dmb said to Steve:
Clearly, you're very interested in making the point that truth and
justification are two different things. ...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. ...Why drop this distinction between truth and
justification, you ask? Because that notion of truth is meaningless.
Steve replied:
"The truth of the matter" stands for our hopes for the best possible belief
that we may come to have in the future and if we are fortunate may even already
have. When we are justified in believing something, we can still be wrong about
its truth. Using the "habit of action idea" that I take as the point of
departure for all pragmatists, when we say that an assertion is true, we are
saying that no other belief is a better habit of action. I'm recommending that
you apply such a description and maintain a distinction between truth and
justification because it avoids the "true for you, false for me" and "true
then, false now" conclusions that get pragmatists accused of relativism.
dmb says:
Well, apparently you don't understand my question. All you did was supply the
same vague, meaningless reference to a utopian vision of some future knowledge
again. You know, "the best possible belief that we may come to have in the
future". I think that is meaningless. Backwards, even.
I'm saddened and frustrated by this response. It seems that you remain
oblivious to the main point. James's defines truth as what happens to an idea
in the process of verification, as what happens to an idea when it is justified
in experience. This definition of truth is quite deliberately rejecting the
distinction you're insisting upon. Do you really suppose it makes sense to say
his theory would have been better off to retain the distinction even though it
contradicts his definition and thereby undoes what he just got done doing?
Sorry, but I really don't see how you can comprehend this point and still
insist on retaining that distinction. Not to mention the fact that
"justification" is being distinguished from a notion of "truth" that's
practically meaningless.
It might be futile but let take up this problem, as you see it, of being
justified now and and being wrong later. I'm not quite sure how it works in
your reasoning but it does seem to be an important part of your fondness for
the distinction in dispute. I think the pragmatist would say that it's not a
problem. If the future is anything like the past, then we should not at all be
surprised to find our previous justifications lacking, to find our previous
truths obsolete or in need of adjustment. This is what it means to say that
truth is provisional, that it is part of an ongoing process of adjustment and
improvement. That's also why truth can't mean anything more than what can be
justified in terms of the presently available practices, within whatever
context you find yourself. That doesn't mean you can't be wrong. It just means
that ideas are made right and wrong in the course of experience rather than
being measured against some ideal notion of full or perfect knowledge.
For some reason I'm thinking of an analogy. Suppose I said that your hopes of
going to heaven after you die are misplaced. What if told you that heaven is a
noble ideal but it's really about where you are before you die. Heaven is not
some other place forever separated from this life, it's what we wish we had
right here and right now. There is no distinction between heaven and earth, we
just have to get a little more realistic about what we can expect from heaven,
bring it down to earth where it actually has some meaning in our lives. Heaven
is not some place far above, it's what happens on earth. Your response would
be, by analogy, to simply reassert the same old distinction between heaven and
earth. And then when I ask you what meaning "heaven" has for this life, you
make some vague reference to the pearly gates.
Or let me put it this way. You want to replace "truth" with our "best habits of
action" and that just means what we can justify in present practices. Don't you
see how that rejects heaven too? How can you reject this heaven for such a down
to earth thing and still insist on the distinction between heaven and earth.
It's incoherent in several directions at once.
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