[MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey

[Steve Peterson]

Hi Dave:

I read that Hildebrand article you linked me to about neopragmatism. 
Thanks.

I had a hard time understanding it. A big disappointment was very early 
on he said he was going to skip all the well known criticism that 
pragmatism makes on the Western tradition. I would have been very 
interested to read about them. If you find anything else that you think 
would be of interest, please send along the link.



On Jan 16, 2009, at 2:35 PM, david buchanan wrote:
>
> 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 says:

> If I think Newton's laws are true and use them to try to put a man on 
> the moon, they'll prove themselves in the actual attempt. Or not. In 
> this sense, the "usefulness" of an idea can only be determined in 
> actual experience, by a process of experimentation. And even something 
> as seemingly universal as Newton's laws are really only rules of thumb 
> that might not be applicable in certain situations. The rules we 
> derive from experience are always considered to be secondary to the 
> actual situations as they're encountered so that in certain cases 
> we're warranted in asserting that Einstein's ideas are true and 
> Newton's are not.

This quote from Einstein has interested me for a long time. Now I see 
it as a criticism of a corresponence theory of truth applied to 
science.

"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, 
however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our 
endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to 
understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the 
moving hands, even hears it ticking, but he has no way of opening the 
case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of the mechanism 
which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may 
never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his 
observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the 
real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the 
meaning of such a comparison."


DMB:

> In other words concepts are "useful" only for particular purposes and 
> these purposes will change as old problems are solved and new ones 
> come up. So here truth is not something that corresponds with 
> objective reality, with the way the world "really" is regardless of 
> what people think. Instead, truth is what agrees with experience as 
> its actually lived.


Steve:

I recall Prisig (Bob) raising the issue of the Catholic who believes 
that the Eucharist is the actual body and blood of Christ. The Catholic 
will also tell you that any scientific study of the wine and cracker 
are left chemically unchanged when the priest does his thing over them, 
but that substance of the wine and cracker have been transformed. 
Clearly the pragmatist can't make any sense of what the Catholic is 
saying if there is no experiential difference imaginable.

Thanks for your response.

Regards,
Steve