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). [Krimel] Exactly, this odd notion of a fixed, absolute, perfect point of view is the dream the drives folks like Ham. You seem to be in accord that philosophers are on board rationally with what the sciences have demonstrated empirically. There is no fixed absolute reference point. There is no Absolute Truth beyond the conception of Absolute Truth. We can imagine such a thing. We can give it a "tip of the hat or a wag of the finger" But we have no way of being certain that what we tip and wag at, is what we think it is. [Matt] 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. [Krimel] One thing that strikes me about you comments here is that as you describe it and whatever form we give to reality or our conceptions of reality it eventually assumes a kind of binary form. Extremes are indentified. I can not account for why this is but this bifurcation seems nearly universal. Our concepts seem to always assume this binary polarity. Why not triads or quartettes? To me this strikes at the heart of the Taoist metaphysics that Pirsig adopts. We see patterns in terms of their extreme manifestations; their poles. We construct opposites out of whatever phenomena present themselves to us whether actual or conceptual. I am torn as to whether this is a metaphysical or a psychological principle or whether a distinction between the two is even possible. [Matt] 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? [Krimel] I would argue that what Plato saw was the purity and clarity of Euclidian geometry. Within it he saw a set of simple and perfect ideas that could describe and make sense of the messy world of dust and bone. Perfect lines and shapes unmarred by shaky hands or blemishes of any kind. From such a vantage point all of the murkiness of messiness of the world of flesh was but a shadow. The essence of a category was the perfect exemplar of a type and whether it did exist or could exist mattered not a bit so long as the light of its conception glowed bright enough to reveal the shadow of its form. [Matt] 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. [Krimel] Excellent explanation of the flow of all of this but I remain deeply suspicious of all of this emphasis on language. The whole idea that truth and language and thought are all of a piece seems fundamentally wrong to me. And if I can say exactly why or even that I am committed to opposition, the suspicion lingers. Certainly language is what we use to communicate and how we communicate will influence the form of our thinking right down to the process itself. But language is thought objectified. It is the summation of our interior musings rendered symbolic. Regardless of how we render our symbols, verbally, gesturally, or musically, something it lost in the rendering. Mathematics or symbolic logic are as close as it gets to unambiguous communication but the very lack of ambiguity limits the range of expression. POP!: Ambiguity versus Range of expression; the duality bubbles like fizzy water. Experience is multimodal and multidimensional. Communication can only be a distillation of this. Dimensions and modes of experience are the currency of communicative processes. I think one of the great advances of the past century was the enabling of new communication modalities. Recorded songs, talking pictures, digital art forms... These enable not only intellectual but emotional and sensory engagement in the communication process. A few years ago at a convention I watched a women demonstrate a sex toy whose movements could be controlled over the internet. Cyberpunk novels and tales like Tad Williams epic Otherworld already predict are future with virtual reality with emphasis on reality. I don't find the digital sex traffickers in the Matrix or Strange Days terribly far fetched or distant. [Matt] 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. [Krimel] All the talk of the sanctity of language reminds me too much of Kant's analytic truth. Truth even with a small 't' is not found in a statement. It is held as a belief. Reason is neither necessary nor sufficient to compel belief. We can divorce Truth and Belief but Justification is the modifier of Belief. Reason is only one of the faces of Justification. More often than not reason is a dash of power covering blemishes of the true face of our justifications. Why isn't belief the primitive notion? Isn't language just a distillation of symbols to communicate belief? [Matt] 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). [Krimel] Rather that "... justification is relative to audience and the only route to _knowledge..." shouldn't it be "... justification is relative to audience and the only route to _belief_..."? 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 believed it, and second, they were justified in doing so (thus making it knowledge and not luck). [Krimel] Aren't you left with "true" and "justified" as adjectives describing belief? Haven't you just identified one species of belief? What about unjustified true beliefs. Or justified false beliefs? 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. [Krimel] I just don't think the distinction between your pain and my pain is artificial or avoidable. There is a qualitative difference between my experience of my own nervous system and my experience of that which is other than my nervous system. Holy crap this goes on and on... I think I missed your point a couple of times and this is even more poorly proofread then usual but I gotta run. I get to the rest of this later... 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/
