Hey Krimel,
Matt said:
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 said:
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:
It isn't really a "clinging" maneuver so much as it is a concession to people
like Platt that that's how the word "truth" works in our language. Truth
doesn't change, but that doesn't mean as much as we used to think.
For instance, you say you concede that "context is relevant," but I would go
much further than that: context isn't relevant, because that implies that
there's other considerations that lay astride context. Context is the whole
ballgame--any and all considerations only become intelligible inside some
context or another. There is no such thing as either an a-contextual situation
(which is a contradiction anyways) or an ur-context, a context that sits
unchanging and eternal and provides intelligibility to the notion of Absolute
Truth (which is different than acknowledging that truth is an absolute
notion--after all, notice the capital letters).
Essentially, my explanation goes like this: truth is a semantic notion, whereas
justification is an epistemological notion. What philosophers have figured out
is that truth is a necessary concept for languages to function, but that it has
no epistemological consequences as is often thought. This explanation,
however, is a bit esoteric. To explain it, I'll perform another dash through
the history of philosophy because it will not only explain who the philosophers
are that figured this out (and what my explanation means), but why I say some
of the strange things I do, about language and all that. Because Pirsigian
philosophers are pretty suspicious of the so-called linguistic turn, which is
an integral part of this story and why I talk my peculiar talk about talking.
There have been two major shifts in what philosophers talk about since Plato,
three different eras of discourse. The Greek era saw philosophers talk about
"reality." The modern era was inaugurated by Descartes, who shifted the topic
of conversation to "experience." This lasted into the beginning of the 20th
century, when the Vienna Circle invaded the United States and solidified in the
anglophone world what Gustav Bergmann called the "linguistic turn," talk about
"language." These shifts can also be called, in an anachronistic way, a shift
between the primacy of the philosophical subdisciplines of metaphysics to
epistemology to semantics/philosophy of language.
Each shift was perpetrated by those who believed their's was the wave of the
future. Each shift left behind unreconstructed philosophers who thought that
it was BS. Every new innovation and shift leaves behind those who think "the
new" is also "the bad," and over time they've collected because philosophy is
the peculiar kind of thing philosophy is. So nowadays we have Platonists,
modernists, and analytics, all arguing with each other over increasingly more
topics of conversation. The Greeks talked about reality, and when Descartes
broke with scholasticism by suggesting that each person has an interior called
"the mind," which carried a stream of experience that paralleled reality, the
Thomists (the Greeks of the time) said that the Cartesians were talking about
"mere" experience, instead of reality. They thought Descartes had created a
needless barrier to reality.
This was, funnily enough, repeated in the 20th century almost to a T.
Modernists talked about experience, but people like Russell, Wittgenstein,
Carnap, and Feigl thought that this kind of talk wasn't getting anywhere. They
said that all they were doing was talking, so they might as well make it a
virtue and figure out what the deal was with language. The modernists, though,
thought that all this talk about talk was pointless breath, missing out on
reality (or rather, "experience").
What I think we've learned from this historical movement, though, is that
Platonism doesn't care _what_ the terms of discussion are, be it reality,
experience, or language. Simply taking the linguistic turn does nothing. The
appearance/reality distinction, knower/known distinction, dialectic/rhetoric,
necessary/contingent, etc., etc., all of these distinctions can be constructed
out of whatever materials you're building with. The Greeks talked about
reality, but Plato had the Sophists, his antithesis. Descartes and Locke
talked about inner experience, but Hume and Hegel began decomposing the residue
of Platonism, the problems of the separation between experience and reality
that the Thomists warned of. The logical positivists said that we needed to
get straight about language, but Carnap and Quine both slid towards pragmatism
and the destruction of the tenets logical positivism needed to purely
distinguish between language and experience.
What I think we've seen is the dialectical movement from metaphysics, "talk
about reality," to epistemology, "talk about how we know about reality," to
philosophy of language, "talk about how we talk about how we know about
reality." What we've learned is that each step discovers something lacking in
the last epoch, but isn't making a progression in finding the _real_ topic of
discussion--reality, experience, or language--because (your choice of
description): 1) all three things interpenetrate; 2) the only way to do
philosophy without interminable problems is to collapse experience back into
reality (a la Dewey) or language back into experience (a la Quine and Sellars);
3) talk of any one of them is elliptical for talk of the others.
Another way of putting the dialectical sequence is that Plato wanted to get at
the reality behind the appearances (Platonism). Descartes figured out that if
that was your goal, you had to figure out how you'd know if you had gotten
behind appearances (Platonic epistemology). The logical positivists, analyzing
"knowledge" into "justified true belief," said that what we really needed was a
theory of truth, an analysis of truth that would lead us back through knowledge
to reality.
The true enemy in all this is the Platonic notion that there is a mysterious
unchanging reality behind the changing one we experience in everyday life. A
Platonic notion of "reality" is what led to the need for a robust notion of
epistemology, something that would answer the skeptic's challenge, "How do you
_know_ you've penetrated past the appearances to reality?" Common sense and
the individual disciplines of knowledge (physics, chemistry, biology, history,
anthropology, literary criticism, etc.) all have routes of _justification_, but
the sense that reality is single, eternal, ahistorical, and universal led
people (read: philosophers) to think that justification wasn't enough--you
might be justified in thinking it, but is it true?
Every explanation of how truth works failed. Correspondentists thought that
truth was a correspondence between proposition and reality, but they could
never explain how a sentence-chunk corresponded to a reality-chunk.
Coherentists, noting the gulf between language and reality, thought that truth
was what resulted when all of your propositions hung together coherently, but
is that truth? Euclidean _and_ Riemannian geometry are both coherent, but
neither one of them can be true at the same time, so how do we know which one
of those are true? Pragmatists, noting that particular problem, said that
truth was what works, but everyone laughed at that, because everyone knows
Nazism worked for the Germans for a while. (Okay, I realize I'm getting
_really_ anachronistic now, but this is spitball history, not actual history.)
What to do?
The answer came with Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson. Both had taken the
linguistic turn and were in the business of analyzing philosophical issues
through the lens of how language functions. The gist is that a fourth way of
explaining truth appeared: disquotationalism. This was a purely semantic way
of explaining truth: "X" is true if and only if X.
A double-take is no doubt in order if you've never heard it before, and it is
almost like I just told a joke, so I'll fill the X in: "This is snow" is true
if and only if this is snow. Disquotationalism: the quotes are taken off. A
sentence is true if what is says is so.
This seems like a cheat: the sentence "It is snowing" is true if it is snowing.
When I say "purely semantic," I mean that the reason why disquotationalism is
unsatisfying is because we feel as if an explanation of truth should tell us
_how we know_ X is true. The semantic answer just tells us what it means for a
sentence to be true--it tells us how language functions. However, what Tarski
and Davidson have told us is that the only way to explain truth is to decouple
it from epistemology. As soon as you want more than "'X' is true iff X",
you've injected epistemological concerns into a semantic explanation.
Pragmatists thought analyzing truth in terms of justification would bridge the
gulf between experience and reality that both the correspondentists and
coherentists held to. What we've learned, however, from Tarski and Davidson is
that _languages_ wouldn't function properly if truth was the same as
justification. Truth is a primitive notion: it can't be analyzed into anything
else, nor can it be explained outside of its function in the language.
This is what I meant by saying that truth is an absolute notion, but
justification is relative _and_ the only route to truth. The latter, however,
contains the epistemological equivocation that still occurs in common sense
talk. What we should really say is that truth is an absolute notion, but
justification is relative to audience and the only route to _knowledge_ (thus
holding the two apart entirely).
Why all of this? Because I don't think it matters too much for most things
whether we talk about reality, experience, or language, _and_, in fact, it
helps for avoiding a particular form of Platonism to talk in terms of language.
I get hit a lot for saying things that Pirsig supposedly rails on, but the way
I see it, philosophical schools differentiate themselves in such a way that
they need to be translated to speak to each other. In other words, just
because the French say, "Je sais!" and the English say, "I know!" doesn't
necessarily mean they are talking about two different things (though,
occasionally it does, as when they say, "Je connais!").
Krimel said:
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.
Matt:
I think you've raised a number of different counterexamples we could
distinguish in various ways. As a matter of consistency, the way through I
think we should take is to say that knowledge of reality is "justified true
belief," and the reason for the three different pieces is 1) "belief" because
Descartes was right, our individual experience of reality is our connection to
reality, 2) "justified" because to bridge the sense of isolation from (1) we
exchange reasons for our beliefs, and 3) "true" because "X" is true if and only
X, which has nothing to do with one person's or many people's beliefs and
justifications. The truth (or falsity) that it is raining does, indeed, have
nothing to do with whether a person believes it to be raining (or not) or even
whether they are justified (or not) in believing so, but only in the fact that
it is raining (or not). But while that remains true, it is also true that the
only way we'd know if it were raining is if first, someone believe
d it, and second, they were justified in doing so (thus making it knowledge
and not luck).
Krimel said:
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.
Matt:
Sure, absolutely. Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature used a sci-fi
story about an alien race, the Antipodeans, that we'd learned to talk to had no
conception of an inner space called the "mind" because they'd happened to have
made scientific breakthroughs in neurophysiology before physics. He used this
story as a means of suggesting how we might talk without a pernicious
conception of a mind that gets in between us and reality. This was a means of
suggesting that Cartesianism is optional, not inevitable. The whole idea
behind the creation of "eliminative materialism" was not that the "mind" is
fake, but that we might someday come to speak without reference to it, thus
effectively eliminating it. We could conceivably be nudged into becoming
Antipodeans, though I doubt we ever will be.
Matt said:
...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 said
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:
On the one hand, when I talk about epistemology being pointless and
disappearing as a subject, I am contextually speaking of it as focusing on
truth--and if anything I've been saying is true, then this makes sense. On the
other hand, epistemology that is focused on justification is the one that is
decoupled from semantics and is still something worth talking about. However,
I still demur on "science" occupying the length and breadth of "how we know."
I think decoupling semantics from epistemology was an important contribution to
"how we know," and only in a loose sense is that a part of "science."
Krimel said:
Call me Pollyanna but I hold out hope that biology and anthropology and
psychology do offer insights into ethics.
Matt:
Well, reading anthropology and psychology might help our ethical understanding,
but let me put it this way: how does learning about how we are help us figure
out how we should be? Not exactly the usual understanding of ethics, and I
realize understanding what we are capable of might help us think about things
that are possible rather than impossible, but take the talk about altruism and
biology in philosophy: who the fuck cares whether altruism exists in the animal
kingdom? How does that tell us anything about how we should treat each other?
I think this is the force of Hume's no oughts from ises: the past doesn't
dictate the future.
Krimel said:
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.
Matt:
Yeah, one could construe them on analogy like that. When I was taking Kant in
college, I remember thinking that the ironic thing about the analytic/synthetic
distinction, which matched up with the necessary/contingent distinction
("bachelors are single" is a necessary truth because it is true by virtue of
the definitions of the terms, which is analytic), was that the analytic truths
were true in virtue of the way we speak, and therefore contingent, but
synthetic truths were true in virtue of the way reality was, and therefore
necessary (like gravity making rocks falling). But really all this kind of
thinking does is punch up how they aren't distinct kinds as Kant thought.
Krimel said:
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:
Well, the "necessary" you are using here is like the necessary I used above.
Kant would've said that hardwiring is the stuff that is investigatible by
science, and therefore empirical and not a priori. His notion of "a priori"
was constructed in a way that made it something totally pure of particular
experiences of reality, which was his notion of reason, but nowadays we have a
hard time conceiving of something like that. So, you could construe Kant that
way, but Kant is an emblem of not-reductionist-materialism and if you were
going to be a nonreductionist, it would be the a priori half you'd construe as
the part that keeps us from being reductionists (this is effectively what
philosophers like P. F. Strawson, Wilfrid Sellars, and even Richard Rorty and
Robert Brandom do).
Krimel said:
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:
Eh, I'm still not so sure they do have better cards. In a lot of cases,
particularly with who we should be as people, I think it's more like they have
regular playing cards and we have dominoes. And that's main suggestion:
science is a different game then ethics. Not all of us play poker, but
everybody plays dominoes, and its as if Pinker and Wilson (and Dawkins) are
trying to figure out how their ace plays in the domino game. Obviously it
isn't nearly that clear cut, but it is an analogy that I think works well
enough: how is telling us how we are going to tell us how we should be? As I
noticed you suggesting elsewhere, say we can translate human behavior into
mathematical formula--that still doesn't tell us how we _should_ behave.
Corporations are good at predicting our behavior, but predicting what we will
do _still doesn't tell us what we should do_.
It is one thing to be an ethical realist, someone that acknowledges and knows
the political realities of life, but it is quite another to think that that's
it--that's when people turn into cynics and either devolve into bitchy inaction
or into power-grabbers gaming the system. A realist acknowledges the realities
(a plus over the fluffy idealist, who is typically ineffective exactly because
of their lack of grasp of reality), but knows that we can be better.
Matt
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