Hi DMB,
> 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: > > ... 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. Steve: You are missing my point. I am not so much disputing James but responding to your criticism of Rorty. When you read Rorty to say that knowledge is a matter of intersubjective agreement, he is talking about the standards for justification as social constructs and not as truth itself being a social construct. You keep insisting that Rorty is saying that truth is equivalent to intersubjective agreement, but that is not what Rorty is saying. DMB: To assert that truth is something other than what can be justified in experience is to retain the problematic dualism. Steve: Rorty along with James and Dewey equates what can be asserted as true with what can be justified, but Rorty also holds that what can be asserted as true may not actually be true. I don't know whether or not James agrees that what can be justified in a given context as true may not actually be true, but if not he should have. DMB: 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. Steve: That is no third option in this conversation. Either truth is the same thing as warranted assertibility or truth is a notion that is at least somewhat independent of what can be justified. DMB: 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. Steve: It is fairly simple and not at all meaningless. The distinction between truth and justification just stands for the fact that many times in the past, what we thought was true turned out to have been false, and we expect that some of the ideas that we now hold as true (no matter how well justified) may actually be false. Most of us therefore see an important difference between warranted assertibility and truth. > 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. Steve: So I take it that you don't have a quote of James saying so? James presumably once said something contradictory to this since Pirsig said that James himself thought that his pragmatism was separate from his radical empiricism even though you seem to hold that radical empiricism is essential to pragmatism. > 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. Steve: I have to admit that I don't know what the form content issue is about, so perhaps you can explain further or point me to something to read. 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/md/archives.html
