[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[Mary]

Hello everyone,

The platypus of truth.  Either you believe something is true for all time
regardless of whether it is known or understood at the time, or you believe
truth is contextual and provisional - true now but not true before.

The MoQ ascribes to neither.  

It renders the debate moot by raising our consciousness to the realization
that we only have the debate at all because we are trapped in the
subject-object dichotomy.  

Once the assumption that subjects and objects are all there is is
transcended and we see that Quality is all there is, the futility of the
argument is apparent.

Truth is revealed as the emperor's new clothes; but, unlike the story, we
are all emperors wearing the truth on our "sleeves", never noticing that we
have no sleeves and are in fact naked.



Static patterns of value represent Dynamic Quality.

Dynamic Quality is indefinable and unknowable.  It is unpatterned.

The world as we know it is composed of nothing but static patterns of value.

Truth is a SOL static pattern of value.

For something to be "true" something else must be "false".



Time is also a static pattern of value.  The concept of beginning and end,
future and past logically had to have been the "first" static pattern there
was.

This is because without the concept of time, there can be no change.  Change
requires comparison.  Without a "prior", what would be the change?


>From the first static latch of "time" arose all else.  

All other static patterns assume it.  Depend on it.

All static patterns are SOL.


Therefore, static patterns are neither "true" nor "untrue" because the
concept of truth is itself a static pattern.

And as we know, static patterns are only representational of reality.

Only DQ is reality itself.


The problem for us is that we cannot readily access unpatterned reality.  We
are creatures of pattern.  From day to day we are each other's subjects and
objects.  This we can only rarely escape.  

So how do we resolve the nature of the static pattern of value we have
chosen to call "truth"?

Pirsig hints at this in the quote DMB provided, with emphasis mine.  

> 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.  


The MoQ says that "truth" is that which satisfies the highest possible
Intellectual Pattern of Value.  

That is, it satisfies the highest possible Intellectual Pattern of Value
existing "at the TIME".

What is true is relative and provisional and static - subject to change -
evolution.

Truth is a static pattern where we can easily see a demonstration of the
fact that static patterns though stable are not immutable.  

Best,
Mary 



> > 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
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