Steve said to Matt:
We've been through this with DMB many times over the past five years or so. I
can't see why he'd want to drop the distinction between a true belief and a
justified belief. I can't imagine that Pirsig meant to drop this distinction in
embracing the pragmatic theory of truth. I tend to think that Pirsig would find
the notion that we could be justified in believing something at one time that
turns out not to be true and that someone could believe something that turns
out to be true without any justification or even right for the wrong reason.
dmb says:
Well, I'm all for a good thought experiment if it helps but the card games and
the case of the stolen money seems to suggest that the distinction between
truth and justification is only good for describing trivial errors and ordinary
mistakes. Further, each of these little scenarios is given to us from a
God's-eye point of view from which none of the relevant facts are hidden. Life
isn't like that.
The notion that our truths can later become untrue does not mean that truth and
justification are two different things. It just means that new truths emerge
and old truths die. If they weren't well justified, we wouldn't have called
them true. As I tried to explain in the last post, the pragmatist thinks that a
well funded, well justified belief is all we can ever mean by the word "true".
From that perspective, it is absurd to ask if a belief can be justified and
untrue. The guy whose money was removed from his wallet by a thief wasn't
really justified because his belief was not well funded, not was it validated
or verified in experience. And he was tricked! I mean, there isn't just truth
and falsity in the abstract. Human truth is also about sincerity, honesty,
lying, cheating, stealing, stupidity, mistakes, optical illusions, moods,
ulterior motives and all sorts of human things.
Laura Weed argues, "that the deflationist view of truth in contemporary
analytical philosophy can not capture the meaning of truth because it has cut
its material too thin in restricting considerations related to truth to very
narrowly conceived logical considerations concerning propositions, and by
shutting itself off from experience of the emotional and intentional aspects of
a lived life. And I have argued," Weed says, "that the socio-historical view of
truth expoused by Foucault, Rorty and other hermeneutical philosopher cannot
capture the meaning of truth because they do not consider the roles of A)
stable functions of consciousness, and B) practical interactions with a
recalcitrantly existent environment, in their considerations of the nature of
truth." (Weed, page 14)
By contrast, she describes James notion of truth as part of a process, as a
portion of the overall experiential process. It functions in connection with
the "stream of experience" to use one of his most famous metaphors. He says
life is in the transitions and describes the present moment in terms of riding
the crest of a wave or a line a flame burning its way across a dry, open field.
In James's metaphors, truth is continually made and the whole thing is in
motion, not unlike trains, motorcycles and sailboats, you see?
"James also considered truth-seeking a form of humanistic endeavor, rooted in
human life, and in this sense, also, I believe he was correct. The moral,
emotional and knowledge-seeking functions of human life cannot be as radically
divorced from one another as the Platonism inherent in math and science
sometimes misleads abstractly-oriented people to believe. As Putnam also
insists, there are no fact-free values and no value-free facts. All mistakes,
lies, and truth are bound up in personal conscious experience, processes of
verification in reality, and the practical results of theorizing in people's
daily lives. Abstract, two-sortal logic utterly fails to capture the immediacy
and compelling moral force of the relationships among truths, mistakes and
lies.Likewise, hermeneutical over-personalizations of truth fail to capture the
compelling nature of experiential, process verified truths, mistakes and lies.
For, if everyone is entitled to an interpretation, and interpretations
are not grounded in anything other than one's own imaginiation, no
classification of any claim as a truth, a mistake, or a lie, can be correct.
The Enron Executives merely had their perspectives, and the duped investors had
their perspectives, and no moral or factual distinction between the two
perspectives obtains." (Weed, page 5)
"On the deflationary account ['snow is white' is true if and only if snow is
white.], truth is utterly detached from experience, perspective-less, and
without practical import, which for Putnam and James implies that either it is
utterly unknowable or there is no reason to value it. ...This sterilized and
epistemologically neutered view of truth may play a role in a formal logic
system, but it is completely impotent to explain truth in human affairs, much
less why it matters, practically and morally. Logicians like Soames, Frege,
Tarski, et al., however, are at least concerned with retaining some eviscerated
vestige of a Jamesian conception of truth; the notion of truth-functionality in
arguments. I think the deflationary view is too thin to even retain that
vestige of the notion, but at least that is the task that the logicians see
themselves as undertaking. Even that vestige of truth is gone from
hermeneutical approaches to philosophy. I will now turn to the hermeneutical a
pproach to truth to show how if fares even worse that the analytical approach
on the issue of truth. Section 3: Foucault and Rorty on Truth as Power" (Weed,
page 8)
Steve said to Matt:
Is DMB trying to enforce a false dilemma in saying that we can either be
pragmatists _or_ distinguish truth and justification? It seems so. Rorty's
articulation of the issue shows that we can have both a distinction between
truth and justification _and_ a re-description of truth in pragmatic terms.
dmb says:
I'm saying that Rorty differs from James and Pirsig. I'm saying that Rorty's
notion of truth is NOT James's pragmatic theory of truth. This is not a false
dilemma because it's not a dilemma at all. It's a distinction - or rather, a
whole set of distinctions that together make one view differ from the other.
Steve said:
I see nothing un-Pirsigian or un-Jamesian about distinguishing between having
good beliefs (truth) and having good reasons for one's beliefs (justification).
I can't see why it would be important for DMB to insist that we _don't_ make
this distinction. If it's a useful distinction, if it helps us make our ideas
clear, shouldn't we use it?
dmb says:
Hopefully, the explanation I just provided explains why the pragmatists don't
think it's a useful distinction. To say that people are sometimes justified in
believing things that just ain't so is true enough, but it's also obvious and
trivial. Are we not talking about a philosophical theory of truth here?
"Putnam argues that James did not confuse truth and methods of confirmation,
[as critics claimed]. James saw a clear connection between confirmation and
truth, but did not reduce one to the other, as Putnam explains: 'To say that
truth is 'correspondence to reality' is not false but empty, as long as nothing
is said about what the 'correspondence' is. If the 'correspondence' is supposed
to be utterly independent of the ways in which we confirm the assertions we
make (so that it is conceived to e possible that what is true is utterly
different from what we are warranted in taking to be true), then the
'correspondence' is an occult one and our grasp of it is equally occult.' Thus,
for James, truth was not reducible to confirmation or to practical effects, but
neither was it radically divorceable from the processes and context from which
it emerges." (Weed, page 4)
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