Hi Mat, DMB, all, Harris’s concerns about pragmatism stem from his concerns about “the demon of relativism.” After easily dismissing a naive version of relativism, Harris discussed pragmatism in the End of Faith as “a more sophisticated version of this line of reasoning that is not so easily dispatched.”
He begins by explaining the pragmatists’ criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth, which says that in order for a statement to be called “true” it must correspond with reality as it is. Pragmatists can’t see how correspondence can function to account for truth. How can bits of a sentence be matched up with bits of non-linguistic reality so that we can test for adequacy of fit? Harris identifies Richard Rorty as pragmatism’s most articulate spokesman and faults the influence that his work has had on society as offering “considerable shelter to the shades of relativism.” Harris thinks such critiques as his on the correspondence theory of truth are dangerous. “Pragmatism, when civilizations come clashing, doesn’t seem to be very pragmatic.” Without the notion of truth as correspondence with reality as it is, we would “lose the conviction that we can be right—about *anything*” which “seems [to Harris] like a recipe for End of Days chaos.” I don’t share Harris’s concern that the sky will fall if people no longer chant, truth is correspondence with reality! I hold the conviction that we can still “hold conviction[s] that we can actually be right” about without this slogan, and I should think that any scientist such as Harris could understand what it is like to be convinced that he is right about something while remaining open to new evidence and arguments as they become available. We _can_ actually be right, but “right” and “truth” don’t seem to gain anything with the notion of correspondence other than openness to a set of critiques against correspondence theory. The needed something that Harris fears we will lose without the correspondence theory of truth is “realism.” Harris writes, “According to Rorty, realism is doomed because there is no way to compare our description of reality with a piece of undescribed reality.” Well, yeah, how exactly do we do that? If a theory of truth is to give us anything worthy of the label “theory of truth,” it ought to be able to do some heavy lifting for us in distinguishing true sentences from false ones. But it doesn’t help us discover new truths or provide better justifications for our beliefs than we would have without it. It doesn’t add anything to the notion that beliefs worth holding as true are the ones that we can justify. Harris thinks he can save the correspondence theory of truth and thereby save realism if he can show that there may be knowledge unmediated by language. “If certain mystics,” he offers for instance, “were right to think that they had enjoyed unmediated knowledge of transcendental truths—then pragmatism would be just plain wrong *realistically*.” The problem for the pragmatist in Harris’s view is that even if the hypothetical mystic did not actually enjoy unmediated knowledge, that fact would still be fatal for anti-realism, because if the pragmatist claims that unmediated knowledge is not possible, he is making “a covert, *realistic* claim about the limits of human knowledge. Pragmatism amounts to a realistic denial of the possibility of realism.” My understanding of Rorty is that he understood full well that anti-realism is a realistic claim. That is why he never would have made it. Rorty, when he was being careful, never would have said that unmediated knowledge is impossible. But if someone claimed to have such knowledge, he should very much like to know what this knowledge is and how he too might become justified in believing it. In asking for such justification he would get us back to the question that was never answered, how exactly do I compare a description with a piece of undescribed reality to know whether or not they correspond adequately? What Harris has missed is that pragmatism is not an anti-realist position. It is a “none of the above” in the realism/anti-realism debates that can be chalked up as one more philosophical platypus that we can avoid if we drop the correspondence theory of truth and the rest of the subject-object picture of reality. Harris’s discussion of realism was only raised as a way of trying to “find deep reasons to reject pragmatism.” Not only did his argument fail to demonstrate them, it also failed to address the pragmatic critique of the correspondence theory of truth. Harris thought he could sweep away the critique if he could sweep away pragmatism, but we should consider why Harris thought it was so important to reject pragmatism to begin with. He wants to maintain the hope that we may someday “reach a global consensus on matters of ethics.” He wants us to be able to say, “for instance, that stoning women for adultery is *really* wrong, in some absolute sense.” Stoning women for adultery certainly is wrong and it is definitely worth trying to get global consensus on that moral truth. I just don’t see the importance of loading “really” in the way he thinks it must be loaded. I would say that stoning women is “really wrong” in the sense that it is “very wrong,” but Harris seems to think it is necessary to appeal to something bigger and more powerful than human needs in saying so. It seems that a moral truth must correspond in some way to something that stands totally outside of human discursive practices for it to be really true. I question whether that is a position that a thoroughgoing atheist ought to take. It sounds like he has rejected God but still holds that for a moral truth to be really true, there must be something perhaps a little too much like a god to _make_ it true. Do we really have to imagine standing godlike outside of all human practices to be able to make sound judgments about human practices? If so, then as atheists we are _really_ in trouble. What do you think? 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
