[MD] Truth as a word of caution

[david buchanan]

Steve:
What sounds wrong to me is to say that X was true when I had good reason for believing it, but now X is false because I now have new information that gives me good reason to think it is false. It makes sense to me to say that X was false all along even though I was justified in believing it in the past.

dmb says:
It only sounds wrong when you believe that the truth exists independently. It only sounds wrong to a Platonist of some kind. It only sounds wrong if you deeply believe truth is distinct from appearances. 



Steve said:
...I have always said that I think justification and truth ought to be kept distinct if only so that we can caution one another that what we are now justified in believing may turn out to be false. You could say in that case that the proposition changes from true to false when a justified belief is later found wanting if you want, but that sounds weird to me.


dmb says:
Huh? Aren't there better ways to warn each other that truths come and go? I think the pragmatic theory does that just fine without having to say that truth is something beyond or above the best ideas we have at present. As I see it, you have just hereby confessed to a Platonic instinct. It's the opposite of my reaction, actually. I always thought such lofty notions of truth were crypto-theological bullshit and it has always been hard for me to fathom how anyone, let alone a bunch of extremely bright people over centuries, could have ever believed such things. I distinctly remember scratching my head and asking, "what the hell is an essence" and "what the heck is a Hegelian Absolute" and "what the heck is a Platonic Form". The more I learned about these things, the more I began to believe that my original hunch was right. It's a bunch of quasi-religious, metaphysical nonsense. Whole philosophies are centered around metaphysical entities and categories that could possibly be known. James and Pirsig come as quite a relief because they not only balk at that - as almost every contemporary philosopher does - but also because they have a remedy and replacement that does NOT devolve into nihilism or relativism or some kind of dogmatic faith. These guys dodge all the right bullets.