[MD] Sam Harris attacks Pragmatism

[david buchanan]

Steve and y'all:

I sympathize with Sam's concerns about relativism. It seems to me that classical pragmatic theory of truth would just about meet his demands for realism, but without resorting to the correspondence theory. In that view, we don't need to get outside all human practices in a godlike fashion or compare a description with a piece of un-described reality. The classical pragmatic theory of truth is empirically based in the sense that our ideas agree with experience. Truths are judged in terms of their practical results, their consequences and effects. I think this test of truth supplies a level of realism that would be much more palatable to anyone concerned with relativism, including Sam Harris. 

It would be nice if you unpacked your paragraph about the hypothetical mystic. I think there is something interesting in there but I don't quite follow the argument. I mean, the idea of using mysticism to save the correspondence theory is a pretty jarring idea. Pirisg says does the opposite of that and the mystical experience itself would be conceived as non-conceptual so that we could call it unmediated experience but not unmediated knowledge. This would be related to Quality or pure experience more than the pragmatic theory of truth, however, and it's not the sort of thing that can be used as evidence for propositional sentences. Anyway, here's the unpackworthy paragraph:



Steve said:
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.”