Hi Ron, I'm not sure where you stand here.
Do you think that what is true is the same as what can be justified in a given context? While I agree with DMB and all pragmatists that there are no more constraints on what can be asserted as true than what can be justified at a given time and place, I still think (along with everyone but the retro-pragmatists apparently) that there is still a useful distinction to be made between truth and justification. I think truth is best left undefined and kept as a separate notion from justification since what we can justify right now based on our current standards of evidence and based on our current experiences is not necessarily true. The distinction between truth and justification simply stands for the fact that some of the things that we once thought were true turned out to have been false all along. That is as much as I think we ought to say about truth in general. There is much more to be said, however, about how we determine which beliefs can be asserted as true, i.e., what we are justified in believing to be true. Rorty reads the classical pragmatists (especially Dewey) as not so much promoting a theory of truth (a description of the nature of Truth or even a deflationary theory aimed at a static definition of "true") but just trying to get us to focus on what they thought was a more a profitable target of inquiry, i.e, how we justify our beliefs. 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
