Hi Ron, all > Ron: > No there is'nt, there is only the possibilty and Probability of truth.
Steve: I am asserting that the sentence "there are intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe" is either a true assertion or a false assertion right now. At this point in time we do not know if this sentence is true or false, but our ignorance on the matter and our lack of a way of verifying it right now does not make this sentence incapable of being true or false right now. I think to say otherwise is a very unusual position on the notion of truth. It is the Jamesian notion of truth. (Is it the Pirsigian one?) C.S. Pierce objected strongly to James here. Even though Pierce coined the term "pragmatism" as the label for his philosophy, he started using the term "pragmaticism" to distance himself from what James was saying because he thought James got his pragmatism all wrong. Dewey eventually shied away from it and eventually stuck to talking about "warranted assertibility" instead of truth. Pragmatists Rorty and Putnam rejected this notion of truth. So the so-called "pragmatic theory of truth" seems to me to be a misnomer, though Davidson never adopted the label "pragmatist" precisely because he associated this theory of truth with pragmatism. Whether or not you want to take a side in the battle for the soul pf pragmatism, to follow DMB in his Jamesian "true for you false for me" relativistic notion of truth where beliefs are made true by verifying them is not what anyone but Jamesians and post-modernists (the sort of relativists that Pirsig was railing against) normally mean by "true." If you are going to use the word "true" in this way, I think it would be better for you and DMB (assuming you really are following DMB here) to simply be up front and just deny that there is such a thing as tuth as it is commonly understood and instead get by with some other term like "warranted assertibility." I don't think you should get to word "true" if you think that a belief can be actually be (and not merely be believed to be) true, then false, then true, then neither depending on what your personal moment to moment experiences are and your ability to verify. This is a purely relativistic position since at the same times the same belief can be otherwise for someone else (again, not merely beleived to be otherwise, but actually otherwise) depending on what their momement to moment experiences are. Again, that is just not what is normally meant by truth. You are of course free to try to win over people to a new way of using an old word, but I think the common sense notion of truth is worth keeping to keep track of what we used to believe to be true that turned out to actually be false or vice versa. Finally, as an MOQer, you might be interested in what Pirsig said about truth. Did he ever say anything to support such a "true for me, false for you" notion of truth hat DMB is supporting? Not that I recall. Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
