[MD] Are There Bad Questions?: Rorty

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Steve,

Steve said:
I can see why even disagreement presupposes a substantial 
background of agreement. But two people could be agreeing 
about a whole bunch of things that they are both wrong 
about.

Matt:
This is why Davidson's argument is a step beyond 
Wittgenstein's about shared backgrounds.  If I understand it 
well enough, the fact of _success_ in communication _in 
general_ are two key parts.  We aren't talking a particular 
time and place (when people on some particular topic might 
say a whole pack of falsities), but say all the negotiation of 
the world we do through a week of time.  If we can 
successfully coordinate our behavior--which we do most of 
the time--then the beliefs that coordinated the two people 
with the world must mostly be true.

This spectare of the "whole bunch of things that they are 
both wrong about" is a Cartesian ghost Davidson wants to 
be done with.  Sure, there can be "a whole bunch," but too, 
"most of their beliefs are true."  You can hold both without 
contradiction because of the vagueness of the notions, 
which was intended on Davidson's part.  Davidson has no 
desire to _actually itemize_ so we can get a quantifiable 
percentage.  Davidson's main concern is anti-skeptical, to 
get rid of the fake threat of what Michael Williams called 
"global skepticism."  The reason "whole bunch" can be true 
without any concern about us not also having "most of 
them true" is because of our infinite capacity to produce 
sentences.  Beliefs are like the movements of an arm, not 
marbles in a bag.  You can't count them up.  Every 
movement is technically slightly different, but we do tend 
to prefer certain patterns of movements, like the pound, 
the thrust, the scribble, the backhand, or the haymaker.

Now, on this analogy, perhaps you're objection appears like: 
"well, do _most_ of our arm movements successfully engage 
the world?  Because it certainly doesn't appear necessary 
that they do.  You might throw all sorts of punches in a 
fight and never land any."  Notice, though, that Davidson's 
argument about beliefs _starts_ with the fact of typical 
success--because communication, following Wittgenstein, 
requires a substantial background of agreement _and_ 
because we have not all died off in our negotiations in the 
world (we do successfully live through the week, usually), 
most of our communication can be termed successful.  
Starting with success, rather than like Descartes with 
doubt, tells you something about the world.  You can 
always go back to Descartes, but his threat of global 
skepticism ("What if all of our beliefs are false!?!") appears 
silly because we know that, based on the fact of our 
successful communication with each other, most of our 
beliefs must be true.

And _all_ this does is defeat Descartes.  It doesn't tell us 
which beliefs _are_ true, just that most of them must be.  
Descartes' big move was to go from doubting one individual 
belief after another to doubting all of them at once.  
Davidson's comfortable with the former, but halts the 
inference to the latter.  Doubting all of your beliefs at once 
is, as Peirce said, fake doubt.

Does that make more sense?  Because I agree, you do 
need to wipe off the stench of quantification from the 
formula.  Davidson's argument's real home is not in numbers 
("most"), but in virtue ("the principle of charity").

Matt
 		 	   		  
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