[MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:

Well, apparently you don't understand my question.


Steve replied:

Your question as I understand it was whether or not your take on James makes sense. I think what you have is a common take on James...[snip]



dmb says:

No, Steve. My question has nothing to do with James. I'm saying (for the 20th time) that your concept of truth is meaningless. I'm asking you what possible meaning YOUR concept of truth has. And for the fourth time, at least, I'm saying "all you did was supply the same vague, meaningless reference to a utopian vision of some future knowledge" or as you put it, "the best possible belief that we may come to have in the future". What part of "I think that is meaningless" do you not understand?


Steve said:
I don't know how you conclude that our hope for the future is a meaningless notion or what is backwards about that notion. Isn't such hope what inquiry is generally about? It is not merely about validating existing beliefs (making them true in the Jamesian way), it is also about finding better alternatives to our current beliefs.

dmb says:

Well, at least you've acknowledged the question but it remains unanswered and I'm not at all convinced you understand the question. And aren't you backtracking on the truth-justification distinction here? In any case, my objection to your notion of truth does not entail a denial of the importance of finding better beliefs nor does it entail a claim that all we can do is validate existing beliefs. Nor does it mean I'm opposed to hope or abstract ideals. I'm only saying that your concept of truth as something "we may come to have in the future" is like a concept of dinner as something "we may come to have in the future". Eating is just not the kind of thing we can put off until the day we have "the best possible" dinner. You just have to make do with what's available today, with what's best today. Concepts like "dinner" just don't make any sense as utopian dreams. The concept of dinner as a future ideal is as meaningless as your concept of truth. In fact, your concept of truth is really just an abstract ideal, an imagined extension of our present inquiries. 


dmb said:

James's defines truth as what happens to an idea in the process of verification, as what happens to an idea when it is justified in experience. This definition of truth is quite deliberately rejecting the distinction you're insisting upon. ... I really don't see how you can comprehend this point and still insist on retaining that distinction.


Steve replied:
I don't know how it has not occurred to you that my whole point has been to reject that definition. I am explicitly disagreeing with James.


dmb says:

Well, okay, I realize that you reject and disagree with his definition. But I don't see you doing that in a way that actually engages with the idea, with reasons for his definition. You have to admit, it's a bit strange to reject James's definition by insisting on the distinction he rejects in order to produce his definition. Especially since you've been so unsuccessful at defending the meaning of "truth" apart from justification. 



Steve said:
You have not made a case that a distinction between justification and truth is necessarily meaningless. 

dmb says:

Well, I don't know about the "necessarily" part, but I have tried to explain many times why I think it's meaningless. I also dished up some quotes from James where he makes the case that it's meaningless too. This is exactly what you have failed to engaged and that failure leads me to think that you don't understand what the problem of meaninglessness means here. That's why I keep asking you what it means. It's no good to simply repeat your definition because that's what I find so meaningless. When I say it's meaningless, I don't mean it has no definition but rather that it has no practical significance, no effect on the present concerns, like heaven in the afterlife or the ideal dinner which we hope to eat someday. 


Steve said:

I've argued that such a distinction is meaningful in distinguishing our currently justified practice from our hopes of having the best possible habit of action and in maintaining that what we are currently justified in believing can be wrong. I've also argued that this distinction is necessary if you want to avoid relativism with regard to truth. All you seem to me to be saying in response is that this is not what James is saying (I KNOW!) and that the distinction I'm making is meaningless.

dmb says:

Well, if your concept of truth is meaningless then the distinction is meaningless too but it's the former that concerns me first. If that goes, so does the distinction. I don't think we need that distinction to admit that our present beliefs can be wrong. James rejects the distinction with rejecting the possibility of wrongness. And I don't buy your concerns about relativism either. This is another area that you don't engage with. As I've already explained, experience itself restrains what we can claim as "true". Despite the fact that radical empiricism rejects objectivity and the correspondence theory of truth, it still retains a kind of realism in the sense that we encounter resistances, pushes and pulls, in experience. Within the tissue of experience itself we find that reality does not obey our commands, fulfill our wishes or bend to our will. Not without a fight, anyway. We are talking about a theory of truth that is very, very empirical, after all. If you think that counts as relativism, then relativism is just anything that doesn't assert a single, absolute or eternal truth. By that definition everyone is a relativist, except for mad scientists and religious fanatics. Like I said, the pragmatic theory of truth simply says that ideas are made right and wrong in the course of experience rather than being measured against some ideal notion of full or perfect knowledge.



Steve said:
I am not promoting any idea of perfect knowledge floating around Out There. I'm just saying that our current beliefs however justified they may be may not actually be true. And YES I do understand that that is not what James is saying. He is saying that a belief is true to whatever extent it can be justified, but I'm saying he would have done better to maintain a distinction between truth and justification.

dmb says:

Well, there it is again. This is what I keep asking about but you do not understand the objection. You're not even addressing the objection. If I may rephrase the problematic claim a bit (just because it looks like a typo is involved), you're saying that our current beliefs might seem justified now but in the future we might discover that it's not actually true. This is why it's important to keep justification distinct from truth, you say. But what does that future truth mean, exactly? I'm not repeating the complaints about otherworldly utopianism this time, although that certainly still obtains. But how could this future "truth" be anything other than a future justification? Will we somehow be let off the hook for our intellectual responsibilities in that future such that future truths won't involve any justifications? Since that seems unlikely, the distinction between truth and justification in nothing more than the distinction between future justifications and present justifications or between future truths and present truths. In other words, it is meaningless. That only means that truth is provisional, not that it's separate from justification. 



Steve said:
When we say that a belief is, as far as we know, true, we are saying that no other belief is, as far as we know, a better habit of action. I think you and me and James can all fully endorse that last sentence as pragmatists. The difference is about whether we should equate what we are warranted in asserting as true with the truth of the matter.

dmb says:

Sigh. There you go again. Instead of addressing the distinction between warranted assertability and the truth of the matter, I'll just ask you to read my last comments again but insert "warrant" where I used "justification" and substitute "truth of the matter" for "truth in the future". Same thing. On the other point, I'd agree that truth is what's good in the way of belief but I'm not so sure about truth as the "best habit of action". I suppose that comes from Rorty, either as a creation of his own or as something he picked up and emphasized. His verbal behaviorism would have made such a phrasing attractive. It's a strange idea though. Have you noticed? Belief defined as an action? It is a subtle way to deny the interiority of belief, or the ability to have access to it, and instead locates belief in the observable realm, in the physical manifestations of beliefs like speech acts and such. Presenting that phrasing as something neutral, as something all pragmatists agree upon is what's known as semantic infiltration. And that's why I'm not so sure I can "fully endorse" that sentence.

Besides that, beliefs as habits are not exactly on topic. So long as they are habits of thought, as I'd prefer to put it, they are not the sorts of beliefs that need justification. Or rather their use remains habitual just as long and insofar as they remain unproblematic and that unproblematic use means the belief is passing the test of experience. The process of inquiry into the truth of anything begins with the recognition of a problem or the emergence of doubt. That's where truth theories come in handy and when they can earn their pay.


Steve said:
The distinction that I would like to see you make is between our currently best justified practices--what we are right now justified in holding as true-- and the best possible habits of action--what actually is true.


dmb says:
That's the whole problem here Steve, I just don't see it. If we have already rejected the idea of objective truth, then what is the meaning of "actually true"? You desperately want to keep this notion separate from present justification but insist that the truth is not floating around out there somewhere. Where, exactly, does this "actually true" thing ever make contact with human reality? If truth is not made in the process of justification (including better truth in future justifications), then where is it? What is it? "Actually true", as opposed to what seems true now, sure sounds an awful lot like the classic, Platonic appearance-reality distinction. It sound like the scientific search for the undiscovered features of an objective reality, as if truth is not something we make but uncover. That distinction sure positivistically ontological. 


Steve said:
If we hold truth as the practical goal of inquiry we run into the problem that we could never know whether we have gotten any closer to it or even if we already have it without already knowing what the truth is, and if we already knew that we wouldn't bother with inquiry and justification. This is why I think every pragmatist will agree with James that the practical goal of inquiry has to be justification. Justification is our only route to truth, but I don't equate justification with the truth as James does. Justification is a practice, the truth is not a practice. The truth is simply the truth. We can't talk about progress toward the truth, but we can measure progress in inquiry as assuages our own doubts, justifying a belief for ever wider audiences, or finding better beliefs to replace our past practices.



dmb says:

I cannot discern the meaning of "truth" as you're using it. "The truth is simply the truth"? Wider audiences? (That's just Rorty talking.) Sir, what you've offered here is an incoherent word salad. I still have no idea what you mean by "truth". I realize that you just absolutely, positively insist that it's opposed to presently justified beliefs. Like everything else you're saying, this is an unexplained reversal of James. He says truth is the practical goal of inquiry, you say it's not. You say we could never know when or if we have truth, James says the opposite. You say truth is not a practice, he says truth in practice is the only truth we can have. He says truth is made in an ongoing process you say it simply is. The thing is, I can discern quite clearly what James means by truth and I can understand his explanations. I think the incoherence of your explanations really does have something to do with some kind of dualistic assumptions and with Rorty's "let's stop talking about truth and change the subject" influence too. As is illustrated in the way you are 180 degrees away from James on every little point, Rortyism and Pragmatism are two completely different things, especially with respect to its theory of truth and empiricism. 




 		 	   		  
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