[MD] Apologies for Dropped Threads

[david buchanan]

Matt said:
When Dave says (and Ian agrees with), "I think James is saying that justified beliefs are all we mean by the word truth," I can't get past the riposte that Steve supplied that we were already using before I left, roughly: how do you reformulate, then, the clear and perspicuous meaning of the English sentences: "what you say might be justified, but it might not be true" or "what you say might be true, but you've presented no justification for thinking so."  This Steve has supplied clearly as the existence of, on the JTB formula of knowledge, "justified beliefs" and "true beliefs" respectively.  The request has been for an account of what those two things are if you collapse justification and truth into a single heap.  If one was supplied by anyone, I apologize for not catching it. ...


dmb says:

I guess I don't understand the objection because reformulating those two sentences seems quite simple and unproblematic to me. "What you says might seem to be justified, but that justification might turn out to be bogus." "You've presented no justification for your position but I suppose you might be inadvertently correct." 
It seems to me that the distinction only serves to illustrate that none of our beliefs in final, that further investigation is always likely to reveal a better way to understand things. So "truth" simply refers to this "cautionary" note about our present beliefs. In that sense, "truth" is an imagined ideal, something above and beyond the justified beliefs we presently hold. It might make sense to insist on the distinction if that was the only way to say that our truths are provisional, that they constantly evolve. But it's not the only way to assert the provisional nature of our truths. And of course that's the main idea behind James's re-conception of truth, that it is part of an ongoing process.

Matt continued:
... I have not, nor will have, the time to give good thought to the extensive extensions of the conversation that went on past me.  It's too hard to play catch up with something like that, as anyone knows whose left a movie midway through to relieve their bowels.


dmb says:
Well, just for the record, there were only a few posts from me on this topic (three, I think, maybe four) and those were all written in the last few days. I've got work to do too, but it's too bad you're letting those last few go because Weed's paper is exceedingly relevant. It compares James's truth to Rorty's in pretty clear terms.  



Matt said:
... Dave continues to think that "Matt and Steve seem to think these strawmen and windmils can be pressed against James," but I thought we'd gotten beyond that. .. I have no real idea what Dave is thinking of by "strawmen and windmills."  I thought I had been clear that I have no real argument to press against James.  The only thing that might come up is if James had really meant to say that truth can be completely replaced by justification.  ...I applaud [Steve's] good answer to the "mere conversation" slogan this is: "Of course conversation is not excluded from experience, but what you fail to get is that nothing is excluded from conversation."  What's great about this is that it catches exactly how the two, conversation and experience, are inverses of each other.  Just as part of our experience is conversation, so can conversation be _about_ anything. 


dmb says:
Right, that's what I was talking about. The truth-justification distinction (analytic) and the notion that nothing is excluded from conversation (hermeneutical) are the things you've been pressing against James, or rather against my James as opposed to Rorty appropriation of James. I believe it was Ian who called them straw men and otherwise doubted their legitimacy. If memory serves, he regarded the deflationary account as yet another straw man. Weed addresses that view in her paper as well. I had hoped it would help you understand what I had been saying earlier about the temperamental differences between pragmatism and the analytic tradition.