Hi Matt/Krim
Really great post below.
Matt the story you tell below what 3/4 books best tell that story would you
say?
Interesting bit about the non-dualist aliens from Philosophy & the Miiror of
Nature.
Also where you resist the pretentions of science. I smell a conflict of
sorts here.
On the one hand you and Rorty and me dismiss the pretentions of science and
scientism when they try to apply the language of science in a different
language
sphere such as ethics. Also you, Rorty and me are non-reductionists.
But you and Rorty are still materialists and I find this odd. As the
physicists
Paul Davies says, modern physics suggests that the concept of matter is more
mythic than real in the current experience of physics.
You see it seems odd to me to say that the non-dualist aliens will talk as
if there is
a single non-dual reality that is grounded in material ideas, because our
notions
of material, of what causes our experience is one step beyond what we
experience,
an aspect of our best theories or assumptions.
Might the aliens not have much more of a sense of the constructed and
provisional character
of all alien knowledge? This would be compatible with Rorty's position but
less tipping
the hat to whatever our latest theories about reality may be. The aliens may
see the focus
much more on experience as being about shared experience with their fellow
aliens and
the specific-ness of their alien point of view. I see no reason in Rorty's
approach that
stops non-dualist aliens having a very strong sense that reality is a larger
category than
experience, is something that is the cause of experience but therefore
transcends experience
and that their conceptions of reality must always go beyond experience to
construct
what they call reality. More in line with Nietzsche than Rorty perhaps they
see the world/reality
as a fiction, a positive and perhaps/theoretically/hopefully/pragmatically
semi-accurate
(but how do you know? -you can't) way to make sense of experience. Therefore
they would
never dream of suggesting that their physical theories can fundamentally
explain experience
in any useful sense, rarther (less scientistically and a critically thought
out way), they see
their theories as always being an attempt to make sense of their shared
experience which
creates the need and interest to theorise and therefore comes before their
probably
incorrect constructions about the reality that transcends experience.
Transcends in the
obvious sense that an individual does not experience what others experience,
other
life forms must experience differently, and much of reality has never been
experienced
by humans or aliens and exiested both before life and will exist after life
in the cosmos.
To leave out what inanimate patterns experience too if anything.
I also note how you talk about the future and what we are to make of
ourselves,
and that whatever we have been this does not tell us which future we should
seek.
This is close to what I am saying about the reality of possibility. It is
only due
to us as humans being faced with alternative futures/possibles that we have
a
problem that goes beyond actuality. Actuality is incomplete, it is open to
alternative futures, we have real choices to make about these, we have to
consider them and value them, they arevery real to us, and in one sense
they are not physical, material or actual, but they have the potential to be
so.
I think Margolis is on to this by the way.
regards
David M
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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