[MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey

[Steve Peterson]

Hi Matt,


> 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.

Steve:
But if we apply the pragmatic maxim on the difference between truth and 
justification, do we find that there is no difference in practice?

Tell me if you think I get the idea: Truth is truth, let's just leave 
it at that and move on to the more interesting questions of how we come 
to have and to evaluate beliefs and how we can convince others of what 
we believe to be true. There is no difference in practice from saying 
"X is true" and "I believe X to be true." These are both understood as 
claims to be prepared to act in certain ways under certain 
circumstances. It's not that truth is equated with what can be 
justified, but rather that we can talk fruitfully about justification 
while there is nothing very interesting to say about truth. The meaning 
of the word truth like everything else is understood in practice. It 
simply is the way that we all use the word--as that which is so 
regardless of what anyone believes. It seems to me that there is 
nothing wrong with that concept of truth. It is a useful tool for 
whatever it is useful for.

The problems only arise when we think of the truth of something like 
F=ma as something that is written into the fabric of the cosmos 
(something that is not a tool but a representation) or think of truth 
as adjudicated from a God's eye view and then try to imagine how we 
could gain access to such a perspectiveless perspective. Truth, Reason, 
and Reality would then be treated as gods--essences that can be known 
outside of lived experience.



Matt:
> 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?

Steve:
I guess the slippery spot here for pragmatists that I may have tripped 
on above is that we can be construed as making an assertion that it is 
impossible to have a theory of truth that tells us when we have 
knowledge as opposed to a belief?

Does the pragmatic method suggest that in practice there is no 
meaningful distinction to be made between knowledge and belief?


Matt:
> 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?\

Interesting, Matt. Thanks.

Regards,
Steve