Hi Matt, DMB, Matt: > ...the question for James's re-conceptualization that you've > articulated is: can we not ever have a true belief that isn't justified? > If I believe that you're holding a Jack of Spades in your hand right > now, what possible justification might that belief have? However, > if it was _true_ that you, Dave Buchanan, for whatever reason, > were holding a Jack of Spades in your hand as you read this > e-mail, I would have a true belief. This is the kind of thought > experiment that illustrates to some people that "true" and > "justified" have two different semantic roles, _and_ that we need > them to have those different semantic roles for situations like these. > Without them, we wouldn't be able to account for all of our > experience of the world, which includes a lot of luck and guessing. > Or rather, you could account for this kind of experience when > redefining our modes of accounting (remembering Pirsig's > endorsement of Einstein's slogan), but it would (so goes Rorty's side > of the bet) produce a bad kind of weirdness rather than a good kind. > In a lot of situations, so goes this semantic conception of language > and truth, it doesn't matter whether you say that a belief is justified > or true. But sometimes it does. It's the sometimes that a semantic > definition of truth attempts to codify.
Steve: Matt, we've been through this with DMB many times over the past five years or so. I can't see why he'd want to drop the distinction between a true belief and a justified belief. I can't imagine that Pirsig meant to drop this distinction in embracing the pragmatic theory of truth. I tend to think that Pirsig would find the notion that we could be justified in believing something at one time that turns out not to be true and that someone could believe something that turns out to be true without any justification or even right for the wrong reason. Conflating truth and justification is also what gets James labeled as a relativist about truth since one person could be justified in believing a claim is false while another person could have good reason to believe the belief is true. If we take James at his word, the belief is true for one and false for the other--a relativistic notion of truth. Is DMB trying to enforce a false dilemma in saying that we can either be pragmatists _or_ distinguish truth and justification? It seems so. Rory's articulation of the issue shows that we can have both a distinction between truth and justification _and_ a re-description of truth in pragmatic terms. Compare Rorty and James... James: "The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons" Here is Rorty's epistemology in a nutshell: Knowledge is (1) justified (2) true (3) belief. (3) Belief? A belief is a habit of action. (Pierce) (2) True? What is true is what is good to believe. (James and Pirsig) (1) Justified? What we are justified in believing is what we have good reason to believe. (disambiguation of James) This is all just a disambiguation of James rather than a contradiction of James considering we have "The TRUE is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of BELIEF, and good, too, for definite, assignable (JUSTIFICATION) reasons" When James talks about the need to have "definite assignable reasons," in retrospect, we can read him as talking about requirements for knowledge rather than truth. For a person to be said to have knowledge it is not enough to get lucky in stumbling onto the truth. One has to have good reasons for believing it. James has all three aspects of a JTB notion of knowledge here which allows us to say A. ...that what we are justified in believing is not necessarily true. B. Justification is our only concern in practice since justification is our only route to truth. C. The word "true" preserves the cautionary note that what we are justified in believing may turn out to have been false as well as the common sense notion that "getting lucky" (holding an unjustified belief that turns out to be true) does not count as knowledge. When James talks about the need to have "definite assignable reasons," in retrospect, we can read him as talking about knowledge rather than truth. For a person to be said to have knowledge it is not enough to get lucky in stumbling onto the truth. One has to have good reasons for believing it. I think James would have agreed if that issue had been put to him. I see nothing un-Pirsigian or un-Jamesian about distinguishing between having good beliefs (truth) and having good reasons for one's beliefs (justification). I can't see why it would be important for DMB to insist that we _don't_ make this distinction. If it's a useful distinction, if it helps us make our ideas clear, shouldn't we use it? 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
