[MD] Truth and the Linguistic Turn

[David M]

Hi Matt/Krim

Really great post below.

Matt the story you tell below what 3/4 books best tell that story would you 
say?

Interesting bit about the non-dualist aliens from Philosophy & the Miiror of 
Nature.
Also where you resist the pretentions of science. I smell a conflict of 
sorts here.
On the one hand you and Rorty and me dismiss the pretentions of science and
scientism when they try to apply the language of science in a different 
language
sphere such as ethics. Also you, Rorty and me are non-reductionists.
But you and Rorty are still materialists and I find this odd. As the 
physicists
Paul Davies says, modern physics suggests that the concept of matter is more
mythic than real in the current experience of physics.

You see it seems odd to me to say that the non-dualist aliens will talk as 
if there is
a single non-dual reality that is grounded in material ideas, because our 
notions
of material, of what causes our experience is one step beyond what we 
experience,
an aspect of our best theories or assumptions.

Might the aliens not have much more of a sense of the constructed and 
provisional character
of all alien knowledge? This would be compatible with Rorty's position but 
less tipping
the hat to whatever our latest theories about reality may be. The aliens may 
see the focus
much more on experience as being about shared experience with their fellow 
aliens and
the specific-ness of their alien point of view. I see no reason in Rorty's 
approach that
stops non-dualist aliens having a very strong sense that reality is a larger 
category than
experience, is something that is the cause of experience but therefore 
transcends experience
and that their conceptions of reality must always go beyond experience to 
construct
what they call reality. More in line with Nietzsche than Rorty perhaps they 
see the world/reality
as a fiction, a positive and perhaps/theoretically/hopefully/pragmatically 
semi-accurate
(but how do you know? -you can't) way to make sense of experience. Therefore 
they would
never dream of suggesting that their physical theories can fundamentally 
explain experience
in any useful sense, rarther (less scientistically and a critically thought 
out way), they see
their theories as always being an attempt to make sense of their shared 
experience which
creates the need and interest to theorise and therefore comes before their 
probably
incorrect constructions about the reality that transcends experience. 
Transcends in the
obvious sense that an individual does not experience what others experience, 
other
life forms must experience differently, and much of reality has never been 
experienced
by humans or aliens and exiested both before life and will exist after life 
in the cosmos.
To leave out what inanimate patterns experience too if anything.


I also note how you talk about the future and what we are to make of 
ourselves,
and that whatever we have been this does not tell us which future we should 
seek.

This is close to what I am saying about the reality of possibility. It is 
only due
to us as humans being faced with alternative futures/possibles that we have 
a
problem that goes beyond actuality. Actuality is incomplete, it is open to
alternative futures, we have real choices to make about these, we have to
consider them and value them, they arevery real to us, and in one sense
they are not physical, material or actual, but they have the potential to be 
so.
I think Margolis is on to this by the way.

regards
David M

>
>
> Hey Krimel,
>
> Matt said:
> The first thing to notice is that you've already relativized correctness 
> to what a particular community says it is. If you concede this 
> contextualist point, then you've already gone a long ways down the 
> pragmatist path which sees truth as unchanging, but the only path to truth 
> being justification in the face of a community of inquirers. Truth is 
> absolute, but justification is relative.
>
> Krimel said:
> I certainly concede that context is relevant and I think using truth and 
> justification is more 'useful' than correctness and usefulness. Truth more 
> or less corresponds to correctness but usefulness is rather like a species 
> of justification. I think what you are getting at is that truth is a 
> belief we are justified in holding. An Absolute Truth would be a belief we 
> are absolutely justified in holding.
>
> Surely a host of problems remain not the least of which is the idea the 
> "Truth is absolute but justification is relative." Where does this leave 
> Truth? If Truth requires Justification, haven't we just shuttled the 
> problem down the a bit. How would any community arrive at absolute 
> standards of Justification? Would such an Absolutely Justified Truth have 
> to be recognized or recognizable by all regardless of community 
> membership?
>
> The crux of my problem here is why bother clinging to the notion of 
> unchanging truth at all?
>
> Matt:
> It isn't really a "clinging" maneuver so much as it is a concession to 
> people like Platt that that's how the word "truth" works in our language. 
> Truth doesn't change, but that doesn't mean as much as we used to think.
>
> For instance, you say you concede that "context is relevant," but I would 
> go much further than that: context isn't relevant, because that implies 
> that there's other considerations that lay astride context.  Context is 
> the whole ballgame--any and all considerations only become intelligible 
> inside some context or another.  There is no such thing as either an 
> a-contextual situation (which is a contradiction anyways) or an 
> ur-context, a context that sits unchanging and eternal and provides 
> intelligibility to the notion of Absolute Truth (which is different than 
> acknowledging that truth is an absolute notion--after all, notice the 
> capital letters).
>
> Essentially, my explanation goes like this: truth is a semantic notion, 
> whereas justification is an epistemological notion.  What philosophers 
> have figured out is that truth is a necessary concept for languages to 
> function, but that it has no epistemological consequences as is often 
> thought.  This explanation, however, is a bit esoteric.  To explain it, 
> I'll perform another dash through the history of philosophy because it 
> will not only explain who the philosophers are that figured this out (and 
> what my explanation means), but why I say some of the strange things I do, 
> about language and all that.  Because Pirsigian philosophers are pretty 
> suspicious of the so-called linguistic turn, which is an integral part of 
> this story and why I talk my peculiar talk about talking.
>
> There have been two major shifts in what philosophers talk about since 
> Plato, three different eras of discourse.  The Greek era saw philosophers 
> talk about "reality."  The modern era was inaugurated by Descartes, who 
> shifted the topic of conversation to "experience."  This lasted into the 
> beginning of the 20th century, when the Vienna Circle invaded the United 
> States and solidified in the anglophone world what Gustav Bergmann called 
> the "linguistic turn," talk about "language."  These shifts can also be 
> called, in an anachronistic way, a shift between the primacy of the 
> philosophical subdisciplines of metaphysics to epistemology to 
> semantics/philosophy of language.
>
> Each shift was perpetrated by those who believed their's was the wave of 
> the future.  Each shift left behind unreconstructed philosophers who 
> thought that it was BS.  Every new innovation and shift leaves behind 
> those who think "the new" is also "the bad," and over time they've 
> collected because philosophy is the peculiar kind of thing philosophy is. 
> So nowadays we have Platonists, modernists, and analytics, all arguing 
> with each other over increasingly more topics of conversation.  The Greeks 
> talked about reality, and when Descartes broke with scholasticism by 
> suggesting that each person has an interior called "the mind," which 
> carried a stream of experience that paralleled reality, the Thomists (the 
> Greeks of the time) said that the Cartesians were talking about "mere" 
> experience, instead of reality.  They thought Descartes had created a 
> needless barrier to reality.
>
> This was, funnily enough, repeated in the 20th century almost to a T. 
> Modernists talked about experience, but people like Russell, Wittgenstein, 
> Carnap, and Feigl thought that this kind of talk wasn't getting anywhere. 
> They said that all they were doing was talking, so they might as well make 
> it a virtue and figure out what the deal was with language.  The 
> modernists, though, thought that all this talk about talk was pointless 
> breath, missing out on reality (or rather, "experience").
>
> What I think we've learned from this historical movement, though, is that 
> Platonism doesn't care _what_ the terms of discussion are, be it reality, 
> experience, or language.  Simply taking the linguistic turn does nothing. 
> The appearance/reality distinction, knower/known distinction, 
> dialectic/rhetoric, necessary/contingent, etc., etc., all of these 
> distinctions can be constructed out of whatever materials you're building 
> with.  The Greeks talked about reality, but Plato had the Sophists, his 
> antithesis.  Descartes and Locke talked about inner experience, but Hume 
> and Hegel began decomposing the residue of Platonism, the problems of the 
> separation between experience and reality that the Thomists warned of. 
> The logical positivists said that we needed to get straight about 
> language, but Carnap and Quine both slid towards pragmatism and the 
> destruction of the tenets logical positivism needed to purely distinguish 
> between language and experience.
>
> What I think we've seen is the dialectical movement from metaphysics, 
> "talk about reality," to epistemology, "talk about how we know about 
> reality," to philosophy of language, "talk about how we talk about how we 
> know about reality."  What we've learned is that each step discovers 
> something lacking in the last epoch, but isn't making a progression in 
> finding the _real_ topic of discussion--reality, experience, or 
> language--because (your choice of description): 1) all three things 
> interpenetrate; 2) the only way to do philosophy without interminable 
> problems is to collapse experience back into reality (a la Dewey) or 
> language back into experience (a la Quine and Sellars); 3) talk of any one 
> of them is elliptical for talk of the others.
>
> Another way of putting the dialectical sequence is that Plato wanted to 
> get at the reality behind the appearances (Platonism).  Descartes figured 
> out that if that was your goal, you had to figure out how you'd know if 
> you had gotten behind appearances (Platonic epistemology).  The logical 
> positivists, analyzing "knowledge" into "justified true belief," said that 
> what we really needed was a theory of truth, an analysis of truth that 
> would lead us back through knowledge to reality.
>
> The true enemy in all this is the Platonic notion that there is a 
> mysterious unchanging reality behind the changing one we experience in 
> everyday life.  A Platonic notion of "reality" is what led to the need for 
> a robust notion of epistemology, something that would answer the skeptic's 
> challenge, "How do you _know_ you've penetrated past the appearances to 
> reality?"  Common sense and the individual disciplines of knowledge 
> (physics, chemistry, biology, history, anthropology, literary criticism, 
> etc.) all have routes of _justification_, but the sense that reality is 
> single, eternal, ahistorical, and universal led people (read: 
> philosophers) to think that justification wasn't enough--you might be 
> justified in thinking it, but is it true?
>
> Every explanation of how truth works failed.  Correspondentists thought 
> that truth was a correspondence between proposition and reality, but they 
> could never explain how a sentence-chunk corresponded to a reality-chunk. 
> Coherentists, noting the gulf between language and reality, thought that 
> truth was what resulted when all of your propositions hung together 
> coherently, but is that truth?  Euclidean _and_ Riemannian geometry are 
> both coherent, but neither one of them can be true at the same time, so 
> how do we know which one of those are true?  Pragmatists, noting that 
> particular problem, said that truth was what works, but everyone laughed 
> at that, because everyone knows Nazism worked for the Germans for a while. 
> (Okay, I realize I'm getting _really_ anachronistic now, but this is 
> spitball history, not actual history.)
>
> What to do?
>
> The answer came with Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson.  Both had taken 
> the linguistic turn and were in the business of analyzing philosophical 
> issues through the lens of how language functions.  The gist is that a 
> fourth way of explaining truth appeared: disquotationalism.  This was a 
> purely semantic way of explaining truth: "X" is true if and only if X.
>
> A double-take is no doubt in order if you've never heard it before, and it 
> is almost like I just told a joke, so I'll fill the X in: "This is snow" 
> is true if and only if this is snow.  Disquotationalism: the quotes are 
> taken off.  A sentence is true if what is says is so.
>
> This seems like a cheat: the sentence "It is snowing" is true if it is 
> snowing.  When I say "purely semantic," I mean that the reason why 
> disquotationalism is unsatisfying is because we feel as if an explanation 
> of truth should tell us _how we know_ X is true.  The semantic answer just 
> tells us what it means for a sentence to be true--it tells us how language 
> functions.  However, what Tarski and Davidson have told us is that the 
> only way to explain truth is to decouple it from epistemology.  As soon as 
> you want more than "'X' is true iff X", you've injected epistemological 
> concerns into a semantic explanation.
>
> Pragmatists thought analyzing truth in terms of justification would bridge 
> the gulf between experience and reality that both the correspondentists 
> and coherentists held to.  What we've learned, however, from Tarski and 
> Davidson is that _languages_ wouldn't function properly if truth was the 
> same as justification.  Truth is a primitive notion: it can't be analyzed 
> into anything else, nor can it be explained outside of its function in the 
> language.
>
> This is what I meant by saying that truth is an absolute notion, but 
> justification is relative _and_ the only route to truth.  The latter, 
> however, contains the epistemological equivocation that still occurs in 
> common sense talk.  What we should really say is that truth is an absolute 
> notion, but justification is relative to audience and the only route to 
> _knowledge_ (thus holding the two apart entirely).
>
> Why all of this?  Because I don't think it matters too much for most 
> things whether we talk about reality, experience, or language, _and_, in 
> fact, it helps for avoiding a particular form of Platonism to talk in 
> terms of language.  I get hit a lot for saying things that Pirsig 
> supposedly rails on, but the way I see it, philosophical schools 
> differentiate themselves in such a way that they need to be translated to 
> speak to each other.  In other words, just because the French say, "Je 
> sais!" and the English say, "I know!" doesn't necessarily mean they are 
> talking about two different things (though, occasionally it does, as when 
> they say, "Je connais!").
>
> Krimel said:
> We might settle any number of disputes without reference to truth at all. 
> All that is required to justify settling a dispute is agreement. Isn't 
> agreement, like usefulness, thus a species of justification? And doesn't 
> justification really apply not so much to truth as to belief? If for 
> example it is raining outside, the rain falls whether I believe it or not. 
> The truth of the rainfall depends neither on my belief nor on the criteria 
> by which I justify my belief nor on the community of picnickers who may 
> justify denying the existence of the rain and soggy sandwiches for reasons 
> of their own.
>
> Matt:
> I think you've raised a number of different counterexamples we could 
> distinguish in various ways.  As a matter of consistency, the way through 
> I think we should take is to say that knowledge of reality is "justified 
> true belief," and the reason for the three different pieces is 1) "belief" 
> because Descartes was right, our individual experience of reality is our 
> connection to reality, 2) "justified" because to bridge the sense of 
> isolation from (1) we exchange reasons for our beliefs, and 3) "true" 
> because "X" is true if and only X, which has nothing to do with one 
> person's or many people's beliefs and justifications.  The truth (or 
> falsity) that it is raining does, indeed, have nothing to do with whether 
> a person believes it to be raining (or not) or even whether they are 
> justified (or not) in believing so, but only in the fact that it is 
> raining (or not).  But while that remains true, it is also true that the 
> only way we'd know if it were raining is if first, someone believe
> d it, and second, they were justified in doing so (thus making it 
> knowledge and not luck).
>
> Krimel said:
> I would agree that "common sense" understandings are different from 
> specialist understandings but I think you would agree that ultimately the 
> goal of special understanding ought to be to influence the "common sense;" 
> Copernicus being the archetypical example of this. The heliocentric model 
> required a change not just in abstract understanding of "how things are" 
> but a radical reinterpretation of sensory input. At their best science and 
> philosophy ought to be able to nudge the common sense and to affect 
> Gestalt shifts.
>
> Matt:
> Sure, absolutely.  Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature used a 
> sci-fi story about an alien race, the Antipodeans, that we'd learned to 
> talk to had no conception of an inner space called the "mind" because 
> they'd happened to have made scientific breakthroughs in neurophysiology 
> before physics.  He used this story as a means of suggesting how we might 
> talk without a pernicious conception of a mind that gets in between us and 
> reality.  This was a means of suggesting that Cartesianism is optional, 
> not inevitable.  The whole idea behind the creation of "eliminative 
> materialism" was not that the "mind" is fake, but that we might someday 
> come to speak without reference to it, thus effectively eliminating it. 
> We could conceivably be nudged into becoming Antipodeans, though I doubt 
> we ever will be.
>
> Matt said:
> ...if epistemology is something like "the study of knowledge," then only 
> under a very loose sense of "science" does science increasingly come to 
> occupy the length and breadth of knowledge.
>
> Krimel said
> On this point I think I understand epistemology to be a inquiring into 
> 'how' we know. Your definition puts the focus on 'truth' my puts it on 
> 'justification'.
>
> Matt:
> On the one hand, when I talk about epistemology being pointless and 
> disappearing as a subject, I am contextually speaking of it as focusing on 
> truth--and if anything I've been saying is true, then this makes sense. 
> On the other hand, epistemology that is focused on justification is the 
> one that is decoupled from semantics and is still something worth talking 
> about.  However, I still demur on "science" occupying the length and 
> breadth of "how we know."  I think decoupling semantics from epistemology 
> was an important contribution to "how we know," and only in a loose sense 
> is that a part of "science."
>
> Krimel said:
> Call me Pollyanna but I hold out hope that biology and anthropology and 
> psychology do offer insights into ethics.
>
> Matt:
> Well, reading anthropology and psychology might help our ethical 
> understanding, but let me put it this way: how does learning about how we 
> are help us figure out how we should be?  Not exactly the usual 
> understanding of ethics, and I realize understanding what we are capable 
> of might help us think about things that are possible rather than 
> impossible, but take the talk about altruism and biology in philosophy: 
> who the fuck cares whether altruism exists in the animal kingdom?  How 
> does that tell us anything about how we should treat each other?  I think 
> this is the force of Hume's no oughts from ises: the past doesn't dictate 
> the future.
>
> Krimel said:
> I have two questions for you on this. First you mentioned a while back the 
> lack of distinction between analytic and synthetic truth. Isn't it just 
> the difference between rationalism and empiricism? Can't one hold an 
> analytic truth to be even Absolutely Truth if it is absolutely justified 
> within a particular rationalist edifice, say Ham's essentialism? Such a 
> truth claims to be outside of empirical justification and makes no claims 
> that appeal to shared experience. Thus within a closed system of thought 
> such Truth is true. In contrast synthetic truth is always making an appeal 
> to empirical experience and shared justification.
>
> Matt:
> Yeah, one could construe them on analogy like that.  When I was taking 
> Kant in college, I remember thinking that the ironic thing about the 
> analytic/synthetic distinction, which matched up with the 
> necessary/contingent distinction ("bachelors are single" is a necessary 
> truth because it is true by virtue of the definitions of the terms, which 
> is analytic), was that the analytic truths were true in virtue of the way 
> we speak, and therefore contingent, but synthetic truths were true in 
> virtue of the way reality was, and therefore necessary (like gravity 
> making rocks falling).  But really all this kind of thinking does is punch 
> up how they aren't distinct kinds as Kant thought.
>
> Krimel said:
> Secondly and this extends a bit past what you said but I take Kant's a 
> priori knowledge to mean hardwired. That is genetically encoded into our 
> being. We can not have experiences that are not temporal and spatial. 
> There are elements in our perception that we inject into our experience so 
> that there is more to it than Hume would have us believe. Obviously Kant 
> might not express this in terms of genetics or heredity but do you see any 
> connection or am I just projecting here the way Pirsig describes his 
> reading habits.
>
> Matt:
> Well, the "necessary" you are using here is like the necessary I used 
> above.  Kant would've said that hardwiring is the stuff that is 
> investigatible by science, and therefore empirical and not a priori.  His 
> notion of "a priori" was constructed in a way that made it something 
> totally pure of particular experiences of reality, which was his notion of 
> reason, but nowadays we have a hard time conceiving of something like 
> that.  So, you could construe Kant that way, but Kant is an emblem of 
> not-reductionist-materialism and if you were going to be a 
> nonreductionist, it would be the a priori half you'd construe as the part 
> that keeps us from being reductionists (this is effectively what 
> philosophers like P. F. Strawson, Wilfrid Sellars, and even Richard Rorty 
> and Robert Brandom do).
>
> Krimel said:
> So in this sense, of scientists having something to say about other fields 
> of inquiry, it isn't so much a matter of trump cards as that they are 
> often holding better cards in their hands and it would be wise not to 
> ignore them.
>
> Matt:
> Eh, I'm still not so sure they do have better cards.  In a lot of cases, 
> particularly with who we should be as people, I think it's more like they 
> have regular playing cards and we have dominoes.  And that's main 
> suggestion: science is a different game then ethics.  Not all of us play 
> poker, but everybody plays dominoes, and its as if Pinker and Wilson (and 
> Dawkins) are trying to figure out how their ace plays in the domino game. 
> Obviously it isn't nearly that clear cut, but it is an analogy that I 
> think works well enough:  how is telling us how we are going to tell us 
> how we should be?  As I noticed you suggesting elsewhere, say we can 
> translate human behavior into mathematical formula--that still doesn't 
> tell us how we _should_ behave.  Corporations are good at predicting our 
> behavior, but predicting what we will do _still doesn't tell us what we 
> should do_.
>
> It is one thing to be an ethical realist, someone that acknowledges and 
> knows the political realities of life, but it is quite another to think 
> that that's it--that's when people turn into cynics and either devolve 
> into bitchy inaction or into power-grabbers gaming the system.  A realist 
> acknowledges the realities (a plus over the fluffy idealist, who is 
> typically ineffective exactly because of their lack of grasp of reality), 
> but knows that we can be better.
>
> Matt
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