dmb said to Steve:
You seem to think that truth is either a matter of mirroring nature or it's a
matter of conversation and social practice. I'm saying that the pragmatic
theory of truth is neither. I'm trying to tell you this is a false dilemma but
you keep asking me questions as if no third option could be possible.
Steve replied:
I understand that the so-called pragmatic theory of truth is supposed to be
neither of those things. I'm just saying that I don't think it works as a
theory of truth because it conflates truth with justification. What James is
saying about truth doesn't sound like truth to me. It says that what is true is
whatever can be justified. I think that beliefs can have all the justification
in the world and turn out to be false. ...Again, if you recognized that most
philosophers do not conflate truth and justification as you do, you would
understand that what we agree to be true may not actually be true.
dmb says:
It seems that you're not quite seeing the point. To dispute James based on the
fact that "most philosophers" keep truth and justification separate, is exactly
what I mean by saying that you keep asking questions as if no third option were
available. To assert that truth is something other than what can be justified
in experience is to retain the problematic dualism. James's truth probably
doesn't sound like truth to you because it is that third option. He simply
rejects the definition of truth that keeps it distinct from what can be
justified. He thinks that old notion of truth is meaningless. So do I and I
recall getting quite frustrated about this a few weeks ago, when I was trying
so hard to explain why it's meaningless and why James chooses a different
option based on that meaninglessness.
dmb said:
Rorty's view that knowledge is a matter of social practice is empty and
incoherent without this this empirical dimension. As David Hildebrand puts it,
"our very ability to assess 'needs' and 'social practices' depends upon our
ability to measure the meaning of these abstractions against something more
intimately present, namely the lived moments to which they supposedly apply."
Steve replied:
MMM HMMM. and how is this comparison done exactly?
dmb says:
By returning to experience itself, James showed that the terms that supposedly
have to correspond, like thoughts and things, are already connected to each
other within the stream of experience through a series of transitional
experiences. That's what it means to say truths are what we "ride", what takes
us from one moment to the next. It is not a correspondence in the sense that
one reflects or mirrors the other. This relationship is functional, not
representational. Again, you're posing questions as if we were not talking
about a third option.
dmb said:
... James only meant that the two [pragmatism and radical empiricism] were not
logically connected. Accepting one does not necessarily entail accepting the
other. That certainly doesn't mean they don't go together quite well. They're
both James's babies after all. The fit is so neat, in fact, that James soon
began to think that pragmatism was a special chapter within radical empiricism.
Steve replied:
Can you point me to where James wrote something in support of that last claim?
dmb says:
You'll find that in the original editor's Preface to the Essays on Radical
Empiricism. Both of them can be summed up in the words of a now forgotten
philosopher, Shadworth Hodgson, who said, "realities are only what they are
'known as'. "In this sense", the editor says, "radical empiricism and
pragmatism are closely allied. Indeed, if pragmatism be defined as the
assertion that 'the meaning of any proposition can always be brought down to
some particular consequence in our future practical experience... Then
pragmatism and the above postulate come to the same thing." The postulate he
refers to is the central stipulation in radical empiricism, "that the only
things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in
terms drawn from experience." So that's what I was thinking about when I said,
"it doesn't matter if radical empiricism is attached to it or not. The
pragmatic theory of truth is still very empirical. It's all about experience.
Experience is not
just the test of truth, it is the only context in which truth has any meaning
or purpose.
Steve:
The only context in which it is possible to say that "meaning" has any meaning
is the context of language. It's fine to say that beliefs are tested in
experience, but how is that testing done? Experience itself is not a standard
for justification. The standards for justification are the cultural constructs
we appeal to in order to decide whether or not our experiences confirm or
invalidate a given proposition.
dmb says:
Sam Harris says what I've been saying. The emphasis is his in the original.
"According to pragmatists like Rorty, realism is doomed because there is no way
to compare our descriptions of reality with a piece of UNDESCRIBED reality.
...This is a clever thesis but is it true? The fact that language is the medium
in which our knowledge is represented and communicated says nothing at all
about the possibilities of unmediated knowledge per se. The fact that no
experience WHEN TALKED ABOUT escapes being mediated by language (this is a
tautology) does not mean that all cognition, and hence all knowing, is
interpretive." I might pick some nits with Sam, but this is basically a good
explanation of the form-content conflation I've accused you of several times.
Like I said, talking about the non-verbal does not make it verbal just because
you're talking about it. That would be like saying that talking about animals
means that animals are just talk or like saying that we could only se
e the moon landing on TV so the moon landing was really just a TV show.
I'd love to go on, but homework calls.
Thanks.
_________________________________________________________________
The New Busy is not the too busy. Combine all your e-mail accounts with Hotmail.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multiaccount&ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_4
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/md/archives.html
