Hi DMB, Matt,
> 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? Steve: No. Why would you say that it has something to do with our sense data never giving us access to The-World-As-It-Is? DMB: 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? Steve: I think we have every reason to believe that this justification process will go on and on. DMB: 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. Steve: If you don't acknowledge a difference between truth and justification you wind up with odd conclusions. For example, we used to be justified in believing that the earth was flat based on the available evidence and arguments and our standards of what counted as justification at that time, but now we are justified in believing that the earth is roundish based on new evidence and arguments and different standards of justification. Your Jamesian notion of assertions being MADE true or false by experience leaves us thinking that the assertion "the earth is flat" was true as one time, but now that same assertion is false. > 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? Steve: No. DMB: 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? Steve: No. DMB: 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? Steve: You are confusing your question "what is true?" with the question, "how can we know what it true?" > 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. Steve: Critics of classical pragmatism would say that it is the classical pragmatists who abandoned truth by collapsing truth into justification. Once you do that, you don't really have a theory of truth anymore since you are only talking about justification. Rorty deflects those criticisms by agreeing that we are indeed only talking about justification, but truth if something else best left undefined. DMB: 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. Steve: You are trying to make something philosphically loaded in fixed eternal forms about the notion that what we once thought was true turned out to have been false. It is just a common sense distinction. You keep trying to say that truth is meaningless, and I keep saying that the term "truth" in Plato's formulation of knowledge as justified true belief merely stands for the fact that what we may be justified in believing right now may not actually be true. We know that because some of the things we were justified in believing in the past turned out to have been false all along, so we acknowledge that the truth is not the same as what can be justified. While acknowledging that fact you just keep saying that truth is meaningless, but that fact is all we mean by retaining the term "true" in knowledge as justified true belief. 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
