Steve said to dmb:
If people long ago could validate their belief that the sun revolves around the
earth, does that mean that the "the sun revolves around the earth" used to be
true but later became false? It was true for them but not true for us?
dmb says:
Yes. Truth changes. It's provisional. It is part of an ongoing process both
historically and personally.
Steve said:
...Since he wasn't making clear distinctions between truth and justification, I
read him as not talking about what is actually true at all and only about what
we ought to hold as true provisionally. ...everyone who is not a
retro-pragmatist (reading James as deliberately equating what is true with what
can be justified within a given context) thinks that truth and justification
need to be kept as two distinct concepts. ...It seems to me that it drops a
quite useful distinction between what is true and what can be justified in a
given time and place. Why do that? Does doing so have other benefits in
practice that make up for this loss of clarity? ...Why not maintain the common
sense distinction between what we are justified in asserting given our current
tools for inquiry and our limitations as finite historically situated human
beings and what is actually true? Everyone can think of examples in their own
lives where they had every reason to think that something was true, but
later found out that it was actually false. ...The facts about what we
already believe and what our current standards for justification are are
additional necessary facts that come in to play in determining whether or not
we are warranted in believing something--whether we are justified in holding a
belief AS true--but the factuality of the belief in question--whether the
belief in question actually IS true-- is best thought of as independent of the
quality of our current justificatory practices. ...The fact that one can be
wrong is a good reason in itself to maintain a distinction between what can be
justified and what is actually true because our justificatory practices
themselves can be wrong.
dmb says:
Clearly, you're very interested in making the point that truth and
justification are two different things. The comments above are an edited
version of your entire reply, in which you made this point in response to
everything I said. You say everyone thinks truth and justification need to be
kept separate, that it's useful, adds clarity. But what does truth even mean
apart from our justifications? The only thing remotely like an explanation as
to what, exactly, this "truth" is supposed to be, you made some vague reference
to a utopian vision of some future knowledge. How that will happen in the
absence of future justifications is a mystery to me. I really don't see how the
notion of truth makes any sense apart from what can be justified in whatever
context you find yourself. But I suppose we don't really think we disagree
about that.
Instead, it seems you're objecting to the usefulness of truth theories in
general and to the usefulness of James's theory in particular because you also
think that we can't have truth as it "actually IS". That's what leads you to
say pragmatists shouldn't have a theory of truth. And yet, oddly, you maintain
this unattainable notion of truth, insist that it should remain distinct from
justification, and then on that basis reject all truth theories. Because they
can only tell us what can be justified in a given context, as distinct from
what "actually IS true", truth theories have failed and we should just talk
about justified beliefs or warranted assertablity instead of truth.
If you think about it for a minute, however, James is doing the same thing and
he's doing so in the very move you've objected to so frequently. Why drop this
distinction between truth and justification, you ask? Because that notion of
truth is meaningless. It is the meaninglessness of that notion that's
motivating your abandonment of truth theories in general but what James does
instead is to drop that meaningless notion of truth and replace it with one
that derives its meaning from experience, from the justification process
itself, which is what the James quotes showed quite nicely, I thought. Once you
divest yourself of the notion that there is an objective truth apart from what
can be made true in actual experience, then truth is still in agreement with
reality but this means agreement with the recalcitrance that experience itself
offers, not something that's true above or apart from experience. See, there is
no appearance-reality distinction here in the same way that ther
e is not a justification-truth distinction. Those are fake problems created by
SOM. That is the uncrossable epistemic gap between subjects and objective
reality that is dissolved by radical empiricism, which requires its own
explanation but first I want to see how you take this defense of the pragmatic
theory of truth. Make sense?
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