Platt, you are being very bad. That was very coy of you to address Ian with that quote from Rorty, but you know who it should go to. Do you want to go around this again? Are you rescinding on the equilibrium we reached? If you sincerely want to talk about truth again, I'd ask that you either leave Rorty out or do more than contextless quotes, and particularly more than quoting a guy talking about someone else's understanding of someone else. Trusting the opinion of somebody is one thing, but throwing that out is like if someone came in here and said, "Pirsig is a lame duck," and then quoted Galen Strawson. If that's all they had, no one would, rightly, take them seriously.
But if you do want to have at it again, let me remind you of our previous point of agreement, to which I've not only made reference to recently, but many times since its happening. I'll lead with your reply to me to remind you of your agreement with what will follow (from the "Mill: Quality philosopher" thread, June 2006, http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/2006-June/003295.html): -------------------------------- Matt, Many thanks for your explication of "truth" below. I have no argument with it other than the minor one of academic philosophy being estranged in certain circumstances from common sense. But even here your analogy of a physicist's perception of table is a nice illustration of the difference, and well taken. Again, much appreciate the time you spent on this. Now if only I can remember it. :-) Platt ----------------------------------- That was a special moment for me, Platt--and now you want to take it away from me ;-) Here was the post from me before (the explication that was "below" the above, located here http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/2006-June/003289.html): ----------------------------------- Platt, Matt said: Gene is right: we shouldn't, in our more careful moments, say that absolute truth does or does not exist. Pragmatists are advocating we stop talking about it because talk of it (started by Plato) hasn't gotten us any closer in answering the question because we are no where closer towards developing criteria of even knowing how we'd know if we answered the question. Platt said: I see what you're saying. But what about the application of what you say to the everyday world we inhabit, such as the death of my cat, UTOE. Most people would agree with the statement, "UTOE is dead. He will never come back." If asked, "Are you sure," the typical response would be "Absolutely." In what way would that statement be wrong? Matt: There would be nothing wrong with it. What I think we should do is make a distinction between commonsensical conversation and philosophical conversation, so-called "speaking with the vulgar" and more sophisticated, specialized talk. Now, I've gotten the sense over the years that you'd be suspicious of such a distinction, seeing it at as breeding pointless jargonizing and instead valuing "plainer speech". But I think one can still keep Pirsig's criticism of pointless Victorian circumlocutions while acknowledging that, for instance, scientists keep the kind of distinction I'm talking about between their activities at work and at home (by calling it a "table" instead of a "cloud of electrons between vectors X, Y, and Z"), or between writing articles for scientific journals and writing a "popular science" book. Or take any of us: do we go around during the day talking about Dynamic Quality? Probably not. We probably reserve most of that talk for moments alone, with close fr iends, and for posts to this group. But say you did--say one of us responded to a fortunate event by saying, "That was Dynamic!", and a friend (who'd never read Pirsig), replied, "Huh?" You explain it, which takes at least five mintues, and I imagine the friend would say something like, "Why didn't you just say it was 'good'?" They'd see _you_ as pointlessly jargonizing, proliferating words when there are easier ones available. The point is the commonsense one that our words gain resonance (and meaning, for that matter) from the contexts in which we use them. A great impetus for 20th century analytic philosophy (the movement that spawned logical positivism) was the notion that the problems of philosophy (so-called "metaphysical problems" like free will v. determinism) were created by taking words like "freedom" out of the original, common sense contexts in which they arose and creating a new context for them, one that warped their original meaning until it had little to do with the original context, thus creating pseudo-problems--in other words, metaphysics was simply a set of pointless circumlocutions that just confused things. On the one had, the project of "ordinary language philosophy" (or Oxford philosophy, as it is sometimes known) foundered just as logical positivism, but it does create added pressure for us philosophers to justify some of the contexts we deal in. How does, or could, this effect us? With this notion of "absolute", I want to say that there's nothing wrong with it in common sense contexts, like if I had answered your question ("Is logical consistency a characteristic of quality truth?") colloquially with "Absolutely", but that there is something wrong with some of the notions created in philosophical contexts--that the effects in such contexts do not extend to everyday life at all. As James said after likewise dismissing the free will/determinism problem, it makes a difference that makes no difference. If you're willing to agree that the notion of an "Absolute Truth" that is an object of inquiry creates an activity that has no criteria for even knowing if we had found what we were looking for (an activity that would go on indefinitely with no parameters for even knowing which direction is the right direction to go hunting in), then you should be willing to agree with me (to this limited extent) that the notion of "absolute truth" in philosophy is a wheel that spins idly by itself, that its dead weight, that it would be best to cut it loose from your philosophical language, thus trimming your own philosophical language and not letting it get away from you with pointless jargonizing. To pave the way for the possibility of agreement (many of our disagreements being built out of our first conversations almost four years ago, and not really worked on since), let me add this about truth: several years ago, Rorty conceded that truth is an absolute concept. What he meant is this: pragmatists have gotten killed because the pragmatist theory of truth is said to prove its own falsity--if the true is what works, then the pragmatist theory of truth is false, 'cuz it don't work. This is a line I'm postive you've used before. Pragmatists like Rorty and Davidson have learned that this is right, that as a _theory_ of truth it _doesn't_ work. One of the formulations that Dewey gave is that truth is warranted assertability. If truth is warranted assertability, then "truth" becomes the same thing as "justification". _That_ conflation is exactly what leads people to call pragmatists relativists, because while we see that justification is relative to communities (or br oadly, contexts), truth is seperate from it for the exact reason that relativism is absurd. So pragmatists should be willing to admit that justification is different from truth. What they've realized though is that the problem is with thinking we need a _theory_ of truth. The development of theories of truth are exactly those philosophical activities that treat Truth as an object of inquiry, inquiries through which we could learn more about truth (and therefore, ideally, the application of "true" to particular linguistic items like "Slavery is bad"), but how can we _learn_ anything if, in such an inquiry, we appear to be in an endless sea with no compass? Truth may be an absolute notion, but pragmatists think we should give up the hope for a theory of it, that we should stop treating it as an object of inquiry. Justification (by such earmarks as Pirsig's "tests of truth") is our only criterion for truth, but they are different. _Justification_ is relative to community, but that doesn't make us relativists because it isn't clear what other criterion we could have for truth. It simply makes us fallible experimentalists, always in search of betterness. There are no theories for truth, justification, or betterness. We simply accrue them by the living of life. Matt ----------------------------------- Now, Platt, the question is: do you want, now, to contest something up there? You are, of course, free at any time to change your mind about things. I'm not going to hold you to something you said two years ago (this isn't a presidential election, after all). People change their minds. Do you not agree with the basic thrust of my explanation now? Do you not assent to this, the essential (if absurdly long and circumlocutorious) conditional in the post: "If you're willing to agree that the notion of an "Absolute Truth" that is an object of inquiry creates an activity that has no criteria for even knowing if we had found what we were looking for (an activity that would go on indefinitely with no parameters for even knowing which direction is the right direction to go hunting in), then you should be willing to agree with me (to this limited extent) that the notion of "absolute truth" in philosophy is a wheel that spins idly by itself, that its dead weight, that it would be best to cut it loose from your philosophical language, thus trimming your own philosophical language and not letting it get away from you with pointless jargonizing." If not, we can have a new conversation. If you _do_, well, then ... I don't know. Back off, I guess. Because I don't think anyone here is suggesting anything except basically something that agrees in spirit with the above. At the very least, I know Ian and Arlo aren't. But for everyone else, if Platt does agree again, I suggest using the above as a reference point if Platt gets out of hand, a reminder of a point of agreement. One of the reasons the MD often seems like an experiment set to prove Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence is because we have bad memories and because points of agreement are rare (often because points of mutual understanding are rare). There isn't a good record of the points when they happen, things that can be built off of, like, "Hey, no, I'm just talking about that thing we agreed on last week." If there were more mutual reference points, that would shut down conversational paths that have already been walked down so that people could spend their time exploring other lanes. So--what's up Platt? What's it going to be? 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