Pragmatism

[Leela]

Hi Syntax,

Can you paint a picture of the landscape of academic philosophy today? I know there is a group called “classical pragmatists” and another called “neo-pragmatists” out there arguing and defending against accusations of relativism levelled at one another, but what are the Big Tent conversations about? Is there even a Big Tent conversation or lots of small tent conversations in separate camps? What other labels do philsophers self-apply besides “pragmatist” to describe their general positions?

Best,
Leela

 

[Syntax]

Thanks for suggesting this distinction. I have to give some more thought to how this works and get back to you (I usually don’t have as much time for philosophy over the weekend). I wonder if the fact that what we now believe to be true guides us in deciding what is and is not adequately justified means that I should conclude that the standards actually do change. It’s not just a matter of what tools and facts that we have available at a given time, it is what we take to be true that also impacts whether or not a belief can be justified.

It’s a “which comes first” thing, “the chicken or the egg”?..something like that.

For example, burning witches makes perfect sense when everyone believes that the eternal soul is incalculably more valuable than a human body and that torturing a human body is inconsequential compared to the possible benefits to the soul. In an epistemic contextualism view, I would be saying that such torture may have been justified though still immoral not because the torturers didn’t have the right evidence available to them (they knew that they were torturing human beings) but rather that they had **inferior standards **for what ought to count as justification available to them.

The two boldfaced highlights are contradictory. The contextualist has NO available means to judge that the torturers standards were inferior to his own. That’s just the problem with contextualism. There exists no superior morally justifying principle outside of cultural context to which one can appeal in evaluating whether one’s actions are, in fact, more morally justified or not in relation to the justifying actions of another culture. The contextualist simply doesn’t have an answer, and he is incapable of cross-cultural criticism. This is precisely why moral contextualists are moral relativists with respect to moral justification. There are simply no objectively moral justifying principles outside of context. The contextualist relativist with respect to moral justification may not be vocal about committing himself to moral relativism about moral truths tout court, but it is very difficult to see that, in practice, how his contextualism would not **look exactly like **moral relativism with respect to moral truth.

With regard to the standards of science being the same and only the evidence has changed, I think the standards for justification probably actually have changed. Kuhn would probably have had something interesting to say on the matter. Part of the broad story of scientific progress is that we have not only learned new things but also have developed better methods for deciding what we should believe. Kuhn saw no “scientific method” characterizing science, probably because the progress of “method”–including standards for how we justify beliefs–is itself part of the progress of science.

I wouldn’t call Kuhn a contextualist at all. To put it briefly, he was concerned about the competing epistemic reasons scientists will cite to justify theory-change. He thought the list of scientific epistemic virtues such as simplicity, fruitfulness, explanatory power, predictive control, etc., stay the same throughout changes in scientific development, but that none of these have any more weight than the other. So when it came down to competing theories, one scientific community will favor simplicity, and another will favor explanatory power–and how to resolve this conflict seems utterly groundless. So he concluded that theory-changes in science depends *less *on the scientific virtues scientists will cite as justifying reason for the theory change, and more upon things like consensus and social factors alone. But for Kuhn, all of these social reasons are *non-*epistemic reasons. So scientific theory-change is a *non-*epistmic “revolutionary” kind of change. But the scientific virtues themselves never change across these changes in scientific theory.

 

[Betterave]

As I said, if that is all you mean by a theory of truth, then go ahead and call it that. But why insist so vigorously that I call it that? To me it doesn’t sound like much of a theory. It pretty much says to me, don’t bother wasting time trying to find some grand theory. If you know how to use the word “true” in conversation as everyone seems to be able to do, then maybe we know all we need to know about truth. We seem to get along just fine with the word without any help from philosophers.

But it is a theory of truth - that’s why everybody calls it a theory of truth! Why do you think that you can flaunt convention? We’ve been through this before, it doesn’t make sense. If everybody calls it a theory of truth, you should too. That’s just how language works, does it not?

And why the attitude, Dave? I’m getting tired of it with you. (It’s like trying to have a conversation with WPS sometimes except for the fact that what you say is often interesting.) Why am I being accused of pretending things? Can’t you try to be civil? If my posts annoy you, please put me on your ignore list. If you think I’m ignorant, then try to educate me, and please spare me all the sarcasm and exasperated incredulity if you can. It’s not helping. I’m not holding back on you. I’m doing the best I can here, and it would help you made your suggestions and criticisms in a straightforward way without all the feigned ignorance whenever you think I’ve said something stupid.

I accuse you of pretending because we’ve been through the theory of truth thing before and it would be nice if you would either explain why you hold yourself justified in saying things that by conventional terminological standards are false, or if you would stop saying those things.

I think we’re all ignorant about many things and I certainly don’t think you are exceptionally so - far from it. I’m sorry if I come off as offensive. I’m just trying to have a real discussion. I think some of my comments are sincere rhetorical questions that might come off as sarcastic when they are not intended to be. Any time you have a problem with one of my comments please point it out and I’ll explain myself or apologize - I don’t want to belittle you, I just try to point out things I think you need to think about.

I’m not sure what you are getting at here. To try to clarify, if you want to know what a word means, in pragmatic terms this is equivalent to asking, “how is this term used?” To know what a term means is to know how to use it in conversation.

I can’t disagree with that, but the point then is just that “in practice” is no different from “in theory.” So what was the point of invoking the notion of “in practice” in the first place? Wasn’t it supposed to function as a critique of that which supposedly makes a difference “in theory only”?

No, I am not advocating injecting yourself with bull semen.

Phew! No seriously, of course you’re not. I just threw that in as some interesting context for your Jamesian comment. It tells us one way it could be interpreted, a way that would obviously seem to contradict comments you had made upthread. I was challenging the consistency of your comments.

I think I have that sort of lack of imagination about the theory of not having free will. I can’t imagine how I would behave if I did not have free will. I tend to think this means that the theory of no free will is just nonsense, but maybe it means that I don’t really understand it. Can you imagine how someone would behave if they really believed that they had no free will?

Hmmm… this may send us off on a tangent, but basic to a theory of not having free will is the claim that there is no reason to think you would not behave exactly as you behave now, including your conversational behavior involving the term ‘free will.’ Can you see that?

 

[Syntax]

Hi Syntax,

Can you paint a picture of the landscape of academic philosophy today? I know there is a group called “classical pragmatists” and another called “neo-pragmatists” out there arguing and defending against accusations of relativism levelled at one another, but what are the Big Tent conversations about? Is there even a Big Tent conversation or lots of small tent conversations in separate camps? What other labels do philsophers self-apply besides “pragmatist” to describe their general positions?

That’s alot to have to answer. There aren’t really any “Big Tent” conversations, much more small tent conversations. But there are areas more popular than others, I suppose.

There are pragmatist positions in every area of discipline whether epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science–and the accusation of relativsm is pretty well-founded in my opinion. As far as I can tell, pragmatists usually don’t deny that their views may have these relativistic consequences, but more directly, they just don’t see their relativism as that problematic at all and just try to “soften up” (rather unsuccessfully, in my opinion) the “terrible import” relativism seems to have. But I wouldn’t describe many people as publicly declaring an “ideology” of pragmatism either. There just exists what you might call “pragmatist” kinds of ideas floating around, each with a different spin here and there (and some with which I agree myself). But no one subscribes to it as if it were the “be-all, end-all” of philosophical discourse, thank God.

Just as I have said before, pragmatism is just a dead end unless you intend to explore these ideas in relation to other traditional philosophical problems. For instance, the following criticism of Rorty’s pragmatism from Susan Haack (whom I respect) is mentioned by the Stanford Article on Rorty:

“While classical pragmatism is an attempt to understand and work out a novel legitimating framework for scientific inquiry, Haack maintains, Rorty’s “pragmatism” (Haack consistently uses quotes) is simply an abandonment of the very attempt to learn more about the nature and adequacy conditions of inquiry. **Instead of aiding us **in our aspiration to govern ourselves through rational thought, Rorty weakens our intellectual resilience and leaves us even more vulnerable to rhetorical seduction. To Haack and her sympathisers, Rorty’s pragmatism is dangerous, performing an end-run on reason, and therefore on philosophy.”

plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/

This is precisely my own objection to it. Rorty’s pragmatism is intellectually lazy and irresponsible because it behaves like an ideology that stunts further thinking about matters while undermining our normal reasoned recourse to philosophical problems.

 

[Syntax]

As I said, if that is all you mean by a theory of truth, then go ahead and call it that. But why insist so vigorously that I call it that? To me it doesn’t sound like much of a theory. It pretty much says to me, don’t bother wasting time trying to find some grand theory. If you know how to use the word “true” in conversation as everyone seems to be able to do, then maybe we know all we need to know about truth. We seem to get along just fine with the word without any help from philosophers.

But it is a theory of truth - that’s why everybody calls it a theory of truth! Why do you think that you can flaunt convention? We’ve been through this before, it doesn’t make sense. If everybody calls it a theory of truth, you should too. That’s just how language works, does it not?

Quite right, Dave–not to mention that Tarski would be really upset to find some pragmatists such as Rorty using his view to support their ideology. From the little that I know of Tarski, he *only *wanted to provide a conventional model for specifying the predicate “true” for formal languages, not for natural languages (or for what Leela calls “conversational language”). So for a pragmatist to say in the same breath that Tarski’s own model of “truth” for formal languages is all that the notion of “truth” amounts to across the board for **all **language, but then claim that they (Leela) are not offering a theory of truth, is blatantly dishonest. Of course they are offering a theory of truth! The pragmatist (Leela) is saying that Tarski’s deflationary model about truth is the correct model for **all **language! Nice try, Leela. lol.

 

[Leela]

But it is a theory of truth - that’s why everybody calls it a theory of truth! Why do you think that you can flaunt convention? We’ve been through this before, it doesn’t make sense. If everybody calls it a theory of truth, you should too. That’s just how language works, does it not?

Let’s try it this way" Why do you think any philosopher would have ever decided that truth was something we ought to have a theory about? What was it hoped that such a theory would do for us? What does it mean to say that some notion is a “theory” of truth rather than a description of truth?

Once you answer those questions, there is the question, do any of the proposed candidates for theories of truth do those things hat theories of truth are supposed to do?

If you are willing to call a way of talking about truth that does none of those things a “theory of truth,” then knock yourself out.

…So for a pragmatist to say in the same breath that Tarski’s own model of “truth” for formal languages is all that the notion of “truth” amounts to across the board for **all **language, but then claim that they (Leela) are not offering a theory of truth, is blatantly dishonest. Of course they are offering a theory of truth! The pragmatist (Leela) is saying that Tarski’s deflationary model about truth is the correct model for **all **language! Nice try, Leela. lol.

Again with the “nice try” as if I was trying to fool you and the lol as if it helps this conversation for you to make public the fact that you are laughing at me (that Christian charity again?). Can you give my the benefit of the doubt that I am not being “blatantly dishonest” but rather sincerely believe that I do not have a theory of truth to offer the world? I really don’t think that Tarski’s deflationary model for truth is anything that the philosophers who first sought to have a theory of truth would have recognized as a theory at all. I’m not trying to fool you. I really think so. We can discuss why I think that is true and why you disagree, but it is pointless if you think have some weird motives about tricking you into believing things that I no aren’t so.

All I am saying is “I know what truth is.” To justify my claim I point to the fact that I can use the word “true” properly in sentences. I’m not dictating what “truth” amounts to “across the board for all language” which is why I set out to explore in the “Demanding Evidence” and “The truth of symbol” threads what people could mean by “truth” if it is intended as something other than the way the term is used in science and history. I’m not saying that Tarski has the correct theory of truth. I’m saying that no one has found a theory of truth that works and we have been getting along just fine without one.

Best,
Leela

 

[Syntax]

Again with the “nice try” as if I was trying to fool you and the lol as if it helps this conversation for you to make public the fact that you are laughing at me (that Christian charity again?). Can you give my the benefit of the doubt that I am not being “blatantly dishonest” but rather sincerely believe that I do not have a theory of truth to offer the world?** I really don’t think that Tarski’s deflationary model for truth is anything that the philosophers who first sought to have a theory of truth would have recognized as a theory at all. **I’m not trying to fool you. I really think so. We can discuss why I think that is true and why you disagree, but it is pointless if you think have some weird motives about tricking you into believing things that I no aren’t so.

I am not trying to construe your motives. I am just certain you don’t see your own inconsistency.

First, you seem to think Tarski’s view about “truth,” no matter how simple, amounts to no theory at all. This is clearly false. It doesn’t matter how simple the theory is, it is still a theory. And in spite of what you think, everyone else agrees that it is a theory of truth, even Tarski. So I don’t know what you are doing here, as if having the quality of “simplicity” makes it no longer a theory.

NO philosopher can do without some concept of “truth,” no matter how deflationary it seems. And for your own information, there exists a wide variety of deflationary theories of truth too. So calling deflationary theories, “non-theories,” is being dishonest, and no one else agrees with you.

All I am saying is **“I know what truth is.” **To justify my claim I point to the fact that I can use the word “true” properly in sentences. **I’m not dictating what “truth” amounts to “**across the board for all language” which is why I set out to explore in the “Demanding Evidence” and “The truth of symbol” threads what people could mean by “truth” if it is intended as something other than the way the term is used in science and history. I’m not saying that Tarski has the correct theory of truth. I’m saying that no one has found a theory of truth that works and we have been getting along just fine without one.

Second, you clearly say you “know what truth is” by pointing to the human practice, saying that “we have been getting along just find without a theory,” “using the term properly,” but then claiming you are not “dictating what truth amounts to.” But you just did dictate what truth is, however implicitly. You just said you know what truth is by looking at human practice. So,

“true”=merely the human practice of taking to be true.

But this is a theory! It’s a pragmatic one! For this practice, as you say, is your own justification for knowing (however, partially) what “true” means and is. The similar point applies here as it does for Tarski. Just because your theory is pragmatically “simple,” doesn’t make it any less a theory. Like I said, no philosopher can do without some concept of “truth,” no matter how deflationary it seems. When you specify the concept, which you just did, you have a theory. There’s no way out of it.

 

[Leela]

I am not trying to construe your motives. I am just certain you don’t see your own inconsistency.

First, you seem to think Tarski’s view about “truth,” no matter how simple, amounts to no theory at all. This is clearly false. It doesn’t matter how simple the theory is, it is still a theory. And in spite of what you think, everyone else agrees that it is a theory of truth, even Tarski. So I don’t know what you are doing here, as if having the quality of “simplicity” makes it no longer a theory.

This notion of “deflationary” theories of truth (I’d love to hear about other examples if you have time) sounds to me like an assertion that we should expect less out of theories of truth. We might call such a deflationist theory a theory about theories of truth rather than itself a theory of truth. Also, seeking to deflate what constitutes a theory of a truth may leave us with something that people who coined the term “theory of truth” might not even recognize as a theory at all.

NO philosopher can do without some concept of “truth,” no matter how deflationary it seems. And for your own information, there exists a wide variety of deflationary theories of truth too. So calling deflationary theories, “non-theories,” is being dishonest, and no one else agrees with you.

“Dishonest” still sounds completely out of place here. You are attaching a moral component to my rhetorical position about whether such theories are best spoken about as theories at all. I see no reason for us to impugn the character of the other on such basis. It will not help us reach consensus to do so.

Second, you clearly say you “know what truth is” by pointing to the human practice, saying that “we have been getting along just find without a theory,” “using the term properly,” but then claiming you are not “dictating what truth amounts to.” But you just did dictate what truth is, however implicitly. You just said you know what truth is by looking at human practice. So,

“true”=merely the human practice of taking to be true.

But this is a theory! It’s a pragmatic one! For this practice, as you say, is your own justification for knowing (however, partially) what “true” means and is. The similar point applies here as it does for Tarski. Just because your theory is pragmatically “simple,” doesn’t make it any less a theory. Like I said, no philosopher can do without some concept of “truth,” no matter how deflationary it seems. When you specify the concept, which you just did, you have a theory. There’s no way out of it.

Again, if that’s all you mean by a theory of truth, then it is a theory of truth for you, but that is not what I mean by one and I don’t think that that is what philosophers have been seeking for so many hundreds of years under the label “theory of truth.” Is it? You would know better than I would what philosophers have sought throughout history. Perhaps you can convince me that such a notion is all philosophers have ever sought and all that was ever meant by “theory of truth.”

Also, I don’t see my assertion that I know what truth is and my offer of justification as proposing a theory of truth as you do. I just see it as a conversation starter. I offer a candidate to justify my claim. You then have the opportunity to argue that that justification is no justification at all or insufficient justification for some reasons or others. I can see how a theory of truth could emerge from such a conversation, but I don’t think what we have here qualifies yet unless, again, if all you mean by having a theory of truth is having some conception of truth.

Best,
Leela

 

[Syntax]

Again, if that’s all you mean by a theory of truth, then it is a theory of truth for you, but that is not what I mean by one and I don’t think that that is what philosophers have been seeking for so many hundreds of years under the label “theory of truth.” Is it?

You would know better than I would what philosophers have sought throughout history. Perhaps you can convince me that such a notion is all philosophers have ever sought and all that was ever meant by “theory of truth.”

You have this false impression that philosophers of old sat around contemplating this abstract and totally unqualified thing called “truth” all the time. This is incorrect. Philosophers of old saw no difference between “seeking for the Truth” and “seeking for what is true.” You are very clearly performing a **straw-man **argument on the philosophers of the past. Ironically enough, no philosopher has ever attempted to provide a systematically or carefully articulated “robust theory of Truth” (other than perhaps Hegel) until correspondence theorists and coherence theorists tried to get *right at the notion of *“Truth” itself. But these theories themselves are not very robust theories, anyways, simply because not much can be said about the concept of truth to begin with. So philosophers of the past had just implicitly assumed that the correspondence theory was given (even though no one had ever coined the term yet)–and then they went about searching for which beliefs were in conformity with what they thought was, in fact, the case. Truly, I can’t think of even one philosopher who has talked more about the concept of “truth” itself than pragmatists, coherence theorists, and correspondence theorists themselves!

Plato, Leibniz, Kant, etc.–all of them would have defined “truth” somehow, but no one proposed a carefully articulated and systematically worked out “Theory of Truth.” So they have said just as little, and just as much, as any pragmatist about the notion.

I can see how a theory of truth could emerge from such a conversation, but I don’t think what we have here qualifies yet unless, again, if all you mean by having a theory of truth is having some conception of truth.

What else would “having a theory of truth” mean?? You still implicitly use the concept, entailing you understand what it means even if you haven’t articulated it–which you already have:

the true=what people take to be true.

This is just as much a **positive answer **that any correspondence theorist or a coherence theorist would give when approaching the very same problem by asking the very same question, “what do we mean when we say something is true”? In fact, pragmatism is just as robust as these theories because pragmatism has meaningful consequences just as any philosophical view would.

This notion of “deflationary” theories of truth (I’d love to hear about other examples if you have time) sounds to me like an assertion that we should expect less out of theories of truth. We might call such a deflationist theory a theory about theories of truth rather than itself a theory of truth.Also, seeking to deflate what constitutes a theory of a truth may leave us with something that people who coined the term “theory of truth” might not even recognize as a theory at all.

This is a dumb distinction. All deflationary theories attempt to find univocal meaning for the predicate “true” in propositional statements that are different. I would call this “search for a univocal meaning of the word “truth”” an attempt to explicate what the very notion is. Though all deflationary theories are linguistic in approach, most of them rely on some metaphysical assumption (or even a correspondence notion about truth). Every deflationist other than Tarski–who defined “true” only for formal systems by means of a linguistic convention, and Ramsey’s **redundancy theory **which denies “truth” is a property at all–have all maintained some metaphysical assumptions guiding their theories. For instance, Horwich maintained that “truth” is a property of propositions. Alston, another deflationist, also had a minimalist realism with regard to “truth.” Russell, another early deflationist, held that all true propositions are **identical to **these very facts themselves in the world. And Frege held all true propositions are explained by their functional mapping to “the True.”

So I don’t see how any of these complex deflationist theories cannot be said to be a about “truth” itself, or its meaning, or what it consists in. So none of them are any different than pragmatism in this respect.

“Dishonest” still sounds completely out of place here. You are attaching a moral component to my rhetorical position about whether such theories are best spoken about as theories at all. I see no reason for us to impugn the character of the other on such basis. It will not help us reach consensus to do so.

You are at such odds with the rest of the philosophical community with your alleged “rhetoric,” and it is because you don’t understand the history of philosophy very well at all.

 

[Syntax]

Leela,
Let me add: yes, many philosopher like Plato and Leibniz had grand metaphysical systems worked out which they thought were true. But it is blatantly inaccurate to say, according to how we view the problems today, that they had all “developed a theory of truth.” They talked more verbosely about “the Truth,” but when we can just as easily construe them as talking about what they thought was true. So their very own applied investigations were no different than any one else’s.

Pragmatism articulates claims about epistemological practices and social structure which pragmatists think are true, just as Plato made grand claims about his theory of Ideal Forms, which he thought were true. So no one is pretending to have a monopoly on “the truth” any more than pragmatists are. This is why your criticisms about philosophers of old for making claims about what they thought was true is pretty dumb because you are making claims about what you think is true as well. And like I said, I don’t see any systematic Theories of “the Truth” until the 20th century (excluding Hegel).

…as if pragmatism were a non-philosophical enterprise that can dispense with the notion of “truth” altogether. That is wishful thinking. If you intend any of your claims to have a truth-value or to have any assertive mental representational content at all, then you are making use of the very same notion that every else does, too. And your pragmatic claims are no less pretending to make claims about a theory of truth than any other deflationary or past philosopher.

 

[Leela]

You have this false impression that philosophers of old sat around contemplating this abstract and totally unqualified thing called “truth” all the time. This is incorrect. Philosophers of old saw no difference between “seeking for the Truth” and “seeking for what is true.” You are very clearly performing a **straw-man **argument on the philosophers of the past. Ironically enough, no philosopher has ever attempted to provide a systematically or carefully articulated “robust theory of Truth” (other than perhaps Hegel) until correspondence theorists and coherence theorists tried to get *right at the notion of *“Truth” itself. But these theories themselves are not very robust theories, anyways, simply because not much can be said about the concept of truth to begin with. So philosophers of the past had just implicitly assumed that the correspondence theory was given (even though no one had ever coined the term yet)–and then they went about searching for which beliefs were in conformity with what they thought was, in fact, the case. Truly, I can’t think of even one philosopher who has talked more about the concept of “truth” itself than pragmatists, coherence theorists, and correspondence theorists themselves!

My point has been that whenever it happened that philosophers first started trying to “provide a systematically or carefully articulated “robust theory of Truth””, that they meant somthing different by the notion of “threory of truth” what I have intended in the positions I’ve given about truth.

Plato, Leibniz, Kant, etc.–all of them would have defined “truth” somehow, but no one proposed a carefully articulated and systematically worked out “Theory of Truth.” So they have said just as little, and just as much, as any pragmatist about the notion.

If neither Plato nor Leibniz or Kant had a theory of truth but merely “defined truth somehow” whithout a “carefully articulated and systematically worked out theory,” who so you insist that I must have such a theory, Your examples demonstrate that philosophy can be done without one.

What else would “having a theory of truth” mean?? You still implicitly use the concept, entailing you understand what it means even if you haven’t articulated it–which you already have:

the true=what people take to be true.

I don’t equate truth with whatever people take to be true but with whatever actually is so.

This is just as much a **positive answer **that any correspondence theorist or a coherence theorist would give when approaching the very same problem by asking the very same question, “what do we mean when we say something is true”? In fact, pragmatism is just as robust as these theories because pragmatism has meaningful consequences just as any philosophical view would.

The classical pragmatists defined the true as whatever proves itself to be good to believe. Rorty’s view is that truth probably isn’t worth talking about in itself. Maybe someday someone will have something philosphically interesting about it, but he doubts it. I think you are dissolving a useful distinction between different attitudes toward the philosphical investigation into truth. To say that that itself is a theory of truth sounds to me like one of those “bald is a hair color” and “not collecting stamps is a hobby” and “atheism is a religion” sorts of arguments that I think all I can do is shrug at and say, if that is all you mean by a religion, then atheism is a religion, but I’ve never found any value in speaking about it in those terms.

Best,
Leela

 

[Syntax]

My point has been that whenever it happened that philosophers first started trying to “provide a systematically or carefully articulated “robust theory of Truth””, that they meant somthing different by the notion of “threory of truth” what I have intended in the positions I’ve given about truth.

The classical pragmatists defined the true as whatever proves itself to be good to believe. Rorty’s view is that truth probably isn’t worth talking about in itself. Maybe someday someone will have something philosphically interesting about it, but he doubts it. **I think you are dissolving a useful distinction between different attitudes toward the philosphical investigation into truth. **To say that that itself is a theory of truth sounds to me like one of those “bald is a hair color” and “not collecting stamps is a hobby” and “atheism is a religion” sorts of arguments that I think all I can do is shrug at and say, if that is all you mean by a religion, then atheism is a religion, but I’ve never found any value in speaking about it in those terms.

So I’m “dissolving the distinction.” Oh, really? Can you tell me what this distinction is, and how past philosophers perceived the difference between “having a theory about truth” and “having a theory about what is true”? And how are past philosophers’ goals different than philosophers and scientists today when trying to understand the world?

Further, do you realize that when you look up “Theories of Truth” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy it mentions pragmatists and deflationists and not Plato, Kant, or Liebniz? This is curious, isn’t it?

Finally, you don’t realize that any proposed “Theory of Truth” is going to be incredibly limited in its scope because it will only be talking about “truth” simpliciter, not about things in the world investigated by metaphysics and ontology, or theories of justification investigated by epistemology. So anyone’s “theory” is going to look rather simple from the surface precisely because of its limited scope, and this doesn’t exculde pragmatists and deflationary theorists whatsoever.

If neither Plato nor Leibniz or Kant had a theory of truth but merely “defined truth somehow” whithout a “carefully articulated and systematically worked out theory,” who so you insist that I must have such a theory, Your examples demonstrate that philosophy can be done without one.

“Demonstrate” huh? This is clearly false. Everyone has implicit conception of what “truth” is and means. This conception is a “theory,” no matter how implicit or simple it is. This conception makes philosophy and science possible right from the start.

I don’t equate truth with whatever people take to be true but with whatever actually is so…

Do you realize this is the correspondence theory of truth and not the deflationary theory?!

 

[Leela]

…The contextualist has NO available means to judge that the torturers standards were inferior to his own. That’s just the problem with contextualism.

A contextualist does have such means and does make such judgments. At least Rorty and I have no trouble doing so. We do just fine arguing that, say, an adult’s perspective on what is fair is superior to that of a three year old. What we don’t claim to have is some way of standing outside our own epistemic context to make such judgments. If no such means are available to any of us, then this is a problem you have with reality rather than with contextualism. Do you claim to have a way of standing outside of your finite historical context to compare two perspectives? Certainly the Bible is not such a way since whenever I refer to it I get told that I am taking it out of context.

 

[Leela]

There exists no superior morally justifying principle outside of cultural context to which one can appeal in evaluating whether one’s actions are, in fact, more morally justified or not in relation to the justifying actions of another culture.

You are correct that I won’t try to appeal to some transcendent principle to decide what ought to serve as standards for justification. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have any way of making a case that one culture has better standards for justification than others. I just have no way to stand outside of my own culture to do that. I might be nice to have such certainty about everything, but such certainty doesn’t seem to be possible.

The contextualist simply doesn’t have an answer, and he is incapable of cross-cultural criticism. This is precisely why moral contextualists are moral relativists with respect to moral justification. There are simply no objectively moral justifying principles outside of context. The contextualist relativist with respect to moral justification may not be vocal about committing himself to moral relativism about moral truths tout court, but it is very difficult to see that, in practice, how his contextualism would not **look exactly like **moral relativism with respect to moral truth.

I agree with the implied assertion here that contextualists will always get called “relativists” by people who claim to have access to the Truth or The Moral Law. But to me this is confusion about the issue of whether such truths exist and whether anyone can publically justify a claim to have access to them. The first issue is no pragmatic concern until we can answer the second. What I hear when I get called a “relativist” is the sound of disappointment that people make about never being offered the sort of certainty that philosophy promised to deliver upon. It is a promise that philsophy never should have made.

As a pragmatist, I deny the absolute-relative dichotomy on the same grounds that I deny the appearance-reality dichotomy. We don’t need to start with an assumption that our beliefs may be out of touch with The-Way-Things-Really-Are when we think of beliefs as habits of action. Our habits may not be as good as we can make them, but they are always part of reality. If we are concerned with the question, “can we improve upon our current beliefs with clever alternatives?” then we don’t bother asking, “can we claim an ahistorical foundation for our past practices?”

Pragmatists think that the metaphysical premise, the subject-object picture of reality, that leads us to such questions as “Is it absolute or relative?”, “Is it real or apparent?”, “Is it essential or accidental?” is problematic and is one that we would do well to drop.

Pragmatists use terms such as “anti-essentialism” and “anti-foundationalism” as labels for the opposition to subject-object metaphysics, and they use “panrelationalism” and “perspectivalism” as terms for the sorts of pictures we can work with once we drop the notion of essences. But we shouldn’t take panrelationalism, which says that everything stands in relationship to other things and that no one of these relations can be priveledged as the true essence of a thing, as equivalent to relativism, which says that such relations are just whatever you want them to be.

Though we don’t worship Reason as a god, I don’t reduce reasoning to whimsical belief as relativism suggests and Dave thinks I do. Reasoning is the practice of justifying beliefs. Relativism is correct as a view that this practice is always done within a cultural context and that no particular culture has the final say on reality, but part of that practice of reasoning involves questioning the assumptions that we use to justify beliefs for what we mean by “reasonable.”

As Jeffrey Stout explained in his book exploring relativism, Ethics After Babel, “We may have no power to transcend our traditional inheritance completely–for we are finite, historically situated beings–but we do not have to rise above history to call our assumptions into question. The attempt to stand outside one’s age, Hegel said in a famous phrase, is like trying to jump over the Rhodes. You cannot do it. the danger comes when you think you have. for then you will be more likely to set limits on criticism. You will view some of your asumptions as eternal deliverances of reason. It would be better to think of them as predjudices…any one of which can be placed in question provided most are kept in place at any given moment.” In other words, we have nowhere to stand to question all of our assumptions at once, but if we stand on this bit over here we can question our assumptions relative to where we are now standing, and then we can move over to somewhere else and question the assumptions we were standing on before.

With such hopping from platform to platform while questioning our beliefs and inventing better ones, we can progress without needing to ground all our beliefs in a philosophical foundation–and it’s a good thing too, since no one has ever found a method for choosing among the various proposed philosophical and theological foundations that have been offered and the root assumptions on which they are based. So while there may be no ahistorical foundation for Reason, we are still better off than relativism–holding whimsical preferences for what we deem to be reasonable.

Best,
Leela

 

[Syntax]

A contextualist does have such means and does make such judgments. At least Rorty and I have no trouble doing so. We do just fine arguing that, say, an adult’s perspective on what is fair is superior to that of a three year old.

You’re certainly free to say that, but not if you want to be consistent with what contextualism actually says. The evaluative term “superior” is a judgment independent of context since it implies you are appealing to some standard outside of the contextually dependent justificatory activities of both the child and the adult.

What we don’t claim to have is some way of standing outside our own epistemic context to make such judgments.

But that is exactly what you’re implicitly doing if you say the adult’s justificatory activities are superior to the child’s.

If no such means are available to any of us, then this is a problem you have with reality rather than with contextualism.

Not isn’t. It is a problem with contextualism itself. It is clear you don’t understand this view.

Epistemic contextualism says there is simply no empistemic standard outside of the very standards that are dependent on context. A non-contextualist will admit there are some standards that are dependent on context (such as mathematical truths dependent on logical standards and not empirical standards which cite evidence as a criterion of justfication), but **not all **standards are dependent on context. It is crucial that you get this distinction correct.

 

[Syntax]

You are correct that I won’t try to appeal to some transcendent principle to decide what ought to serve as standards for justification. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have any way of making a case that one culture has better standards for justification than others. I just have no way to stand outside of my own culture to do that. I might be nice to have such certainty about everything, but such certainty doesn’t seem to be possible.

This is contradictory right from the start if you claim to be a contextualist about **all **justification. For how are you supposed to make a 2nd-order **justified case **against another culture’s 1st-order standards of justification if all standards of justification, including your own, are culturally dependent standards? You can certainly try to make a 2nd order critique of other 1st-order standards of justification. But your allegedly 2nd-order justification for doing so will be meaningless and hence have no 2nd-order justificatory weight at all since *all *justification is 1st-order contextually-dependent justification. Similarly, the terrorist can criticize your own 1st-order standards of justification and hence they would not carry any 2nd-order justificatory weight since these very standards are 1st-order standards.

 

[Syntax]

I agree with the implied assertion here that contextualists will always get called “relativists” by people who claim to have access to the Truth or The Moral Law.

But epistemic contextualists ARE relativist with respect to justification. No one is claiming that epistemic contextualism is relativism with respect to truth. You continue to confuse the two because you’re not understanding epistemic contextualism. Here’s a good, often-cited, example of how context will change justificatory standards:

Suppose we are just walking around town talking about our favorit music, and out of the blue you ask me what evidence I have for my believing “I have hands.” And I reply, “well, when I hold them up before my face, I can see them.” So in this ordinary everyday context, “seeing that” is an appropriate justification for my belief that I have hands.

But suppose we are in a philosophy class entertaining the Matrix hypothesis that we are all envatted brains having our cerebral-cortex’s stimulated by a computer program designed to simulate reality, and you ask me what justification I have for believing that I have hands. And I say, “well, I can see them when I hold them up to my face.” In this context, my justification is undercut by the very hypothesis that I am entertaining since what I think counts as evidence cannot be really held to be evidence at all since a BIV would have the exact same indistinguishable 1st-person experience that a non-BIV would have. So “I can see my hands” does not count as appropriate justification for my hypothesis that “I have hands.” And it is true that I remain completely unjustified in believing that I have hands if I only try to use “I can see my hands” as potential evidence for my belief.

So I have to appeal to some other stronger **a priori **argument to find the appropriate justification I need. So let’s suppose I do adopt an argument that is much stronger that does give me good reason to believe independent of sense-experience that “I have hands.” Only then *would * I be justified

Here’s the crucial distinction many people don’t understand: The difference is not that I lack justification in one context that I happen to have in the other, or that my standards of justification in one context are “superior” than the standards of justifcation I have in the other context, for my very same belief. No! The difference is that “I can see my hands” counts as justification in one context but not the other. So in both contexts I do have justification, only that the standards of what *counts *as justification have switched. So the social context, and the various hypotheses we are entertaining at the time, will switch what counts as appropriate justification.

 

[Leela]

But epistemic contextualists ARE relativist with respect to justification. No one is claiming that epistemic contextualism is relativism with respect to truth. You continue to confuse the two because you’re not understanding epistemic contextualism. Here’s a good, often-cited, example of how context will change justificatory standards:

Suppose we are just walking around town talking about our favorit music, and out of the blue you ask me what evidence I have for my believing “I have hands.” And I reply, “well, when I hold them up before my face, I can see them.” So in this ordinary everyday context, “seeing that” is an appropriate justification for my belief that I have hands.

But suppose we are in a philosophy class entertaining the Matrix hypothesis that we are all envatted brains having our cerebral-cortex’s stimulated by a computer program designed to simulate reality, and you ask me what justification I have for believing that I have hands. And I say, “well, I can see them when I hold them up to my face.” In this context, my justification is undercut by the very hypothesis that I am entertaining since what I think counts as evidence cannot be really held to be evidence at all since a BIV would have the exact same indistinguishable 1st-person experience that a non-BIV would have. So “I can see my hands” does not count as appropriate justification for my hypothesis that “I have hands.” And it is true that I remain completely unjustified in believing that I have hands if I only try to use “I can see my hands” as potential evidence for my belief.

So I have to appeal to some other stronger **a priori **argument to find the appropriate justification I need. So let’s suppose I do adopt an argument that is much stronger that does give me good reason to believe independent of sense-experience that “I have hands.” Only then *would * I be justified

Here’s the crucial distinction many people don’t understand: The difference is not that I lack justification in one context that I happen to have in the other for my very same belief: therefore all justification is contextual. No! The difference is that “I can see my hands” counts as justification in one contexts but not the other. So in both contexts I do have justification, only that the standards of what *counts *as justification has switched. So the social context, and the various hypotheses we are entertaining at the time, will switch what counts as appropriate justification.

Thanks for refocussing me on the 2nd-order issue, but now I am confused about where you side. Do you disagree with the above that standards for justification can change depending on context in that example or are you an epistemic contextualist?

I’m going to go back an re-read a bunch of stuff in this thread to try to myself get on track with what you are saying.

 

[Betterave]

Let’s try it this way" Why do you think any philosopher would have ever decided that truth was something we ought to have a theory about? What was it hoped that such a theory would do for us? What does it mean to say that some notion is a “theory” of truth rather than a description of truth?

Okay, let’s speculate: People disagreed about what was true. They had trouble resolving their disputes. They wanted to get clear about what they meant by affirming the truth of a proposition. They assumed this might shed some light on their dispute and perhaps even help to resolve it. Presumably they always took their ‘theories’ of truth to be descriptive of truth (are you suggesting there is an alternative?).

How would you answer your questions?

Once you answer those questions, there is the question, do any of the proposed candidates for theories of truth do those things that theories of truth are supposed to do?

If you are willing to call a way of talking about truth that does none of those things a “theory of truth,” then knock yourself out.

I don’t know what you’re referring to here - are you saying that the pragmatist’s adoption of a Tarski-style theory of truth is not supposed to help us resolve/clarify our disputes about what is true? So why do you adopt the theory?

Here’s a question I really wonder about: who are you talking about when you refer to these theorists of truth with theories that don’t do what they are supposed to do? Do you have a list to propose of the usual suspects? Please name just one, tell us his theory and what he took it to be capable of doing, and why it failed to do that. Maybe that will orient our discussion with a little concreteness so that we can think about the kind of argument that supposedly grounds your blanket dismissal (at least as a ‘conversational starting-point’) of ‘theories of truth’.

Again with the “nice try” as if I was trying to fool you and the lol as if it helps this conversation for you to make public the fact that you are laughing at me (that Christian charity again?). Can you give my the benefit of the doubt that I am not being “blatantly dishonest” but rather sincerely believe that I do not have a theory of truth to offer the world? I really don’t think that Tarski’s deflationary model for truth is anything that the philosophers who first sought to have a theory of truth would have recognized as a theory at all. I’m not trying to fool you. I really think so. We can discuss why I think that is true and why you disagree, but it is pointless if you think have some weird motives about tricking you into believing things that I no aren’t so.

To be fair, calling someone’s position dishonest need not be interpreted as an accusation of intent to deceive - it may be just the claim that the view itself is objectively misleading. After all, that is the issue. (I guess Syntax already pointed this out.)

All I am saying is “I know what truth is.” To justify my claim I point to the fact that I can use the word “true” properly in sentences. I’m not dictating what “truth” amounts to “across the board for all language” which is why I set out to explore in the “Demanding Evidence” and “The truth of symbol” threads what people could mean by “truth” if it is intended as something other than the way the term is used in science and history. I’m not saying that Tarski has the correct theory of truth. I’m saying that no one has found a theory of truth that works and we have been getting along just fine without one.

Can you use the word ‘true’ properly in sentences? Some sentences, sure, we’ll of course grant you that - but that’s true of anyone. (How does pragmatism help us to see that?) But the question here is whether you use it properly in sentences involving theories of truth. Your deflationary position seems to suggest that you think (1) that there is obviously no point in thinking about the obvious polysemy associated with the use of the word ‘true’ and (2) that the limits you propose regarding what we can legitimately think of as the ‘useful’ ways of using the concept are a fairly obvious result of examining the fairly obvious failure of the philosophical tradition (which you only ever refer to in general terms that don’t refer to anything or anyone in particular), as compared to the obvious success of our conversational (which you inexplicably seem to continue to equate with ‘practical’) use of ‘true’ confused. Can you see why this is problematic? Can you see that you’re begging questions rather willy-nilly?

 

[Syntax]

Thanks for refocussing me on the 2nd-order issue, but now I am confused about where you side. Do you disagree with the above that standards for justification can change depending on context in that example or are you an epistemic contextualist?

I’m going to go back an re-read a bunch of stuff in this thread to try to myself get on track with what you are saying.

Please read my last paragraph again. I sat here just now modifying it to draw out the distinction further to assist your understanding. Thanks.

Honestly, I am not sure where I stand yet. I may or may not be thoroughly contextualist with respect to epistemic justification. But I will say that I am not, by any means, contextualist with respect to *moral *justification.