Steve said:
... it always has been a semantic issue as far as I am concerned while DMB has
wanted to make it an epistemological issue. He wants to say that since whatever
we feel justified in believing (...) we will of course call true, then truth is
just that--justified belief.
dmb says:
Well, you're right about my insistence on the epistemology but the pragmatic
theory of truth certainly does NOT say truth is "whatever we feel justified in
believing". You should know better than that just from what you've read in our
exchanges. I guess you're trying to bait me with stuff like this. Or the one
where you try to make Pirsig's ghost stories into a pro-slavery position. That
kind of thing doesn't get my goat, though. It only makes me think you're being
disingenuous and unserious.
Steve said:
...it is nevertheless good to recognize that at least some of the things that
we are justified in believing are probably not actually true. That is to say
that some of the things we now say are true we will come to call false at some
time in the future, and our use of the word "truth" is not such that we would
say that the truth of the belief changed from one to other but rather our
knowledge changed.
dmb says:
It means the same thing to simply say that truth is provisional. From the
perspective of the new truth (slavery is evil) the old truth looks false and we
condemn it as such. Don't we agree that it amounts to the same thing? Isn't
that just what provisional means? The point is, I think, that we ought not
think of truth as a form of perfection, some ideal we are headed for in the
sense of getting ever closer to the way things really are. We want our truths
to get better and fuller but they can never be anything more than what's
justifiable in a particular context and in concrete experience. That's where
the insistence on empiricism comes into it. Truth can't be a utopian ideal in
this conception and in fact such a notion is seen as rather empty. I have tried
to explain this several times. The emphasis is James' in the original...
"The pragmatist thesis ...is that the relation called 'truth' is thus
concretely DEFINABLE. Ours is the only articulate attempt to say positively
what truth actually CONSISTS OF. Our denouncers have literally nothing to
oppose to it as an alternative. For them, when an idea is true, it IS true, and
there the matter terminates, the word 'true' being indefinable."
Compare that sentiment with Rorty's view, wherein truth is "not the sort of
thing we should expect to have an interesting theory about". Truth is a
semantic issue because of this view but, of course, that's the very thing in
dispute.
Steve said:
DMB thinks that we can't say "some of the things we thought were true turned
out to have been false" without reverting to a correspondence theory of truth.
But following Pierce, this sentence cashes out to something like "certain
practices that led us to successful action for the purposes we had in the past
have been found not to always lead us to successful action for those puposes
and/or for new purposes that we now have. In short, it would have been better
for us to have believed what we now believe all along instead of what we used
to believe." In that chacterization of the situation I see nothing to suggest
correspondence theory--the notion of truth at getting our sentences to allign
properly with a reality that exists independently of our purposes.
dmb says:
Well, I thought the debate was between Rortyism on one hand and on the other
James and Pirsig. Pierce fans hate Rorty with a passion that shocks even me.
Curious bedfellows get curiouser and curiouser. I'll play along anyway because
I can sort of see why you'd go there.
Rorty does say, basically, that since we can't get our sentences to correspond
to "the way things really are" and that means truth theories are banned, we can
only develop ways of talking that help us cope. And he'll probably add that
they DON'T help us cope with reality, they just help us cope. Period.
I think this is incoherent. How are we going to evaluation whether or not a
certain vocabulary helps us cope better or not without the ability to
evaluation the actual coping part? We test of the semantic prowess how,
exactly? And if words help us cope, with what are we coping if not reality?
What can "successful action" mean, if not some actual concrete experience in
which the proposition is tested?
Thanks.
P.S. I bet the very first slave was opposed to slavery, by the way. I don't
think the idea of opposition was recently invented. They didn't have
abolitionists in Rome, but they had Spartacus and you can see a pretty
sophisticated subversive attitude toward it in Roman literature. I think it's
probably more realistic to believe that slavery persisted as long as it did
simply because the means of resistance were not available to the slave or his
sympathizers, not because they were morally or intellectually oblivious.
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