[MD] Are There Bad Questions?: Rorty

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Steve,

Steve said:
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.

Matt:
Yeah, I think the "to whatever extent" functions in the 
same vague way as "most" does in Davidson's formula.  I 
suppose the Davidsonian addition to James would be that 
the "extent" be designated "most of the time."  We are on 
the main successful animals.

Steve said:
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. 

Matt:
Yah, but read these two bits from James with Davidson in 
view and it's not too much of a reach: "The most violent 
revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old 
order standing.  Time and space, cause and effect, nature 
and history, and one's own biography remain untouched.  
New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of 
transitions."  "The true is the name of whatever proves 
itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for 
definite, assignable reasons." (from "What Pragmatism Means")

James is still apt to talk about subjectivity, without a doubt 
(e.g. "When old truth grows, then, by new truth's addition, it 
is for subjective reasons"), but the stretch from James to 
Davidson's not that bad.

Steve said:
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?

Matt:
"True" is only used for sentences, and I'm not sure how far 
Davidson himself got on such questions (he was 
crazy-genius, so I imagine far), but I'll recur to Brandom's 
lingo, because I know how to fit it here to answer.  I think 
Brandom says somewhere that he doesn't believe in belief.  
The reason why, I think, is that beliefs are an intermediary 
that we can cut out of our philosophy of language, just like 
what Quine called the "idea idea."  Just talk about 
sentences.  It is one of the activities of humans to produce 
sentences.  A subset of that activity is saying that some 
sentences (assertions) are true or false.  The superset of 
the former activity (sentence-production) is "Activity"--any 
and all of the shit we do.  The very presence of linguistic, 
communicative activity creates an implicit/explicit 
distinction across all of our activity.  The function of a 
sentence is, then, to make explicit in sentence-form what 
was previously only implicit in the object of the sentence 
(what the sentence was "about," whether rocks, frowns, 
gestures, or other sentences).

So, for a gesture, we can say it's true--a successful 
communication--but only in the attenuated sense in which 
_we_ can make explicit ("suppose we could infer") a true 
sentence that corresponds to the gesture.  For instance, 
we can do this to talk about successful nonlinguistic 
animal behavior.

As for your final question, "Is that the sort of belief that 
Davidson would say must be true given our success in 
communication?", remember that Davidson's formula refers 
to _no particular belief/act of communication_.  "Most of 
our _beliefs_ must be true" not "_this belief_ must be true."  
I'm not even sure how far we would want to pursue shaking 
out certain sectors of our webs of belief that are we likely 
to find most of the stable ones.  I suspect that treats 
them like marbles when we shouldn't.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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