[MD] Truth as a word of caution

[Steven Peterson]

Hi dmb,


> Along the way, Steve also said:
> (Unlike James, however, he [Rorty] does not simply equate truth and justification since we may be now justified in believing something that turns out to be false.) ...You've quoted SEP saying that Rorty says there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones. It is your Jamesian conflation of justification and truth that is the problem in your misreading here.
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> dmb says:
> We've been through this before. I distinctly remember that you never did grasp my point on this. Maybe I can explain it better this time and if you can see what I'm saying about truth and justification, then maybe you can also grasp pragmatism as a theory of truth.

Steve:
I understand James's position on truth, I just think he made a wrong
turn--not even so much a "wrong" turn so much as I think he had a
better option for dealing with truth and justification that wouldn't
have raised so many hackles about relativism. Note that I don't think
that there is anything dangerously relativistic about James's theory
of truth. It just would have been better for him and more true to the
spirit of pragmatism to deal with the matter differently. Just as
pragmatism is an alternative to realism and antirealism and doesn't
take a stand on the existence or non-existence of an objective reality
independently of the sorts of situations where it could make a
difference, rather than denying that there is a difference between a
justified belief and a true belief, James could have simply held off
on answering by demanding to know for what purposes the difference
could make a difference. And I think there is at least one sort of
situation where it does make a difference--he ignored the cautionary
usage of the term for pointing out that what we are justified in
believing may not be true just as some of the things in the past that
we believed to be true turned out to have been false.


dmb:
You may recall that I tried to explain that Rorty has rejected truth
theories - as we see in the quote you brought - because he defines
"truth" in terms of the Platonic aspirations he rejects.

Steve:
Rorty _doesn't_ define "truth" at all. He doesn't have a theory of
truth, remember? He knows how to _use_  the word truth, and
pragmatically, to know a thing is to be able to use it, so that is
quite enough for him. He doesn't think any theory about truth is going
to us past James definition of "truth" as “the name of whatever proves
itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite,
assignable reasons.” No further investigation into truth than that
will help us say more true things or to distinguish our true beliefs
from the one's we think are true but are in fact false.

dmb:
> If a justified belief is later exposed as an error of some kind, this does not mean that truth is separate from justification. Instead, this is simply what the pragmatist means when he says that truths are provisional and not eternal. Ideas are supposed to grow and evolve and improve, just as we do.

Steve:
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:
> I distinctly remember asking you over and over again what "truth" as distinct from justification could possibly mean. I'm pretty sure you never even tried to answer.

Steve:
Sure I did. I have always said that I think justification and truth
ought to be kept distinct if only so that we can can caution one
another that what we are now justified in believing may turn out to be
false. You could say in that case that the proposition changes from
true to false when a justified belief is later found wanting if you
want, but that sounds weird to me.

Best,
Steve