[MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
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 says:

That only points out one more important difference between Rorty and the classical pragmatist. Rorty thinks we pragmatists shouldn't have a theory of truth but as James, Pirsig, Dewey and I see it, pragmatism IS a theory of truth. 


Steve said:

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 property that an assertion may either have or not regardless of whether or not the assertion can be justified. 

dmb says:
Huh? If an assertion can't be justified then in what sense does it have the property of truth? In any case, according to the Stanford article, it's not just me reading this into Rorty. As the article's author says, "it is not surprising that Rorty's commitment to epistemological behaviorism should lead to charges of relativism or subjectivism. Indeed, many who share Rorty's historicist scepticism toward the transcending ambitions of epistemology—friendly critics like Hilary Putnam, John McDowell and Daniel Dennett—balk at the idea that there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones. Yet this is a central part of Rorty's position, repeated and elaborated as recently as in TP and PCP. Indeed, in TP he invokes it precisely in order to deflect this sort of criticism."
Please notice that the author is saying "a central part of Rorty's position" is "the idea that there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones". You are denying this and accusing me of error but that just doesn't seem plausible. Every source I check seems quite clear about this.

dmb had said:...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 replied:
That doesn't sound like Pirsig to me.

dmb says:
I'm worried that Pirsig and Rorty are getting rather blurred in your mind. Here's the actual quote with some context. As you can see, my paraphrase wasn't too shabby...

"The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know. There's not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn't suffered from that one so much that he's not instinctively on guard. That's the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities. One must be finely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely." (ZAMM, chapter 9) 
 
Steve said:
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 hundred years.

dmb says:
Has it? I'd like to hear more about the last hundred years of criticism. In any case, while it's true that the classical bunch had their differences, they all put the emphasis on experiential constraints on knowledge. James and Dewey were very close to each other on this point. Dewey's definition of truth in his debates with Bertrand Russell was "warranted assertibility". This little phrase, Hickman points out, captures the experiential constraints in the pragmatic theory of truth. Its warrant is based on the past, refers to the past experience which the idea refers to. The assertion is directed toward the future. The warrant and assertibility of an idea function in the present but it is based on what was and it's directed toward what will be. That's a pretty good way to think about what it means to say that experience is the test of truth. Obviously, this is not the same as saying that conversation is the only constraint. 


Steve said:...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.

dmb says:
Hmmm. I don't get that. As I understand it, pragmatic truth is exactly the same thing as what we're justified in believing. I guess I like "warranted" better because "justified" sounds vaguely legalistic and so invokes the notion of "virtue" in that Victorian conformist sense of the word. In any case, I would have thought that distinguishing between justified beliefs and true beliefs would sound the alarms for a guy like Rorty. Wouldn't such a thing count as Platonism?  


Steve said: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.

dmb says:
Yea, actually he's my least favorite pragmatist. I ever prefer Rorty over Peirce. Peirce was about 9 inches from being a positivist. Still, he's worth pondering.  


Steve said:
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.

dmb says:
Doesn't seem to be a particular theory of truth that defines pragmatism? I'm pretty sure that James, Dewey and Pirsig all think that pragmatism IS a theory of truth. It's a method for settling philosophical disputes and for distinguishing real problems from mere verbal disputes. It's anti-essential and anti-foundational but it also has a positive, constructive side. In fact, In the Essay In Radical Empiricism James uses the positive side to do the deconstructive work. It wasn't a matter of clearing the field first. The move against modern metaphysics of fixity and certainty was made with radical empiricism already in hand, so to speak. 
But speaking of traditions, one thing I've learned lately is that a lot of what Rorty says we can't have was something that the analytic philosophers sought and thought we could have. Modern philosophy in general does this too, of course, but man, those guys were pretty hard ass about things certainty and fixity. We're talking about a degree of scientism that would have made DesCartes look like a hippie and Newton look like a new ager. Seriously. In any case, from my own particular point of view, Rorty is adamantly against a bunch of stuff I was never for and in fact never even heard of. I'm still not entirely sure what an "essence" is or why anyone ever wanted one. It's just about certainty, I guess. 


Steve said:
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.


dmb says:

See, that just seems silly to me. Does pragmatism, in the abstract, need an essence for me to assert that Dewey's view is different from Rorty's? Do I need a metaphysical substance of some kind to notice that there are close similarities between Dewey and James, to see that James and Pirsig are saying similar things? Of course not. You just read them, think about it and then, hopefully, make some warranted assertions about it. Anti-essentialism doesn't mean that we can't distinguish one idea from another, one thinker from another, or make judgements about how far we can stretch the meanings of labels like "pragmatist". I realize there's room for debate and that's just what we're doing. But this all-or-nothing-ism falls flat for me. If you're a pragmatist, you're an anti-essentialist and that means you can't say what a pragmatist is? Think about that, Steve. If that's not pulling the rug out from under one's self, I don't know what is. This kind of intellectual paralysis sets in at just about every point in Rorty's thought. I fail to understand your admiration for him nor do understand why you'd want to blur the difference between his thought and these other academic pragmatists (despite all the quotes stating their objections to his thought). 









  		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390710/direct/01/