Pragmatism and truth

Metaphysics & Epistemology
241

OK, given some charity about “intelligible contents.” But my statement was different: “I saw a rabbit”, when there was only a hallucination. This statement uses a term, “rabbit”, that the speaker believes refers to one thing, but is mistaken. Your statement, “I hallucinated a white rabbit,” is different. Here, the speaker is correct. So I’m asking whether we should say that my mistaken speaker is using a term that does or does not refer. The key here is that it’s a question about this speaker, not about the propositional content.

@EQV @j_j @John

The discussion about how to parse “correspondence” is very good. I think you three raise many of the important problems, and provide a sketch of why their resolution is difficult.

It’s the sort of question that can reduce a philosopher to arm-waving! I mean, isn’t it obvious how correspondence works?! The picture @John lays out shows how we might defend this obviousness. Here the isomorphism is mappable, because numerical, by fiat. Do we do something similar, albeit between the lines, in all cases of correspondence? Well, John sensibly says, “This is not to say that we are able to explain just how this is possible, but it does seem that we do know it is not merely possible, but achievable.”

Or consider @j_j 's formulation: “I think the temptation [is] to say that the ‘meaning’ of a claim ‘is like’ the way things.” But he reminds us, “The ‘way things are’, [in order to] ‘be like meaning’, would have to be ‘articulated’.” So we have a further step, articulation, that sounds to me (and I’m guessing to j_j) as if we’re still searching for a better way to understand the two terms involved in the image/reflection metaphor of “mirroring.” They certainly don’t articulate themselves, nor would they appear, at first glance, to show obvious points of resemblance.

I would slow this down a little. A-perspectival reality (or call it “the view from nowhere” or “the God’-eye view”) is more than an agreed-upon practical map, though it certainly is that in practice. And true, there is no accessible “view from nowhere.” But there’s a great deal to be learned, I think from John’s phrase “it is something we are forced to assume.” I agree. Why are we forced to assume it? What is it about Peirce’s convergent goal, knowledge as a regulative ideal, that so strongly makes itself felt? How does that change the way we conceive of an artificial, shared practical map?

2 Likes
242

That points to an important difference between Husserlian intentionality and Heideggerian thrown being-in-the-world. For Husserl a subject intends a specific object , like a blackboard. Heidegger rejects this structure of subject pole-object pole and intentional directness from the former to the latter. We don’t intend the blackboard, we comport ourselves in relation to it in terms of how we are involved with it, and this involvement is not restricted to the blackboard but to the totality of relevant relations of use he calls ‘world’.

“It could be shown from the phenomenon of care as the basic structure of Dasein that what phenomenology took to be intentionality and how it took it is fragmentary, a phenomenon regarded merely from the outside. But what is meant by intentionality-the bare and isolated directing-itself-towards-must still be set back into the unified basic structure of being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-involved-in. This alone is the authentic phenomenon which corresponds to what inauthentically and only in an isolated direction is meant by intentionality.”

“…in all comportment we become aware of comporting ourselves in each case from out of the ‘as a whole’, however everyday and restricted this comportment may be…However concerned we are to comport ourselves with respect to various issues and to speak in terms of individual things, we nevertheless already move directly and in advance within a tacit appeal to this 'as a whole‘. (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)

A totality of useful things is always already discovered before the individual useful thing…” “The fact that I know nothing about a particular founding connection in the enactment of a way of being cannot be taken as justification for the conclusion that this founding connection is not constitutive for that way of being.” “ in our natural comportment toward things we never think a single thing, and whenever we seize upon it expressly for itself we are taking it out of a contexture to which it belongs in its real content: wall, room, surroundings.

The request “Think the wall,” is saying: Make yourselves blind to what is already given to you in the very first place and for all apprehending that is explicitly thinking. But what is thus antecedently given? How do the beings with which we dwell show themselves to us primarily and for the most part? Sitting here in the auditorium, we do not in fact apprehend walls— not unless we are getting bored. Nevertheless, the walls are already present even before we think them as objects. Much else also gives itself to us before any determining of it by thought.

Much else—but how? Not as a jumbled heap of things but as an environs, a surroundings, which contains within itself a closed, intelligible contexture. What does this mean? One thing with these properties here, another with those properties there, a whole juxtaposition of things alongside, above, and through one another, so that, as it were, we grope forward from one to the next, progressively taking the single things together, in order finally to establish a coherent interconnection of them? That would be quite an ingenious construction. What is primarily given instead—even if not in explicit and express consciousness—is a thing-contexture.” (much more on p.85, Basic Problems of Phenomenology)

243

@j_j

Circling back to some of your earlier replies:

No worries. I didn’t take it that way.

In your view, what distinguishes a hallucination from a veridical perception?

Ok, but there’s a difference between saying that the content of your hallucination is real and that the lurking man is real. We can accept the former while denying the latter. Do you agree?

But would you agree that there is an asymmetry of access? Your perspective is not mine, and vice versa?

In your view, is eidos something that intelligent beings construct, or something they discover? Or something else?

244

My view is that if the statement “I saw a rabbit” is purporting to make a claim about a rabbit in the garden, then insofar as there is no rabbit in the garden, it fails to refer.

In the Aristotelian tradition the world is not understood as an arrangement of “bare” physical particulars. In that tradition, physical particulars are themselves metaphysical compounds of matter and form. A form can be thought of as an intelligible content and, as such, provides the common denominator that enables mind and world to intersect. For in the act of knowing, the intelligible content that is grasped by the mind via an act of understanding is the very same intelligible content that exists within the physical particular.

245

OK. So you wouldn’t say that “rabbit”, in the case in question (a speaker who’s mistaken a hallucination for a rabbit) refers to the hallucination, right? You’re saying that this speaker thinks they’re referring to something, but in fact there is nothing at all that corresponds to the attempted reference.

Yes, that’s a classic picture. But we still have to ask, “Can you describe this common denominator? What features are held in common? In what way is the form of something in the mind the same as, or resembling, or representing, the form in the world?” We presumably don’t want to go back to saying that it’s a mirror, a physical resemblance, but what then do we mean by “a form in common”? In Platonic terms, the question might be, “How does something participate in its Form?”

246

What’s your view on scientific realism? Would you agree that our best theories are “true” in some sense? If yes, what does this mean to you?

247

Braver’s Groundless Grounds seems relevant here. “Representing” the milk being in the fridge with the sounds that get categorized as “there is milk in the fridge” is a fundamental learn-it-or-perish skill. If you make the right noises, vibrate the air between us in a certain way, then I act basically as I would act when I perceived that milk in the fridge myself.

So (articulated) perceptions are “beamed sonically” from one ape to another. Likewise the monkey responds to the sound of the predator warning cry basically as to the sight of a predator. The sound becomes another “indication” of the predator, another “trigger” of scurrying to cover.

There’s something “right” about the “picture theory.”

I sort of have an identity theory of belief. I realized that this is sort of what I was trying to say by “belief is the form of the world-for-that-believer.”

Right. I can’t “really” let you see through my eyes with a report. But somehow I can be trained into giving you an “abstract.” To compare this “abstract” with “the world” is to compare an one’s own “articulating perception” with the remembered report of the other. This report is a singular event but fits into a “role” as equivalence class of similar events. Saussure discusses the strangeness that is already in classifying a sound as the pronunciation of this or that word. This is already a categorization, a map from an infinite domain to a finite domain.

248

I agree that there is “something” that is forced on us. But maybe a generalization suffices. I believe that we want a “high sense of community” with others. But a “monological goal” looks like the abolition of individuality. As if a partially dissonant plurality of belief is something “bad” that should “die off.” As if rational community, which tolerates and even enjoys the surprise of difference, wants to free itself from just this, which may be its essence. The “a-perspectival truth” suggests, in a certain light, a monotheistic intolerance of “false gods.” Yet we often need to figure out what to do together. If we are stuck on a lifeboat, we need our individual reactions to this peril to interfere constructively.

249

For me (or the position I’m exploring by defending ), there just “is no” a-perspectival distinction. It’s not denied as incorrect (failing to mirror ) but questioned (by situated me) as lacking definite sense.

But from “within” a perspective, I can recategorize an intentional object. At first I am “directed toward” a creepy figure lurking ahead. But then I realize that it’s just a long shadow. My comportment shifts as the form of the world shifts.

If I decide that I only “dreamed” winning a million dollars, then I don’t go on a shopping spree.

This form of the world-for-me, the “essence” of the current situation-for-me, is “belief.”

As impractical as it sounds, I think that I need to insist on the temporary “practical” reality of the lurking man. One person’s hallucination is another person’s conversation with God.

This means that God is indeed in the world of the theist (our-world-for-the-theist.) God-from-point-of-view as a “practical” reality. Likewise God is absent from the world of the atheist.

Exactly. I’m suggesting that asymmetry of access ( or from-a-point-of-view-ness ) has been misread in terms of an “image” of the world in individual “mindstuff.”

For “generic” dualism, the “real world” is X and mindstuff is f(X), g(X), h(X),…

For me it’s more like just f(X), g(X), h(X),…, but all of them aspects of X, via “the forum.” Crucially, f(X), for instance, is not “mindstuff” but “the entire world” ( in the context of a genial pluralism) from a situated “standpoint” within that world. The empirical subject is another object in the world, also given in aspects.

To me this works best if “consciousness” is the “mere presence” of world-from-POV. The “for-me-ness” of the hallucination is “there in its quality.” There is no “witness consciousness,” as this is already too much reification, though I understand the motive.

That’s a deep question ! Because “empirical subjects” have their “being” only through the enacting of a eidos. The responsible soul is an institution, perhaps the primary institution. Bodies are “trained” into performing their temporal unity. “I” am still responsible tomorrow for what “I” did yesterday.

Beyond that, I “believe in novelty.” So complex numbers were “invented.” And yet invention is not instantaneous, and the implications of an invention are themselves disclosed or discovered.

This is a rich issue. How does the past exist ? Is it even “good” to assume “the” past, as if “the” past is fixed and singular ? Once the wheel is invented, it is “understood” as “having been possible all along.” As the “essence” of the world is updated, it is retrojected also.

An ontological perspectivist “should” talk about “the” past “from” a point of view. Or is that too much ? This is mundane in one sense, because people debate “what really happened” all the time. But mostly they assume “the” past and try to “represent it” “correctly.”

250

But that comportment is the intending.

It is not the case that a perception first becomes intentional by having something physical enter into relation with the psychic, and that it would no longer be intentional if this reality did not exist. It is rather the case that perception, correct or deceptive, is in itself intentional. Intentionality is not a property which would accrue to perception and belongs to it in certain instances. As perception, it is intrinsically intentional, regardless of whether the perceived is in reality on hand or not. Indeed, it is really only because perception as such is a directing-itself-toward something, because intentionality constitutes the very structure of comportment itself, that there can be anything like deceptive perception and hallucination. When all epistemological assumptions are set aside, it becomes clear that comportment itself-as yet quite apart from the question of its correctness or incorrectness-is in its very structure a directing-itself toward. It is not the case that at first only a psychic process occurs as a nonintentional state (complex of sensations, memory relations, mental image and thought processes through which an image is evoked, where one then asks whether something corresponds to it) and subsequently becomes intentional in certain instances. Rather, the very being of comporting is a directing-itself-toward.
Intentionality is not a relationship to the non-experiential added to experiences, occasionally present along with them. Rather, the lived experiences themselves are as such intentional. This is our first specification, perhaps still quite empty, but already important enough to provide the footing for holding metaphysical prejudices at bay.

My “comportment” changes as the lurking stranger becomes “just a long shadow.” To me this looks connected to the “significance” of the lifeworld. It “matters” to me in various ways. The furniture is to be stepped around. The ringing phone is to-be-answered. The telemarketer is to-be-got-rid-of.

The bolded part suggests to me the “subject-like structure” of world-from-perspective.

251

I can relate to this in terms of an “identity theory of belief.” If I “say what it’s like for me,” then I report on the world-from-my-perspective. That world is (roughly) “what is the case (for me).” It is “articulated quality.”

We can imagine/remember and predict/recall this articulated quality. Somehow signs “express” it.

The “mirror” metaphor is strongest here. The “meaning” of my prediction turns out to be “what perceptually happened.” For me it’s important that memory and fantasy have their own “quality.” A song remembered has a quality “like and unlike” the song heard. The internal monologue is not “pure meaning” but the qualitative imagination of the iterable phonemes. A flesh of breath bare. No “escape” from “quality.” We live “between being and nonbeing” or “idea” and “quality,” which is to say only their fusion. So there is no “pure eidos” apart from its “instantiations.” The number “is” an open plurality of numerals.

252

Yes, I think our best theories are true, no scare-quotes needed. I go back and forth on whether this entails a belief in scientific realism, and if so, of what strength. In the debate between “compulsory” scientific realists and those who accept that some scientific stances can be “voluntary,” especially around issues of evidence, I generally find myself agreeing with the stance voluntarists, but the question is far from resolved in my mind – or, dare I say, in anyone’s.

I’m curious to know how these questions were prompted by our discussion of how forms should be understood. Do you see scientific realism as being committed to some formal resemblance between mind and world?

And it looks “rightest” when we make it a question about the correspondence between the world and language. Here, the description you give seems sensible. The problems emerge, for me, when we ask about the correspondence between world and concept. This is a question about how our mental construals map onto an external world. We’re now asking about “meaning”, and whether the meaning-correspondence is arbitrary, in the way that the language-correspondence is. Of course many philosophers scorn this, and prefer to see the whole thing as about language.

Yes, I’m sure these considerations play a part. Would you agree to call them psychological or anthropological explanations? If so, then I can ask: But is there a further, strictly philosophical explanation that plays even a partial role in understanding the attraction to the convergent goal, the impossible “view from nowhere”?

253

So how do you resolve the common complaint that Newtonian physics turned out to be “false” and that disagreement between quantum mechanics and relativity would seem to suggest that both will be overturned in the future? Or there is phlogiston theory, etc., that normally get called up here.

This is normally an issue pragmatist theories of truth push on.

254

Your Heidegger quote is from the 1925 work, History of the Concept of Time. It is the precursor to Being and Time. In this early work Heidegger is still using Husserlian vocabulary of intentionality, perception and lived experience. He is soon to reject all three terms as too Cartesian. What makes the subject-like structure of world-from-perspective in Heidegger radically different than the phenomenological subject is that for him the “center” of disclosure is not an already constituted subject that subsequently enters into relation with a world. Rather, the self only comes to be in and through the projection of a world. As Derrida writes:

That the self projects itself does not mean that this self exists first and then projects itself or not, but that the self constitutes itself in projecting itself. The self is this projection. Authenticity is this projection when it is taken up.

255

I see what you’re saying better now. I guess there are two issues I like to try to disambiguate with constructivism.

The first is pretty straightforward. If we appeal to usefulness as the driver of categorization (which in turn seems essential to inquiry and defining causes at all) we will still have the question of why these particular categories have proven useful? Why do all cultures distinguish between the living and non-living, different kinds of organism or mineral, etc.? Our understanding of usefulness itself has its causes, which seem to lie, in part, in what is being categorized.

This can become circular in a vicious way however (maybe Locke’s real versus nominal essence is one potential example).

But the second way issue is that desire itself can be well-ordered or poorly ordered. We tend to say that desire is well-ordered vis-á-vis inquiry when it primarily ordered to truth. Yet what exactly can our construction of categories be ordered to if these categories can be any which way?

And how can formal causality be anything other than an extrinsic description (purely narrative) if form is itself dependent on our narratives?

If there weren’t “things” then was there nothing, or nothing in particular? Formal causality would seem to require some determinate actuality, and so things in at least some sense.

Indeed, the analytic mereology where composition (and so categories) become more or less arbitrary ends up where it does because it rejects formal/final causality (or try to build it back in downstream of mechanism). But assuming explanations can work just as well with discontinuous trout and fox halves, or one half of the moon and one half of a ham sandwich, presupposes the thing in question re formal causality, i.e., that wholes are not causally efficacious (are reducible to their component parts).

Now, it seems rather implausible, on any account where reason is not epiphenomenal, that a man might just as truly be described as not one whole, but three or nine (because this seems to imply that the unity of the whole—man—is causally inert since ignoring the unity has no effect on explanation). This seems just as true for rabbits. Maybe it is less obvious for bacteria. But it also isn’t obvious that stars and weather patterns lack this same sort of unity entirely.

Plus, surely in this history of science there are some good examples where it simply does seem that the categorization itself is wrong, no?

Anyhow, I guess my main response would be that it still seems like we are making an illicit leap/collapse between the phenomenology of human inquiry and metaphysics. I don’t think the fact that our categories could be otherwise says anything much about the status of formal causality and the existence of “natural kinds.” Afterall, everyone agrees we can describe the world in any which way (through fiction, lying, ignorance, etc.), if we choose to, but this is hardly taken as evidence that the way the world is becomes dependent on our descriptions.

But I guess I’m also not particularly concerned about having a distinction between 'things as known" and ‘things as they are,’ because I don’t think such a distinction requires anything like the Kantian “thing-in-itself.” Kant’s problem shows up, down stream of Hume and Galileo, because causes have already been rendered extrinsic and so unintelligible except as an imposition from without.

Now, a common objection to something like “natural kinds” is vagueness, but it seems like the problem mostly comes from assuming that natural kinds just reduce to neat binaries that can be plugged into a formalism. I am not sure if we shouldn’t expect that a cyclone or star be less well delineated than a cow or man. In particular, vagueness objections that demand a framing in terms of specific particles ensembles and the like seem to have already assumed the reductionism they are intended to argue to as a conclusion. So, for instance, life is said to be vague because mapping the moment of death in terms of chemistry is difficult, and yet clearly there is hardly anything less vague than one’s child being alive versus dead. The vagueness becomes problematic in a frame that already assumes the whole is not primary to explanation.

256

So a person might recategorize an intentional object when they “realize” that it’s just a long shadow. But what is the nature of this “realization”? And why should it lead to a recategorization?

But if it’s only the “deciding” that matters here, then why not just “decide” that you have a million dollars in your bank account for some other reason? Then you’d get to go on that shopping spree after all!

Yes, this seems like a bit of an issue. If “it’s all real”, then there’s no basis for saying that the lurking man wasn’t real. But then there’s also no basis for saying that the lurking man isn’t real now. Sure, you’ve switched beliefs, but your beliefs might switch back at exactly the wrong time. Or worse, perhaps someone else still believes in the lurking man. And in that case, he’s still out there waiting to strike.

But what does it mean to say that there are aspects of X — f(X), g(X), h(X) — if there’s no X?

You previously said that it’s the eidos that ties aspects together making them aspects of one thing. Then the question arises: is the eidos that ties the aspects together within my experience the very same eidos that ties aspects together within the experience of others? And if so, then eidos starts to look a lot like an objective intelligible structure against which the contents of individual claims can be judged. Thoughts?

257

I didn’t think it had turned out to be false, so much as incomplete. Doesn’t it still give all the right answers to the questions it was intended to answer? I’m not very sophisticated about this, so maybe not.

Anyway, to your point: If I thought a belief was true, but was shown it was not, I guess I’d say, “I thought it was true, but I was wrong.” The important phrase is “I think.” To hold the concept of “truth” doesn’t commit one to infallibility, or even to an epistemology that guarantees we will know the truth.

258

I agree, and I have been presenting just this idea from the beginning, from my POV.

Consciousness is “presence of world,” nothing “in” a “subject.” Not a stuff has “contains” a mediation of the “true world.”

The witness is given with what should no longer be called the witnessed. Wittgenstein says something similar in the TLP, as does Sartre in The Transcendence of the Ego. Mach’s Self-Portrait is a picture worth a thousand words along these lines. It’s this idea that concerns me, which I try to present as worthy of consideration.

Here’s a good passage from Ontology : Hermeneutics of Facticity, one of my favorite early works. I tend to prefer the lectures leading up to B&T.

What is being encountered is there as “a means to,” “useful for,” “of importance for.” Its being-there is based on its being-there-in-order- to-do-this and being-there-for-this. It is ready-to-hand from out of and on the basis of its definite there-in-order-to-do-this and there- for-this. This being-ready-to-hand, being-at-our-disposal, constitutes its availability in advance. The definiteness of the there-in-order-to-do- this and that of the there-for-this are not merely applied to and predicated of beings-which-are-there [Da-seienden] initially without them, but rather the reverse: precisely they are what is primary and what for the very first time presses what we encounter forth into its authentic encountered being-there [Da-sein] and holds it enclosed in this being-there.

If we are to gain a correct understanrung of the phenomenal structure of availability in advance, it is important to see that the in-order-to and for-what make up the originally given “there” which is closest to us and not to explain them as something we come across subsequently in the sense of an external point of view imposed on and affixed to what is already there.

1 Like
259

A great question, which might belong in Plato’s Parmenides !

Let’s make this concrete and go back to an influence on Plato. Can I step in the same river twice ? I’d say yes. Though maybe Heraclitus would say yes. So his point is that the same river is also always different. The one and the many. The tension between the “category” and the “categorized.” Which came first ? Does that question make sense ? Does the Left causes the Right to exist ?

Is the “same-river-ness” there in a “sensuous” manner ? Yes and no. I mean it’s the “same river” that is cold this morning on my bare feet. But my “experience” is “articulated” — has a “significance” that includes this enduring-but-ever-new-river-for-me-and-others.

We are trying to gesture toward “sense itself.”

260

To me all of this is the easy stuff.

Of course the “appearance-reality” distinction is pragmatically central.