[MD] DMB and Rorty

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
You seem to think that truth is either a matter of mirroring nature or it's a matter of conversation and social practice. I'm saying that the pragmatic theory of truth is neither. I'm trying to tell you this is a false dilemma but you keep asking me questions as if no third option could be possible.

Steve replied:

I understand that the so-called pragmatic theory of truth is supposed to be neither of those things. I'm just saying that I don't think it works as a theory of truth because it conflates truth with justification. What James is saying about truth doesn't sound like truth to me. It says that what is true is whatever can be justified. I think that beliefs can have all the justification in the world and turn out to be false. ...Again, if you recognized that most philosophers do not conflate truth and justification as you do, you would understand that what we agree to be true may not actually be true.

dmb says:

It seems that you're not quite seeing the point. To dispute James based on the fact that "most philosophers" keep truth and justification separate, is exactly what I mean by saying that you keep asking questions as if no third option were available. To assert that truth is something other than what can be justified in experience is to retain the problematic dualism. James's truth probably doesn't sound like truth to you because it is that third option. He simply rejects the definition of truth that keeps it distinct from what can be justified. He thinks that old notion of truth is meaningless. So do I and I recall getting quite frustrated about this a few weeks ago, when I was trying so hard to explain why it's meaningless and why James chooses a different option based on that meaninglessness. 



dmb said:


Rorty's view that knowledge is a matter of social practice is empty and incoherent without this this empirical dimension. As David Hildebrand puts it, "our very ability to assess 'needs' and 'social practices' depends upon our ability to measure the meaning of these abstractions against something more intimately present, namely the lived moments to which they supposedly apply."



Steve replied:

MMM HMMM. and how is this comparison done exactly?


dmb says:

By returning to experience itself, James showed that the terms that supposedly have to correspond, like thoughts and things, are already connected to each other within the stream of experience through a series of transitional experiences. That's what it means to say truths are what we "ride", what takes us from one moment to the next. It is not a correspondence in the sense that one reflects or mirrors the other. This relationship is functional, not representational. Again, you're posing questions as if we were not talking about a third option.  



dmb said:

... James only meant that the two [pragmatism and radical empiricism] were not logically connected. Accepting one does not necessarily entail accepting the other. That certainly doesn't mean they don't go together quite well. They're both James's babies after all. The fit is so neat, in fact, that James soon began to think that pragmatism was a special chapter within radical empiricism.

Steve replied:


Can you point me to where James wrote something in support of that last claim?


dmb says:

You'll find that in the original editor's Preface to the Essays on Radical Empiricism. Both of them can be summed up in the words of a now forgotten philosopher, Shadworth Hodgson, who said, "realities are only what they are 'known as'. "In this sense", the editor says, "radical empiricism and pragmatism are closely allied. Indeed, if pragmatism be defined as the assertion that 'the meaning of any proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence in our future practical experience... Then pragmatism and the above postulate come to the same thing." The postulate he refers to is the central stipulation in radical empiricism, "that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience." So that's what I was thinking about when I said, "it doesn't matter if radical empiricism is attached to it or not. The pragmatic theory of truth is still very empirical. It's all about experience. Experience is not just the test of truth, it is the only context in which truth has any meaning or purpose.

Steve:

The only context in which it is possible to say that "meaning" has any meaning is the context of language. It's fine to say that beliefs are tested in experience, but how is that testing done?  Experience itself is not a standard for justification. The standards for justification are the cultural constructs we appeal to in order to decide whether or not our experiences confirm or invalidate a given proposition.


dmb says:


Sam Harris says what I've been saying. The emphasis is his in the original. "According to pragmatists like Rorty, realism is doomed because there is no way to compare our descriptions of reality with a piece of UNDESCRIBED reality. ...This is a clever thesis but is it true? The fact that language is the medium in which our knowledge is represented  and communicated says nothing at all about the possibilities of unmediated knowledge per se. The fact that no experience WHEN TALKED ABOUT escapes being mediated by language (this is a tautology) does not mean that all cognition, and hence all knowing, is interpretive."   I might pick some nits with Sam, but this is basically a good explanation of the form-content conflation I've accused you of several times. Like I said, talking about the non-verbal does not make it verbal just because you're talking about it. That would be like saying that talking about animals means that animals are just talk or like saying that we could only see the moon landing on TV so the moon landing was really just a TV show. 


I'd love to go on, but homework calls.


Thanks.




 		 	   		  
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