[MD] DMB and Rorty

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:

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?

dmb says:

Huh? How can you deny that the correspondence theory of truth does not answer the question of truth? That theory says our ideas are true when they correspond to objective reality. That is its answer to the question of truth.  I see that all-or-nothingism at work again in your next objection; where you say that since I'm not looking for the essence of all true sentences, we can simply agree on lots and lots of true sentences. I mean, it seems rather drastic to jump from such truth essentialism to no truth at all. I'm just saying that the pragmatic theory of truth does not aim for any such things as objective truth or essential truth. Pragmatism answers the question of truth in a way that simply does not claim any such things and yet it is still a theory of truth. It is designed to overcome those things without giving up on epistemology or truth theories or philosophy or even metaphysics. (For James and Pirsig, you can't avoid metaphysics and one of the problems with traditional empiricism (positivism) is that it rejects metaphysics, denies that it is doing metaphysics and it does these things for metaphysical reasons.)  
Your final objection seems to express this all-or-nothingism too. You say that by NOT looking for the essence of truth or for objective truth, "we wouldn't be getting to the issues that theories of truth are supposed to inform us about". You seem to be saying that a truth theory doesn't count as a truth theory unless it defines truth in these essentialist or objectivist terms. But why are truth theories supposed to inform us about that? Those are the failed answers we're trying to overcome and so of course the pragmatist does not define truth in those terms. Rorty takes those failed answers as a definition of the question of truth. And then says we should not have a theory of truth at all, that we should stop doing epistemology. By this account, to simply ask what counts as true would be fancy enough to be called epistemology because epistemology MUST ask what is objectively true or essential true or eternally true or True with capital "T". See what I mean? This confuses the question with the answer, and the rejected answer at that. 


Steve said:
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."


dmb says:

Well, first of all, the assertion this "is not the sort of issue we can have an interesting theory about" is exactly what I mean by saying he's "abandoned" truth theories. His refusal to do epistemology is famous. I'm just saying the question of truth ought not be a loaded question. Thus is becomes simply "what is true?". By this I certainly am NOT asking for a list of true sentences or assertions we agree upon. That might be closer to Rorty's notion of truth as intersubjective agreement but, as you know, I'm defending empiricism against rorty's post-analytic linguistified pragmatism. As James and Pirsig see it, truth is a species of the good and agreement with experience is the most important component of the pragmatic theory of truth. Ideas, assertions, propositional sentences are MADE true in the course of EXPERIENCE. This is far less ambitious goal that essential truth or objective truth, it is always taken provisionally, and there is not just one Truth but many truths. It is somewhere between all and nothing. 


steve quoted Rorty:

"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."


dmb says:

I think Rorty leaves out the most important part of the pragmatic theory of truth and thereby misrepresents James's view. He leaves out the empiricism, which is quite consistent with his refusal to do epistemology. (Obviously, any empiricism or theory of truth is an explicit epistemological theory.) The Stanford Encyclopedia article on James says, "Truth, James holds, is “a species of the good,” like health. Truths are goods because we can “ride” on them into the future without being unpleasantly surprised. They “lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.  They lead away from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking” (103). Although James holds that truths are “made” (104) in the course of human experience, and that for the most part they live “on a credit system” in that they are not currently being verified, he also holds the empiricistic view that “beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure” (P, 100)."

Notice the emphasis on experience? This is not just a feature of his radical empiricism but also of the pragmatic theory of truth. Fitting in with other sentences or beliefs is just one of the features of pragmatic truth. We also "ride" truths into future experience, they lead us through experience and terminate in experience, and those truths that are concretely verified by somebody in actual experience are the support beams that hold the whole thing up. As you know, one of the aims of this truth theory is to distinguish ideas that make a practical difference from the merely verbal disputes that would make no difference in actual practice, in actual experience. Remember the argument James's friends about the man "going round" the squirrel?

This empirical bent does not depend on any notions of "the given" as traditional empiricism had. He fully recognized what we would today call "contextualism". But again this classical pragmatism walks down the middle of things. As the Stanford article puts it: "“We carve out everything,” James states, “just as we carve out constellations, to serve our human purposes” (P, 100). Nevertheless, he recognizes “resisting factors in every experience of truth-making” (P, 117), including not only our present sensations or experiences but the whole body of our prior beliefs. James holds neither that we create our truths out of nothing, nor that truth is entirely independent of humanity. He embraces “the humanistic principle: you can't weed out the human contribution” (P, 122)."

Those "resisting factors in every experience" are key. This element of the pragmatic theory of truth is what prevents it from being anti-realist. It is not a realism in the usual sense of that word, but it definitely retains a certain respect for experience as natural bullshit detector. That's where ideas are tested and made true. That's the sense in which they are good, or not. Without this important feature, then the claim that true ideas are ideas that are useful for certain purposes can be construed as meaning that truth is whatever pleases me. Without this test of experience, then it becomes too difficult to distinguish empirically verifiable truths from wishful thinking or from using ideas as the intellectual equivalent of comfort food or junk food. We need some kind of reality check, you know? We don't need God's eternal truth but we do need a way to sort out bad ideas, empty ideas, dangerous ideas even. Who's the arbiter of truth here? You and me and empirical reality. That seems pretty fair and workable and down to earth. 


  
 		 	   		  
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