[MD] brief tangent with Steve

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Dave,

Dave said:
To say James's theory is only about justification and not about truth 
is to assert a certain definition of truth, one that says that truth is 
something over and above justification. ... But James 
re-conceptualized the meaning of truth such that it can only ever be 
what's justified in experience.

Steve said:
Rorty's conception of truth is not a something which can be over and 
above something else. He just supports the notion of making a 
distinction between truth and justification. He preserves the common 
sense notion and usage of the word "true" in that what we are 
justified in believing may not be true.

Matt:
Steve is pointing out there the funny move on your part, Dave.  You 
say the above because you're asserting that Rorty's rejection of 
"theories of truth" is based on a Platonism-defined opponent.  That's 
right: if there is ever any rejection, it is only because of a prior act of 
accepting for polemical purposes the opponent's terms of debate.  
You also then like to say, "Why not reject the definition?"  Rorty does 
this also.  When he moves to this part of his project, that's when it 
helps to not take so seriously his polemical slogans.  What Steve is 
pointing out is that Rorty's agreement with a semantic definition of 
truth distinguishes between truth and justification, but does not take 
one to be "higher" than another.  That means you're actually the 
one importing the "false dilemma" in your first sentence above.

Further, the question for James's re-conceptualization that you've 
articulated is: can we not ever have a true belief that isn't justified?  
If I believe that you're holding a Jack of Spades in your hand right 
now, what possible justification might that belief have?  However, 
if it was _true_ that you, Dave Buchanan, for whatever reason, 
were holding a Jack of Spades in your hand as you read this 
e-mail, I would have a true belief.  This is the kind of thought 
experiment that illustrates to some people that "true" and 
"justified" have two different semantic roles, _and_ that we need 
them to have those different semantic roles for situations like these.  
Without them, we wouldn't be able to account for all of our 
experience of the world, which includes a lot of luck and guessing.  
Or rather, you could account for this kind of experience when 
redefining our modes of accounting (remembering Pirsig's 
endorsement of Einstein's slogan), but it would (so goes Rorty's side 
of the bet) produce a bad kind of weirdness rather than a good kind.  
In a lot of situations, so goes this semantic conception of language 
and truth, it doesn't matter whether you say that a belief is justified 
or true.  But sometimes it does.  It's the sometimes that a semantic 
definition of truth attempts to codify.

Dave said:
Once you divest yourself of Platonic truth or get rid of the idea that 
truth is about reality whereas opinions are about appearances, then 
what could truth mean beyond this lived justification? Since your 
analytic objection is predicated on the notion that truth and 
justification can NOT be collapsed, I'd like to know why not? Why 
doesn't that distinction collapse under the weight of anti-Platonism? 
These are not rhetorical questions.

Matt:
"What could truth mean beyond this lived justification?"  Why does 
this sound like the collapse of truth _into_ justification, which you 
slapped at me for as importing Platonism?

Aside from what seems like a razor-thin distinction on your part 
between the way I put it and the way you put it, the one simple reason 
why truth and justification cannot be collapsed is because of the 
existence of the aforementioned "true beliefs that are not justified."  
One certainly could reconstrue my belief that you are now holding a 
Jack of Clubs as being justified by the mere fact that you are, but 
this makes the point of Bain's definition of beliefs as guides to action 
look weird (see the beginning of "What Pragmatism Means").  Would 
it have been wise for me to be guided by my true belief that you 
were holding the Jack of Spades (particularly as we find out now that 
it was for very long)?  It certainly may have so guided: we all know 
that false beliefs guide action just as assuredly, if perhaps 
occasionally disastrously (think: Iraq), as true beliefs.  And some 
false beliefs may have been justified at the time, which is why we 
give them a pass morally, since while truth and justification may be 
distinct, justification is still our only route to truth (a slogan I'm sure 
I picked up from Rorty somewhere).   But what about that true 
belief?  If the only thing going for it is a guess, should we say that 
that's enough to guide an action?  Don't we distinguish between 
justified and unjustified beliefs just for these occasions, the 
occasions in which the belief may end up true, but _experience_ 
has evolutionarily made it clear that mere guesses are typically not 
a good guide to action?

I have three pieces that discuss pragmatism, truth, and Rorty.  

"What Pragmatism Is" takes that annoying route that Rorty usually 
takes, in playing up the "we shouldn't have a truth theory" angle.  It 
is a broad-view of what I take pragmatism to be.
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-pragmatism-is.html

"Are There Bad Questions?" takes up an issue in interpreting Rorty, 
outlining two of Rorty's rhetorical approaches, the 
these-are-bad-questions approach and the I-have-no-theory 
approach, using as its first example the famous passage from 
Consequences of Pragmatism about theories of truth. (Apparently I 
wrote this 7 months ago, though I'd forgotten.  There's also an 
addendum on Pirsig.)
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2010/05/are-there-bad-questions.html

"Rhetorical Universalism" is an ambitious (i.e. perhaps still too 
convoluted) attempt to talk about truth and belief by opposing a 
Platonist and a Sophist.  It works through a number of issues (like 
Davidson, the rhetoric of illusion, the "all the way down" slogan 
makes an appearance) that I think are in this area.  I might put it for 
the local audience as an attempt to answer Platt's favorite question 
of "Is relativism absolutely true, or just relative?" in favor of Marsha 
by paradoxically coopting the enemy's ism.
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2010/05/rhetorical-universalism.html

Steve has a good discussion of pragmatism and truth in relationship 
to theism here (there's also a series of responses I'm involved in 
where I half-articulate some things about Davidson and the semantic 
conception of truth):
http://www.atheistichope.com/2009/05/response-to-rc-sproul-on-pragmatism.html

Dave said:
"Epistemological behaviorism leaves no room for the kind of 
practice-transcending legitimation that Rorty identifies as the defining 
aspiration of modern epistemology." (from Ramberg's 
plato.standford.edu entry on Rorty)

Steve said:
Can you give me an example of a constraint on knowledge claims 
that is "practice-transcending"--one that isn't merely conversational?

Matt:
The true dilemma that faces Dave is this: Dave is going to want to 
say "experience," because it is not obvious how this is "merely 
conversational," but he is going to be uncomfortable because what 
he means by "experience" is entirely pragmatic, the praxis of being 
human, an experiencer of life.  Dave will correctly see that his 
discomfort comes from the fact that he's forced by the constraints of 
Rorty's definition of what "epistemological behaviorism" is to reject 
"merely conversational" this way.  So Dave will object to Rorty's 
definition of his own position as based on a false dilemma between 
transcendence and conversation.  However, since whatever Rorty's 
notion of "conversation" is is based on its antithesis to 
"practice-transcending legitimation," Dave has also made the target 
of his animus invisible, since it only appears to us conceptually 
_when_ and _only when_ it has "practice-transcending legitimation" 
as its oppositional term.  So the choice is 1) Dave can be 
uncomfortable with Rorty or 2) by opposing "Jamesian experience" 
to "Rortyan conversation," get Rorty wrong conceptually.

This is the kind of conceptual dilemma created by two different 
vocabularies, only one of which you find rhetorically inviting.  A third 
way through is to ignore the offending vocabulary.  If anybody asks, 
you can say something pithy like, "Pirsigian experience is, too, a 
rejection of 'practice-transcending legitimation,' however I don't like 
Rorty's way of highlighting this as 'conversation.'  I find the positive 
project I want to build easier to do using 'experience' as my building 
block, rather than 'language,' though there aren't a lot of conceptual 
differences in what James and Pirsig do with 'experience' and Rorty 
does with 'language.'"  Perhaps there are some conceptual 
differences down the line somewhere, but Rorty often worked at a 
high metaphilosophical level of abstraction, and it hasn't become 
any clearer to me--at that level--what those differences might be.  
One can avoid Rorty's metaphilosophical vocabulary, and perhaps 
bemoan the fact that he didn't come down the mountain more, but 
I don't think there's a lot of traction to be had in deploying the 
rhetoric of "denying" and "rejecting" to Rorty to convey these 
differences.

Dave said:
I really don't understand this denial. I mean, doesn't Rorty explicitly 
say that we to ought to give up on epistemology and truth theories? 
Haven't you quoted him many times saying that?

Matt:
Shall I repeat to you the distinction between "saying" and "meaning"?

Matt