[MD] DMB and Rorty

[John Carl]

I agree completely Ron,

And I'd also like to send a thank-you shout-out to dmb: without whose
irritating grittiness, these pearls would not have been presented.

I'm glad to have learned somewhat of Rorty's thought.  I am clinging tho, to
the view that pragmatism isn't a philosophy so much as an approach to doing
philosophy.

John on the sidelines


On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 7:27 AM, X Acto <xacto at rocketmail.com> wrote:

> 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."
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