[MD] theories of truth

[david buchanan]

Not surprisingly, Marsha said to D. Harding:
...  But personally, I prefer to stick with RMP's terminology "static patterns of value" without the need to assign the term 'truth'.  And I prefer to think of all static patterns of value as hypothetical. 



Unsurprisingly, dmb disputes this with quotes from Pirsig and an encyclopedia:

"Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological... As the atomic phsyicist, Niels Bohr, said, 'We are suspended in language.' Our intellectual descriptions are always culturally derived."

"Descartes' 'I think therefore I am' was a historically shattering declaration of independence of the intellectual level of evolution from the social level of evolution, but would he have said it if he had been a seventeenth century Chinese philosopher? If he had been, would anyone in seventeenth century China have listened to him and called him a brilliant thinker and recorded his name in history?  If Descartes had said, "The seventeenth century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am," he would have been correct."



"There is a temptation to say that solipsism is a false philosophical theory, but this is not quite strong or accurate enough. As a theory, it is incoherent. What makes it incoherent, above all else, is that the solipsist requires a language (that is a sign-system) to think or to affirm his solipsistic thoughts at all. Given this, it is scarcely surprising that those philosophers who accept the Cartesian premises that make solipsism apparently plausible, if not inescapable, have also invariably assumed that language-usage is itself essentially private. The cluster of arguments – generally referred to as “the private language argument” – that we find in the [Wittgenstien's] Investigations against this assumption effectively administers the coup de grâce to both Cartesian dualism and solipsism.
Language is an irreducibly public form of life that is encountered in specifically social contexts. Each natural language-system contains an indefinitely large number of “language-games,” governed by rules that, though conventional, are not arbitrary personal fiats. The meaning of a word is its (publicly accessible) use in a language. To question, argue, or doubt is to utilize language in a particular way. It is to play a particular kind of public language-game. The proposition “I am the only mind that exists” makes sense only to the extent that it is expressed in a public language, and the existence of such language itself implies the existence of a social context. Such a context exists for the hypothetical last survivor of a nuclear holocaust, but not for the solipsist. A non-linguistic solipsism is unthinkable and a thinkable solipsism is necessarily linguistic. Solipsism therefore presupposes the very thing that it seeks to deny. That solipsistic thoughts are thinkable in the first instance implies the existence of the public, shared, intersubjective world that they purport to call into question."