Hi Steve, Ian, Steve said: But if we apply the pragmatic maxim on the difference between truth and justification, do we find that there is no difference in practice?
Matt: Pretty much, mainly because the only way we know truth is through justification. But, only pretty much, because there are certain practices that do show a difference (for instance, when constructing a theory of truth or trying to figure out all the requirements for what counts as knowledge). And there are uses of truth worth distinguishing (which I'll mention below). Steve said: 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. ... 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: Let me first say this: knowledge, ever since Plato's Theaetetus, has been mainly analyzed as a peculiar form of belief, as "justified true belief." There have been attempts to tinker (the most famous being Gettier's two and a half page article that gave two counter-examples in which all three pieces were in place, yet we'd intuitively say knowledge was not had--this produced the field of Gettierology, more and more ingenious counter-examples in which we'd withhold "knowing"). There have even been attempts to completely overhaul (my favorite being Barry Allen, a former student of Rorty's, who in Knowledge and Civilization suggested that traditional analyses of knowledge have a "discursive bias," by taking knowledge to be a peculiar form of belief, and that this ignores the distinction between know-how and knowing-that, and that we should rather analyze propositional knowing-that as a peculiar form of non-discursive know-how). But either way, pragmatists have always made a distinction between knowledge and belief. We might say this: a simple belief, sans justification and truth, is something you have when you have no good reasons for believing it, like when you have a "gut feeling," for instance, or you believe X because you hope its true. When you try and justify a belief, you are entering your belief into Sellars' "space of reasons," which is a critical exchange (even with just yourself), a building up of reasons for believing, reasons which lend plausibility for the belief being true, which is to say probability for the belief successfuly guiding action (and we shouldn't be so hasty as to think that "thinking" isn't a kind of "acting"). There are two things notice here. 1) Religious believers, particularly religious intellectuals (priests, pastors, rabbis, imams, brahmins, etc.), sometimes do enter their beliefs in the space of reasons--the trouble has been whether or not to recognize these reasons as _good_ reasons. 2) We can see the Dynamic/static distinction at work between unjustified belief and justified belief. The importance Pirsig's analysis of the relationship between the two, and its relationship to pragmatism, is that an unjustified belief, an apprehension of Dynamic Quality, is simply the first stage in experimentation. Dewey said life and beliefs are an experiment. When we instintively sense something as good, we might initially have no reasons for thinking so. The static latching Pirsig talks about is the work of the space of reasons, of building up justification, of trying that belief out in guiding life and, if it works, you get justification. In Rorty's analysis of truth, he further suggests that there are at least two ways in which we use it in regular life that are distinguishable from justification (there might be more): the endorsing use and the cautionary use. The former has gotten Rorty in a lot of trouble, as he often incautiously says that's the only use (the "truth is a compliment" stuff). The cautionary use, when we say, "Okay, what you say might be jusitified, but it might not be true," takes the distinction between justification and truth for granted. It's an important use, as it reminds us that the infinite space of life might prove more unpredictable then we presently imagine. What we shouldn't hope for, however, is a theory about the cautionary use of truth. Matt said: 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? Ian said: Taking the pragamatic view simply as food for more thought, argument and justification (of what constitutes success or value) is just more of the intellectual game. And a game it is; an intellectual arms race, snowballing ever larger to ever diminishing returns; taking our eye off the real ball ... living real life. Matt: That's not exactly what I meant. If we take Dewey's view on what reflection is, we live our lives according to a set of habits and reflecting takes us out of the regular stream of life to think about the habits we typically use. This is what I meant about focusing on doing--think/reflect on the habits of our life. This was the culture of Socrates. Plato inaugurated something new (actually, the Sophists had started it, and technically we should count the poets' musings on the Muses, but Plato really kicked it into gear)--reflection on the activity of reflection. This is two removes from our regular habits of life, but it can be supremely useful in refining and bettering the reflective habits we use to refine and better our other habits. This is what we can read the 2500 year history of philosophy as--an ongoing refinement of our thinking habits, and throwing off of new disciplines to help better our life habits (physics, biology, psychology), but interminable debates that don't seem to have any practical effects whatsoever--which is what James thought of the debate between free will and determinism--these are the things that should be cut, evidence of the law of diminishing returns. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®: Chat. Store. Share. 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