Hi Matt,
Matt:
When Rorty first said in the early 80s that pragmatists shouldn't be
seen as technically holding a theory of truth, his reason for saying
so was that what became identified as the "pragmatist theory of
truth," i.e. truth is what works (which all three classicals can be
read as saying, though James most so), has pretty plainly been shown
to not work. The main idea is that what the classicals seemed to be
suggesting is that we reduce truth to justification. Peirce says
truth is what you have at the end of inquiry, James that truth is an
expedient, Dewey that truth is warranted assertibility. I'm not
competent enough to judge whether the classicals are correctly
criticized for this, but my suspicion is that the water was muddy
enough in their writings that it seems pertinent to say. You can't
reduce truth to justification.
And this is why DMB is wrong--we don't disagree on this. Rorty
himself for most of his career, I think, was as muddy as James and
Dewey--reducing truth to intersubjective agreement would be wrong.
But the way we should read all of the pragmatists is _not_ as
attempting to reduce truth to anything else, but trying to get us to
refocus our attention on something more relevant to life--they were
attempting to change the conversation from truth to justification, not
reduce the former to the latter.
Steve:
But if we apply the pragmatic maxim on the difference between truth and
justification, do we find that there is no difference in practice?
Tell me if you think I get the idea: Truth is truth, let's just leave
it at that and move on to the more interesting questions of how we come
to have and to evaluate beliefs and how we can convince others of what
we believe to be true. There is no difference in practice from saying
"X is true" and "I believe X to be true." These are both understood as
claims to be prepared to act in certain ways under certain
circumstances. It's not that truth is equated with what can be
justified, but rather that we can talk fruitfully about justification
while there is nothing very interesting to say about truth. The meaning
of the word truth like everything else is understood in practice. It
simply is the way that we all use the word--as that which is so
regardless of what anyone believes. It seems to me that there is
nothing wrong with that concept of truth. It is a useful tool for
whatever it is useful for.
The problems only arise when we think of the truth of something like
F=ma as something that is written into the fabric of the cosmos
(something that is not a tool but a representation) or think of truth
as adjudicated from a God's eye view and then try to imagine how we
could gain access to such a perspectiveless perspective. Truth, Reason,
and Reality would then be treated as gods--essences that can be known
outside of lived experience.
Matt:
The classicals weren't successful, of course. While Russell and other
realists laughed the pragmatists off the stage, the stage itself was
shifting to more promising territory for the realists: language. If
we are going to get a theory of truth, one that tells us when we have
knowledge, why not analyze our language, how we use words and how they
hook up to the world?
Steve:
I guess the slippery spot here for pragmatists that I may have tripped
on above is that we can be construed as making an assertion that it is
impossible to have a theory of truth that tells us when we have
knowledge as opposed to a belief?
Does the pragmatic method suggest that in practice there is no
meaningful distinction to be made between knowledge and belief?
Matt:
I will grant DMB one thing: I've been coming quite recently (today at
work) to understand why people take Rorty's "intersubjective
agreement" to be flimsy (despite the fact that it is pretty much
identical to Habermas' notion, sans some Peircean nods in the
direction of an ideal end of inquiry). Agreement between people can
be had in some pretty flimsy cases, like at the end of a gun or "let's
agree to disagree." These are indeed agreements, but they don't seem
to be very justified. Rorty's notion of "ethnocentrism" is
technically what gets Rorty off the hook (his desire to continue the
culture of Socrates), but I won't expand on that except to say that
Rorty _should_ have distinguished between "agreement" and
"justification." Justificatory practices, part of what Brandom calls
the "asking and giving of reasons" (following Sellars' "space of
reasons" metaphor), are an instrumental social practice in the West,
one that goes a bit beyond simple agreement. You can vote in a
president, even cheat one in, but you can't vote the truth of an idea.
I don't have any extra rhetoric alloted to this topic as of yet, but
the abstract idea is the same as Dewey and the classicals: stop
expending energy on truth, because in isolation from knowledge about
all your going to come up with is banal disquotationalism--"'it's
snowing' is true if and only if it is snowing." And hooking it up to
knowledge just gets you into useless battles, when all the real work
in knowledge production is still being done by justificatory
practices.
A muddy way of putting it is to say: stop focusing on what you're
thinking, and focus on what you are doing. We've come up with some
pretty good stuff while thinking about thinking, and thinkers are
always good at hyping what they do, but the law of diminishing returns
has gotta' kick in some time, right?\
Interesting, Matt. Thanks.
Regards,
Steve
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