[MD] Are There Bad Questions?: Rorty

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt,


> 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").

Steve:
That helps on the quantifying and clarifies some other stuff. I like
the attempt at anti-skepticism so I'd like to understand what he
means.

I still don't understand what Davidson means by truth in saying that
most of our beliefs are true. By James's definition, since our beliefs
lead to successful action (or we would not believe them), then our
beliefs are all true to whatever extent that they do lead to
successful action and simultaneously also false to whatever extent
that they don't.

Davidson seems to have an extra component to his construction of truth
that James does not have (a total of three: a person, another person,
and the world). It sounds like truths are not personal possessions but
rather consist in such a triangle of successfully coordinated
behavior. But it sounds like he still has a pretty Jamesian notion of
truth as a habit of communication (verbal or written language,
gesturing?, making faces?) that leads to successful action within such
a triangle. If someone beckons for someone to approach with a gesture
and the other person comes over that is communication constituting a
successful coordination of behavior, but is anything established as
true here? Is the gesture true? Is "true" for Davidson a word that is
only used to describe sentences? I suppose we could infer that a
sentence like this is true: "when person A makes that gesture it means
that they want person B to come closer." Is that the sort of belief
that Davidson would say must be true given our success in
communication?

Best,
Steve