Arlo said to dmb:
...Would you describe 'truths' as high-Quality intellectual patterns? I'm
thinking along the lines of: the greater the explanatory power, the greater the
affordances to activity, the greater the cohesion with experience, all these
things which are evaluative measures of intellectual Quality seem linked to the
notion of pragmatic truth. For example, the flat-earth theory is an
intellectual pattern, but it is a low-quality intellectual pattern because it
lacks the explanatory power, affordances ..that an ellispoid-earth theory
offers. 'Truth', seems to me, to be good and simple way to say 'high-quality
intellectual pattern of value', and that evaluation rests on
pragmatic-experiential cohesion. Does this gel with what you are saying?
dmb says:
Yea, the pragmatic definition says that truth is an intellectual pattern and
that entails the first of two major elements. For a concept to count as truth,
as you say, it has to have explanatory power or predictive power - and all
kinds of qualities like clarity and precision enter into it too. But -
something I haven't mentioned much - the quality of an idea is also very much
about how well it fits with all the other relevant concepts in the total web of
beliefs. Remember that part in ZAMM, as he's wrapping up the sermon on
Poincare, where he says that it's the harmony of ideas that really holds the
world together? We recognize the harmonious reasonings of other reasonable
creatures like ourselves, he says, and this harmony is the sole basis of our
"objective" reality.
The pragmatic definition of truth says that intellectual quality always exists
within a larger entity called Quality. This is the second element of truth, the
empirical element. Truths are always subordinate to this primary empirical
reality, always have to agree with experience, operate within experience. For
Pirsig, this is reality as such and concepts can only have value in relation to
reality. The MOQ is radically empirical, meaning it's empirical all the way
down to bone marrow. Reality is experience and experience is reality.
As James puts it, pragmatic truths are tightly controlled by these two
elements; truths are wedged between the conceptual order (those harmonious
reasonings) and the perceptual flux (dynamic experience). This is just a
different way to say the same thing as Pirsig, where he says, "truth is a
static intellectual pattern within a larger entity called Quality".
There can be many truths in this picture because it has replaced the idea of
eternal Truth or objective Truth and instead sees all concepts and all
knowledge as parts of one giant pile of analogies, as parts of our total
understanding. From this perspective, knowledge and truth is a species of the
good, a servant of life. From this perspective Einstein is not truer than
Newton anymore that liters are truer than gallons. But that doesn't mean it's
okay to put a gallon of gas into a one liter bottle. It doesn't mean we get to
be sloppy about the meaning of our analogies or the precision of our truths.
But you already know this. You're just showing the trolls what an actual
conversation would look like. Thanks for that.
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