A subtle but important differentiation: Truth does make sense as what the ideal believer believes, but not as identical to what any actual believer believes. Articulate form, or truth, is not other than ideal belief – but it is other than pragmatic belief.
Yes, that’s my understanding.
Again, well said. Most of the controversy, I think, revolves around trying to explain why scare-quotes are needed around “more” and “truth”. Are we saying that these terms change (and sometimes lose) their meanings according to context, and thus must be set off against more established terms? Or do the quotes merely acknowledge the metaphorical nature of language, at this level of abstraction?
I don’t think so. Did you have a specific counterexample in mind?
Doesn’t this say something about the indispensibility of truth as the notion that reality has a true face?
But what does it mean to say that we’re talking about the same object while denying that the object has a true face? This strikes me as incoherent.
We can acknowledge that people are related to the same painting in different ways without collapsing into dualism. Indeed, the very possibility of our disagreeing over the painting’s significance depends on the assumption that we are looking at the same painting.
But that’s a non-sequitur. When I look into the mirror it doesn’t reflect the totality of my face. This doesn’t mean it reflects nothing of my face. Partial disclosure is still disclosure.
I would on that front, but to the extent it is satisfying it would seem to demonstrate the need for a power (ordered potency) ordered to being qua intelligible (to truth), which was the point I hoped to highlight.
I do think there are ancillary puzzles here though. For instance, Augustine, among many others, points out that nowhere are we going to find a perfect triangle, circle, etc. Likewise, the organisms we find are never ‘finished’ but always staying-at-work-being-themselves. But if the form in the mind/nous is more intelligible and perfect than that in the material composites, we seem to have a case of the less perfect, and less intelligbile (and so less actual), actualizing what is more intelligible/actual. This is clearer in the Platonist framing Augustine inherits because it would be the material actualizing the noetic (forbidden upwards causality).
So, the agent intellect as a general power seems to resolve this, but there is the objection that a power is structured potency and what is actualizing it here remains the material sensibles… and so on (and I know Thomas would respond here that the phantasm is only the instrumental cause, etc., plus, what is known, per Aquinas, is not the object of phantasm but the quiddity). I think this works in a context where beings participate in a reality beyond themselves, where being itself is in a sense pregnant with meaning (a view I actually think Plato captures, but which gets lost in some of his successors’ disparagement of matter). On this turn, the lower isn’t really actualizing the higher, but rather the mind/nous is lifting the material upwards (another case of epistrophe). In a flatter “naturalist” context though, I think the problem is going to re-emerge, and when it does the light of the intellect starts to look like a sort of sui generis mystical power (which is then in part why it gets the axe historically AFAIK, or why “subjectivity” becomes an isolated light in the noumenal darkness).
Interestingly, otherwise able thinkers seem to have twisted themselves into some odd knots on this issue, like Plotinus with his undescended intellects and Averoese with the cosmic intellect,
Well, sheer potential would, by definition, be formless, no? If the potential in question is ordered to something, than it is in some sense actual, in the way a power is a structured potency.
But it’s also unclear to me how you are using “formal cause” here. A thing lacking any form would be nothing at all/nothing in particular. So, if man, and man’s appetites (what is found “useful”) determine the “formal cause” of all the preconditions of man himself (the “pre-biotic Earth”) then wouldn’t it follow that man also has to be the formal cause of himself? But “formal causes” are here created according to man’s acts and desires. Yet how can man know and desire anything in particular unless he is already something?
Likewise, if “the pre-biotic Earth” is “nothing over and above its catchability,” and “catchability” is itself defined in terms of man’s net, then prior to man the universe was not merely physically “latent,” but appears to be ontologically “void” (formless), no? But then this would involve a potency (the pre-biotic Earth) producing an actuality (men), who turned around and “gave” the potency its form (indeed, man seems to need to create himself here).
I’m not sure if trading on the distinction between efficient and formal causes makes much sense here. A thing cannot be an efficient cause if it has no form, because then it would be nothing at all. Similarly, if the “net” determines the “fish,” then the fish seemingly has no nature of its own.
From whence come these rational active powers though? How is this not a power spontaneously actualizing itself? The circularity isn’t just temporal, its logical and ontic as well as far as I can see.
I’m not sure about this immediate move between the epistemic and the ontological orders. Such a move is at least far from obvious. What is true in the order of human knowing need not be true in the order of being. For one thing, this lead between the limits of human knowing and being seems to presuppose the empiricist assumptions you appear to have been arguing against earlier.
Consider: “If a rock falls and there is no determinate point of view to verify it, the rock has no actual state.”
This seems to require the assumption that determinacy (i.e., the state of being a specific, actual thing) requires a determinate point-of-view. This is, ironically, precisely the doctrine that led to positing the “God’s eye database” view of truth in the first place.
Plus, let’s take the idea that the cosmos exists prior to man’s (spontaneous?) full actualization of it, but only as mathematics. Aside from implying other metaphysical assumptions, this has the difficulty that mathematical structure is still thought-like. So, we still end up with the problem of a thought without a thinker as far as I can see. That is, we still end up with existence outside any “point of view.” Yet if we scrape away this last bit of prior actuality, it would seem that man, according to his will (what is desired or useful) is creating the cosmos ex nihilo, which also seems problematic.
The collapse of the knowing and being seems to lead to the need for man as self-actualizing potency here. If we separate them, we can simply have it that:
A. The Earth was in act prior to man (had a form) - order of being
B. The Earth was in potency relative to our knowledge of it - order of knowing.
When the two are merged, the constructive powers of the intellect re knowledge seem to me to become constructive ontic powers of creation (making man into God in a sense).
This is reasonable, so let me explain my approach in another way.
Some define belief as taking to be true. The solidity of the concept of truth is presupposed, and this presupposed solidity provides a foundation for belief as a derivative concept.
But it occurred to me that belief is “closer” to us. The beliefs of others that I do not share are “conspicuously” beliefs and not what I’d call “true.” My access to “truth” on the other hand looks to be “through” my own beliefs.
So perhaps I try casting belief as the fundamental concept, which leaves “true” and “truth” as tools for expressing belief.
Formal translations can be used to disclose this perspective on inquiry.
In my terms, I’d say that we describe how the world shows itself to us. We articulate our beliefs and highlight their advantages. We can’t avoid standpoint, but it is rational to remember that the world shows itself to others differently, and that others often see what I have missed. By listening to them, I can be directed toward the object in a new-to-me way. They help me see a another “face” of the situation by pointing with words.
I’m with you on this. We should try to hear those concerns.
I very much agree that partial disclosure is still disclosure. This is connected to what I mean by “it’s all real.” All experience is “immediately” disclosure of world, and my belief is “there in that disclosure.” But the world is always more than the world-for-me-now. The object is always more than object-for-me-now.
My problem with the appearance-reality distinction is that “throws away” much of the world as unreal. In practical terms, this is needed. We have to focus on what matters. But ontologically it looks to me like evasion of some of the “total fact of the world.”
We don’t have to see it that way, do we? A mirage is an appearance when contrasted with, say, a tree (though we know that this kind of contrast has its problems too). Does that make the mirage “unreal”? Only if we insist on this vocabulary. Call it something else by all means; call it George; what matters is the distinction between how mirages exist and how trees exist, not the labels we choose in order to express that distinction. Personally, I hate “reality” as a philosophical term.
Building on @Jay’s reply, which I largely agree with…
But “it’s all real” doesn’t follow from “partial disclosure is still disclosure”. If I hallucinate a white rabbit running through my garden, that’s not a partial disclosure of a white rabbit. That’s a failed disclosure of a white rabbit.
It only “throws away” that which has been rightly judged to be unreal. I’m not “evading” anything by acknowledging that there was no white rabbit running through my garden. Indeed, it would be evasive to insist otherwise.
But even as we acknowledge the fact that there was no rabbit, we should also acknowledge that my act of hallucination – the experiencing, understanding and judging, and their contents — was perfectly real. But they were real qua acts and contents, not qua white rabbit.
Yes (if we continue to use “real” ). Again, the distinction is what’s important.
An interesting question is whether this flexibility on ontology can carry over into questions about reference. A hallucinated rabbit is an item in the world, albeit not a “real” rabbit. But what does the false proposition “I saw a rabbit” (in the case of the hallucination) refer to?
I would not say a hallucinated rabbit is an item in the world. Rather, someone hallucinating a rabbit is an event in the world (specifically: it is a defective actualization of someone’s general ability to perceive rabbits). We might say that seeing a real rabbit in the world and hallucinating one are two acts that share the same content. “There is a rabbit over there,” for instance, may be a sentence that suitably expresses this shared propositional content between those two possible states of a person (one of them perceptual, and the other hallucinatory). But saying that there is a shared propositional content between both cases may be saying no more than that, in both cases, the subject finds (rightly or wrongly) the same linguistic form to suitably express what it is that they believe to be seeing.
A representationalist might say that in both cases the subject is acquainted with the same “proposition” (reified as an abstract object or “internal” representation) and that, in one case, the proposition is true because it reflects, or matches, or corresponds to, a state of affairs in the “external” world (a rabbit actually being where it is perceived to be), and in the other it is false because there is no such state of affairs.
The alternative to representationalism that I favor is a form of epistemological and perceptual disjunctivism that coheres with an identity theory of truth. On that broadly Fregean view, what it is that distinguishes the contents of the act expressed by “there is a rabbit over there” in the good (i.e. successful perception) and bad cases (i.e. hallucinations, illusions or misperceptions) isn’t something extrinsic to this content, such that “truth” of “falsity” attaches to this content extrinsically, as it were. Rather, in the good case, the propositional content being true just is for this propositional content to be identical with the state of affairs in the world. In other word, there being a rabbit in the world as I see it and the content of my perceptual act (an my avowal of it) being true are the same thing. And in the hallucinatory case (or any case of false belief in general) this content being false is a case of it’s merely seeming to me that there is such a state of affairs being disclosed to me although, unbeknownst to me, there isn’t.
This view closes the gap between true propositional contents and the states of affairs that allegedly makes those contents true, and it displaces the idea of the word as it is in itself being what it is (i.e. its being the “truthmaker”) that makes our perceptual acts (or justified beliefs) true. But it also retains the intelligible idea of a gap that accounts for false beliefs, specifically, in cases where our epistemic and perceptual abilities remain unactualized or defectively actualized.
We are basically on the same page here. The “appearance versus reality distinction” is fine in practical life. It causes problems in philosophy when it is made “absolute” and “ontological.”
In terms of philosophy of science, I’m against the tendency to understand the perceived object as “unreal” or as an “internal mirage.” While such theorizing is harmless, it still affects me like bad art, like kitch maybe, because it has nothing to do with how we live in the world.
Why is a “mirage” a “mirage” ? Because I end up dying in agony when I expected to be saved from dehydration. This agony deserves the honorific “real” if anything does. People “trust science” primarily because technology gives them what they want. They feel its power.
This touches an issue that Brandom lit up for me. A hallucinated rabbit, like a toothache, can play a role in explanations that include “physical” entities. Your hallucination exists for me also, at least in “the space of reasons.”
To me it looks like we just need the mutual sense that we are directed at the same “thing,” albeit differently directed. The “grammar” of our language is such that you have a special relationship with your hallucination and your toothache. But it’s still not just yours.
I didn’t mean to accuse you personally of evasion. Sorry if my words suggested that !
To your point here, I invoke a previous Einstein quote. In sticky cases there may not be consensus on how to classify an intentional object. Half believe the phenomenon was “physical” ( “real” in some stronger sense than merely existing in the space of reasons) and half class it as a hallucination.
To say that it is “actually physical or not” seems to presuppose the solidity of “truthmakers” which I am trying to question. This “actually” looks like the belief of the ideal believer and belief in the ideal believer.
Yes, this is better. It’s so hard to find neutral terms for world-content! I find that “item” often does the job, so I used it here, but I agree that “event” gives a better picture.
OK, but is this any less problematic? Are you confident that you understand how “propositional content” (already a somewhat abstract, arcane term) can be identical to some physical arrangement in the world? I’m not. (I agree that the Fregean philosophy seems to require it, if we are going to talk about propositional content at all.)
But notice that this enumerates three things, not two. There’s the rabbit; a perceptual act (with “content”); and my saying something, i.e., a proposition. I don’t think we can describe the content of the perceptual act as “true”, anymore than propositional content can be identified with a state of affairs in the world.
What I’m jibbing at is not the conceptual scheme you’ve laid out, which I think is basically correct, but the insistence that truth somehow gets equated, unproblematically, with items/events/experiences that it doesn’t much resemble, such as perceptual states and rabbits. The connection with truth plays out more or less as you describe. But I don’t think identity is the right way to understand that connection.
But of course this no more than to say that I have problems with the identity theory of truth, so it’s not very illuminating! The alternative, some form of representationalism, has its own problems, as you note, but I think Tarski gets us closer than Frege: “the proposition is true because it reflects, or matches, or corresponds to, a state of affairs in the ‘external’ world.” I’m curious whether you think the main difficulty with this sort of representationalism is how it handles external-world problems, and this is why you view perceptual/epistemological disjunctivism more favorably?
Precisely ! For “content” to “mirror” the world, it seems the world has to “have the form” of content. How can the “external” or “trans-conceptual” mirror the conceptual ? For either can be called the mirror in the case of a “true” statement.
FWIW, this is what I mean by “belief.” Belief is the “shape” of world-from-perspective. The problem with truth looks to be related to a presupposed dualism of “mentality” and what it strives to accurately mediate.
In case of particular objects, we can and do revise our beliefs. So the lurking man ahead while I walk at night “turns out to be” just a broom in a garbage can.
But “it’s all real” means for me that “it’s all world.” The subject has no “interior.” Or rather we need not envision the situation that way.
The world-from-my-POV with the lurking man ahead is “just as real” in this sense as what followed. Though practically I will say I was “wrong,” because I act on current beliefs, not remembered beliefs that have been revised.
The world itself is changed as the lurking man morphs into a trash can and broom. If world is world without pragmatic excision.
Good observation. Also a good illustration of how the space of reasons operates differently from what we might call scientific naturalism. (Not sure if Brandom would agree with me!)
Does it matter, though, that my “special relationship” with my hallucination includes a false belief, whereas the special toothache relationship does not? This may need further thought. Can “the same thing” encompass, for me, a false belief, and for you, a true one? Or perhaps that becomes irrelevant when we examine, e.g., a causation question involving my belief in the hallucination? If the hallucination is put forward as an explanation, it may not matter whether you and I differ about whether the statement “I saw a rabbit” is true or false.
). Again, the distinction is what’s important.