Hi DMB, > Steve said: > DMB of course disagrees. ... Everything he says about truth ought to be said > about justification instead. We are better off leaving truth to semantics to > avoid all the "true for you, not for me" and "true then, false now" sort of > nonsense. > > > > dmb says: > > There you go again. Instead of dealing with my case honestly, you put quotes > around silly, trivial distortions of what you wish I'd said. The nonsense, > sir, is all yours. I mean, really Steve. It looks like you're constructing > straw men to avoid case I actually made.
Steve: This is no straw man argument. You specifically said that "the earth is flat" used to be true. Now it is of course false and "the earth is roundish" is true. Such "true for you, not for me" and "true then, false now" business is your nonsense, not mine. DMB: You insist that justification has to be distinct from truth and yet you can't even say what that precious concept means. Steve: I don't insist that your concept of truth must distinguish between truth and justification. I'm just pointing out that your concept of truth doesn't do that and then entails all that "true for you, not for me" and "true then, false now" business that I would prefer to avoid. And I can indeed "say what that precious concept means." I you the word truth as follows: When I say that the assertion "X" is true, I mean that X. This is where you yawn and say that that is a boring unhelpful definition of truth, but I am happy to have a boring unhelpful definition of truth since I don't think that there is any mileage we are going to get out of truth as distinct from justification other than the notion that what we are justified in believing may not be true. DMB: This is the part you can't deal with, or explain. This is what makes your position so incoherent. How can truth transcend justification? Steve: Truth (in my view) transcends justification because some things that are true cannot be justified as true. For example, there either are or are not an even number of birds flying right now despite the fact that there is no way to verify it one way or the other. There either is or is not intelligent life elsewhere in the universe right now whether we have any way to know the answer to the question right now. In the Jamesian view, the assertion "there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe" is literally true precisely to the extent that belief in this assertion can be ridden to successful action and is also simultaneously literally false to the extent that it cannot be ridden to successful action. I don't think that there is anything inherently wrong with James's conception of truth. I just think he is using the word "truth" in a strange way that doesn't not distinguish between what is true and what we are justified in believing. I think it would be better for him to say that he was talking about justification whenever he said he was talking about truth. Truth/justified belief is a distinction that I think is worth keeping, but if you are comfortable with "true for you, not for me" and "true then, false now" and the fact that you will always need to defend your position against charges of relativism (a phoney problem in my book), then you should go along with James. What is strange to me is that you are one of those people that likes to accuse others of relativism as though there is something in that term that ought to scare us, so it would seem to me that you wouldn't want to have a relativistic definition of truth. DMB: You're turning an abstract concept into something by which to judge the actual concrete reality from which it was abstracted in the first place. It's just a generalization, not a god we aspire to. Truths are made by humans. Period. James is saying truth can't mean anything more than that. Steve: In my way of thinking, beliefs are made by humans. Some of them are true and some of them are false. Our only way of determining which beliefs are good to hold as true is through the human practice of justification. I agree with Pierce and James and Dewey and Rorty that inquiry is about resolving doubts, better justifying our beliefs, and finding better beliefs rather than about getting closer to the truth. "Closer to the truth" has no cash value in inquiry. The difference between James and I is only that I am not willing to equate truth and justified belief. I would just keep teh distinction as a reminder that some of our beliefs are probably not true since some of the beliefs that we were once justified in believing turned out to have been false. You and James are content in such situations to say "true then, false now." "The earth is flat" was true, but now it is false. "Slavery is good" was true, now it is false. I don't see the advantage in using the word truth in this way instead of saying, as most people would, that what we once believed to be true was false all along. What are you getting from your "audacity" in calling truth rather than justified belief "what works"? This loss of distinction between truth and justification must have some redeming value, but I can't tell what that could be. 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
