever we feel justified in believing"." His emphasis not mine.

Steve said:
DMB of course disagrees. ... Everything he says about truth ought to be said about justification instead. We are better off leaving truth to semantics to avoid all the "true for you, not for me" and "true then, false now" sort of nonsense.



dmb says:

There you go again. Instead of dealing with my case honestly, you put quotes around silly, trivial distortions of what you wish I'd said. The nonsense, sir, is all yours. I mean, really Steve. It looks like you're constructing straw men to avoid case I actually made. You insist that justification has to be distinct from truth and yet you can't even say what that precious concept means. This is the part you can't deal with, or explain. This is what makes your position so incoherent. How can truth transcend justification? You're turning an abstract concept into something by which to judge the actual concrete reality from which it was abstracted in the first place. It's just a generalization, not a god we aspire to. Truths are made by humans. Period. James is saying truth can't mean anything more than that.

Again, the emphasis is James's.... 

"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."


"X is true" iff X is true. "The cat is on the Matt" iff snow is white. YAWN! Boring. Trival. Purely formal. Who cares? That's what James is talking about. His denouncers (Steve) oppose James's concretely definable and positive notion of truth with "literally nothing". In this case, for reasons of Rortyian nature, but it's still literally nothing. 


It's true if and only if it's true? Sounds like a lullaby for little baby logicians.


Somehow, that's less than nothing.


 


 		 	   		  
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