John said to dmb:
... since you and I agree on disparaging Relativism, I'm puzzled how you can
disagree with me that Truth is an Absolute Ideal. Even if you make Experience
your Absolute, it is still, an Absolute.
dmb says:
The pragmatic theory of truth is neither. It's a false dilemma. James and
Pirsig agree that there is no such thing as the Truth. There are specific
truths in the plural and they are provisional. They agree on the notion that
"truth is a species of the good" so it is also NOT absolute in the sense that
it is one particular kind of Quality, specifically intellectual static quality.
Also, the pragmatist says that ideas are made true in experience. In a very
real sense, this kind of truth is not ideal. It's practical and empirical. A
true idea is one that leads you successfully in experience and false ideas
don't. In that sense, truth is agreement with experience. But this applies to
the realm intellectual realm as well as the workshop or science lab. "True
ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well," James says,
and they "lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They
lead away from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thin
king". In other words, true ideas have quality. They work well AS ideas.
"To 'agree' in the widest sense with a reality, can only mean to be guided
either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such
working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it
better than if we disagreed. Better either intellectually or practically! And
often agreement will only mean the negative fact that nothing contradictory
from the quarter of that reality comes to interfere with the way in which our
ideas guide us elsewhere. To copy a reality is, indeed, one very important way
of agreeing with it, but it is far from being essential. The essential thing is
the process of being guided. Any idea that helps us to deal, whether
practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that
doesn't entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts
our life to the reality's whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the
requirement. It will hold true of that reality.
Thus, names are just as 'true' or 'false' as definite mental pictures are. They
set up similar verification-processes, and lead to fully equivalent practical
results.
All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and borrow
verifications, get them from one another by means of social intercourse. All
truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made available for everyone.
Hence, we must talk consistently just as we must think consistently: for both
in talk and thought we deal with kinds. Names are arbitrary, but once
understood they must be kept to. We mustn't now call Abel 'Cain' or Cain
'Abel.' If we do, we ungear ourselves from the whole book of Genesis, and from
all its connexions with the universe of speech and fact down to the present
time. We throw ourselves out of whatever truth that entire system of speech and
fact may embody.
...Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading, leading
that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are
important. True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as
well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency,
stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from excentricity and
isolation, from foiled and barren thinking."
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