----- Original Message ----
From: david buchanan <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Sat, January 30, 2010 2:18:12 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists
Steve said to dmb:
You didn’t bother to address the concern that having a theory of truth or not
is exactly the sort of philosophical non-issue that James should want to call a
difference that makes no difference when none of the proposed candidates for
so-called “theories of truth” give us any way of distinguishing true beliefs
from false ones.
dmb says:
I don't understand this concern, probably because I don't think "truth" is a
non-issue. In fact, I'm making a case that it matters, that it is an issue, and
that lots of other pragmatists think so too. To claim that the inventor of the
pragmatic theory of truth would take his own work as the treatment of a
non-issue strikes me as wholly implausible. James thought his theory of truth
could be used to eliminate fake philosophical problems, but having a theory of
truth is not one of them. And of course he thought we could distinguish truth
from falsity by testing our ideas in experience. As Hickman tells it, when
James introduced pragmatism as "a new name for some old ideas" he was making a
cheeky reference to that saying of Jesus; "By their fruits ye shall know them".
At least in this moment, Jesus was a pragmatist. Who knew? And it's not that
the pragmatist just glances up and says, "yep, they look like figs to me". Oh,
no. He's gotta eat a fig or two
before he claims knowledge of that tree. What's more, he insists this is the
oldest and best way to know anything.
Ron:
Some critiques of Pragmatism imply that James realized he was following in the
tradition of
Socrates, Aristotle, Hume,Locke..and one could argue Jesus, Lao Tsu,
Gautama..ect..
The point being that Pragmatism may not be as reveolutionary as some would like
to
believe. The little I read of Rorty so far suggests to me that he, as well as
Aristotle
recogizes in an empirical way that experience is indeed relative, plural and
infinite.
That through complexity a unity of experience emerges... through these
complexities
these hanging togethers of meaning ever and ever more simplifications of value
emerge.
Truth then is a complexity of value that emerges as what we mean by the
word truth.
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