Steve said:
I don't think anyone has any problem with truth as "agreement with experience."
The problems only arise when someone wants to have a theory of truth--an
account of what this agreement must be like in order to say something is true.
Since no one has ever been able to do that in such a way as to provide a method
for distinguishing true beliefs from false ones, having a theory of truth or
not is the sort of difference that doesn't make a difference that a Jamesian
should want to drop.
dmb says:
That only points out one more important difference between Rorty and the
classical pragmatist. Rorty thinks we pragmatists shouldn't have a theory of
truth but as James, Pirsig, Dewey and I see it, pragmatism IS a theory of
truth.
Steve said:
What Rorty doesn't say that you keep reading him as saying is that the lack of
non-conversational pressures on assertions means that truth is whatever your
conversational partners will let you get away with. He is only saying that
justification is a social process. Truth on the other hand is a property that
an assertion may either have or not regardless of whether or not the assertion
can be justified.
dmb says:
Huh? If an assertion can't be justified then in what sense does it have the
property of truth? In any case, according to the Stanford article, it's not
just me reading this into Rorty. As the article's author says, "it is not
surprising that Rorty's commitment to epistemological behaviorism should lead
to charges of relativism or subjectivism. Indeed, many who share Rorty's
historicist scepticism toward the transcending ambitions of
epistemology—friendly critics like Hilary Putnam, John McDowell and Daniel
Dennett—balk at the idea that there are no constraints on knowledge save
conversational ones. Yet this is a central part of Rorty's position, repeated
and elaborated as recently as in TP and PCP. Indeed, in TP he invokes it
precisely in order to deflect this sort of criticism."
Please notice that the author is saying "a central part of Rorty's position" is
"the idea that there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones".
You are denying this and accusing me of error but that just doesn't seem
plausible. Every source I check seems quite clear about this.
dmb had said:...what was that quote from Pirsig? Something like...The
scientific method is the way nature keeps us from thinking something is true
when it isn't - or something like that.
Steve replied:
That doesn't sound like Pirsig to me.
dmb says:
I'm worried that Pirsig and Rorty are getting rather blurred in your mind.
Here's the actual quote with some context. As you can see, my paraphrase wasn't
too shabby...
"The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you
into thinking you know something you don't actually know. There's not a
mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn't suffered from that one so
much that he's not instinctively on guard. That's the main reason why so much
scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you
get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish
here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it
often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities. One must be
finely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip
and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about
the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely." (ZAMM, chapter 9)
Steve said:
Pierce, James, and Dewey all had different ideas about truth. None of them
figured out how to distinguish truth from justification in an account of truth
which has been the primary criticism of pragmatism over the last hundred years.
dmb says:
Has it? I'd like to hear more about the last hundred years of criticism. In any
case, while it's true that the classical bunch had their differences, they all
put the emphasis on experiential constraints on knowledge. James and Dewey were
very close to each other on this point. Dewey's definition of truth in his
debates with Bertrand Russell was "warranted assertibility". This little
phrase, Hickman points out, captures the experiential constraints in the
pragmatic theory of truth. Its warrant is based on the past, refers to the past
experience which the idea refers to. The assertion is directed toward the
future. The warrant and assertibility of an idea function in the present but it
is based on what was and it's directed toward what will be. That's a pretty
good way to think about what it means to say that experience is the test of
truth. Obviously, this is not the same as saying that conversation is the only
constraint.
Steve said:...Wouldn't it be better to be able to say that what we once
believed to be true and what we were even justified in believing to be true in
that past has turned out to have never been true? Only by keeping truth and
justification distinct can we say such things.
dmb says:
Hmmm. I don't get that. As I understand it, pragmatic truth is exactly the same
thing as what we're justified in believing. I guess I like "warranted" better
because "justified" sounds vaguely legalistic and so invokes the notion of
"virtue" in that Victorian conformist sense of the word. In any case, I would
have thought that distinguishing between justified beliefs and true beliefs
would sound the alarms for a guy like Rorty. Wouldn't such a thing count as
Platonism?
Steve said:Pierce thought that truth was what we would all come to believe
under ideal conditions of inquiry. It's tough to make this theory of truth work
because of the problem of articulating what these ideal conditions must be like.
dmb says:
Yea, actually he's my least favorite pragmatist. I ever prefer Rorty over
Peirce. Peirce was about 9 inches from being a positivist. Still, he's worth
pondering.
Steve said:
So I think you have a problem if you want to define the essence of pragmatism
as a particular theory of truth since there doesn't seem to be one--at least
not one that works. I think it would be better to think of pragmatism as
anti-essentialism with regard to such notions as Truth. If we do, then it is
easy to see the classical pragmatists and Rorty as part of the same tradition.
dmb says:
Doesn't seem to be a particular theory of truth that defines pragmatism? I'm
pretty sure that James, Dewey and Pirsig all think that pragmatism IS a theory
of truth. It's a method for settling philosophical disputes and for
distinguishing real problems from mere verbal disputes. It's anti-essential and
anti-foundational but it also has a positive, constructive side. In fact, In
the Essay In Radical Empiricism James uses the positive side to do the
deconstructive work. It wasn't a matter of clearing the field first. The move
against modern metaphysics of fixity and certainty was made with radical
empiricism already in hand, so to speak.
But speaking of traditions, one thing I've learned lately is that a lot of what
Rorty says we can't have was something that the analytic philosophers sought
and thought we could have. Modern philosophy in general does this too, of
course, but man, those guys were pretty hard ass about things certainty and
fixity. We're talking about a degree of scientism that would have made
DesCartes look like a hippie and Newton look like a new ager. Seriously. In any
case, from my own particular point of view, Rorty is adamantly against a bunch
of stuff I was never for and in fact never even heard of. I'm still not
entirely sure what an "essence" is or why anyone ever wanted one. It's just
about certainty, I guess.
Steve said:
It also then would seem out of line to say that pragmatism itself has an
essence with regard to which Rorty is not in the proper relation.
dmb says:
See, that just seems silly to me. Does pragmatism, in the abstract, need an
essence for me to assert that Dewey's view is different from Rorty's? Do I need
a metaphysical substance of some kind to notice that there are close
similarities between Dewey and James, to see that James and Pirsig are saying
similar things? Of course not. You just read them, think about it and then,
hopefully, make some warranted assertions about it. Anti-essentialism doesn't
mean that we can't distinguish one idea from another, one thinker from another,
or make judgements about how far we can stretch the meanings of labels like
"pragmatist". I realize there's room for debate and that's just what we're
doing. But this all-or-nothing-ism falls flat for me. If you're a pragmatist,
you're an anti-essentialist and that means you can't say what a pragmatist is?
Think about that, Steve. If that's not pulling the rug out from under one's
self, I don't know what is. This kind of intellectual paralysis sets in at just
about every point in Rorty's thought. I fail to understand your admiration for
him nor do understand why you'd want to blur the difference between his thought
and these other academic pragmatists (despite all the quotes stating their
objections to his thought).
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