[MD] DMB and Rorty

Mon Mar 29 13:05:20 PDT 2010

Steve:

It seems like you were in a hurry when you responded to the following. It seems like you began your reply before you finished reading my argument because you raise objections that have already been addressed further into the message. If that's not enough, you ended by asking questions that I'd already answered but were not reproduced in your reply. Rather than ask you to try to address the argument again as a whole, let me just repeat some of the main points. That way, it won't seem so stale and you'll see which points I want to stress. It's cleaned up a bit too. 

dmb says again:

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.)   
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 Rorty's account, to simply ask what counts as true would NOT 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". 

I'm just saying the question of truth ought not be such 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. 

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. (Whether they are connected to each other or not.) 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 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. Experience is where ideas are tested and made true. Or not. That's the sense in which they are good, or not. Without this important feature, it becomes too difficult to distinguish empirically verifiable truths from wishful thinking or from using ideas as the intellectual equivalent of comfort food. We need some kind of reality check, you know? That's you and me and empirical reality. 

.......

Let me add that the radical empiricist claim that true ideas agree with experience is not the same as the traditional empiricist's claim that true ideas correspond to reality. While both generally agree that all our knowledge comes from experience and by thinking about what experience provides, they have completely different assumptions about what reality is, what truth is, and what experience is. Basically, for the radical empiricist, reality is an experience continuum. For a positivist, reality is physical and is thought to exist regardless of whether or not it is experienced. Agreement with the former is nothing like correspondence to the latter for lots of reasons but basically we're talking about two completely different worldviews, the mystical and the material. 

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