[MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
You never responded to what is below, so I'll try a different angle.

dmb says:

It seems I've missed a lot lately. Glad you brought it up again.



Steve said:
I can't figure out why someone would try to pursue a theory of truth other than to have a way to be able to settle disputes about what is true. Calling such a task pursuing a theory of truth means that disputes are supposed to get settled by correctly characterizing truth itself. I doubt that any proposed theory of truth is good for settling disputes about what is true. When I say that Rorty and I do not (and I think pragmatism does not) have a theory of truth to offer, I am saying that I don't see myself as claiming to have a systematic method of settling disputes about what is true. There are lots of ways we try to get consensus on beliefs, and appealing to a theory of truth to settle the issue for us isn't one of them. If correspondence or coherence or Tarski's disquotational model or James's pragmatism are thought of as theories of truth, then they are all bad ones since none of them perform well the function that theories of truth are pursued to do, i.e. settle disputes about what is true by characterizing truth itself.

dmb says:


First of all, I would object to the way you've framed the issue. I don't disagree with the basic notion that truth theories are supposed to settle disputes about what's true and false, but I think it is unreasonable to suggest that the pragmatic method is unsound simply because it has not been universally adopted and used to settle all disputes. I mean the analysis of the validity and workability of the method itself is separate from questions about the scope of its influence or range of actual applications. Seems to me that it is still trying to get off the ground because it suffers from a century of misinterpretations. Anyway, to frame the issue in terms of getting consensus is to pose the question in terms of Rorty's answer. The issue of whether or not we ought to have a theory of truth has already been decided in advance by this framing. It begs the question. The answer that Pragmatism gives not construe truth in linguistic terms or in terms of consensus the way Rorty does. He thinks Pragmatism shouldn't have a theory of truth but from the classical point of view, Pragmatism IS a theory of truth. This is exactly why so many scholars think he doesn't deserve the name. I mean, it seems quite unreasonable to deny that there is a difference. I figure my task here is to try to get you to see what a big difference it is. 

Steve said:
The way I read James and the classical pragmatists is as taking their point of departure not as suggesting a new way of characterizing truth itself and a method for settling disputes based on that characterization of truth itself but as suggesting a method for settling philosophical disputes by considering the consequences of holding various beliefs in practice. Their method (the pragmatic method) was to re-characterize belief rather than truth.


dmb says:

Let me quote James from the introduction to his sequel to "Pragmatism", a book called "The Meaning of Truth". It's a neat summary.

"The pivotal part of my book named PRAGMATISM is its account of the relation called 'truth' which may obtain between and ideas (opinion, belief, statement, or what not) and its object. 'Truth', I there say, 'is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality. Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. Where our ideas do not copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? Pragmatism asks its usual question. 'Grant an idea or belief to be true', it says, 'what concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual life? What experiences may be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? How will the truth be realized? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms? The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE, AND VERIFY. FLASE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. This 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 it verifying itself, its veriFICATION. Its validity is the process of it validATION.

To agree in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed. Better intellectually or practically... Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn't entangle our progress in frustration, that FITS, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality's whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will be true of that reality." (Emphasis is James's) 


As you can see, Steve, James does have a new way to characterize "truth" and the method for settling disputes can be applied to both practical and intellectual matters. It is supposedly applicable to any area of investigation. James uses the image of a hotel or office building (I forget which, but it doesn't matter). There are many different rooms with a different kind of investigator in each of them. One might be trying to deal with philosophical disputes, another is studying religions, another science and another art. The hallway that they all share in common and which they all must pass through on their way to their various rooms is pragmatism, is this theory of truth. Those same questions about the actual consequences in experiential terms will be asked of each investigator no matter what kind of truth he or she is interested in. Hopefully, you can see why I keep stressing the radical empiricism and its equally ardent emphasis on experience. Hopefully, you can see why it makes no sense for a pragmatist to say that truth and justification are two different things. As James puts it, truth happens to an idea, its becoming true is a process of verification. Since it is made true by events, truth and verification are identical. See? That's all truth can ever mean. It doesn't correspond to our idea of an objective reality and then stay true forever, it is an ongoing process of engagement with reality as it's experienced. 


James makes an important footnote to this, extending his "cash-value" metaphor, saying that most of the time our truths operate on a credit system. We don't take the time to investigate or ask those pragmatic questions simply because they are unproblematic, because they work. But he says, this doesn't undermine the pragmatic theory of truth because this whole credit system is held up by a series of support beans, each of which is a case of somebody, somewhere, actually making truth in the process of actual life. In other words, but sticking to the money imagery, experience is the gold that backs up the paper currency. 


Steve said (a while back):
When I say that "justification is relative to some particular epistemic context," I mean that what can be justified depends on the the availability of evidence and arguments in a particular time and place, while "the truth of the matter" is a notion that is best kept separate from the idea of what can be justified here and now and should rather stand for our hopes for the best possible belief that we may come to have in the future and if we are fortunate may even already have. Certainty about whether or not we are currently in such a happy circumstance right now is something that we must get along without until someone finds a theory of truth that functions in distinguishing true and false assertions for us. We've gotten along without such a theory just fine so far.


dmb says:

Hopefully you can see how truth as "our hopes for the best possible belief that we may come to have in the future" would have no place in James's pragmatic conception of truth. As you saw in the quote from James, truth can only be attributed to ideas enacted in a particular time and place. There is no "truth of the matter" outside of that or rather that is all the truth of the matter can ever mean. Also the hope of a best belief in the future is hardly more than an indefinite postponement of something we should never expect in the first place. We don't say truth is provisional because it'll do until we get to the end of the road to find a pot full of the best beliefs but because it is an ongoing process. The direction of the process is toward betterness but I don't think that it ever stops. I mean, this talk about the process is not to suggest that it's headed toward some kind of final fulfillment. This notion of process characterizes the nature of reality and the nature of truth as a relation to that reality. In a "pluralistic universe" the fact that "justification is relative to some particular epistemic context" means that there can and should be multiple truths. But that doesn't mean that truth is just whatever your culture let's you say, that truth is determined by cultural standards exclusively or in a causal, law-like way. And that doesn't mean we can make assertions that don't agree with experience. I mean, the pragmatic test of truth still applies since all truth can ever mean is what's justifiable right here and right now. Truth is provisional and plural and specific, not timeless or universal. They don't even have to be popular or rhetorically persuasive because reality has a way of keeping us honest regardless of such considerations. 


Steve also said:

...I am unwilling to say that Rorty's account of truth is true and a workable "theory of truth" because it doesn't satisfy a key criterion that a theory of truth would need to satisfy. It doesn't enable us to distinguish true statements from false ones in practice. All proposed theories of truth are variations on "agreement with reality" but no one is able specify what exactly this agreement is supposed to be like and how to directly compare an assertion of truth to reality for agreement. Since no account of truth seems very likely to ever do that, Rorty's attitude toward theories of truth (and mine) is similar to Pirsig's insistence on Quality as undefined. We all know what it is anyway without having workable theories about it, and the available theories just seem to muddy it up rather than clarify it. So why not just continue to deploy the term "true" as we always have? It functions just fine in conversation without any help from philosophers who have never found a workable theory for it anyway. Perhaps we learn all we need to know about truth simply by understanding how the word is used in such sentences as "The assertion 'the cat is on the mat' is true if and only if the cat is on the mat." Perhaps everything philosophically interesting that we can say about truth turns out to be very little indeed and is exhausted by such consideration.



dmb says:


There one thing that really makes me cringe here. Rorty's attitude toward truth is like the need to keep Quality undefined? I really think you can't compare the two at all. Rorty thinks we ought to drop the subject of truth and talk about something else. Pirsig's refusal to define Dynamic Quality entails a claim that "the fundamentally nature of reality is outside language", which makes him a philosophical mystic, and that claim isn't directly related to his notion of pragmatic truth (as intellectual static quality). This is another major area where Rorty is at odds with Pirsig and James. Rorty has taken French literary theory and married it to linguistic analysis of the Anglo-American variety to produce a kind of linguistic idealism. I think it would help to think about this for a moment because his convictions about truth, or the lack thereof, have everything to do with that marriage. 

You've heard about semiotics? Let me give you a cartoon version of what happened. Some Saussure French guy noticed that words (signs) could be broken down into parts, the sound or marks (signifier) and the image or concept it conjured (signified). There can also be the actual thing (referent) represented by the image or concept, but it's not necessary. Then it was noticed that the connections between sounds and meanings was arbitrary, which is to say the meaning is not inherent to the sounds or marks we know as words. Now it doesn't take too much imagination to see how this could be translated into the terms of subject-object metaphysics. Signifiers are objective and the signified is subjective. The actual text or acoustic waves can be measured with scientific instruments, unlike the signified meanings, which are also infinitely variable depending on who is doing the interpreting and in what context. Semiotics became a powerful tool for the interpretation of literary texts, for the analysis of language as a system with a structure that could be analyzed. 

Now think about the way Rorty talks. His rejection of the correspondence theory of truth is not predicated on the rejection of the assumptions of subject-object metaphysics. It's based on the theoretical, semiotic, disconnection between the signifier and the signified, between the signified and it's referent. Everything was cut loose so that these elements were no longer the innocent anatomy of a whole unit of meaning but instead the signifiers became detached and floated to the surface. Now there was nothing but infinitely interpretable text. It's text all the way down and there's nothing outside the text. You've heard all the slogans. Anyway, you can see what happens to the meaning of "meaning" in a situation like this. 

Basically, I think Rorty's mistake (and yours too, apparently.) is that he can't reject of the correspondence theory of truth without rejecting all theories of truth. I think that's exactly what classical pragmatism does. It rejects correspondence without rejecting epistemology altogether. 

I don't think a theory of truth needs to be all that grand, you know? Pragmatists don't even pretend to offer anything eternal or universal in the way of truth. We just need a basic set of rules that filter out the lies and nonsense, the wishful thinking and the crackpots. 


 


 


























  		 	   		  
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