Hi Dave, Dave said: To say James's theory is only about justification and not about truth is to assert a certain definition of truth, one that says that truth is something over and above justification. ... But James re-conceptualized the meaning of truth such that it can only ever be what's justified in experience.
Steve said: Rorty's conception of truth is not a something which can be over and above something else. He just supports the notion of making a distinction between truth and justification. He preserves the common sense notion and usage of the word "true" in that what we are justified in believing may not be true. Matt: Steve is pointing out there the funny move on your part, Dave. You say the above because you're asserting that Rorty's rejection of "theories of truth" is based on a Platonism-defined opponent. That's right: if there is ever any rejection, it is only because of a prior act of accepting for polemical purposes the opponent's terms of debate. You also then like to say, "Why not reject the definition?" Rorty does this also. When he moves to this part of his project, that's when it helps to not take so seriously his polemical slogans. What Steve is pointing out is that Rorty's agreement with a semantic definition of truth distinguishes between truth and justification, but does not take one to be "higher" than another. That means you're actually the one importing the "false dilemma" in your first sentence above. Further, the question for James's re-conceptualization that you've articulated is: can we not ever have a true belief that isn't justified? If I believe that you're holding a Jack of Spades in your hand right now, what possible justification might that belief have? However, if it was _true_ that you, Dave Buchanan, for whatever reason, were holding a Jack of Spades in your hand as you read this e-mail, I would have a true belief. This is the kind of thought experiment that illustrates to some people that "true" and "justified" have two different semantic roles, _and_ that we need them to have those different semantic roles for situations like these. Without them, we wouldn't be able to account for all of our experience of the world, which includes a lot of luck and guessing. Or rather, you could account for this kind of experience when redefining our modes of accounting (remembering Pirsig's endorsement of Einstein's slogan), but it would (so goes Rorty's side of the bet) produce a bad kind of weirdness rather than a good kind. In a lot of situations, so goes this semantic conception of language and truth, it doesn't matter whether you say that a belief is justified or true. But sometimes it does. It's the sometimes that a semantic definition of truth attempts to codify. Dave said: Once you divest yourself of Platonic truth or get rid of the idea that truth is about reality whereas opinions are about appearances, then what could truth mean beyond this lived justification? Since your analytic objection is predicated on the notion that truth and justification can NOT be collapsed, I'd like to know why not? Why doesn't that distinction collapse under the weight of anti-Platonism? These are not rhetorical questions. Matt: "What could truth mean beyond this lived justification?" Why does this sound like the collapse of truth _into_ justification, which you slapped at me for as importing Platonism? Aside from what seems like a razor-thin distinction on your part between the way I put it and the way you put it, the one simple reason why truth and justification cannot be collapsed is because of the existence of the aforementioned "true beliefs that are not justified." One certainly could reconstrue my belief that you are now holding a Jack of Clubs as being justified by the mere fact that you are, but this makes the point of Bain's definition of beliefs as guides to action look weird (see the beginning of "What Pragmatism Means"). Would it have been wise for me to be guided by my true belief that you were holding the Jack of Spades (particularly as we find out now that it was for very long)? It certainly may have so guided: we all know that false beliefs guide action just as assuredly, if perhaps occasionally disastrously (think: Iraq), as true beliefs. And some false beliefs may have been justified at the time, which is why we give them a pass morally, since while truth and justification may be distinct, justification is still our only route to truth (a slogan I'm sure I picked up from Rorty somewhere). But what about that true belief? If the only thing going for it is a guess, should we say that that's enough to guide an action? Don't we distinguish between justified and unjustified beliefs just for these occasions, the occasions in which the belief may end up true, but _experience_ has evolutionarily made it clear that mere guesses are typically not a good guide to action? I have three pieces that discuss pragmatism, truth, and Rorty. "What Pragmatism Is" takes that annoying route that Rorty usually takes, in playing up the "we shouldn't have a truth theory" angle. It is a broad-view of what I take pragmatism to be. http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-pragmatism-is.html "Are There Bad Questions?" takes up an issue in interpreting Rorty, outlining two of Rorty's rhetorical approaches, the these-are-bad-questions approach and the I-have-no-theory approach, using as its first example the famous passage from Consequences of Pragmatism about theories of truth. (Apparently I wrote this 7 months ago, though I'd forgotten. There's also an addendum on Pirsig.) http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2010/05/are-there-bad-questions.html "Rhetorical Universalism" is an ambitious (i.e. perhaps still too convoluted) attempt to talk about truth and belief by opposing a Platonist and a Sophist. It works through a number of issues (like Davidson, the rhetoric of illusion, the "all the way down" slogan makes an appearance) that I think are in this area. I might put it for the local audience as an attempt to answer Platt's favorite question of "Is relativism absolutely true, or just relative?" in favor of Marsha by paradoxically coopting the enemy's ism. http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2010/05/rhetorical-universalism.html Steve has a good discussion of pragmatism and truth in relationship to theism here (there's also a series of responses I'm involved in where I half-articulate some things about Davidson and the semantic conception of truth): http://www.atheistichope.com/2009/05/response-to-rc-sproul-on-pragmatism.html Dave said: "Epistemological behaviorism leaves no room for the kind of practice-transcending legitimation that Rorty identifies as the defining aspiration of modern epistemology." (from Ramberg's plato.standford.edu entry on Rorty) Steve said: Can you give me an example of a constraint on knowledge claims that is "practice-transcending"--one that isn't merely conversational? Matt: The true dilemma that faces Dave is this: Dave is going to want to say "experience," because it is not obvious how this is "merely conversational," but he is going to be uncomfortable because what he means by "experience" is entirely pragmatic, the praxis of being human, an experiencer of life. Dave will correctly see that his discomfort comes from the fact that he's forced by the constraints of Rorty's definition of what "epistemological behaviorism" is to reject "merely conversational" this way. So Dave will object to Rorty's definition of his own position as based on a false dilemma between transcendence and conversation. However, since whatever Rorty's notion of "conversation" is is based on its antithesis to "practice-transcending legitimation," Dave has also made the target of his animus invisible, since it only appears to us conceptually _when_ and _only when_ it has "practice-transcending legitimation" as its oppositional term. So the choice is 1) Dave can be uncomfortable with Rorty or 2) by opposing "Jamesian experience" to "Rortyan conversation," get Rorty wrong conceptually. This is the kind of conceptual dilemma created by two different vocabularies, only one of which you find rhetorically inviting. A third way through is to ignore the offending vocabulary. If anybody asks, you can say something pithy like, "Pirsigian experience is, too, a rejection of 'practice-transcending legitimation,' however I don't like Rorty's way of highlighting this as 'conversation.' I find the positive project I want to build easier to do using 'experience' as my building block, rather than 'language,' though there aren't a lot of conceptual differences in what James and Pirsig do with 'experience' and Rorty does with 'language.'" Perhaps there are some conceptual differences down the line somewhere, but Rorty often worked at a high metaphilosophical level of abstraction, and it hasn't become any clearer to me--at that level--what those differences might be. One can avoid Rorty's metaphilosophical vocabulary, and perhaps bemoan the fact that he didn't come down the mountain more, but I don't think there's a lot of traction to be had in deploying the rhetoric of "denying" and "rejecting" to Rorty to convey these differences. Dave said: I really don't understand this denial. I mean, doesn't Rorty explicitly say that we to ought to give up on epistemology and truth theories? Haven't you quoted him many times saying that? Matt: Shall I repeat to you the distinction between "saying" and "meaning"? 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