[MD] Pragmatic truth is neither nor

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
Of course conversation is not excluded from experience, but what you fail to get is that nothing is excluded from conversation.

dmb says:
It's not that I fail to understand that nothing is excluded from conversation. That is the assertion I'm disputing. That is the assertion Laura Weed is disputing when she says the "view of truth expoused by Foucault, Rorty and other hermeneutical philosophers cannot capture the meaning of truth because they do not consider the roles of A) stable functions of consciousness, and B) practical interactions with a recalcitrantly existent environment, in their considerations of the nature of truth." (Weed, page 14) It is the recalcitrance offered by experience that makes James's theory of truth a kind of empiricism and a kind of realism. Further, Pirsig and James are both asserting a non-linguistic, pre-intellectual category of experience. By definition, this is something that is excluded from conversation, distinguishable from conversation. In terms of the MOQ, conversation is static and is distinguished from the Dynamic. You know, because we don't eat thirty thousand page menus.



Steve said to dmb:
Rorty understands language to be something that human beings do. How is that free-floating?


dmb says:

As Laura Weed puts it, "if everyone is entitled to an interpretation, and interpretations are not grounded in anything other than one's own imagination, no classification of any claim as a truth, a mistake, or a lie, can be correct. The Enron Executives merely had their perspectives, and the duped investors had their perspectives, and no moral or factual distinction between the two perspectives obtains." (Weed, page 5) That's what free-floating means; "not grounded". The slogan that it's language all the way down" is a denial of any ground other than more language. Weed, Seigfried, myself and many others think that this hermeneutical view amounts to relativism precisely because it paints our justifications as free-floating and ungrounded. Like I said, Weed is basically saying that Rorty has taken the empiricism out of James's theory of truth and replaced it with mere conversation.

Steve:
Ok, but why the "mere"?  If conversation doesn't rule anything out in being used as justification, what exactly is the problem?

dmb says:
If memory serves, conversation was "mere" when you opposed it to "practice-transcending justification". I mean, it's just a way to reference the question as you posed it. But it's also true that I've been trying to explain the role of experience in James's view of truth and especially this assertion that there is an important non-verbal factor in experience that Rorty's language-centered view does not acknowledge. 


Steve said:
Rorty's position is that there are no constraints on _justification_ outside of the practice of trying to convince one another of our claims (conversation).


dmb says:
Right, and I am trying to show you that James and Pirsig say there ARE constraints on justification outside of conversation. I am opposing Rorty to James and Pirsig for that reason. 

Steve continued:
 ...you can't hope to understand what Rorty means when you are unwilling to use the distinction between a good belief and a good justification for a belief.

dmb says:
Well, you and Matt are quite fond of saying that I don't understand what Rorty means but if that's true then neither do the scholars I've been quoting. I mean, I have given quite of lot of textual evidence on this issue. (Siegfried, Rockwell, Weed, James and the Stanford Encyclopedia, just to name a few off the top of my head.) Don't get me wrong. I still have lots to learn. Who doesn't? But the charge that I "can't hope to understand what Rorty means" strikes me as pretty implausible and even demonstrably false. Doesn't my use of evidence PROVE that my case has at least some merit?

As Weed explains it, for example, the independence of truth and justification leads us "to envision a world description consisting of sets of propositions that exist completely independently of any human knowledge-producing capacities. ...the end terms of the relationship are misconceived. rationalists represent the truth of propositions [I've got $20 in my wallet or you are holding the jack of spades] as being completely isolated and unrelated to any process of verification or validation, in exactly the way that Putnam and James ARGUE THAT TRUTH CANNOT BE SO ISOLATED. The God's eye view of reality might exist in Plato's heaven, but James and Putnam point out that we humans don't live there, and have no access to the God's eye vision independently of our individual and collective human experience. We would not value the truth-functionality of any heuristics independently of the consequences of following them, and it is explicitly the fact that EXPERIENTIAL and PERCEPTUAL SUCCESS occurs consequent to some behaviors that we designate the success with the laudatory expression 'EMPIRICALLY TRUE'. On the deflationary account, truth is utterly detached from experience, perspectiveless, and without practical import, which for Putnam and James implies that either is it utterly unknowable or there is no reason to value it." (Weed, page 7, my emphasis)


Steve said to dmb:
I have read these [quotes below] and similar writings of James and understand the view of truth that he endorsed. Are you putting this view forth here as the truth about what truth is?

"Beliefs at any time are so much experience FUNDED. But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the world's experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day's funding operations. So far as reality means experienceable reality, both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of mutation - mutations toward a definite goal, it may be, - but still a mutation." (Emphasis is James's)

"True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth can be known-as."

"The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true by events. Its verity IS in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-FICATION. Its validity is the process of its valid-ATION" (emphasis is James's)


dmb replies:
I'm putting this view forward to show you what Pirsig and James think about truth, as opposed to what Rorty thinks. The James quotes are supposed to show you that James didn't think truth could mean anything more than an idea that has been validated and verified. Truths can only ever be had within experienceable reality and cannot be isolated from those lived processes. You may recall that these quotes were accompanied by a list of metaphors from James and Pirsig wherein experience is "everlastingly in process". Streams, waves, fires, trains, motorcycles, sailboats. Instead of truth being a matter of static relations - between propositions and states of affairs or between one part of language and other - truth functions within an ongoing process and its success is measured by its performance within the ongoing stream of experience. Truth only has any practical meaning in it's relation to actual experience. And this obtains for science and as well as our more intimate and personal truths.


Steve said:
What if justified belief is NOT what we mean by truth in some cases? For example, I might wonder whether a belief I am justified in believing is actually true. Doesn't that in itself say that James was wrong in asserting that justified belief is "all we mean by truth"? It may usually be true that that is what we mean, but there are cases where that is NOT what I and others mean when we use the word "true." There is a cautionary use of the word that James does not take into account.


dmb says:
How are you going to find out if your belief is actually true? How are going to find out that your belief is false? How are you going to confirm your doubts? Without some notion of an Platonic heaven of objective reality, I don't see how it makes any sense to posit a truth beyond our justification processes or one that's isolated from our validation processes. The cautionary use of the word "truth" can be taken account of in other ways. Like I said, the purpose of it doesn't really get beyond trivial errors and common mistakes. Further, the scenarios are told from that God's eye point of view and the beliefs held wouldn't even count as justified. Those thought experiments use a very thin and trivial notion of a justified belief, so much that truth is barely more than a guess. 

The deflationary view is so empty and trivial that it's almost funny. It's true that "snow is white" if and only if snow is white. This is a neat little trick if one is trying to untangle the liars paradox but otherwise it is just an epistemologically and ontologically neutral version of the correspondence theory. It doesn't dare to be so bold as the make any actual claims about the color of snow or even the existence of snow. It vaguely tells you that a proposition is true if it corresponds to a state of affairs but it doesn't tell you anything about that state or the truth of the proposition. By design, it is purely formal and conceptually empty. It could be written as an algebra equation. And so the imagery is perfect. Snow is cold and white is blank and analytic truth is also cold and blank.