Matt said: ... the reason there is always a distinction between truth and justification is because of what I will now dub the Truth Fact: "you might be justified in thinking X, but X might not be true." Steve has endlessly reiterated this fact about the experience of truth, and what neither of us are sure about is why people wish to deny this fact--or rather, how you acknowledge this fact while collapsing the distinction between justification and truth.
dmb says: Isn't this just a version of the appearance-reality distinction? And how would it be possible to establish that X might not be true except through some future justification. And do we have any reason to believe that at some point we will have arrived at the final justification? See, I think you don't need a distinction between truth and justification to acknowledge the fact that truth changes. All we can have is an endless series of justified beliefs and that's all truth can mean. Matt said: ...what neither Steve nor I are clear on is how one both collapses truth into justification and acknowledges the Truth Fact. When you collapse the distinction, it makes it seem like one is saying, with every claim of truth, that it is both true and not true at the same time. (Watch the verb "to be": "X _is_ true, but might not _be_ true." ... Here's Davidson's theory of truth: "the sentence 'X' is true if and only if X is true." It tells you exactly when and where something that is true is true. dmb says: Davidson's theory of truth sounds a lot like Aristotle's. It's a version of the correspondence theory, no? I think that kind of theory is all form and no substance and it strikes me as the kind of thing Rorty would deny, no? He would say there is no way to know if X is true and so all we can do is compare the sentence "X" to other sentences, no? Matt said: Steve and I make a distinction between justification (changes) and truth (does not change). dmb says: Right, and it is that particular definition of truth that leads you to abandon truth theories and epistemology. I think it make a lot more sense to abandon that particular definition of truth to make room for a theory of truth that doesn't ask for eternal sufficiency. That's what I mean by saying that Rorty defines the question in terms of the failed answer and then gives up on the question. It's so much more sensible to just ask a better question, a question without all the crypto-theological eternal truth baggage. I thought you guys were trying to anti-Platonic? Fixed eternal forms were his idea of truth too. _________________________________________________________________ The New Busy is not the old busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_3 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
