Wow! That **IS **creepy! I don’t see what’s so novel about Aquinas’ alleged “dictum” anyways…it’s an implicit principle employed in all our reasonings.
You’ve fine. You mentioned “Leela” liked to quote atheists, which made me chuckle when I found the other post. “Leela” used to copy Sam Harris verbatim, without attribution, as thought “Leela” was responsible for the content.
Gotcha! Thanks!
Hi John,
I think this is a pretty good summary of Rorty’s position, but I don’t share your anxiety that people can just believe whatever they want if there are no constraints directly offered by the world on the practice of justification. Constraints on justification have always been and will always be based on the human concerns that we want to satisfy. Is is only to address such concerns that we come to have beliefs at all, so it is in relation to such concerns that criteria for truth come about. You need not be anxious about this situation because one of our concerns will always be to try to predict and control our environment, and another of our concerns will always be to get consensus among other inquirers about how best to do that. Because of these human concerns, people themselves put constraints on what ought to count as good justification including the notion that good beliefs will demonstrate their quality in practice. So it is not the external world that puts normative constraints on inquiry. Constraints on beliefs are conversational pressures. We try to find evidence in support of our beliefs–evidence being whatever may help us get consensus. But evidence is not arbitrary. There are standards, but these standards emerge from the conversational pressures we put on one another to justify our beliefs.
How could the world itself make demands about what ought to counts as evidence? he world doesn’t allow us to just believe whatever the heck we want, but not because it makes demands on us. It is because we make demands of ourselves to make our beliefs agree with experience.
Rorty agrees that the classical pragmatists were conflating justification and truth. For Rorty, what can be justified in a given epistemic context and what is actually true are separate questions, but justification is our only path to truth.
I’ve never read any Aquinas. I read this quote in a Rorty essay. Perhaos it is misattributed.
Is your name really 1holycatholic??? It is strange that you (and someone going by WarpedSpeedPetey) are so surprised that someone else does not use their real name on this site. Personally, I do it here and on my blog because there are a lot of religious nut jobs out there (not saying you or anyone here is necessarily one of them). Having been frighteningly threatened by such people in the past, I use an alias to protect my family. I hope you will respect my need to do so. Whether you do or not, I make no apology.
My real name is David, but people often call me Dave. Sorry guys.
)first. i use pseudonym, because i have a legitimate, security related reason to do so, by dint of my work.
I’ve very, very anxious about this. If the world is not a normative constraint on inquiry, then this is tantamount to trusting that what we’ve stipulated to be a justified belief is, in fact, justified. No, I’m not buying this is what we do at all. We decide our beliefs are justified because they are true, not the other way around. Justification is ultimately brought back to and grounded in how things actually are. It doesn’t just hang in the air as something the community decides to stipulate according to need and practice.
Wait, are you now backpedalling? If the world doesn’t allow us to believe anything we want, this phenomenon is what we call a “normative constraint,” Leela. And the world does demand that I ought to believe objects near massive bodies always fall to their surfaces. This is because of the state of world, not because I think it is rational to believe it.
We make demands on ourselves precisely because we think our beliefs are** true**, independent of our needs and practices.
Yes. This is exactly like what I, and most other philosophers, are saying. So Rorty is not a pragmatist…?
Have you heard of Richard Bernstein? He coined the term “Cartesian anxiety” in his book “Beyond Objectivism and Relativism.”
The fact that objects near massive bodies always fall to their surfaces does not include the demand that we believe it. Such massive bodies seem pretty indifferent to human belief and justification.
Trying to hold beliefs “because we think they are true independent of our needs and practice” is just one among many of our human needs and practices. Isn’t it?
Rorty called himself a pragmatist in the tradition of Dewey. He is often labelled a neo-pragmatist and criticized by retro-pragmatists (who refer to themselves as classical-pragmatists, a term I reserve for Dewy, James, and Pierce) for not really being a pragmatist at all because he rejects the so-called “pragmatist’s theory of truth.” Rorty doesn’t see pragmatists as having a theory of truth. He doesn’t think truth is the sort of thing that we ought to have a theory about. It is a transparent term that functions just fine in language without any help from philosophers. He follows Davidson in that regard.
Why are you reading a historian’s approach to philosophical problems? It’s like reading Dawkins on theology and religion. Both are totally unqualified in these respective areas. The same goes for Harris and Hutchinson. I wouldn’t ask you to read Pat Robertson on Middle Eastern politics, now would I? Quite honestly, I think you are wasting your time picking these guys up.
“Faith”? Are you sure you want to say that? You realize faith makes this *alleged trust *in our epistemic practices totally blind, and even *pragmatically *pointless, since you’ve just divorced these epistemic practices from their having anything to do with what we take to be true *prior to *any notions of justification and warrant.
“Hope” in what? You just said searching for certainty is pointless. I find this pragmatic position very nihilistic since it denies this very hope of ever attaining the certainty about what is true.
That’s not right. Rorty’s own abandonment of analytic philosophy to become a professor of literature is evident that the Cartesian Anxiety bothered him so much that he gave up on trying to figure things out. This is defeatist, not hopeful. He adopted this position to alleviate his worries, or just to abandon them altogether. I don’t share this defeatist nihilism about inquiry. So quite the contrary, pragmatism just seems to be another answer that pretends to alleviate our Cartesian worries.
I am certainly free to deny it, but I would be behaving irrationally if I denied it precisely because the statement is true, not merely because my denial would be unjustified.
Sure, but the pragmatist move of relegating “the true” to what is believed and practiced, doesn’t logically follow. This is precisely the unjustified ideology pragmatism is offering. But there is no reason to believe *pragmatism itself *is true. And it can’t give us any reason other than a faulty inductive generalization about past failures.
This is nothing novel. Most philosophers have a delfationist idea about “truth”: they agree that no general theory of “truth” can be offered, and that it does not have nay significant role to play in particular theories themselves. But as Frege notes in his article “The Thought,” the notion of truth is presupposed in all our statements about the world, just as “it is true that roses are red” is presupposed in the statement “roses are red.” I cannot make sense of what I mean by the latter without understanding the former. The notion of “truth” is logically prior to the notion of “justification” without which the notion of justication becomes meaningless.
Unattributed.
That makes no sense at all.
I can’t win no matter what I do. If I attribute my use of such terms as Cartesian Anxiety to the author who coined them I get criticized by you. If I don’t explicitly attribute them I get attacked by holy1 and warpedspeedpetey. May the three of you should argue this issue and get back to me when you come to some agreement.
I didn’t think a Catholic would read faith as blind. At any rate, that is not what I meant.
I’m not aware that someone has discovered a grounding for the scientific method. Can you explain what this is about?
Rorty’s pragmatism is not the position that certainty is impossible. Instead his position is that if we focus on trying to come up with better alternatives to our current beliefs, we don’t concern ourselves with trying to find an ahistorical foundation for what we already believe. In place of working to lend our past practices the prestige of the eternal in a quest for certainty, we have the hope that our future can be made better than our past.
This is not how Rorty would characterize his move.
I agree, if pragmatists claim to have a theory of truth as what works, it fails by their own standards because it doesn’t work. That is why I don’t see pragmatists as having such a theory. I read the classical pragmatists as saying, let’s stop trying to have a theory of truth and focus instead on how we justify our beliefs.
I don’t think the point is to try to have novel views about truth.
It looks like we agree on something. When I say that “justification is relative to some particular epistemic context,” I mean that what can be justified depends on the the availability of evidence and arguments in a particular time and place, while “the truth of the matter” is a notion that is best kept separate from the idea of what can be justified here and now and should rather stand for our hopes for the best possible belief that we may come to have in the future and if we are fortunate may even already have.
Yes, but notice the difference between traditional philosophy and pragmatism. You have to ask yourself this:
The standard reply to the extreme skeptic or the post-modernist seems to apply: How can you claim as fact that “there are not facts, but only interpretations”?
Unattributed.
So, again, you’re busted for copying another’s work and presenting it as your own.
That makes no sense at all.
I’m glad I never asserted that it is a fact that there are no facts or I’d be looking pretty foolish right now.
