Hi Ron, DMB,
> DMB to Ron: > As I understand it, Rorty abandons the notion of truth in favor of > intersubjective agreement while pragmatic truth in the MOQ is neither social > nor biological but intellectual. (Truth is an intellectual species of the > Good.) Steve: Rorty maintains the usual notion of truth as a separate notion from justification, whereas the classical pragmatists are easily read as conflating the notions of truth and justification. Rorty agrees with pretty much everyone (except for the retro-pragmatists) that the assertion "X" is true if and only if X is true. It's that simple, and no so-called theory of truth will be any more helpful than that in telling us what it means for something to be true. For a pragmatist, to say that an assertion is, as far as we know, true, is to say that no other habit of action is, as far as we know, a better habit of action. The retro-pragmatists on the other hand are still reading the classical pragmatists as saying that what is true is what ever can be justified through experience and trying to be loyal to what Rorty would see as some of the classical pragmatist's biggest blunders. The problem is that what can be justified as true in one epistemic context may be justifiably false in another. So the retro's appeal to the pragmatist's so-called theory of truth results in absurd "true for me, false for you" situations that defy what anyone means by the word true. If we just keep truth and justification as separate issues, we don't have these sorts of problems. To compound confusion on this issue, the retro-pragmatists like DMB seem to insist upon misreading Rorty to be conflating truth and justification and then reading Rorty's talk about justification as an intersubjective process to be saying that truth is simply intersubjective agreement. Apparently they can't help but misread Rorty this way if they are like DMB in claiming that there is no difference is saying a belief is justified and saying that a belief is true. Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
