Matt said:
When Dave says (and Ian agrees with), "I think James is saying that justified
beliefs are all we mean by the word truth," I can't get past the riposte that
Steve supplied that we were already using before I left, roughly: how do you
reformulate, then, the clear and perspicuous meaning of the English sentences:
"what you say might be justified, but it might not be true" or "what you say
might be true, but you've presented no justification for thinking so." This
Steve has supplied clearly as the existence of, on the JTB formula of
knowledge, "justified beliefs" and "true beliefs" respectively. The request
has been for an account of what those two things are if you collapse
justification and truth into a single heap. If one was supplied by anyone, I
apologize for not catching it. ...
dmb says:
I guess I don't understand the objection because reformulating those two
sentences seems quite simple and unproblematic to me. "What you says might seem
to be justified, but that justification might turn out to be bogus." "You've
presented no justification for your position but I suppose you might be
inadvertently correct."
It seems to me that the distinction only serves to illustrate that none of our
beliefs in final, that further investigation is always likely to reveal a
better way to understand things. So "truth" simply refers to this "cautionary"
note about our present beliefs. In that sense, "truth" is an imagined ideal,
something above and beyond the justified beliefs we presently hold. It might
make sense to insist on the distinction if that was the only way to say that
our truths are provisional, that they constantly evolve. But it's not the only
way to assert the provisional nature of our truths. And of course that's the
main idea behind James's re-conception of truth, that it is part of an ongoing
process.
Matt continued:
... I have not, nor will have, the time to give good thought to the extensive
extensions of the conversation that went on past me. It's too hard to play
catch up with something like that, as anyone knows whose left a movie midway
through to relieve their bowels.
dmb says:
Well, just for the record, there were only a few posts from me on this topic
(three, I think, maybe four) and those were all written in the last few days.
I've got work to do too, but it's too bad you're letting those last few go
because Weed's paper is exceedingly relevant. It compares James's truth to
Rorty's in pretty clear terms.
Matt said:
... Dave continues to think that "Matt and Steve seem to think these strawmen
and windmils can be pressed against James," but I thought we'd gotten beyond
that. .. I have no real idea what Dave is thinking of by "strawmen and
windmills." I thought I had been clear that I have no real argument to press
against James. The only thing that might come up is if James had really meant
to say that truth can be completely replaced by justification. ...I applaud
[Steve's] good answer to the "mere conversation" slogan this is: "Of course
conversation is not excluded from experience, but what you fail to get is that
nothing is excluded from conversation." What's great about this is that it
catches exactly how the two, conversation and experience, are inverses of each
other. Just as part of our experience is conversation, so can conversation be
_about_ anything.
dmb says:
Right, that's what I was talking about. The truth-justification distinction
(analytic) and the notion that nothing is excluded from conversation
(hermeneutical) are the things you've been pressing against James, or rather
against my James as opposed to Rorty appropriation of James. I believe it was
Ian who called them straw men and otherwise doubted their legitimacy. If memory
serves, he regarded the deflationary account as yet another straw man. Weed
addresses that view in her paper as well. I had hoped it would help you
understand what I had been saying earlier about the temperamental differences
between pragmatism and the analytic tradition.
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