Stefan, Gary R., Gary F., list,
This post might need to have a paragraph moved up or down, but here goes.
As to "opinion versus true opinion": Mostly I was expositing Peirce's
views on truth (with which I generally agree). It's Peirce who often
called truth the final _/opinion/_ that sufficient investigation would
reach. Peirce held that truth is immutable, unchangeable.
When you say that we don't have any truth (because we don't have
absolute theoretical assurance of truth), the question is, how do you
know that? Why do you think that _/that/_ is a truth? Obviously it's
inconsistent. Anyway, we just can't attain absolute theoretical
certainty, that's all. But there's no escaping the fact that to hold an
opinion is to hold that that opinion is true.
If one doesn't want to hold one's opinion as flatly true, then one
qualifies the opinion, hedges it with words like 'probably',
'seemingly', 'if I recall correctly,' etc., and then _/that/_ opinion, a
qualified version of the previous, is the opinion that one more firmly
hold - an opinion, e.g., that 'probably people have lived in yonder
house', or 'seemingly people have lived in yonder house', etc. Even if
the truth, as you say, doesn't have 'error bars,' it will still be true
that there can be truth in terms of error bars. For example, it can be
true that it seems that people have lived in yonder house, and that
that's how it would seem to anybody with the same vantage point and
information, without its being true that people have lived in yonder
house. So the opinion, that it seems that people have lived in yonder
house, is a safer opinion, likelier to be true.
So one says, 'horses give birth to live young,' and concedes a tiny
probability of error, or a thin feasibility of error, almost as a
philosophical nicety, and in fact sometimes as an afterthought, since
one has no real doubt of that horses give birth to live young. One bets
on it, commits oneself to it as true, for practical purposes, and don't
you actually think that that one is a pretty safe bet? For theoretical
purposes, one is more cautious about such commitment. But even for
theoretical purposes one does not wait for an absolute theoretical
certainty that one never can have. Peirce argued that fruitful inquiry
comes from real doubt, not from merely verbal, quarrelsome, or Cartesian
hyperbolic doubt.
Standard first-order logic does not include such qualifications of truth
as 'plausibly', 'seemingly', etc. I wouldn't get too hung up on that.
Anyway, the idea that something is possibly true does not automatically
mean the idea that it escapes being either true or false in a flat-out
way. 'Partly true' etc., is a way of speaking of a proposition as a
conjunction of truth(s) and falsehood(s). Such a conjunction, if it
contains a single falsehood, is false. But if most of the component
propositions are true, it's helpful and informative to say that it's
'mostly true'. Newton's physics is 'true enough' at velocities that
don't get "near lightspeed," as people say, where the phrase 'near
lightspeed' means 1/7 or more of lightspeed. Newton's physics is really
'not true enough' at any velocity in terms of the constancy of
lightspeed, the unification of time quantities and distance quantities,
etc. In speaking of the truer (or less true) one sometimes prefers to
say 'more accurate' or 'more generally true' or 'more deeply true', or
the like. Yet even Peirce uses the phrase 'more true' in "A Neglected
Argument".
I don't know whether Foucault meant in saying "Mendel said the truth but
he wasn't within the biological truth of his time". Did he mean that
Mendel's truth was not among the biological truths commonly recognized
(at least by biologists) in his time, that it was found by a separate
stream of investigation, and so on? Then "the biological truth commonly
recognized" or the like would have been a better phrase, but Foucault
seems to be working a bit of literary metaphysical titillation, whether
merely for effect or in a serious effort to weaken the idea of truth, I
don't know. Or did Foucault mean that Mendel's truth was not among the
opinions comprising the 'so-called "truth"' popular among biologists in
his time (and was reached by separate stream of investigation, and so
on)? Then that's just a relativist way of speaking about truth.
If somebody states, 'your opinion is the truth', one need not interpret
that statement to mean 'it is absolutely theoretically certain that your
opinion is the truth' or 'the truth is defined as your opinion'. Now 'a
truth' and 'a falsehood' have long been taken as equivalent expressions
for 'a true proposition' and 'a false proposition' respectively, and
Peirce talked that way. (An aside: in English 'a falsity' and 'a
falseness' are not interpreted to mean 'a false proposition'.) When I
said that one can think of a truth as a true opinion (or just as well a
true proposition), I meant opinion that coincides with the final opinion
that sufficient investigation would reach, the difference being that
truth is pragmatically _/defined/_ (e.g., by Peirce) as that final
opinion, and is not _/defined/_ as yours or my firm opinion that happens
to be true despite yours and my lack of absolute theoretical certainty.
Also Peirce did think that truth can have 'error bars', so to speak. He
held that if not even the final opinion on a question could achieve
complete precision (e.g., because of measurement's limitations even in
principle), then that leads to the idea that there is imprecision,
indefiniteness, vagueness in the real itself, and from there he derives
tychism and synechism. I.e., if, _/even in principle/_, no one could
ever be quite precise about X, then X itself, the object, is really
vague. See "Fallibilism, Continuity, and Evolution" in CP 1.141-175
http://www.textlog.de/4248.html , placed by the volume's editors right
after the brief MS "F.R.L." (First Rule of Logic), circa 1899, titled
"First Rule of Reason" by the editors in CP 1.135-140,
http://www.textlog.de/4249.html .
As to the idea of knowledge: 'Knowledge' is an 'achievement' word, it
means that one successfully knows the truth because it has been proven
to one, and, in science, it tends to mean that one can prove it to
others too. It is generally taken to mean not merely justified belief
but justified _/true/_ belief. The key ideas there are of truth and
proof, and so the idea of knowledge brings no way to escape the
commitment to something as true; it increases the commitment in fact,
insofar as it implies a commitment to something as _/proven true/_.
There are ways of weakening the achievement sense of the verb 'to
remember' (e.g., "I remember him as being here"), and maybe one could do
the same with the verb 'to know' but, for whatever reason, people don't
do that.
Best, Ben
On 9/26/2014 5:52 AM, sb wrote:
Ben, Garys, list,
seems i took some things down the wrong pipe (see my post to Gary).
There is not much in what you say that I'd disagree with. But there is
still the truth-problem, but maybe this is just a problem of labeling.
For me truth has no little errorbars, but i'm apodictic here like "god
doesn't throw dices". What is true now, can't be false later. Yes,
truth is not changeable. And we don't have this truth.
But by introducing the "distincton between opinion and true opinion"
it seems to me you are trying to reintroduce truth under a new flag.
Something is true or not true, do we know with absolute certainty that
something is true or not true? No, we can't and therefore you have to
introduce the errorbars. But errorbars and truth don't fit together,
something is true or not and not possibly-maybe-a-little
-less-than-true. Samples can have errorbars but not truth and hence
true opinion as something actual existent doesn't seem sound to me.
This Foucault quote shows the paradox "Mendel said the truth but he
wasn't within the biological truth of his time" you are already
adressing. Now exchange Mendel with Newton. Is Newtons mechanics true
or false? Hmm, i would say neither, it works under certain
circumstances. So yes, inquiry can be succesful! In this little
example we had three meanings of truth: as actual opinion, truth as
better viable opinion and truth as true opinion at the end of all time.
That's the reason why i wouldn't use truth and opinion as opposites. I
belief the better distinction is knowledge and opinion like the greece
doxa and episteme. Important is wether you can give a sound
justification for your belief or not. Knowledge is justified belief
and opinion unjustified belief.
Is there much difference between what you and i said except not using
the word "truth"?
Best
Stefan
P.S.: Introducing the errorbars into this topic is problematic,
because it assumes bayesian statistics. But yes it is important to
argue for the reasonableness of a knowledge claim and to point at
possible shortcomings but this just means to justify.
Stefan, Gary R., Gary F., list,
I'm not sure how much there is in what you say that I'd disagree with.
I'd point out that I wasn't attempting to describe social influences
on research in real depth, but just to indicate that I believe that
they exist and that I had given them at least a little thought.
"Light pseudo-hallucinatory fun" was just my way of referring to
fanciful fun in the mind. I wasn't jumping to the end of "the long
run" or of sufficient investigation except in that sense in which
every one of us does in asserting a proposition, making a declarative
statement. To assert a proposition is to say that anybody who
_/were/_ to investigate it far enough _/would/_ find it to be true.
Note the conditional modal 'would' as per Peirce's repeated
formulation of truth as the end of inquiry.
All this idea of truth as _/only/_ at the end of the longest run, as
attainable _/only/_ by a perfect sign incorporating all possible
perspectives at the end of all times, goes against Peirce's idea that
inquiry can succeed without taking forever or almost forever. When
you think that you've reached the truth about something, then you
think that your actual opinion coincides with the final opinion that
would be reached by sufficient investigation. That final opinion to
which sufficient research would be destined is not affected by any
person's or group's actual opinion. The idea of the final opinion is
a way of defining truth pragmatically in relation to investigation.
You can't have absolute theoretical certainty that your actual
opinion coincides with the final opinion that would be reached; but
you can have strong reasons to think that it does. But even then,
being scientifically minded, you would not _/define/_ the truth as
yours or anybody's actual opinion.
Now, statisticians add error bars to their graphs. One way, pointed
out by Peirce, to close a suspected gap between actual opinion and
the ideal final opinion is for one's actual opinion to include a
confession of its own possible error, its being merely plausible, or
likely, or whatever, so that, in asserting your opinion, you're
asserting that anybody who were to investigate far enough would find
it likely that such-and-such is the case; or even that anybody who
were to investigate far enough would find it likely that anybody who
were to investigate far enough would find it likely that such-&-such
is the case.
The proposition that I asserted was that conflating the ideas of
truth and opinion, making them the same thing in the mind, leads,
like by having a drink or a toke or both, to fanciful fun in the
mind, the thought of somehow having one's cake and eating it too, for
example, some idea of people's conflicting opinions/truths as
involving conflicting realities, various actual worlds, somehow
intersecting, maybe in a somewhat magical way like in an old _Dr.
Strange_ comic book. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe some people never get
any pleasurable sensation out of it at all.
The distinction between opinion and truth, which can also be
formulated as the distincton between opinion and true opinion, is one
that Peirce certainly held with; he strongly opposed James's idea of
changeable truths. Peirce held that opinions, propositions, etc., can
be true and can be false. He did not believe that truths can be false.
Sometimes it is hard to arrive at a firm conclusion about which
opinion is true, and sometimes something that one firmly believed
turns out false, it feels as if one's truth turned out to be false.
As Robert Creeley wrote somewhere, "What I knew / wasn't true". That
doesn't make the truth-opinion distinction spurious. But there won't
be a 'constructive' definition of truth from philosophy that will
empower philosophy to hand out warrants of truth, validity,
soundness, etc., to particular conclusions claimed by researchers in
the special sciences.
I certainly agree that it is good to approach the object from
multiple perspectives. The idea of convergence is not just the idea
of one person approaching every more closely to the truth from a
single direction, but also of various researchers converging from
various starting points (and zigzagging too) till things fit together
like in a crossword puzzle, as Haack said.
Best, Ben
On 9/24/2014 8:36 AM, sb wrote:
Ben, Gary, R., Gary F.,
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