[MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,


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?



Steve:

This is a very important question in our conversation. I keep wondering how
you could possibly be taking Rorty to be saying the things that you accuse
him of, and this conflation of justification with truth explains it.

Rorty accepts Plato’s formulation of knowledge as justified true belief.* *

* *

*Wikipedia says, “Justified true belief* is one definition of knowledge that
states *for someone to have knowledge of something, it must be true, it must
be believed to be true, and the belief must be justified*. In more formal
terms, a subject *S* *knows* that a proposition *P* is true if and only if:

   1. *P* is true
   2. *S* believes that *P* is true, and
   3. *S* is justified in believing that *P* is true “



You wonder how someone can be justified in believing something that is not
true. The answer is that justification is relative to some particular
epistemic context, while the truth of the matter is not.

Based on your experience, a certain belief may reliably have led you to
successful action but could actually have been false all along. For example,
perhaps someone once believed that the sun revolves around the earth and
used this belief to predict the proper place to plant her garden so as to
get the most sun throughout the day. It worked! So by James’s “theory of
truth” the assertion that the sun actually revolves around the earth is
actually true to precisely the extent that it did work. But this seems like
a strange way to talk about truth. Doesn’t it? This is the sort of thing
that turns people off to pragmatism.

On the other hand, if we follow Plato in keeping justification and truth
distinct, we can say that if she didn’t have access to telescopes and the
measurements taken by later astronomers because such things had not been
invented yet, this person could have indeed been justified in believing that
the sun revolves around the earth, but that claim was never true.



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.

Steve:

Why do you think most philosophers are not pragmatists? I’m sure you’ve
heard many times that the problem with pragmatism’s theory of truth as “what
works” is that it doesn’t work. If we can better communicate a distinction
between justification and truth we will pragmatists will be more difficult
to dismiss with this quip.



DMB:

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:

I’m fine with “experience is the test of truth.” How else could truth
candidates be tested if not in experience?  The point I would add is just
that whether or not an assertion is true does not depend on whether or not
we can justify believing it, though assertions we can justify as true are
more likely to actually be true than ones that we have been convinced are
false.

You keep pulling this “conversation is the only constraint” line out as if
Rorty is talking about truth rather than warrant in this quote. The problem
is that the classical pragmatists can easily be taken to be claiming that
these are the same thing. The problem is in doing so you end with "true for
me but false for you" nonsense.

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.

Steve:

I think that Rorty and the classical pragmatists all have the same
anti-essentialist take on truth. The issue here is just whether or not we
want to assert that what we have is a theory.



DMB:

It's a method for settling philosophical disputes and for distinguishing
real problems from mere verbal disputes.

Steve:

Yes, and this method that requires a difference to make a difference
suggests to me that we should be asserting that we have a theory of truth.



DMB:

It's anti-essential and anti-foundational but it also has a positive,
constructive side.



Steve:

If “constructive” has something to do with building foundations or scaffolds
or platforms, then that is not what Rorty would say he is doing. He might
say that he is creating linguistic tools.



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?

Steve:

Of course not. In fact, we agreed from the start that Rorty and Dewey have
different views.



DMB:

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.

Steve:

Agreed. But why not agree that Rorty is also saying similar things? You want
to say that though he has some similar ideas, he is not agreeing on the core
point of the pragmatic theory of truth. But why make that one point the core
issue that is supposed to decide whether or not someone is really a
pragmatist? I’ve suggested some other possible ways of distinguishing
pragamatism such as the pragmatic method of insistence that a difference
must make a difference as well as anti-essentialism and
anti-foundationalism. Other candidates for the essence of pragmatism might
be ultilitarianism applied to beliefs or always considering the meaning
of  beliefs in terms of their consequences in lived experience.

Best,

Steve