[MD] Pragmatic truth is neither nor

[david buchanan]

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

dmb replied:
No, Steve. That's the false dilemma again and that's the point of Rockwell's analogy. James's pragmatic theory of truth is NEITHER practice-transcending NOR merely conversational. 


Steve asked dmb:
If there is a false dilemma here (an excluded middle?), then you must be able to provide an example of a justificatory practice that is NEITHER conversational NOR practice-transcending.

dmb says:
Can I provide an example? James's pragmatic theory of truth does not count as an example? For the purposes of our discussion, I'd say it is THEE example. Against the merely conversational approach, I'm asserting pragmatic truth as a form of empiricism wherein our truths are tested by their performance in experience. Conversation is not excluded from experience, of course, but it's important to understand that language is only half of the equation, the static half. As Seigfried points out, Rorty understands language to be free-floating and he ascribes this view to James. Seigfreid thinks he's wrong on both counts and so does Weed: 

"Rorty writes as if his position were close to that of William James, but both James's appeal to the stream of conscious experience as a source of recalcitrant psychological truth, and his appeal to processes of verification as collaborators for theoretical and learned truth are missing from Rorty's approach to the subject. ..Rorty collapses all of the terms used by pragmatists into a very Foucault-like social category as his analysis of James's pragmatic conception of truth in praxis works...  I think that Rorty has elided 'empirical' and 'sociohistorical' to ignore the empirical stress in James's conception of truth and replaced it with a far more Foucault-like sociohistorical concept, for which he then usurps the 'pragmatist' label. ...I don't think Rorty is entitled to call himself a pragmatist on the issue of truth, at least not of a Jamesian stripe." (Laura E. Weed in "The Concept of Truth that Matters", pages 8-9. Published online by Harvard's William James Society.)

Basically, she's saying that Rorty has taken the empiricism out of James's theory of truth and replaced it with mere conversation. As the Stanford article points out, the notion that there are no constraints on truth outside of language is a bit shocking even to Rorty's friendliest critics and they can't follow him quite that far. I think this is worth mentioning because there seems to be some confusion about what is and is not the pragmatic theory of truth. I cite Seigfried, Weed and others because I think they're right to call Rorty a usurper of the label. And so a lot of what I've been doing in trying to explain how very different they actually are. And as I've said before, I think it basically comes down to a battle between experience and language, between an empirical theory of truth and a free-floating conversation. 

"Beliefs at any time are so much experience FUNDED. But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the world's experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day's funding operations. So far as reality means experienceable reality, both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of mutation - mutations toward a definite goal, it may be, - but still a mutation." (Emphasis is James's)

"True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth can be known-as." 

"The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true by events. Its verity IS in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-FICATION. Its validity is the process of its valid-ATION" (emphasis is James's)

This is what I mean by saying that pragmatic truth is not something over and above a justified belief. I think James is saying that justified beliefs are all we mean by the word truth. As a practical matter, that's all you're going to get. To say that truth can never mean anything more than that is to give up on the Platonic ideal of Truth altogether and instead present a human-sized theory about the kind of actual truths we can and do have.