[MD] DMB and Rorty

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,


On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 4:05 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
> It seems like you were in a hurry when you responded to the following.


Steve:
Nope. I took my time and meant what I said. Did you read it? I'm
pretty surprised that you didn't find anything there to respond to
other than to repost your last.


DMB:
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.

Steve:
Pretty much what I wrote about was that there is no single "THEE
question of truth" and that we should agree as pragmatists that there
are a lot of questions that we would both like to drop. Dropping those
questions doesn't mean that we can't ask new ones or are forced to
"abandone truth" as you claim Rorty has done. He hasn't.


DMB:
If that's not enough, you ended by asking questions that I'd already
answered but were not reproduced in your reply.


Steve:
I still don't see any answers to the questions I asked. I would love
to read your answer to the question, "How does your talk about
empirical reality add anything to saying that true beliefs lead to
successful action? Does it explain anything more than that about
justification of beliefs? What tools do you have for justifying
beliefs to others that Rorty could not use? Is Rorty somehow forced to
accept others's wishful thinking and "whatever pleases me" arguments
as true because he doesn't talk about radical empiricism?"

I didn't see anything in your posts to suggest that there is any
value-added in talking about empirical reality in better explaining
truth.


DMB:
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....

Steve:
Yeah, I read it before and I just read it again. I still didn't see
anything there that Rorty is sorely lacking. I understand completely
that you think that Rorty has left something important out by not
talking about empirical reality. I'm still wondering what that
something is. What is the practical difference  between James saying
that true beliefs lead to successful action and saying that true
beliefs lead to successful action IN EXPERIENCE? Does that last bit
add some explanatory power? Does it keep us from getting fooled or
keep us from being able to fool others?

Can you cut and paste directly in the parts that directly answer the
following? Because I still don't see any answers.

(1) What tools do you have for justifying beliefs to others that Rorty
could not use?

(2) Is Rorty somehow forced to accept others's wishful thinking and
"whatever pleases me" arguments as true because he doesn't talk about
radical empiricism?"




DMB adds:
> 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.

Steve:
I understand that.

DMB:
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.

Steve:
Even though the theory of truth that says that what is true
corresponds with objective reality is different from a theory of truth
that says that what is true corresponds to empirical reality you still
have at least one problem in common. Before this theory can be said to
add anything to James's notion that truth leads to successful action
you will need to explain the microstructure that allows us to compare
and assertion to empirical reality for correspondence in the same way
that the positivist has a problem trying to compare a bit of language
to objective reality. Otherwise you are not offering anything we don't
already have. You are doing no more than saying that opium helps
people fall asleep because it has dormitive power. It's just doesn't
offer anything that I can see as an explanation.

I suspect you will want to expound on how truths are empirically
verifiable. How exactly is that accomplished? I doubt that you can add
anything to the notion that true beliefs lead to successful action as
Rorty supported by quoting James by expounding and generalizing about
the verification process.

Consider again what Rorty said about truth in that essay...


"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..."


Steve:
It seems to me that your theory of truth still has the problems of
(III) above if you want to get beyond truth as leading to successful
action to something more--whatever it is that Rorty is supposed to be
missing. What is this correspondence supposed to be like between an
assertion and empirical reality before we should say that the
assertion is true?

Best,
Steve