[MD] Sam Harris attacks Pragmatism

[Steven Peterson]

Hi  Mat, DMB, all,

Harris’s concerns about pragmatism stem from his concerns about “the
demon of relativism.” After easily dismissing a naive version of
relativism, Harris discussed pragmatism in the End of Faith as “a more
sophisticated version of this line of reasoning that is not so easily
dispatched.”

He begins by explaining the pragmatists’ criticisms of the
correspondence theory of truth, which says that in order for a
statement to be called “true” it must correspond with reality as it
is. Pragmatists can’t see how correspondence can function to account
for truth. How can bits of a sentence be matched up with bits of
non-linguistic reality so that we can test for adequacy of fit? Harris
identifies Richard Rorty as pragmatism’s most articulate spokesman and
faults the influence that his work has had on society as offering
“considerable shelter to the shades of relativism.” Harris thinks such
critiques as his on the correspondence theory of truth are dangerous.
“Pragmatism, when civilizations come clashing, doesn’t seem to be very
pragmatic.” Without the notion of truth as correspondence with reality
as it is, we would “lose the conviction that we can be right—about
*anything*” which “seems [to Harris] like a recipe for End of Days
chaos.”

I don’t share Harris’s concern that the sky will fall if people no
longer chant, truth is correspondence with reality! I hold the
conviction that we can still “hold conviction[s] that we can actually
be right” about without this slogan, and I should think that any
scientist such as Harris could understand what it is like to be
convinced that he is right about something while remaining open to new
evidence and arguments as they become available. We _can_ actually be
right, but “right” and “truth” don’t seem to gain anything with the
notion of correspondence other than openness to a set of critiques
against correspondence theory.

The needed something that Harris fears we will lose without the
correspondence theory of truth is “realism.” Harris writes, “According
to Rorty, realism is doomed because there is no way to compare our
description of reality with a piece of undescribed reality.” Well,
yeah, how exactly do we do that? If a theory of truth is to give us
anything worthy of the label “theory of truth,” it ought to be able to
do some heavy lifting for us in distinguishing true sentences from
false ones. But it doesn’t help us discover new truths or provide
better justifications for our beliefs than we would have without it.
It doesn’t add anything to the notion that beliefs worth holding as
true are the ones that we can justify.

Harris thinks he can save the correspondence theory of truth and
thereby save realism if he can show that there may be knowledge
unmediated by language. “If certain mystics,” he offers for instance,
“were right to think that they had enjoyed unmediated knowledge of
transcendental truths—then pragmatism would be just plain wrong
*realistically*.” The problem for the pragmatist in Harris’s view is
that even if the hypothetical mystic did not actually enjoy unmediated
knowledge, that fact would still be fatal for anti-realism, because if
the pragmatist claims that unmediated knowledge is not possible, he is
making “a covert, *realistic* claim about the limits of human
knowledge. Pragmatism amounts to a realistic denial of the possibility
of realism.”

My understanding of Rorty is that he understood full well that
anti-realism is a realistic claim. That is why he never would have
made it. Rorty, when he was being careful, never would have said that
unmediated knowledge is impossible. But if someone claimed to have
such knowledge, he should very much like to know what this knowledge
is and how he too might become justified in believing it. In asking
for such justification he would get us back to the question that was
never answered, how exactly do I compare a description with a piece of
undescribed reality to know whether or not they correspond adequately?

What Harris has missed is that pragmatism is not an anti-realist
position. It is a “none of the above” in the realism/anti-realism
debates that can be chalked up as one more philosophical platypus that
we can avoid if we drop the correspondence theory of truth and the
rest of the subject-object picture of reality. Harris’s discussion of
realism was only raised as a way of trying to “find deep reasons to
reject pragmatism.” Not only did his argument fail to demonstrate
them, it also failed to address the pragmatic critique of the
correspondence theory of truth. Harris thought he could sweep away the
critique if he could sweep away pragmatism, but we should consider why
Harris thought it was so important to reject pragmatism to begin with.

He wants to maintain the hope that we may someday “reach a global
consensus on matters of ethics.” He wants us to be able to say, “for
instance, that stoning women for adultery is *really* wrong, in some
absolute sense.” Stoning women for adultery certainly is wrong and it
is definitely worth trying to get global consensus on that moral
truth. I just don’t see the importance of loading “really” in the way
he thinks it must be loaded. I would say that stoning women is “really
wrong” in the sense that it is “very wrong,” but Harris seems to think
it is necessary to appeal to something bigger and more powerful than
human needs in saying so. It seems that a moral truth must correspond
in some way to something that stands totally outside of human
discursive practices for it to be really true. I question whether that
is a position that a thoroughgoing atheist ought to take. It sounds
like he has rejected God but still holds that for a moral truth to be
really true, there must be something perhaps a little too much like a
god to _make_ it true. Do we really have to imagine standing godlike
outside of all human practices to be able to make sound judgments
about human practices? If so, then as atheists we are _really_ in
trouble.

What do you think?

Best,
Steve