[MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey

[Matt Kundert]

Steve, DMB,

Steve said:
I'm confused about what the pragmatic theory of truth is. James says truth is a species of good and is that which is expedient in terms of belief. Pierce says that truth is what is so whether you are I or anyone else believes it. I think Pierce's take is what we usually mean by truth. Rorty says that pragmatism doesn't really have a theory if truth. Truth is just the property that all true startments have in common and pragmatists don't have anything philosphically interesting to say about truth beyond that.

DMB said:
Truth is not something about which we can be so whimsical simply because beliefs have practical consequences. This is where Matt and I disagree. While it might be true that I don't generally have a whole lot of sympathy for way conservatives complain about relativism (so as to assert moral absolutes and such) there is a genuine problem with truth as "intersubjective agreement".


Matt:
When Rorty first said in the early 80s that pragmatists shouldn't be seen as technically holding a theory of truth, his reason for saying so was that what became identified as the "pragmatist theory of truth," i.e. truth is what works (which all three classicals can be read as saying, though James most so), has pretty plainly been shown to not work.  The main idea is that what the classicals seemed to be suggesting is that we reduce truth to justification.  Peirce says truth is what you have at the end of inquiry, James that truth is an expedient, Dewey that truth is warranted assertibility.  I'm not competent enough to judge whether the classicals are correctly criticized for this, but my suspicion is that the water was muddy enough in their writings that it seems pertinent to say.  You can't reduce truth to justification.

And this is why DMB is wrong--we don't disagree on this.  Rorty himself for most of his career, I think, was as muddy as James and Dewey--reducing truth to intersubjective agreement would be wrong.  But the way we should read all of the pragmatists is _not_ as attempting to reduce truth to anything else, but trying to get us to refocus our attention on something more relevant to life--they were attempting to change the conversation from truth to justification, not reduce the former to the latter.

The classicals weren't successful, of course.  While Russell and other realists laughed the pragmatists off the stage, the stage itself was shifting to more promising territory for the realists: language.  If we are going to get a theory of truth, one that tells us when we have knowledge, why not analyze our language, how we use words and how they hook up to the world?  The metaphysical battle between realists and idealists at the turn of the century transformed itself into the linguistic battle between realists and anti-realists, each with more and more refined theories of truth and language to show how their respective pictures work.  Correspondentists tried to show how language hooks onto the world, and when successful produces truth.  Coherentists continued confuting these attempts by showing how each proposal failed, and then trying to show how truth is instead produced by how beliefs hang together.

The importance of Donald Davidson to Rorty is that, working at the heart of the philosophy of language, Davidson came to see that both sides will always fail in their pursuits because they treat truth as roughly coextensive with knowledge.  Trade in "knowledge" for every use of "truth" above, and every sentence comes out pretty much with the same meaning, the hunt being pretty much the same (in fact, "intersubjective agreement as knowledge" makes Rorty look a little less silly).  Davidson, instead, tells us that we need to treat truth as a radically non-epistemic notion, giving us a pure semantic conception of truth.

The reason why "truth" as a topic turns out to be a dead-end, and less relevant to life, is because these battles about realism have turned out to be fruitless, with less and less hanging in the balance with their successful conclusion.  The classicals saw this coming, but the analytic track that runs through Sellars, Quine, Davidson and Robert Brandom ends at their feet (though possibly with a little bit better understanding of why we should refocus on justification, why truth turns out to be a fruitless topic by itself).  This is why Rorty says pragmatists shouldn't have a theory of truth--Davidson's theory isn't the theory we've been looking for (with appropriate hand waving).  Of course, every time Rorty tried to enlist Davidson as a pragmatist, for finally showing us why we should refocus on justification, Davidson demured because technically he _does_ have a theory of truth and it ain't a traditionally pragmatist one.

I will grant DMB one thing: I've been coming quite recently (today at work) to understand why people take Rorty's "intersubjective agreement" to be flimsy (despite the fact that it is pretty much identical to Habermas' notion, sans some Peircean nods in the direction of an ideal end of inquiry).  Agreement between people can be had in some pretty flimsy cases, like at the end of a gun or "let's agree to disagree."  These are indeed agreements, but they don't seem to be very justified.  Rorty's notion of "ethnocentrism" is technically what gets Rorty off the hook (his desire to continue the culture of Socrates), but I won't expand on that except to say that Rorty _should_ have distinguished between "agreement" and "justification."  Justificatory practices, part of what Brandom calls the "asking and giving of reasons" (following Sellars' "space of reasons" metaphor), are an instrumental social practice in the West, one that goes a bit beyond simple agreement.  You can vote in a president, even cheat one in, but you can't vote the truth of an idea.

I don't have any extra rhetoric alloted to this topic as of yet, but the abstract idea is the same as Dewey and the classicals: stop expending energy on truth, because in isolation from knowledge about all your going to come up with is banal disquotationalism--"'it's snowing' is true if and only if it is snowing."  And hooking it up to knowledge just gets you into useless battles, when all the real work in knowledge production is still being done by justificatory practices.

A muddy way of putting it is to say: stop focusing on what you're thinking, and focus on what you are doing.  We've come up with some pretty good stuff while thinking about thinking, and thinkers are always good at hyping what they do, but the law of diminishing returns has gotta' kick in some time, right?

Matt

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