Hi Ian,
Ian said:
Believing Dave to be holding the Jack of Spades (with no particular
reasonable evidence) is hoping or guessing that something might be
true, not holding that something IS true.
Matt:
Yes, one can distinguish between "believing" and "hoping or guessing"
in this way. However, for the purposes of those who follow Bain's
description of belief as a habit of action, this is not the case. "Belief"
in these cases becomes the propositional form of mental items. This
becomes hairy philosophy of mind, but the idea is that not all "mental
items" are beliefs, some are desires or hopes (for example), but all
desires and hopes can be explicated as beliefs ("I _believe that_ I
desire...") thus putting it into terms where we can discuss
propositional knowing-that.
Why would you want to do this? Because in instances of activating
Bain's description of belief, one way we do this is by taking an action
that was taken and attributing to the action-taker a belief (since
belief is a habit of action, all actions qua action have a belief standing
behind them). For example, I drink a glass of water. You might
then attribute to me the belief that "if I am thirsty, then I should drink
water." Since I had just unreflectively drank water, after you make
this explicit to me, I can say, "Hunh--I guess that's true." The "true"
is a term of endorsement. The "true" marks the fact that it _is_ (in
the sense you used "IS") a habit of action that I hold.
Now, here's where things become semantically interesting: "justified"
is a term of endorsement, too. Noticing this kind of thing is what
leads you to say, "it is splitting pedantic hairs to either make, or insist
in not making, the truth-justification distinction." It is _certainly_
splitting semantic hairs (it is, after all, a semantic theory of language
I am describing), but you say "pedantic" because you can't see what
the use is, so this just looks like scholastic angel counting. However,
I tried to acknowledge the large overlap between "true" and
"justified" as coeval terms of endorsement when I said, "In a lot of
situations ... it doesn't matter whether you say that a belief is
justified or true. But sometimes it does." The "sometimes" in
question is in those situations where I have a habit of action, I have
a mental item that is guiding my action, that turns out retroactively
to be true, but was not at all justified. Guesses and hopes that
guide are actions are two kinds of mental items that, when put into
propositional form, might end up being true beliefs, but not justified
and therefore we were right, but not guided by knowledge.
They aren't the only mental items like that. Much as atheists might
like to say so, I don't think belief in God is best put (for most) as a
guess-belief (maybe for Pascal) or hope-belief (maybe for the
tragically afflicted wanting karmic revenge). It is a belief, and it
guides their action, and it is not justified by most canons of
justification, but I won't find out whether the Mormons were being
guided by a true or false belief until I end up in Hell. And either
way, it is not a form of commonly acknowledged knowledge that
paved the Mormons' route to Heaven. (I don't know what kind of
sub-belief to call it: faith-belief?) As you say, it is about hindsight,
but Steve's thought experiments, I think, are a good selection of
considerations for how we want to choose to deploy the words of
our systematic vocabulary to deal with actual situations. What
Steve and I just rattled off are considerations in two areas: the
distinction, if any, between knowledge and truth and the distinction,
if any, between "true" and "justified." If we think about it this way,
we can say that because human inquiry was doing so well by the
end of the 19th century in guiding our action, the early pragmatists
tried, at the semantic level, to make the Greek episteme and
aletheia human-looking and attainable (rather than the out of reach
versions that Plato described). And what philosophers like Donald
Davidson have tried to emphasize is that, while we can and should
make knowledge and truth human-looking, attempting to make
"true" and "justified" able to do the other's work at all points
("collapsing" them) looks a little inhuman. It's the cautionary use
of true, as Steve pointed out, that seems to disappear. What
could be more human, more destructive of hubris, then pointing
out to the arrogantly confident, "Well, you might be justified, but is
it true?" The cautionary use of true codified in a semantic
distinction between "true" and "justified" is just the semantic side
of what Dewey described attitudinally as fallibilism.
Does that make sense as a split semantic hair? Is it still pedantic?
Perhaps it still is. And most of the time, I certainly don't consider it.
However, if there is any point to systematic understandings (as
Pirsig's is an example of a kind of), we should be precise for when
the occasions call for it. For the rest, we can enjoy pragmatic
fuzziness.
Matt
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