the ultimate pragmatist

Some indigenous explanations of worldly phenomena were accurate enough to not be abandoned over centuries of belief. These same explanations, through an important sort of self-validation, ended up maintaining the very truth of their claims: to the extent that humans living under their belief came to act in certain ways, the natural world expected it and indeed acted back in turn. It is in this way that Joe Sheridan says indigenous myths complete ecosystems. The level of accuracy demanded by modern science, which by its nature must perpetually revise itself and lead believers to successively new and unforeseen ways of living, is unlikely to be necessary for the existence of life on earth. In fact, one might say that there is an optimal level of accuracy that leads to a perfect combination of predictability, while simultaneously creating patterns of human behaviour that complete the ecosystem. Myths probably hovered about this level, as the stories changed themselves over generations of re-telling. Nature is the ultimate pragmatist here: the validity of a “truth”, to paraphrase Dewey, is judged by the consequences of the actions that lead from it –and an absolutely accurate prediction that causes the destruction of our life support system just can’t be considered “true”.