[MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
Rorty agrees with pretty much everyone that the assertion "X" is true if and only if X is true. It's that simple, and no so-called theory of truth will be any more helpful than that in telling us what it means for something to be true. For a pragmatist, to say that an assertion is, as far as we know, true, is to say that no other habit of action is, as far as we know, a better habit of action.

dmb says:
I don't get it. "X" is true if X true? That's not simple so much as it is just meaningless. In fact, I've ask you to explain this a couple of times now. How can anything be held as true without justification. How can true mean anything apart from justification. How does the claim that there is no better habit of action fail to count as a justification? 



Steve said:
To compound confusion on this issue, the retro-pragmatists like DMB seem to insist upon misreading Rorty to be conflating truth and justification and then reading Rorty's talk about justification as an intersubjective process to be saying that truth is simply intersubjective agreement. Apparently they can't help but misread Rorty this way if they are like DMB in claiming that there is no difference is saying a belief is justified and saying that a belief is true.

dmb says:
Actually, I didn't come to Rorty's notion of intersubjective agreement by way of this truth and justification business. I don't recall ever hearing about that except from you. What I had in mind was a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia.

"...it is not surprising that Rorty's commitment to epistemological behaviorism should lead to charges of relativism or subjectivism. Indeed, many who share Rorty's historicist scepticism toward the transcending ambitions of epistemology—friendly critics like Hilary Putnam, John McDowell and Daniel Dennett—balk at the idea that there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones. Yet this is a central part of Rorty's position, repeated and elaborated as recently as in TP and PCP. Indeed, in TP he invokes it precisely in order to deflect this sort of criticism. In "Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace," Rorty says:
In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try. (TP 57)"

The crucial phrase here is "the idea that there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones". See, rejecting truth theories is a strategy to escape the charge of relativism. Even his friends think that bogus and yet it is "a central part of Rorty's position" that is "repeated and elaborated" in his recent work. And yet you insist that it's just a misreading of Rorty. Well, at least I have some kind of reason for thinking what I do and I can show it to you. It would be nice if you returned the favor.



 		 	   		  
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