Steve asked dmb:
Can you give me an example of a constraint on knowledge claims that is
"practice-transcending"--one that isn't merely conversational?
dmb replied:
No, Steve. That's the false dilemma again and that's the point of Rockwell's
analogy. James's pragmatic theory of truth is NEITHER practice-transcending NOR
merely conversational.
Steve asked dmb:
If there is a false dilemma here (an excluded middle?), then you must be able
to provide an example of a justificatory practice that is NEITHER
conversational NOR practice-transcending.
dmb says:
Can I provide an example? James's pragmatic theory of truth does not count as
an example? For the purposes of our discussion, I'd say it is THEE example.
Against the merely conversational approach, I'm asserting pragmatic truth as a
form of empiricism wherein our truths are tested by their performance in
experience. Conversation is not excluded from experience, of course, but it's
important to understand that language is only half of the equation, the static
half. As Seigfried points out, Rorty understands language to be free-floating
and he ascribes this view to James. Seigfreid thinks he's wrong on both counts
and so does Weed:
"Rorty writes as if his position were close to that of William James, but both
James's appeal to the stream of conscious experience as a source of
recalcitrant psychological truth, and his appeal to processes of verification
as collaborators for theoretical and learned truth are missing from Rorty's
approach to the subject. ..Rorty collapses all of the terms used by pragmatists
into a very Foucault-like social category as his analysis of James's pragmatic
conception of truth in praxis works... I think that Rorty has elided
'empirical' and 'sociohistorical' to ignore the empirical stress in James's
conception of truth and replaced it with a far more Foucault-like
sociohistorical concept, for which he then usurps the 'pragmatist' label. ...I
don't think Rorty is entitled to call himself a pragmatist on the issue of
truth, at least not of a Jamesian stripe." (Laura E. Weed in "The Concept of
Truth that Matters", pages 8-9. Published online by Harvard's William James
Society.)
Basically, she's saying that Rorty has taken the empiricism out of James's
theory of truth and replaced it with mere conversation. As the Stanford article
points out, the notion that there are no constraints on truth outside of
language is a bit shocking even to Rorty's friendliest critics and they can't
follow him quite that far. I think this is worth mentioning because there seems
to be some confusion about what is and is not the pragmatic theory of truth. I
cite Seigfried, Weed and others because I think they're right to call Rorty a
usurper of the label. And so a lot of what I've been doing in trying to explain
how very different they actually are. And as I've said before, I think it
basically comes down to a battle between experience and language, between an
empirical theory of truth and a free-floating conversation.
"Beliefs at any time are so much experience FUNDED. But the beliefs are
themselves parts of the sum total of the world's experience, and become matter,
therefore, for the next day's funding operations. So far as reality means
experienceable reality, both it and the truths men gain about it are
everlastingly in process of mutation - mutations toward a definite goal, it may
be, - but still a mutation." (Emphasis is James's)
"True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify.
False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes
to us to have true ideas; that, therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is
all that truth can be known-as."
"The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth HAPPENS
to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true by events. Its verity IS in fact an
event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its
veri-FICATION. Its validity is the process of its valid-ATION" (emphasis is
James's)
This is what I mean by saying that pragmatic truth is not something over and
above a justified belief. I think James is saying that justified beliefs are
all we mean by the word truth. As a practical matter, that's all you're going
to get. To say that truth can never mean anything more than that is to give up
on the Platonic ideal of Truth altogether and instead present a human-sized
theory about the kind of actual truths we can and do have.
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