[MD] Ron, Rorty and Truth

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Ron,

Ron said:
> Dave has provided several quotes over the course of this arguement. Which stated that Rorty felt that any epistomologial theory of truth is meaningless, Dave points out that this is true if one is speaking to the context of objective truth in an ontological way. Objective truth is culturally derrived. Pirsig and James remark how truth is a species of the good. Connecting truth and experience, that is why everyone can agree to "the good" but disagree over the truth.

Steve:
I don't think that Pirsig thinks that people agree about "the good"
any more than they do about the truth.

Rorty agrees with Pirsig about the notion that truth is a sort of
good. What he doubts (I think along with Pirsig) is the possibility of
coming up with a theory about what MAKES all true statements good--the
essence of Truth. He thinks it is pointless to ask, what is that
common feature that all true sentences share other than goodness? No
answers to that question have ever helped us say more true things or
distinguish true beliefs from false ones. Pirsig points to common ways
that we verify beliefs (logical consistency, coherence with other
beliefs we take to be true, economy of explanation, agreement with
experience), but like Rorty, he doesn't think that truth has an
essence we can get at with a theory. That is what Rorty means by
saying that he sees the pragmatist theory of truth as a deflationary
theory says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to
have a philosophically interesting theory about. In Pirsig's terms, to
say that a sentence is true is to say no more and no less than that it
is a high quality intellectual pattern of value. In Rorty's terms, to
say that a belief is true is to say that, as far as we know, no other
habit of action is a better habit of action.


Rorty in his Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism:
"The essays in this book are attempts to draw consequences pragmatist
theory about truth. This theory says that truth is not the sort of
thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory
about. from a For pragmatists, “truth” is just the name of a property
which all true statements share. It is what is common to “Bacon did
not write Shakespeare,” “It rained yesterday,” “E = mc2” “Love is
better than hate,” “The Allegory of Painting was Vermeer’s best work,”
“2 plus 2 is 4,” and “There are nondenumerable infinities.”
Pragmatists doubt that there is much to be said about this common
feature. They doubt this for the same reason they doubt that there is
much to be said about the common feature shared by such morally
praiseworthy actions as Susan leaving her husband, America joining the
war against the Nazis, America pulling out of Vietnam, Socrates not
escaping from jail, Roger picking up litter from the trail, and the
suicide of the Jews at Masada. They see certain acts as good ones to
perform, under the circumstances, but doubt that there is anything
general and useful to say about what makes them all good. The
assertion of a given sentence – or the adoption of a disposition to
assert the sentence, the conscious acquisition of a belief – is a
justifiable, praiseworthy act in certain circumstances. But, a
fortiori, it is not likely that there is something general and useful
to be said about what makes All such actions good-about the common
feature of all the sentences which one should acquire a disposition to
assert.

Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or
the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their
suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area.
It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly
enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force
and the definition of “number.” They might have found something
interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they
haven’t. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such
attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary
genre we call “philosophy” – a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists
see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This
does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to
Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we
should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask
questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a
theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that
“there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a
“relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They
would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position
analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the
Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists
are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear
about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the
point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical
view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one
we ought to be using. Similarly, pragmatists keep trying to find ways
of making anti-philosophical points in non-philosophical language. For
they face a dilemma if their language is too unphilosophical, too
“literary,” they will be accused of changing the subject; if it is too
philosophical it will embody Platonic assumptions which will make it
impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to
reach.

All this is complicated by the fact that “philosophy,” like “truth”
and “goodness,” is ambiguous. Uncapitalised, “truth” and “goodness”
name properties of sentences, or of actions and situations.
Capitalised, they are the proper names of objects – goals or standards
which can be loved with all one’s heart and soul and mind, objects of
ultimate concern. Similarly, “Philosophy” can mean simply what Sellars
calls “an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of
the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.”
Pericles, for example, was using this sense of the term when he
praised the Athenians for “philosophising without unmanliness”
(philosophein aneu malakias). In this sense, Blake is as much a
philosopher as Fichte, Henry Adams more of a philosopher than Frege.
No one would be dubious about philosophy, taken in this sense. But the
word can also denote something more specialised, and very dubious
indeed. In this second sense, it can mean following Plato’s and Kant’s
lead, asking questions about the nature of certain normative notions
(e.g., “truth,” “rationality,” “goodness”) in the hope of better
obeying such norms. The idea is to believe more truths or do more good
or be more rational by knowing more about Truth or Goodness or
Rationality. I shall capitalise the term “philosophy” when used in
this second sense, in order to help make the point that Philosophy,
Truth, Goodness, and Rationality are interlocked Platonic notions.
Pragmatists are saying that the best hope for philosophy is not to
practise Philosophy. They think it will not help to say something true
to think about Truth, nor will it help to act well to think about
Goodness, nor will it help to be rational to think about Rationality."

Best,
Steve