Steve said:I'm confused about what the pragmatic theory of truth is. James says truth is a species of good and is that which is expedient in terms of belief. Pierce says that truth is what is so whether you are I or anyone else believes it. I think Pierce's take is what we usually mean by truth. Rorty says that pragmatism doesn't really have a theory if truth. Truth is just the property that all true startments have in common and pragmatists don't have anything philosphically interesting to say about truth beyond that. dmb says:Good questions, Steve. I think the main idea is that beliefs can only be considered true if they are successful in guiding experience. And this principle can be applied in the context of scientific inquiry and in the less formal processes of lived experience. Unlike Platonic notions of truth, there is no important difference between experience and reality. Lived experience is the only reality we can ever have and inquiry grows out of the problems encountered in particular situations. If a belief can successfully resolve a problematic situation, then we can say its assertion is warranted. That's how Dewey liked to put it. He used the word "truth" only reluctantly and instead used the phrase "warranted assertibility". His idea was that scientific inquiry was basically a formalized extension of what living creatures do naturally in order to survive. The lion doesn't explicitly think, "hey, if I catch this animal I can have lunch" but there is a sequence of actions that will prove successful or not. The lion better be quiet, stay hidden, run fast and pounce hard if he wants to stay alive. Scientific inquiry is also seen as a process, a lived experience in which the interactions will work out or they won't. In this way, the word "expedient" almost has to be vague because it will mean different things in different problematic situations and it is only within particular situations that such words can have any practical meaning. In other words concepts are "useful" only for particular purposes and these purposes will change as old problems are solved and new ones come up. So here truth is not something that corresponds with objective reality, with the way the world "really" is regardless of what people think. Instead, truth is what agrees with experience as its actually lived. If, for example, I think a nice tall glass of hemlock will be refreshing and nutritious and then use this belief to try to solve the problem of being thirsty... Well you get the idea. If I think Newton's laws are true and use them to try to put a man on the moon, they'll prove themselves in the actual attempt. Or not. In this sense, the "usefulness" of an idea can only be determined in actual experience, by a process of experimentation. And even something as seemingly universal as Newton's laws are really only rules of thumb that might not be applicable in certain situations. The rules we derive from experience are always considered to be secondary to the actual situations as they're encountered so that in certain cases we're warranted in asserting that Einstein's ideas are true and Newton's are not. This emphasis on lived experience and the particular situation is not the same as thing as relativism. You don't get that undergraduate attitude of "who are we to judge what true and not true?" Truth is not something about which we can be so whimsical simply because beliefs have practical consequences. This is where Matt and I disagree. While it might be true that I don't generally have a whole lot of sympathy for way conservatives complain about relativism (so as to assert moral absolutes and such) there is a genuine problem with truth as "intersubjective agreement". As Pirsig, Rosenthal and Habermas all like to point out, Hitler managed to do some pretty awful things on that basis. As we all know cleansing Germany of Jews was seen as a good thing to do. And as one of the guests pointed out on the latest installment of In Our Time (a BBC radio show) relativism is quite disturbing to Human Rights activists. And I'm afraid that Rorty's dismissal of certain Enlightenment ideals would jeopardize some very valuable ideals. His notion of truth as nothing more than intersubjective agreement result in a kind of cultural solipsism that prevents us from asserting important moral principles. They also talked about the mid-19th century anthropologists who were among the first to develop the idea of universal human rights. They were making these assertions in the context of America's political situation, in which slavery and genocide were being practiced. To the extent that our diminished concepts of truth lead to such moral nightmares or stand in the way of preventing them, they're not "working". They're much worse than useless, in fact. And I think this is why liberal intellectuals have to be concerned about relativism. As the world gets smaller and we find it increasingly common to bump up against other cultures, the need for some kind of adjudication becomes more desperate. Or to be a little more generous toward Rorty's notion of agreement, the community of inquirers needs to be broad enough to include the whole globe rather than just groups that play the same language games. One would hope that the United Nations can evolve into an institution where the various cultures can all inquire together and agree on universal principles such as human rights. Without the radical empiricism, I suppose James isn't much help here either. When the two are married, as in the MOQ, certain limits are placed on the notion that something can be true for me but not for you. (Not to mention the problem of slipping back into some kind of solipsistic subjectivism.) In that case, truth is not a property of sentences but the successful application of beliefs in particular situations. There truth proves itself in practice, not just satisfaction in the believer. It's the determining feature of a life process, not the property of a sentence.
I'm just thinking out loud too. These are really big questions and next to them my answers seem pretty small. I don't really have an answer here so much as an attitude and a few ideas. dmb _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®: Chat. Store. Share. Do more with mail. http://windowslive.com/howitworks?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_hm_justgotbetter_howitworks_012009 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/
