[MD] Mill: Quality philosopher

[Platt Holden]

Matt,

Many thanks for your explication of "truth" below. I have no argument 
with it other than the minor one of academic philosophy being estranged 
in certain circumstances from common sense. But even here your analogy 
of a physicist's perception of table is a nice illustration of the 
difference, and well taken.

Again, much appreciate the time you spent on this. Now if only I can 
remember it. :-)

Platt

> 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