[MD] MOQ and Gödel's incompleteness theorems

[david buchanan]

Tuukka said:

What happens if you change "true" and "false" into "good" and "evil"? A "logical system" turns into an intellectual static value pattern, and an unprovable statement turns into an act whose moral value cannot be determined from within the system. And if the act is good, it is Dynamic Quality. This is MOQ. Right?


dmb says:
It seems to me that Pirsig's pragmatic theory of truth is very different from the kind of truth that logicians and mathematicians pursue. The latter is almost entirely rational and the former is almost entirely empirical. They have very different accounts of truth. These are the two rival camps that have existed throughout the history of philosophy.
I don't know about their completeness, but in Zen and the Art Pirsig talks about "truth" in relation to the emergence of alternative geometries, as you might recall. I guess it was quite earth-shattering at the time, the way relativity overthrew Newton's static and mechanical universe. Suddenly, there was a second and a third system of geometry and they were not only logically consistent but they "worked" as geometric systems. Suddenly, Euclid's geometry was not the only kind and Euclid's was supposed to describe our common sense notions of real space. Yikes! 
But the pragmatist says if they all work well, then we can rightly say they are all true, if even they seem to describe different realities or different conceptions of reality. The pragmatic truth is not tied to any ontology because those claims are treated the same pragmatic way. If your notion of what reality really is actually "works" when it's tried out, acted upon or otherwise tested in experience, then that ontological notion can be counted as true. 
I think that's what it means to say "truth is a species of the good", the pragmatic slogan that Pirsig takes from James. Like health is a biological good and wealth is a social good, truth is a name for intellectual quality. Coherence and logical consistency are part of it, of course. But this notion is very empirical, but it's not the narrow sensory empiricism of the positivists. Instead, ideas are tested in experience in a very broad sense. What happens when you take that idea out for a serious test drive? What happens over the long haul? 
You could have a perfectly complete and logical system that is also useless or even disastrous when applied. In that sense, logic and pragmatic truth are two completely different things. Or maybe it would be better to say that logic is true only to the extent that it's useful.