[MD] Mill: Quality philosopher

[Matt Kundert]

Platt,

Matt said:
Gene is right: we shouldn't, in our more careful moments, say that absolute 
truth does or does not exist.  Pragmatists are advocating we stop talking 
about it because talk of it (started by Plato) hasn't gotten us any closer 
in answering the question because we are no where closer towards developing 
criteria of even knowing how we'd know if we answered the question.

Platt said:
I see what you're saying. But what about the application of what you say to 
the everyday world we inhabit, such as the death of my cat, UTOE. Most 
people would agree with the statement, "UTOE is dead. He will never come 
back."  If asked, "Are you sure," the typical response would be 
"Absolutely."  In what way would that statement be wrong?

Matt:
There would be nothing wrong with it.  What I think we should do is make a 
distinction between commonsensical conversation and philosophical 
conversation, so-called "speaking with the vulgar" and more sophisticated, 
specialized talk.  Now, I've gotten the sense over the years that you'd be 
suspicious of such a distinction, seeing it at as breeding pointless 
jargonizing and instead valuing "plainer speech".  But I think one can still 
keep Pirsig's criticism of pointless Victorian circumlocutions while 
acknowledging that, for instance, scientists keep the kind of distinction 
I'm talking about between their activities at work and at home (by calling 
it a "table" instead of a "cloud of electrons between vectors X, Y, and Z"), 
or between writing articles for scientific journals and writing a "popular 
science" book.  Or take any of us: do we go around during the day talking 
about Dynamic Quality?  Probably not.  We probably reserve most of that talk 
for moments alone, with close friends, and for posts to this group.  But say 
you did--say one of us responded to a fortunate event by saying, "That was 
Dynamic!", and a friend (who'd never read Pirsig), replied, "Huh?"  You 
explain it, which takes at least five mintues, and I imagine the friend 
would say something like, "Why didn't you just say it was 'good'?"  They'd 
see _you_ as pointlessly jargonizing, proliferating words when there are 
easier ones available.

The point is the commonsense one that our words gain resonance (and meaning, 
for that matter) from the contexts in which we use them.  A great impetus 
for 20th century analytic philosophy (the movement that spawned logical 
positivism) was the notion that the problems of philosophy (so-called 
"metaphysical problems" like free will v. determinism) were created by 
taking words like "freedom" out of the original, common sense contexts in 
which they arose and creating a new context for them, one that warped their 
original meaning until it had little to do with the original context, thus 
creating pseudo-problems--in other words, metaphysics was simply a set of 
pointless circumlocutions that just confused things.

On the one had, the project of "ordinary language philosophy" (or Oxford 
philosophy, as it is sometimes known) foundered just as logical positivism, 
but it does create added pressure for us philosophers to justify some of the 
contexts we deal in.  How does, or could, this effect us?

With this notion of "absolute", I want to say that there's nothing wrong 
with it in common sense contexts, like if I had answered your question ("Is 
logical consistency a characteristic of quality truth?") colloquially with 
"Absolutely", but that there is something wrong with some of the notions 
created in philosophical contexts--that the effects in such contexts do not 
extend to everyday life at all.  As James said after likewise dismissing the 
free will/determinism problem, it makes a difference that makes no 
difference.  If you're willing to agree that the notion of an "Absolute 
Truth" that is an object of inquiry creates an activity that has no criteria 
for even knowing if we had found what we were looking for (an activity that 
would go on indefinitely with no parameters for even knowing which direction 
is the right direction to go hunting in), then you should be willing to 
agree with me (to this limited extent) that the notion of "absolute truth" 
in philosophy is a wheel that spins idly by itself, that its dead weight, 
that it would be best to cut it loose from your philosophical language, thus 
trimming your own philosophical language and not letting it get away from 
you with pointless jargonizing.

To pave the way for the possibility of agreement (many of our disagreements 
being built out of our first conversations almost four years ago, and not 
really worked on since), let me add this about truth: several years ago, 
Rorty conceded that truth is an absolute concept.  What he meant is this: 
pragmatists have gotten killed because the pragmatist theory of truth is 
said to prove its own falsity--if the true is what works, then the 
pragmatist theory of truth is false, 'cuz it don't work.  This is a line I'm 
postive you've used before.  Pragmatists like Rorty and Davidson have 
learned that this is right, that as a _theory_ of truth it _doesn't_ work.  
One of the formulations that Dewey gave is that truth is warranted 
assertability.  If truth is warranted assertability, then "truth" becomes 
the same thing as "justification".  _That_ conflation is exactly what leads 
people to call pragmatists relativists, because while we see that 
justification is relative to communities (or broadly, contexts), truth is 
seperate from it for the exact reason that relativism is absurd.

So pragmatists should be willing to admit that justification is different 
from truth.  What they've realized though is that the problem is with 
thinking we need a _theory_ of truth.  The development of theories of truth 
are exactly those philosophical activities that treat Truth as an object of 
inquiry, inquiries through which we could learn more about truth (and 
therefore, ideally, the application of "true" to particular linguistic items 
like "Slavery is bad"), but how can we _learn_ anything if, in such an 
inquiry, we appear to be in an endless sea with no compass?

Truth may be an absolute notion, but pragmatists think we should give up the 
hope for a theory of it, that we should stop treating it as an object of 
inquiry.  Justification (by such earmarks as Pirsig's "tests of truth") is 
our only criterion for truth, but they are different.  _Justification_ is 
relative to community, but that doesn't make us relativists because it isn't 
clear what other criterion we could have for truth.  It simply makes us 
fallible experimentalists, always in search of betterness.  There are no 
theories for truth, justification, or betterness.  We simply accrue them by 
the living of life.

Matt

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