Steve said to dmb: Your answer that the MOQ subscribes to empiricism doesn't get to the issue of relativism at all.
dmb says: Sure it does. But I honestly don't know how I can explain this any clearer than I already have. Laura Weed's explanations are probably better than mine. Read her article and get back to me, eh? It's not long. http://williamjamesstudies.org/3.1/weed.html "The Concept of Truth that Matters" by Laura E. Weed Here's the abstract and short section on Rorty... Abstract: This paper defends James's pragmatic theory of truth from the two most prominent theories of truth in contemporary philosophy: the post-modern deconstructionist theory and the analytic deflationary theory. I argue that truth is an important concept, which can best be understood as framed by James's radical empiricism. Paradigmatic examples such as court testimony, sincerity and personal integrity in speech, and accuracy of description of a recalcitrant reality, as it impacts a stream of consciousness, do a much better job of framing issues related to truth than do 'cats on mats' or the political ramifications of 'schizophrenia.' I argue that this pragmatic concept of truth differs sharply from the trivial correspondence embraced by the deflationist account and the texts-mirroring-texts account espoused by the deconstructionists. I also point out that James's conception of truth is the best for explaining discoveries about language in contemporary neuroscience. William James argued a century ago for a conception of truth that establishes a clear middle way between the rigid logicism of contemporary analytical philosophy and the relativity of contemporary hermeneutics and deconstructionism. James argued for a humanistic and practical conception of truth, rooted in human experience and indexed to available evidence, and the perspective of human individuals or groups. In this paper I will argue that James's conception of truth is still the most important conception of truth for both philosophy and human life, for it stresses the humanistic conception of truth that occurs in court rooms, relationships of trust and, ultimately, in rules for integrity in science. I will argue for this position against some contemporary analytical and hermeneutical philosophers, and will claim support from contemporary results in cognitive science. .... b. Rorty's misleading claim to be a pragmatist Richard Rorty considers himself a pragmatist, but from his point of view, also, language is exhaustively a matter of social conventions reflecting established power relations among individuals and institutions. Rorty writes as if his position were close to that of William James,30 but both James's appeal to the stream of conscious experience as a source of recalcitrant psychological truth, and his appeal to processes of verification as collaborators for theoretical and learned truth are missing from Rorty's approach to the subject. In the following passage Rorty collapses all of the terms used by pragmatists into a very Foucault-like social category as his analysis of how James's pragmatic conception of truth in praxis works:If all awareness is a linguistic affair, then we are never going to be aware of a word on the one hand and a thing-denuded-of-words on the other and see that the first is adequate to the second. But the very notions of 'sign' and 'representation' and 'language' convey the notion that we can do something like that. 3133But James clearly uses the notion of a representational theory of reality. He envisions language as connecting empirical processes of interaction between oneself and a world outside oneself, through experience as an individual stream of consciousness. In his arguments against Clifford in Will to Believe James explicitly distinguishes between scientific cases for which truth can and should wait for verification, and moral, legal, personal, and religious cases for which the costs of waiting for certainty outweigh the benefits.32 Rorty also misidentifies the pragmatist's conception of truth, or James's conception of truth, at any rate, in the following passage, from a discussion of Donald Davidson and Crispin Wright on the subject:Content, pragmatists say on the basis of this argument, counts for vanishingly little in determining cognitivity, and defacto agreement on conventions for everything. That is why pragmatists think cognitivity a purely empirical, historico-social notion. But if conventions of representation can vary as blamelessly as sense of humor—or, more to the point, if the only relevant sort of blame is the sort that attaches to those who are insufficiently cooperative in achieving shared practical goals—then representationality, like convergence, is a broken reed. It is of no help in pinning down the nature of cognitivity or in offering a seriously didactic account of truth.3334But James was a physician and a scientist committed to empirical research first and foremost, who clearly considered representationality and the content of both representations and the stream of consciousness very important to determining the pragmatic conception of truth. I think that Rorty has elided 'empirical' and 'sociohistorical' in the above passage to ignore the empirical stress in James' conception of truth and replaced it with a far more Foucault-like sociohistorical concept, for which he then usurps the 'pragmatist' label. Likewise, Rorty runs together 'shared practical goals,' 'representationality,' and 'convergence,' as if all three were the same, either for pragmatists in general, or for James in particular. But James, at least, a) does not think that goals have to be socially shared to be legitimate, b) values representations, of both shared and individual types,34 and c) does not think that convergence necessarily follows from either of the other two. Indeed, James's take on convergence would be that it is only appropriately to be expected in science, where the evidence for some claim is potentially complete. Unlike Rorty, James can clearly distinguish lies from mistakes, and truths, of both pragmatic and scientific types, from both of them. Rorty, like Foucault, cannot. I don't think Rorty is entitled to call himself a pragmatist on the issue of truth, at least not of a Jamesian stripe. 35 _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your inbox. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_2 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
