Hi Ian, > I was going to comment that this (nevertheless interesting) thread was > descending into a purely definitional one in terms of the word truth, then I > noticed Matt had already said it better (quoting Davidson) "truth is a > semantic notion, not an epistemic one" And therefore not an important one to > Pirsig (or any pragmatist), where truth value (quality) is what matters. So > abandoning a definition of truth to the obscurity of language - a la Rorty - > is ... errr ... pragmatic (if not audacious).
Steve: Pretty much, except it always has been a semantic issue as far as I am concerned while DMB has wanted to make it an epistemological issue. He wants to say that since whatever we feel justified in believing (where his radical empricism is supposed to somehow ground us by keeping us from having bad justifications) we will of course call true, then truth is just that--justified belief. I agree that it is indeed the same thing to assert that something is true and to assert that you are justified in believing that same something--as Pierce said, "we think each one of our beliefs to be true, and, indeed, it is mere tautology to say so"--it is nevertheless good to recognize that at least some of the things that we are justified in believing are probably not actually true. That is to say that some of the things we now say are true we will come to call false at some time in the future, and our use of the word "truth" is not such that we would say that the truth of the belief changed from one to other but rather our knowledge changed. Though being justified in believing something is all that is required to be able to assert that a belief is true, we can still say that a belief that has led us to successful action may nevertheless not be true. DMB thinks that we can't say "some of the things we thought were true turned out to have been false" without reverting to a correspondence theory of truth. But following Pierce, this sentence cashes out to something like "certain practices that led us to successful action for the purposes we had in the past have been found not to always lead us to successful action for those puposes and/or for new purposes that we now have. In short, it would have been better for us to have believed what we now believe all along instead of what we used to believe." In that chacterization of the situation I see nothing to suggest correspondence theory--the notion of truth as getting our sentences to allign properly with a reality that exists independently of our purposes. 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
