[MD] JTB

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB.

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 7:03 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Steve said to Matt:
> We've been through this with DMB many times over the past five years or so. I can't see why he'd want to drop the distinction between a true belief and a justified belief. I can't imagine that Pirsig meant to drop this distinction in embracing the pragmatic theory of truth. I tend to think that Pirsig would find the notion that we could be justified in believing something at one time that turns out not to be true and that someone could believe something that turns out to be true without any justification or even right for the wrong reason.
>
> dmb says:
> Well, I'm all for a good thought experiment if it helps but the card games and the case of the stolen money seems to suggest that the distinction between truth and justification is only good for describing trivial errors and ordinary mistakes.

Steve:
What makes you think that I had some higher aim than "describing
trivial errors and ordinary mistakes"? Why is that not a valid
consideration in philosphical talk about the use of the word "true"?


DMB:
> The notion that our truths can later become untrue does not mean that truth and justification are two different things. It just means that new truths emerge and old truths die. If they weren't well justified, we wouldn't have called them true. As I tried to explain in the last post, the pragmatist thinks that a well funded, well justified belief is all we can ever mean by the word "true".

Steve:
Obviously, true CAN mean something other than that because a
well-justified belief may not be true.

Best,
Steve