Steve:
It seems like you were in a hurry when you responded to the following. It seems
like you began your reply before you finished reading my argument because you
raise objections that have already been addressed further into the message. If
that's not enough, you ended by asking questions that I'd already answered but
were not reproduced in your reply. Rather than ask you to try to address the
argument again as a whole, let me just repeat some of the main points. That
way, it won't seem so stale and you'll see which points I want to stress. It's
cleaned up a bit too.
dmb says again:
I'm just saying that the pragmatic theory of truth does not aim for any such
things as objective truth or essential truth. Pragmatism answers the question
of truth in a way that simply does not claim any such things and yet it is
still a theory of truth. It is designed to overcome those things without giving
up on epistemology or truth theories or philosophy or even metaphysics. (For
James and Pirsig, you can't avoid metaphysics and one of the problems with
traditional empiricism (positivism) is that it rejects metaphysics, denies that
it is doing metaphysics and it does these things for metaphysical reasons.)
You say that by NOT looking for the essence of truth or for objective truth,
"we wouldn't be getting to the issues that theories of truth are supposed to
inform us about". You seem to be saying that a truth theory doesn't count as a
truth theory unless it defines truth in these essentialist or objectivist
terms. But why are truth theories supposed to inform us about that? Those are
the failed answers we're trying to overcome and so of course the pragmatist
does not define truth in those terms. Rorty takes those failed answers as a
definition of the question of truth. And then says we should not have a theory
of truth at all, that we should stop doing epistemology. By Rorty's account, to
simply ask what counts as true would NOT be fancy enough to be called
epistemology because epistemology MUST ask what is objectively true or
essential true or eternally true or True with capital "T".
I'm just saying the question of truth ought not be such a loaded question. Thus
is becomes simply "what is true?". By this I certainly am NOT asking for a list
of true sentences or assertions we agree upon. That might be closer to Rorty's
notion of truth as intersubjective agreement but, as you know, I'm defending
empiricism against rorty's post-analytic linguistified pragmatism. As James and
Pirsig see it, truth is a species of the good and agreement with experience is
the most important component of the pragmatic theory of truth. Ideas,
assertions, propositional sentences are MADE true in the course of EXPERIENCE.
This is far less ambitious goal that essential truth or objective truth, it is
always taken provisionally, and there is not just one Truth but many truths. It
is somewhere between all and nothing.
I think Rorty leaves out the most important part of the pragmatic theory of
truth and thereby misrepresents James's view. He leaves out the empiricism,
which is quite consistent with his refusal to do epistemology. (Obviously, any
empiricism or theory of truth is an explicit epistemological theory.) The
Stanford Encyclopedia article on James says, "Truth, James holds, is “a species
of the good,” like health. Truths are goods because we can “ride” on them into
the future without being unpleasantly surprised. They “lead us into useful
verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible
termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.
They lead away from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren
thinking” (103). Although James holds that truths are “made” (104) in the
course of human experience, and that for the most part they live “on a credit
system” in that they are not currently being verified, he also holds the
empiricistic view that “beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts
of the whole superstructure” (P, 100)."
Notice the emphasis on experience? This is not just a feature of his radical
empiricism but also of the pragmatic theory of truth. (Whether they are
connected to each other or not.) Fitting in with other sentences or beliefs is
just one of the features of pragmatic truth. We also "ride" truths into future
EXPERIENCE, they lead us through experience and terminate in experience, and
those truths that are concretely verified by somebody in actual experience are
the support beams that hold the whole thing up. As the Stanford article puts
it: "“We carve out everything,” James states, “just as we carve out
constellations, to serve our human purposes” (P, 100). Nevertheless, he
recognizes “resisting factors in every experience of truth-making” (P, 117),
including not only our present sensations or experiences but the whole body of
our prior beliefs. James holds neither that we create our truths out of
nothing, nor that truth is entirely independent of humanity. He embraces “the
humanistic principle: you can't weed out the human contribution” (P, 122)."
Those "resisting factors in every experience" are key. Experience is where
ideas are tested and made true. Or not. That's the sense in which they are
good, or not. Without this important feature, it becomes too difficult to
distinguish empirically verifiable truths from wishful thinking or from using
ideas as the intellectual equivalent of comfort food. We need some kind of
reality check, you know? That's you and me and empirical reality.
.......
Let me add that the radical empiricist claim that true ideas agree with
experience is not the same as the traditional empiricist's claim that true
ideas correspond to reality. While both generally agree that all our knowledge
comes from experience and by thinking about what experience provides, they have
completely different assumptions about what reality is, what truth is, and what
experience is. Basically, for the radical empiricist, reality is an experience
continuum. For a positivist, reality is physical and is thought to exist
regardless of whether or not it is experienced. Agreement with the former is
nothing like correspondence to the latter for lots of reasons but basically
we're talking about two completely different worldviews, the mystical and the
material.
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