dmb said:
Pirsig's pragmatic truths are neither of those things. They don't correspond to
anything or any thing, although they do have to agree with experience.
Ron replied:
I think we have to be careful with using that assertion Dave, that pragmatic
truths have to "agree" with experience.
dmb says:
I was being careful to use the same word that James and Pirsig use. They both
say that truths must "agree" with experience - as opposed to "corresponding" to
things-in-themselves or reality as it really is.
Ron continued:
Because to correspond is to agree and if I understand pragmatic truth it has to
do with how well an idea "performs" in experience, how succesful it is in
regard to our aims.
dmb says:
Well, you're equating correspondence and agreement, whereas I had just
distinguished them or contrasted them. To say that true ideas are the ones that
actually work when you act on them is agreement with experience but NOT
correspondence to objective reality. The latter depends on the assumptions of
subject-object metaphysics whereas pragmatic truth begins by rejecting those
assumptions.
Ron said:
Because experience, can be misleading and colored. It can be distorted and
exaggerated. To say that experience is reality is not to imply that experience
is what is "true".
dmb says:
I think it doesn't make any sense to say that experience is true. Or false.
Ideas, beliefs, claims, and other conceptual matters can be true or false.
Experience can't be right or wrong but it is real. Ideas are supposed to be
tested and made true or false by empirical reality, but experience itself is
not true or false. It just is.
And, no, of course experience doesn't automatically generate the perfect truth
and we're constantly adjusting our understanding of things as new experience
unfolds. That's how we can realize the distortions and mistakes as well as the
clarifications and corrections. All these things occur within experience,
within the empirical reality.
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