[MD] Truth and the Linguistic Turn

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Krimel,

Krimel said:
I think language is an effort to share and communicate "about" those inner activities and that language, even "inner musings" are but a shadow of.

Matt:
I don't like "shadow" metaphors (guess, guess!) because I prefer to think of us as having a direct connection to all things, words, sensations, concepts, rocks, people, dreams, whatever (give up? because Plato uses shadow imagery).  Language, and symbols generally, do have this "about" relation, but I don't think this makes them a shadow, I just think it reminds us that "rock" is not a rock, nor "pain" a pain (though it does become difficult to separate "idea" from an idea, unless you shunt both concepts and precepts under it, which is what you want to do, and I resist, which might explain how I see it easier to reduce "thoughts" to language and you do not).

(By the by, I don't take "musings" to be a particularly unfortunate choice on your part because, from my angle, the disturbing weight is on the "interior" half of "interior musings.")

Krimel said:
I would say the cogito itself provides us will all the "certainty" we are like to get in this life and I am grateful to Descartes for dreaming it up. The real problem is his division of reality into mind stuff and body stuff.

Matt:
Let me put it this way: the real problem _is_ his division into mind-stuff and non-mind-stuff.  Anything that is left after we get rid of that is what I would describe as the _good_ part of the move forward in shifting from "reality" to "experience" (if you remember my little narrative that accompanied this subject).  Whether the problematic part or the good part, or both, or neither, are _all_ Descartes' work, or distinctively his work, or were in the air enough that _somebody_ would've have done much the same thing--those are scholastic questions I'm not qualified enough to answer.  But I _want_ to blame Descartes for the bad, and link the good  to the wider culture as a whole (and that's partly because Rorty disliked Descartes immensely, and that's rubbed off on me, and because it does make an easier story to tell--"Descartes bad," rather than "Descartes complex").

Krimel said:
I have resisted Rorty in part because I heard him speak in a radio interview and he sounded like a guy who felt really pompous about having been able to stick his head up is own ass. I suspect that is a bit unfair and when I was in Boston recently I was looking for the book you suggest. I have downloaded lots of his stuff from the internet but I can only find a scanned copy of PMN. I guess if I am going to take Dreyfus's classes on Heidegger I might as well give Rorty a shot.

Matt:
Personally, I think he is (was) the least pompous philosopher in his generation.  He really disliked the whole idea behind "absolute certainty," from philosophical position all the way to personality quirk.  Now, I do know what he _sounds_ like, I've heard him before, but there is a music to his words and a twinkle in his eyes: he'll lull you into thinking he is as pompous as every other philosopher, but then his wit, his irony, pops up and you'll find he's making fun of those who think themselves so wise.  (I take one strike against the idea of his pretentiousness, not just from people who knew him, but a conference held in, I think Poland, or some Eastern European country.  The conference was for undergraduate philosophy students, and it was held at the end of the semester and the undergrads collaborated in groups to write papers about Rorty's work and to engage critically with it--and then they were all presented with Rorty there, who (having been given advance copies, as is customary in most conference situations) then presented replies to the papers, followed by discussions.  There's a collection of the event and all the papers, and what is striking is the willingness on Rorty's part to take seriously this kind of undergrad work--because, honestly, young-ens at that stage just usually aren't on the same level, but he treated their concerns seriously, even if there may have been logical missteps or ticky-tack stuff you could focus on--he saw what their point was, what the concern they were trying to enunciate, if inadeptly, and helped them see the issue better and respond to it.)

Matt said:
The reason I would say specifically "knowledge" as opposed to "belief" is because analytic philosophy has done a decent job of noting that there is such a thing as true belief that we are not justified in (and so would not count as knowledge).

Krimel said:
Sticky business, this. This still seems to me to be tied up in belief, whatever it is. Your take on knowledge here still seems to be about particular kinds of belief.

Matt:
Yes, it is.  We're totally together on this.  Knowledge (barring massive redefinitions like Barry Allen's) is a species of belief, specifically one that is both "true" and "justified."

Krimel said:
I have some sympathy to the notion of belief being manifest in action. This was productively pursued by the behaviorists for more than 50 years. But I suspect there are problems with confining belief to outward manifestations and I am more than a little suspicious of the notion of belief as motivation. I eat because I AM hungry not because I believe I am hungry.

Matt:
Well, I think pragmatists have to also pursue a wider sense of "action" to include "thinking" to pursue their attachment to Alexander Bain's definition of belief as "habits of action."  And, in doing so, I think they'd have a slightly wider sense of "outward manifestation."  They are "behaviorists," in a sense, but not reductionists, and that puts them in a difficult position, philosophically speaking.  The key is the idea of "attribution."  When I talked about translation between reality-talk, experience-talk, and language-talk in philosophy as more or less entirely permissible and interchangeable, part of what gets captured by this is the sense that "I eat because I am hungry" and "I eat because I believe I am hungry" are, more or less, interchangeable because they convey the same thing, they allow us to predict basically the same--dare I say--behavior.  Not always, of course, which is why we do still distinguish between reality, experience, and language.  But when you say "I am hungry," I attribute to you the belief that you are hungry because a) it allows me to predict your behavior (I'm guessing you are going to look for food) and b) it allows both of us to be wrong (you might eat a little something, and find that, it turns out, you aren't actually hungry, lending credence to the then apropos "Well, he _believed_ he was hungry, but wasn't actually hungry.")  Our choice in language is just as much a behavior to be tracked and predicted as other behaviors, like eating and running from tigers.

Krimel said:
I may have this wrong but I take Dennett's claim to be that the intentional stance is metaphorical and pragmatic but it is all in the translation between ways of understanding. We can talk about computers having intention and thoughts without actually believing they have them.

Matt:
No, you might be right about Dennett.  I often read philosophers, like Dennett and Davidson, through the eyes of Rorty because that's where I first heard of them.  However, to cast doubt on the idea that the intentional stance is metaphorical, and not real (a dispute that Rorty has with Dennett, if not about the ontological status of the intentional stance, then about something related in the area--specifically Dennett's use of "real patterns"), let me say that if the question of whether computers will someday have thoughts, have consciousness in some sense that we (used to) think was only the province of animals, perhaps even only humans, is an _empirical_ matter--as I believe you are arguing in a different thread of conversation--then it is paramount that one has a metaphilosophical stance like Rorty's and not like Dennett's: the intentional stance, a.k.a. consciousness, is as real as anything else because why else would we spend our time arguing about whether computers will someday be able to, or never be able to, attain a position that is only metaphorical?

Matt
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