[MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
If people long ago could validate their belief that the sun revolves around the earth, does that mean that the "the sun revolves around the earth" used to be true but later became false? It was true for them but not true for us?

dmb says:

Yes. Truth changes. It's provisional. It is part of an ongoing process both historically and personally.


Steve said:
...Since he wasn't making clear distinctions between truth and justification, I read him as not talking about what is actually true at all and only about what we ought to hold as true provisionally. ...everyone who is not a retro-pragmatist (reading James as deliberately equating what is true with what can be justified within a given context) thinks that truth and justification need to be kept as two distinct concepts. ...It seems to me that it drops a quite useful distinction between what is true and what can be justified in a given time and place. Why do that? Does doing so have other benefits in practice that make up for this loss of clarity?  ...Why not maintain the common sense distinction between what we are justified in asserting given our current tools for inquiry and our limitations as finite historically situated human beings and what is actually true? Everyone can think of examples in their own lives where they had every reason to think that something was true, but later found out that it was actually false. ...The facts about what we already believe and what our current standards for justification are are additional necessary facts that come in to play in determining whether or not we are warranted in believing something--whether we are justified in holding a belief AS true--but the factuality of the belief in question--whether the belief in question actually IS true-- is best thought of as independent of the quality of our current justificatory practices. ...The fact that one can be wrong is a good reason in itself to maintain a distinction between what can be justified and what is actually true because our justificatory practices themselves can be wrong.



dmb says:

Clearly, you're very interested in making the point that truth and justification are two different things. The comments above are an edited version of your entire reply, in which you made this point in response to everything I said. You say everyone thinks truth and justification need to be kept separate, that it's useful, adds clarity. But what does truth even mean apart from our justifications? The only thing remotely like an explanation as to what, exactly, this "truth" is supposed to be, you made some vague reference to a utopian vision of some future knowledge. How that will happen in the absence of future justifications is a mystery to me. I really don't see how the notion of truth makes any sense apart from what can be justified in whatever context you find yourself. But I suppose we don't really think we disagree about that. 

Instead, it seems you're objecting to the usefulness of truth theories in general and to the usefulness of James's theory in particular because you also think that we can't have truth as it "actually IS". That's what leads you to say pragmatists shouldn't have a theory of truth. And yet, oddly, you maintain this unattainable notion of truth, insist that it should remain distinct from justification, and then on that basis reject all truth theories. Because they can only tell us what can be justified in a given context, as distinct from what "actually IS true", truth theories have failed and we should just talk about justified beliefs or warranted assertablity instead of truth. 


If you think about it for a minute, however, James is doing the same thing and he's doing so in the very move you've objected to so frequently. Why drop this distinction between truth and justification, you ask? Because that notion of truth is meaningless. It is the meaninglessness of that notion that's motivating your abandonment of truth theories in general but what James does instead is to drop that meaningless notion of truth and replace it with one that derives its meaning from experience, from the justification process itself, which is what the James quotes showed quite nicely, I thought. Once you divest yourself of the notion that there is an objective truth apart from what can be made true in actual experience, then truth is still in agreement with reality but this means agreement with the recalcitrance that experience itself offers, not something that's true above or apart from experience. See, there is no appearance-reality distinction here in the same way that there is not a justification-truth distinction. Those are fake problems created by SOM. That is the uncrossable epistemic gap between subjects and objective reality that is dissolved by radical empiricism, which requires its own explanation but first I want to see how you take this defense of the pragmatic theory of truth. Make sense?














 		 	   		  
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