[MD] Pirsig's theory of truth

[david buchanan]

Matt said:
For fuckheads who like Rorty and beavers and think that Rorty has a bias towards language over non-linguistic experience, I present this passage talking about the distinction between propositional knowing-that and nonlinguistic know-how (with beavers):

dmb says:

I think Rorty has a linguistic bias and I'm a fuckhead who likes beavers. Three out of four isn't bad, so I figure this damn passage is for me. In any case, it prompted me to read Barry Allen's essay.

The first thing that needs to be said is that Allen's know-how is nothing like Pirsig's primary empirical reality or DQ, as you and Steve have suggested in subsequent conversations. Allen is talking about artifactual knowledge as a key component of our evolutionary history and he's doing so from the perspective of realism. He's making a case that Rorty's idea of knowledge is exclusively propositional and that this is a distorted picture of what knowledge actually is. Because he's a realist and a SOMer, I can't quite take his side over Rorty's. But with certain qualifications, I think some of his criticisms are valid even from my perspective.

Allen concludes, for example, with the same diagnosis I've been pushing here for a while. Naturally, I had to agree with the part where Allen says of Rorty: "He sees a bad answer and infers that the question must be bad too. ...What is epistemology? A bad answer to a good question". As you might recall, I've been saying that Rorty defines the question in terms of the failed answer. I think Allen is saying the same thing. But I also found that his emphasis on know-how has the curious effect of getting at the difference between Rortyism the pragmatic theory of truth as James and Pirsig have it. 

Basically, he says that knowledge is not just propositional. It is operational or performative. In this sense, knowledge has nothing to do with verbal agreements. We can use it to operate successfully and reliably or we can't. This is how knowledge is justified, he says. "Nothing is clarified, and a lot is made obscure, by the suggestion that innovations in reinforced concrete were really just a new way of talking."

"The value of knowledge is the value of any capacity to perform reliably with artifacts. ...Think of an obviously sophisticated artifact [let's say a motorcycle], or any artifact used in a sophisticated, artful, excellent manner. It is the performative quality that makes the difference between knowledge and belief, and proves that it is the artifact, not the sentence or belief, which is the unit of knowledge , the foci around which all or practice of knowledge and all its results gravitate."

That's not too far away from the notion of pragmatic truth. I'd tweak the whole idea by changing the first sentence to; "The value of knowledge is its capacity to perform reliably in the course of experience." Another tweak would look like this: "It is the performative quality that makes the difference between true beliefs and false ones." The pragmatic theory of truth is a kind of empiricism, where our ideas have to be tested in experience. 

Rorty, seemingly missing the point entirely, simply converts active know-how back into a verbal description.  "..We attribute knowledge-how wherever telic description seems appropriate, but knowledge-that only when intentional description does." 






 		 	   		  
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