[MD] DMB and Rorty

[X Acto]

At a cursory reading, a fine rebuttle to the arguement concerning Rorty's
views..and a fine quote defining how Pragmatism treats the issue.
a good read, thanks Steve..



----- Original Message ----
From: Steven Peterson <peterson.steve at gmail.com>
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Sent: Fri, March 26, 2010 10:19:37 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] DMB and Rorty

Hi DMB,


> DMB said:
> "The correspondence theory is just one particular answer to the question of truth and knowledge but because that particular answer has failed, he concludes that we should abandon the questions too."
>

> Steve replied:
> ...before I respond to your post, it would be helpful if you explained what you see as "the question of truth and knowledge" that you keep referring to if it is not to ask about the fundamental nature of the True and the Good.
>
>
> dmb says:
> You already have a good idea from the debate we recently had about the pragmatic theory truth. In the eyes of a pragmatist, truth and knowledge are not eternal and they're not spelled with capital letters. We just want to which ideas actually work in the course of experience and which one's don't. We just want to know the difference between good ideas and bad ideas, between wishes and actualities. The question of truth is just, "What's true?" and not "What is the fundamental nature of truth?" or "What do all true sentences have in common?".



Steve:
That helps me understand what you are saying. When you say "the
question of truth" you are referring to the question, "what is true?"
Making this substitution in your previous post then, you mean to say,
"The correspondence theory is just one particular answer to the
question ["what is true?"]  but because that particular answer has
failed, he concludes that we should abandon the questions too. Because
the various attempts to get the subject to correspond with objective
reality, he refuses to do epistemology at all. He refuses to have a
truth theory at all."

But that doesn't quite work in that sentence, does it? Correspondence
theory was never an answer to the question, "what is true?" Since you
say you are not taking on the question "what do all true sentences
have in common?" then we simply can agree that lots and lots of things
are true. We can list true sentences all day long. I think, however,
that in doing so we wouldn't be getting to the issues that theories of
truth are supposed to inform us about. Would we?

Also, Rorty has never abandoned the question, "what is true?" Where
did you get the idea that he was?  Rorty, like the rest of us, was
always very interested in trying to say true things.

So I guess I am still pretty confused about what you mean by "the
question of truth" that theories of truth are supposed to answer since
the question "what is true?" doesn't seem to be a question that Rorty
has abandoned as you have alleged and is not the sort of issue that we
can have an interesting theory about.  Once you have dropped the quest
for nailing down the nature of Truth and claims about what all true
sentences have in common (which you have), then all you are left with
with respect to the question "what is true?" is a never ending list of
assertions that are true. Perhaps you meant something else by the
question "what is true?" or have a different question to propose to
substitute for "the question of truth."

Since you want to discuss pramatism's theory of truth as well as the
realism-idealism issue, here is the part of that essay that most
directly relates:

"If the pragmatist is advised that he must not confuse the
advisability of asserting S with the truth of S, he will respond. that
the advice is question-begging. The question is precisely whether “the
true” is more than what William James defined it as: “the name of
whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too,
for definite, assignable reasons.” On James’s view, “true” resembles
“good” or “rational” in being a normative notion, a compliment paid to
sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other
sentences which are doing so. To think that Truth is “out there” is,
on their view, on all fours with the Platonic view that The Good is
“out there.” To think that we are “irrationalist” insofar as it does
not “gratify our souls to know/That though we perish, truth is so” is
like thinking that we are “irrationalist” just insofar as it does not
gratify our moral sense to think that The Moral Law shines resplendent
over the noumenal world, regardless of the vicissitudes of
spatio-temporal lives. For the pragmatist, the notion of “truth” as
something “objective “ is just a confusion between

(I) Most of the world is as it is whatever we think about it (that is,
our beliefs have very limited causal efficacy)

and

(II) There is something out there in addition to the world called “the
truth about the world” (what James sarcastically called “this tertium
quid intermediate between the facts per se, on the one hand, and all
knowledge of them, actual or potential, on the other”).

The pragmatist wholeheartedly assents to (I) – not as an article of
metaphysical faith but simply as a belief that we have never had any
reason to doubt – and cannot make sense of (II). When the realist
tries to explain (II) with

(III) The truth about the world consists in a relation of
“correspondence” between certain sentences (many of which, no doubt,
have yet to be formulated) and the world itself the pragmatist can
only fall back on saying, once again, that many centuries of attempts
to explain what “correspondence” is have failed, especially when it
comes to explaining how the final vocabulary of future physics will
somehow be Nature’s Own – the one which, at long last, lets us
formulate sentences which lock on to Nature’s own way of thinking of
Herself.

For these reasons, the pragmatist does not think that, whatever else
philosophy of language may do, it is going to come up with a
definition of “true” which gets beyond James. He happily grants that
it can do a lot of other things. For example, it can, following
Tarski, show what it would be like to define a truth-predicate for a
given language. The pragmatist can agree with Davidson that to define
such a predicate – to develop a truth-theory for the sentences of
English, e.g, – would be a good way, perhaps the only way, to exhibit
a natural language as a learnable, recursive structure, and thus to
give a systematic theory of meaning for the language. But he agrees
with Davidson that such an exhibition is all that Tarski can give us,
and all that can be milked out of Philosophical reflection on Truth.

Just as the pragmatist should not succumb to the temptation to capture
the intuitive content of our notion of truth” (including whatever it
is in that notion which makes realism tempting), so he should not
succumb to the temptation held out by Michael Dummett to take sides on
the issue of “bivalence.” Dummett (who has his own doubts about
realism) has suggested that a lot of traditional issues in the area of
the pragmatist-realist debate can be clarified by the technical
apparatus of philosophy of language, along the following lines:

In a variety of different areas there arises a philosophical dispute
of the same general character: the dispute for or against. realism
concerning statements within a given type of subject-matter, or,
better, statements of a certain general type. [Dummett elsewhere lists
moral statements, mathematical statements, statements about the past,
and modal statements as examples of such types.] Such a dispute
consists in an opposition between two points of view concerning the
kind of meaning possessed by statements of the kind in question, and
hence about the application to them of the notions of truth and
falsity. For the realist, we have assigned a meaning to these
statements in such a way that we know, for each statement, what has to
be the case for it to be true... . The condition for the truth of a
statement is not, in general, a condition we are capable of
recognising as obtaining whenever it obtains, or even one for which we
have an effective procedure for determining whether it obtains or not.
We have therefore succeeded in ascribing to our statements a meaning
of such a kind that their truth or falsity is, in general, independent
of whether we know, or have any means of knowing, what truth-value
they have. ...

Opposed to this realist account of statements in some given class is
the anti-realist interpretation. According to this, the meanings of
statements of the class in question are given to us, not in terms of
the conditions under which these statements are true or false,
conceived of as conditions which obtain or do not obtain independently
of our knowledge or capacity for knowledge, but in terms of the
conditions which we recognise as establishing the truth or falsity of
statements of that class.

“Bivalence” is the property of being either true or false, so Dummett
thinks of a “realistic” view about a certain area (say, moral values,
or possible worlds) as asserting bivalence for statements about such
things. His way of formulating the realist-vs.-anti-realist issue thus
suggests that the pragmatist denies bivalence for all statements, the
“extreme” realist asserts it for all statements, while the
level-headed majority sensibly discriminate between the bivalent
statements of, e.g., physics and the non-bivalent statements of, e.g.,
morals. “Bivalence” thus joins “ontological commitment” as a way of
expressing old-fashioned metaphysical views in up-to-date semantical
language. If the pragmatist is viewed as a quasi-idealist
metaphysician who is ontologically committed only to ideas or
sentences, and does not believe that there is anything “out there”
which makes any sort of statement true, then he will fit neatly into
Dummett’s scheme.

But, of course, this is not the pragmatist’s picture of himself. He
does not think of himself as any kind of a metaphysician, because he
does not understand the notion of “there being... out there” (except
in the literal sense of ‘out there’ in which it means “at a position
in space”). He does not find it helpful to explicate the Platonist’s
conviction about The Good or The Numbers by saying that the Platonist
believes that “There is truth-or-falsity about ...regardless of the
state of our knowledge or the availability of procedures for inquiry.”
The “is” in this sentence seems to him just as obscure as the “is” in
“Truth is so.” Confronted with the passage from Dummett cited above,
the pragmatist wonders how one goes about telling one “kind of
meaning” from another, and what it would be like to have “intuitions”
about the bivalence or non-bivalence of kinds of statements. He is a
pragmatist just because he doesn’t have such intuitions (or wants to
get rid of whatever such intuitions he may have). When he asks
himself, about a given statement S, whether he “knows what has to be
the case for it to be true” or merely knows “the conditions which we
recognise as establishing the truth or falsity of statements of that
class,” he feels as helpless as when asked, “Are you really in love,
or merely inflamed by passion?” He is inclined to suspect that it is
not a very useful question, and that at any rate introspection is not
the way to answer it. But in the case of bivalence it is not clear
that there is another way. Dummett does not help us see what to count
as a good argument for asserting bivalence of, e.g., moral or modal
statements; he merely says that there are some people who do assert
this and some who don’t, presumably having been born with different
metaphysical temperaments. If one is born without metaphysical views –
or if, having become pessimistic about the utility of Philosophy, one
is self-consciously attempting to eschew such views – then one will
feel that Dummett’s reconstruction of the traditional issues
explicates the obscure with the equally obscure.

What I have said about Field and about Dummett is intended to cast
doubt on the “technical realist’s” view that the pragmatist-realist
issue should be fought out on some narrow, dearly demarcated ground
within the philosophy of language. There is no such ground. This is
not, to be sure, the fault of philosophy of language, but of the
pragmatist. He refuses to take a stand – to provide an “analysis” of
“S is true,” for example, or to either assert or deny bivalence. He
refuses to make a move in any of the games in which he is invited to
take part. The only point at which “referential semantics” or
“bivalence” becomes of interest to him comes when somebody tries to
treat these notions as explanatory, as not just expressing intuitions
but as doing some work – explaining, for example, “why science is so
successful.” At this point the pragmatist hauls out his bag of
tried-and-true dialectical gambits.” He proceeds to argue that there
is no pragmatic difference, no difference that makes a difference,
between “it works because it’s true” and “it’s true because it works”
any more than between “it’s pious because the gods love it” and “the
gods love it because it’s pious.” Alternatively, he argues that there
is no pragmatic difference between the nature of truth and the test of
truth, and that the test of truth, of what statements to assert, is
(except maybe for a few perceptual statements) not “comparison with
reality.” All these gambits will be felt by the realist to be
question-begging, since the realist intuits that some differences can
be real without making a difference, that sometimes the ordo essendi
is different from ordo cognoscendi, sometimes the nature of X is not
our test for the presence of Xness. And so it goes.

What we should conclude, I think, is that technical realism collapses
into intuitive realism – that the only debating point which the
realist has is his conviction that the raising of the good old
metaphysical problems (are there really universals? are there really
causally efficacious physical objects, or did we just posit them?)
served some good purpose, brought something to light, was important.
What the pragmatist wants to debate is just this point. He does not
want to discuss necessary and sufficient conditions for a sentence
being true, but precisely whether the practice which hopes to find a
Philosophical way of isolating the essence of Truth has, in fact, paid
off. So the issue between him and the intuitive realist is a matter of
what to make of the history of that practice – what to make of the
history of Philosophy. The real issue is about the place of Philosophy
in Western philosophy, the place within the intellectual history of
the West of the particular series of texts which raise the “deep”
Philosophical problems which the realist wants to preserve."
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html