[MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists

[Steven Peterson]

>
> Hi DMB,
>

DMB:
This post is well written and thoughtful and yet it makes me cringe. What
you're expressing here is Rorty's view of pragmatism, not THEE view of
pragmatism. And there are more than a few pragmatists who think Rorty isn't
a pragmatist at all.

Steve:
It is certainly true. But consider that these sorts of debates about what
pragmatism REALLY means have been going on pretty much from the beginning.
In fact, Pierce didn't think that James was articulating what Pierce meant
when he invented pragmatism and starting calling his philosophy
"pragmaticism" to distinguish his views from what James was saying.



DMB:

> As James saw it in "The Will To Believe", for example, we have the right to
> assert our own desires and make a choice about what to believe ONLY when
> there is no available evidence to settle the matter. He had other conditions
> too, like it can't be a trivial belief. Pierce was fiercely scientific about
> what we can believe and assert. As he saw it, the only alternatives to
> beliefs based on evidence and inquiry were beliefs based on authority,
> tenacity and even less attractive options.


Steve:
Part of what I was trying to bring out in the original post is the question
of what counts as evidence?

DMB:

> Dewey thought inquiry was essential and basic to life on the planet and no
> less useful for philosophers. But of course it's Pirsig's pragmatism that
> concerns here the most. Like Dewey and James, he's a radical empiricist and
> that means that true beliefs don't correspond to an objective reality but
> they do agree with experience. That's practically what pragmatic truth
> means.


Steve:
I don't think anyone has any problem with truth as "agreement with
experience." The problems only arise when someone wants to have a theory of
truth--an account of what this agreement must be like in order to say
something is true. Since no one has ever been able to do that in such a way
as to provide a method for distinguishing true beliefs from false ones,
having a theory of truth or not is the sort of difference that doesn't make
a difference that a Jamesian should want to drop.


DMB:

> I mean the rejection of objectivity, for Rorty, means that conversation is
> the only restraint on what we can assert.


Steve:
What Rorty doesn't say that you keep reading him as saying is that the lack
of non-conversational pressures on assertions means that truth is whatever
your conversational partners will let you get away with. He is only saying
that justification is a social process. Truth on the other hand is a
preperty that an assertion may either have or not regardless of whether or
not the assertion can be justified.


DMB:

> This is very different from the radical empiricist's claims. What was that
> quote from Pirsig? Something like...The scientific method is the way nature
> keeps us from thinking something is true when it isn't - or something like
> that.


Steve:
That doesn't sound like Pirsig to me.

DMB:

> The idea is simply that experience is what constrains our truth claims. For
> the pragmatist, "truth" has no meaning except as an idea that works in
> experience. I'm not saying that consensus forming activities don't count as
> experience but rather that experience is much, much broader than that.
> For whatever its worth,
>
Steve:
Pierce, James, and Dewey all had different ideas about truth. None of them
figured out how to distinguish truth from justification in an account of
truth which has been the primary criticism of pragmatism over the last
hunders years.

Dewey's strategy was to pay somew lip-service to Pierce but pretty much to
avoid talk about truth and focus instead on how we justify our beliefs.
James thought that an assertion is literally true to whatever extent it
leads to successful action. But then what is good for one person to believe
may not be good for another person to believe. And what is true now may
cease to be true later. Wouldn't it be better to be able to say that what we
once believed to be true and what we were even justified in believing to be
true in that past has turned out to have never been true?  Only by keeping
truth and justification distinct can we say such things.

Pierce thought that truth was what we would all come to believe under ideal
conditions of inquiry. It's tough to make this theory of truth work because
of the problem of articulating what these ideal conditions must be like.

So I think you have a problem if you want to define the essence of
pragmatism as a particular theory of truth since there doesn't seem to be
one--at least not one that works. I think it would be better to think of
pragmatism as anti-essentialism with regard to such notions as Truth. If we
do, then it is easy to see the classical pragmatists and Rorty as part of
the same tradition.

It also then would seem out of line to say that pragmatism itself has an
essence with regard to which Rorty is not in the proper relation.

Best,
Steve