Tony,
I’m not sure she expects you to accept it, at least not entirely on the basis of truth. Pragmatists usually don’t expect you to act based on rational thought alone, especially if most people aren’t primarily motivated by truth. If she thinks you’re mostly intellectually moved by pride, then perhaps all the superficial arguments boil down to power trips. Maybe she thinks you will be so bothered by her unwillingness to budge in the face of logic that you will consequently deny the importance of logic in human affairs. Who knows? An abstract proposition itself asserts truth and has truth-value; an utterance of words in propositional structure is just the creation of the speaker, who may be using it as a vehicle for other intentions, not thinking of truth. (We call these bullsh***ers.)
Imagine a man (hypothetically, contrary to fact) whose sole purpose in existence is to maximally procreate, and thus, whose every act would be justified only according to whether it in fact contributed toward or detracted from that purpose. (I’m meaning ‘justification’ in terms of goodness, i.e., perfection, i.e., completion, wholeness, unity between means and end.) By my understanding, the goodness of a means is relative to its end and that alone. What else would justify a means? So this man’s rationality and intellect would only be a tool that he may use for a further end. In this case, he uses his reason well (reasonably) when it properly serves and supports his maximal procreation; truth is secondary at best, as that’s not his real purpose or aim, either subjectively or objectively. Truth itself would, it seems, be instrumental, deriving its worth from the Good.
Now suppose, as a given fact, that the man’s most efficient way to achieve that end and cause maximal procreation is by mating with several women, all while maintaining concurrent emotionally stable relationships with each. In order to successfully and perfectly achieve his end, in other words, in order to act with justification, he has to really believe that he is in true love with only the one he is around at any given moment. Assuming that sexual, romantic love necessarily requires lifelong monogamy and exclusive commitment, his beliefs about truly loving each woman are false. So false belief is justified and reasonable for him, since true belief will cause him to fail to reach his sole purpose for existence, “his good.” He actually is better off by “fragmenting” himself and avoiding a coherent and unified belief-system to make his goals psychologically viable. Whenever there is tension between truth and goodness, on this view, the latter takes precedent.
The question is: what is the true end of man, and how does one speak of goodness without presupposing the truth of its required end? Ah, but the pragmatist is typically not as concerned with the truth of the answer as much as whether it works and produces good. The empowered will (that which is oriented toward the good) is in control, running the show non-rationally, and let’s hope the intellect (that which understands and sees truth) can keep up, since the will may be hard pressed to reach anything if it’s stuck in utter darkness.
The divorce of will and intellect is a result of the Fall. They can only be united again under God, which means one must come to know Him again, so that His undeniable Goodness and Beauty will be irresistible to the will. The will’s proper place, following the intellect and its beholding of good, can then be restored. United, they are the loving spirit. Prayer and sacraments help, since no one will make it all on his own.
Say a physicist holds the view that the universe has both matter (which is clearly material) and fields (which seem to be immaterial). Examples of the latter would be the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field. Thus it would seem that the physicist was not a materialist. However, this appears to go against the usage here of painting scientists as materialists.
So what exactly does it take for something to be immaterial? Is dark matter immaterial? What about dark energy?
Scholastics distinguish form and matter as co-principles that cannot exist in isolation, so it’s no wonder that materialists are unable to maintain coherency. A pure materialism would deny the formal aspects and thus be left only with primary, formless, unintelligible matter. Materialists just tend to reduce the formal as much as they conceivably can, perhaps because they focus too much on the fact that pure form “in” nothing is also problematic. (Pure form is like pure ‘relationality’: relations “exist” between THINGS though, i.e., constituents, materials, elements, what have you; see the absurdity of Leela’s “collection of patterns” idea and how “collection” is her word for sidestepping commitment to a unified basic substance while seeming to state a meaningful affirmation of pure diversity, change, “evolution,” etc.)
