dmb asked Steve:
If an assertion can't be justified then in what sense does it have the property
of truth?
Steve replied:
This is a very important question in our conversation. I keep wondering how you
could possibly be taking Rorty to be saying the things that you accuse him of,
and this conflation of justification with truth explains it. Rorty accepts
Plato’s formulation of knowledge as justified true belief.* *
dmb says:
You mean that it's Plato's formulation of truth that Rorty rejects, don't you?
And I don't think that I'm inadvertently conflating justification and truth.
I'm saying that the pragmatist thinks there is no difference. Like I explained
last time, Dewey's definition of truth is "warranted assertability". I take
"warranted" to mean it's "justified" by past experience. Plato and the
Wikipedia definition of knowledge doesn't seem very relevant to the pragmatic
theory of truth, except as something that it is not.
Steve said:
You wonder how someone can be justified in believing something that is not
true. The answer is that justification is relative to some particular epistemic
context, while the truth of the matter is not.
dmb says:
See, aren't you just saying that the truth of the matter is objective while the
justification is just subjective? That reality differs from appearance? And
haven't we already agreed that all the pragmatists are in agreement about
rejecting those specific dualisms?
Steve said:
Based on your experience, a certain belief may reliably have led you to
successful action but could actually have been false all along. For example,
perhaps someone once believed that the sun revolves around the earth and used
this belief to predict the proper place to plant her garden so as to get the
most sun throughout the day. It worked! So by James’s “theory of truth” the
assertion that the sun actually revolves around the earth is actually true to
precisely the extent that it did work. But this seems like a strange way to
talk about truth. Doesn’t it? This is the sort of thing that turns people off
to pragmatism.
dmb says:
Well, no. This example confuses the practical knowledge of gardeners with the
theoretical knowledge of astronomy. The latter makes no practical difference in
terms of where and when the sun shines on her garden. That much simpler fact is
the actual basis of her justification, the actual basis of her successful
action. It could certainly be that the case that she believed that a
earth-centered model of the solar system fitted with her local observations but
so would the new model. I mean, the theoretical untruth that she mistakenly
believed had no practical bearing on the ripeness of her tomatoes. The
difference between geocentric and a heliocentric system can't really be used to
guide gardeners at all. Her original justification remains unchanged. The sun
still shines on summer afternoons all the same, despite the epic paradigm shift
in astronomy.
Steve said:
On the other hand, if we follow Plato in keeping justification and truth
distinct, we can say that if she didn’t have access to telescopes and the
measurements taken by later astronomers because such things had not been
invented yet, this person could have indeed been justified in believing that
the sun revolves around the earth, but that claim was never true.
dmb says:
Doesn't the pragmatist say instead that it was true but now it isn't? Truth is
provisional and contextual ( and I like to believe that it is improvable rather
than just changeable). Wouldn't the pragmatist point out that our gardener not
only missed out because telescopes hadn't been invented yet but also because
our heliocentric solar system hadn't been invented yet. Aren't we agreed that
these scientific theories don't represent objective discoveries so much as they
present a constructed and organized picture of a whole series of things known
in experience. The telescope observations are important of course but there are
many other factors. Oddly, astrophysicists rarely mention gardens, even when
they're standing in one.
Steve said:
Why do you think most philosophers are not pragmatists? I’m sure you’ve heard
many times that the problem with pragmatism’s theory of truth as “what works”
is that it doesn’t work. If we can better communicate a distinction between
justification and truth we will pragmatists will be more difficult to dismiss
with this quip.
dmb says:
No, actually. I'd like to know who thinks it doesn't work and, more
importantly, why they think it doesn't work. Pirsig's complaint, that terms
like "cash value" made pragmatism seem crass and superficial, as if it were all
about unprincipled expediency, just about getting what you want, I've found
this elsewhere too. A young German translator of James says that he has mostly
been misunderstood as a radical subjectivist in Europe (for a hundred years!)
but he hopes this false impression is about to change. When I look at James and
Dewey, as well as their contemporary apologists, it seems that there is a
tendency for pragmatists to believe that their critics don't get what they're
saying. I don't want to say they feel misunderstood because that makes them
sound sappy or something but if they did I think this attitude would quite
justified. (Maybe I'm just projecting my own frustration but hopefully it's
more like empathy) It's probably related to the fact that pragmatism rejects
all the most basic assumptions upon which common sense is based and yet it puts
all the emphasis on our practical realties. Anyway, to the extent that people
think pragmatism is just whatever works they're not philosophical pragmatists,
they're just Americans. The slogan, if you can call it that, that says "truth
is a species of the good" could be taken in that crass way, to mean that truth
is whatever benefits me at the moment or what makes me feel good to believe.
Philosophical Narcissism would be a fitting name for that, not pragmatism. But
think of what that slogan conjures up in the MOQ, where truth is a set of
static intellectual patterns. That species of good is evaluated not in terms of
my personal interests as such, but it terms of what we can expect from
intellectual patterns. Here, the question "does it work?' is a much more
precise question than the crass would have suspected. Here, the questions asks
if it has those aesthetic qualities that mark a good idea; clarity, brevity,
explanatory and predictive power, coherence and even elegance. BUT for a
radical empiricist it also has to agree with experience. Don't forget that
Pirsig didn't reject Positivism because it was too empirical but because it
wasn't empirical enough. He says the MOQ does not disagree with science and
even if our metaphysical assumptions shift and we explain things in new ways,
the readings on the dials in the science labs do not change. That still counts
as real information, real data that can only be defied at the philosopher's
peril. Anyway, you get the idea. This is the context in which it makes sense to
say that truth is what works.
Steve:
I’m fine with “experience is the test of truth.” How else could truth
candidates be tested if not in experience? The point I would add is just that
whether or not an assertion is true does not depend on whether or not we can
justify believing it, though assertions we can justify as true are more likely
to actually be true than ones that we have been convinced are false.
dmb says:
I still don't get that. What could it mean to be true outside of a
justification in experience? At the top of this message you said,
"justification is relative to some particular epistemic context, while the
truth of the matter is not". Where is this truth outside some particular
context? Is that some kind of Platonic form or some other objective reality
beyond appearances. That's not an accusation, just a suggestion, but I do
wonder what you mean.
This is already too long but one more point, about what is and is not
pragmatism. It seems the academic world has already settled on some labels,
ones that are not terribly at odds with most people's self-descriptions. There
is classical pragmatism and neo-pragmatism. (Here the term "classical" does not
refer to an historical period or to the even the original pragmatist but rather
to a contemporary school of thought within academic pragmatism. Neo-pragmatism
basically refers to Rorty and others with a similar background in the Analytic
tradition. Anyway, I don't really think the labels are important even if I
think the conceptual and attitudinal differences are important. I'm just fine
with the labels they've settled (more or less) upon. We're talking about
specific ideas anyway. That's what matters.
Thanks.
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