"One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along." (LILA)

Notice Pirsig does not say here that truth is provisional, but that explanation is.

[Arlo]
> Within a MOQ, can you point to a pattern, any pattern, that is "right" but is not "useful"?

By 'useful' do you mean has an actual use or has a potential use?
It is true that a speck of dust on the far side of the moon has an actual shape,
but this might not be actually useful.  That is enough to show that 'true'/'right' are different
concepts than 'useful'.

[Arlo}
> In fact, I'd argue that within a MOQ, 'right' would mean 'useful'. To the sailor trying to determine which map to
> use, he'd examine his context, and select the best map to get him where he needed to be, and he might say
> "that was the right map for that task", but 'right' is being defined and used by virtue of 'usefulness'.
> I can't imagine any context where he'd say, "well, the Cartesian map was right but not useful,
> the Polar map was not right but it allowed me to navigate to where I needed to be."

But if 'right' is to mean 'useful', you also have to show that every case of being useful is a case of being
right.  What if a sailor used a map of the East Indies to successfully navigate between two islands, then later discovered it was a map of the West Indies?
Craig  



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