Matt: No, I don't think it does. The first thing to notice is that you've already relativized correctness to what a particular community says it is. If you concede this contextualist point, then you've already gone a long ways down the pragmatist path which sees truth as unchanging, but the only path to truth being justification in the face of a community of inquirers. Truth is absolute, but justification is relative.
[Krimel] I certainly concede that context is relevant and I think using truth and justification is more 'useful' than correctness and usefulness. Truth more or less corresponds to correctness but usefulness is rather like a species of justification. I think what you are getting at is that truth is a belief we are justified in holding. An Absolute Truth would be a belief we are absolutely justified in holding. Surely a host of problems remain not the least of which is the idea the "Truth is absolute but justification is relative." Where does this leave Truth? If Truth requires Justification, haven't we just shuttled the problem down the a bit. How would any community arrive at absolute standards of Justification? Would such an Absolutely Justified Truth have to be recognized or recognizable by all regardless of community membership? The crux of my problem here is why bother clinging to the notion of unchanging truth at all? [Matt] However, justification is a whole different story, and as it happens the routes of justification are the only routes to truth. The relativity of justification, so we've learned with hindsight, is what the classical pragmatists were really talking about. What I've been trying to suggest about correctness and usefulness is that the concept of correctness only becomes applicable (one could say, "useful") if there are agreed-upon criteria available for settling dispute. [Krimel] Exactly, but here again I wonder where this leaves truth? We might settle any number of disputes without reference to truth at all. All that is required to justify settling a dispute is agreement. Isn't agreement, like usefulness, thus a species of justification? And doesn't justification really apply not so much to truth as to belief? If for example it is raining outside, the rain falls whether I believe it or not. The truth of the rainfall depends neither on my belief nor on the criteria by which I justify my belief nor on the community of picnickers who may justify denying the existence of the rain and soggy sandwiches for reasons of their own. So unless I am mistaken we are in general agreement about the problem and I am mainly interested in how the notion of Truth survives. It seems to me that what we are left with is not Truth but true enough for government work. What justifies our acceptance of any truth can be precision of measurement or preservation of community cohesion. I think the MoQ addresses this problem by refusing to define an Absolute Truth. Matt: I think we may agree more than not on the overall pattern. I think the above is a pretty good explanation, but I hesitate to use "empiricism" and "epistemology" as designations of positions or subjects that anybody but philosophers use. On the one hand, you can catch me saying things like, "empiricism had become common sense," but on the other hand, I don't want to say that laypeople had become empiricists. This has to do with the fact that I just don't think it is wise to impute to people a whole host of beliefs that, I think at least, are only induced after one has taken a few philosophy classes. [Krimel] I would agree that "common sense" understandings are different from specialist understandings but I think you would agree that ultimately the goal of special understanding ought to be to influence the "common sense;" Copernicus being the archetypical example of this. The heliocentric model required a change not just in abstract understanding of "how things are" but a radical reinterpretation of sensory input. At their best science and philosophy ought to be able to nudge the common sense and to affect Gestalt shifts. Certainly the empiricist view as common sense is reflected in such common sense statements as "seeing is believing" and "show me" and "the sense don't lie." The fact that the senses do in fact lie has little impact on the common sense. The whole idea of 'common sense' in this sense reminds my of Pirsig's discussion of Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture in which she claims that whole societies exhibit certain personality characteristics. We might see these as examples of 'common sense' views or distribution of belief sets within particular populations. So we might classify western culture as empiricist. But however we classify a culture or a common sense, you are right the average person holding these views doesn't much care how they are labeled or how specialists might seek to justify or refute them. My brother was once expounding the finer points of politics to a coworker on a loading dock. The guy gently but effectively ended the tirade by observing. "You know if it ain't got to do with fishin' or fuckin' I really don't wanna hear about it." I think that's a fair summary of the 'common sense' of things where I come from. [Matt] And on this, I have to demur on saying that epistemology is a subject of scientific scrutiny. For one, I again think it is too fancy a word for laypeople and we should just reserve it for philosophers. But two, and more importantly, if epistemology is something like "the study of knowledge," then only under a very loose sense of "science" does science increasingly come to occupy the length and breadth of knowledge. [Krimel] On this point I think I understand epistemology to be a inquiring into 'how' we know. Your definition puts the focus on 'truth' my puts it on 'justification'. [Matt] I think it would warp our linguistic habits far too much to deny something called "ethical knowledge," to never again say, "Yes, I knew it was bad." I think the question philosophers faced was, "Well, if science is really good at dealing with nature, telling us what we know about it and all that, then what are _we_ going to tell people about? What do we know?" [Krimel] Call me Pollyanna but I hold out hope that biology and anthropology and psychology do offer insights into ethics. [Matt] After Kant, philosophers went into the business of knowing about "knowing," which is epistemology, and I don't think there's a whole lot that is too interesting to be said about it, but it is what keeps driving most philosophy and it is why empiricism doesn't die. If empiricism is common sense, then what is it to be a philosophical empiricist? Why keep repeating it? Only to ward off Descartes? Empiricism won't die because it is still needed as an antidote to something. Indeed, some, including me, think that empiricism is a self-stoking fire because it only behooves you to identify as an empiricist to stave off unrepentant rationalists, but that involves taking seriously the subject of epistemology, and by doing that you've already committed yourself to the assumptions--reason as a distinct faculty--that keeps rationalism alive. In other words, the only way to kill rationalism properly is to kill empiricism, too. More words: empiricism has been involved in a purifying process, slowly eliminating the bad bits, working out all the kinks. And at the end of the line, empiricism will have purified itself out of existence. Which I think is only proper if philosophy is a critical tool applied to culture: philosophy gloms onto whatever is going on in society and keeps nudging common sense until there's no reason to nudge anymore. [Krimel] I have two questions for you on this. First you mentioned a while back the lack of distinction between analytic and synthetic truth. Isn't it just the difference between rationalism and empiricism? Can't one hold an analytic truth to be even Absolutely Truth if it is absolutely justified within a particular rationalist edifice, say Ham's essentialism? Such a truth claims to be outside of empirical justification and makes no claims that appeal to shared experience. Thus within a closed system of thought such Truth is true. In contrast synthetic truth is always making an appeal to empirical experience and shared justification. Secondly and this extends a bit past what you said but I take Kant's a priori knowledge to mean hardwired. That is genetically encoded into our being. We can not have experiences that are not temporal and spatial. There are elements in our perception that we inject into our experience so that there is more to it than Hume would have us believe. Obviously Kant might not express this in terms of genetics or heredity but do you see any connection or am I just projecting here the way Pirsig describes his reading habits. [Matt] I agree absolutely with you and Dewey that "Philosophy is always playing catch up in this respect." That's essentially what Hegel meant with his dark saying "When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." Philosophy isn't the vanguard of culture. [Krimel] For all my bad mouthing of philosophy I would not be quite so bleak. Inherent in its very name are two concepts that I still hold out much hope for. Philosophy is the 'love' of 'wisdom'. If science can be criticized for being merely the accumulation of dry meaningless facts then a philosophy that is merely the dry recitation of formulaic argumentation is certainly no antidote. I like very much your characterization, "Philosophy is a gadfly, playing its part in nudging it forward, but not at the front as it has always thought of itself." Wisdom often proves to be less a comfort than a pain in the ass. As far as saying that the science "card doesn't have the trumping power they are so used to it having in other fields of inquiry," I would find Darwin right at the heart of this. Most people don't care that black holes act in ways we can't truly understand or that time and space are not absolute. They don't understand it and it makes no difference to them. But Darwin is a different story. First of all they understand it readily and they understand its implications just as readily. Dawkins only expresses forcefully and clearly what most people 'get' without the exposition. So is he speaking outside of his role as scientist qua scientist? Perhaps, but I would say he is standing just outside the door on the porch not out in the back yard. Wilson for example explains beautifully and in largely scientific terms what the value of diversity is within ecosystems and even planetary ecology. When Pinker and others talk about how particular behaviors that make us characteristically human evolved over time it is not stretch to see how this applies to life as we live it and how life as we are living it may run counter to our best interests. So in this sense, of scientists having something to say about other fields of inquiry, it isn't so much a matter of trump cards as that they are often holding better cards in their hands and it would be wise not to ignore them. [Matt] All of what I'm talking about may seem like "arguing over the meaning of words," which you seem to evince some fatigue with, but I've come to the point where there's no such thing as a "meaning" that does not impact life. We can, of course, make a very simple distinction between meanings and [Krimel] You know after expressing fatigue I still seem happy to carry on defining and redefining... 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
