[MD] Truth as a word of caution

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
What sounds wrong to me is to say that X was true when I had good reason for believing it, but now X is false because I now have new information that gives me good reason to think it is false. It makes sense to me to say that X was false all along even though I was justified in believing it in the past.


dmb commented:
It only sounds wrong when you believe that the truth exists independently. It only sounds wrong to a Platonist of some kind. It only sounds wrong if you deeply believe truth is distinct from appearances.


Steve replied:
Independently of what? Certainly truth is independent of some things but not independent of _everything_.   ...I also think of truth as independent of justification in that what we are justified in believing may not be true. You say that that makes me some sort of a Platonist, but I don't see anything metaphysical about that view. To take a concrete example, people were once justified in believing that the world was flat. Now we know that they were wrong and it is true that the world is roundish. But you seem to be saying that it was true that the world was flat, but now it is true that the world is round. At the same time, I don't think you also believe that the shape of the word changed since the pre-Copernican days, so it appears you have a contradiction. What seems appropriate to me is to say that even though people may have been justified in believing that the world is flat, it has nevertheless always been roundish. in that sense justification is independent of truth.


dmb says:

Your concrete example relies on a reintroduction of SOM. To say the "true" shape of the planet is distinct from the "justified" beliefs about its shape, is to say that there is a pre-existing objective reality to which our subjective ideas must correspond. These SOM assumptions are contained within one of your favorite philosophical phrases, namely "justified true belief". Collapsing the distinction between truth and justification plays an important role in rejecting SOM and its' correspondence theory of truth. Replacing that Platonic notion of truth with the pragmatic theory of truth is going to mean, among other things, that truths can't be anything more than what's justified. How else would we ever encounter truth? The truth does not exist in some realm beyond human practices. Truths are just excellent ideas and they are considered excellent insofar as they serve human life. That's all that true can ever mean.

Your example re-establishes the correspondence theory and that's why the pragmatic theory sounds so wrong to you. You're trying to understand pragmatic truth in terms of the very thing it is supposed to reject and replace. By doing this, we get crazy results. We have to try to imagine how a new human belief could reach back in time and retroactively change the shape of planets or the laws of nature. We have to try to imagine that the earth really was physically and literally flat so that if you looked at it from the moon it would be a beautiful blue pancake or something. But of course the flat-earthers (if there really ever was such view) didn't have Sputnik or the Apollo mission and couldn't have seen the earth from space. I mean, your example invokes not only objectivity but also the triumph of Western science and technology. That's what Platonism looks like in our time and it seems that you need to exorcise this ghost. Considering all your protests against Platonism, I assumed you already had. But now I can see that maybe this is why you tend to project Platonism onto my statements and onto Pirsig's claims. 


Steve said:
I haven't put truth "out there" or "above and beyond" the best ideas we have at present. I am just saying that the best ideas at present may not be true. That is to say that there may be better ideas that we will come to have in the future. 


dmb says:
Dude, if you're saying our best ideas might not be true, then you most certainly have put truth above and beyond our best ideas.


dmb said to Steve:
As I see it, you have just hereby confessed to a Platonic instinct.  ..James and Pirsig come as quite a relief to me because they not only balk at that - as almost every contemporary philosopher does - but also because they have a remedy and replacement that does NOT devolve into nihilism or relativism or some kind of dogmatic faith. These guys dodge all the right bullets.



Steve replied:
I don't think I am saying anything Platonistic or even anything that Pirsig would disagree with. I think Pirsig would find it ordinary to say that the world was roundish even before it became possible to justify that belief. ..I see nothing Platonic about the intuition that the morality of slavery and the roundness of the earth are not dependent on what people have been able to justify about them in the past any more than the present is all that maleable by what people believe about it now. As Rorty put it, "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” . 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)." You seem to be accusing me of doing (II) and therefore revealing myself as a Platonist for thinking that the earth has always been roundish. I think that there is good reason to think it has always been roundish without having to believe that the truth about the world is a something extra in addition to the world.



dmb says:
You're digging yourself deeper. The pragmatist wholeheartedly believes that the world is as it is whatever we think or believe about it? The pragmatist has never had any reason to doubt this notion of objective truth, but this belief is NOT an article of metaphysical faith? Oh man, I'd say that's exactly what it is. Pirsig and James are definitely NOT that kind of pragmatist. For them, "the world" is NOT as it is regardless of what we think or believe about it. For them, the so-called "objective" world is a secondary concept or rather an evolved pile of analogies that have been mistaken for reality. 

As I understand it, Rorty maintains his faith in SOM in a tricky, covert way. He needs to posit an objective reality in order to deny that we can have any kind of epistemic access to it. As a result, he believes that we have a causal relation to the world but not an epistemic one. In other words, he rejects the correspondence theory of truth but not because he rejects the basic metaphysical framework but because we are hopelessly trapped in our own intersubjectivity. Thus his ethno-centrism is a kind of cultural solipsism. 

And, apparently, you're following him down this hole.