Yes, but there is a similar risk when treating our models, theories, beliefs as absolute, as essentially “truth itself” and then making “usefulness” (our will) the ultimate measure of truth.
As I noted in the thread on knowledge, I am not sure if equating truth with models, etc. doesn’t just replicate the earlier Enlightenment mistakes, by demanding foreclosure and simplicity, where openess is wanted.
I’ll just restate what I said there:
Making our current beliefs and desires the measure of truth seems absolutizing, closing us off from what lays beyond us, which risks a sort of calcifying dogmatism. On this view, we exhaust truth/being with our own thinking and desiring, particularly formal/conceptual thinking. To be sure, we might change a model when it fails to be “useful,” but then presumably questions about what is truly useful, or what ought to constitute “success” are also based on models (or something similar). Aside from the problem of this slipping into a sort of voluntarism where current desire becomes the ground of truth, it seems to result in a sort of hubris precisely where there are often claims to humility. The claim to humility is: “I am not appealing to any ultimate/transcendent/[insert undefined loaded term here] truth, just what works,” but the potential hubris is, “therefore, we are entitled to treat our model as equivalent with truth per se” (thus foreclosing on any truth beyond our own intellect and will).
Now, Adorno reaches this sort of concern with exhausting being from the direction of the elevation of the “material” (loosely speaking), whereas I would like to do it from the direction of the inexhaustibility of the intelligbile, but I think either justification can identify the same potential risk here.
Another way to frame it would be that the intellect becomes entirely constructive, with receptivity foreclosed on (and often, the will placed definitively prior to the intellect).
Here is the problem in a nutshell: if I claim, from the outset, that I can have no claim on truth, then it follows that the truth can have no claim on me. But then this isn’t really humility, since it absolutizes the self, and immunizes it from any correction that isn’t itself grounded in what is considered “useful” (i.e., the desires of the self).
But rejecting absolute truth doesn’t remove a range of constraints. Any beliefs are still answerable to evidence, logic, and communal standards of justification. Are you possibly presenting a false dichotomy here? Are we are governed only by truth or desires of the self? Isn’t fallibilism a third option? The claims we make are continuously revised under pressure from experience and criticism without appeal to metaphysical certainty. “Usefulness” is not mere preference but what survives testing, prediction, and intersubjective scrutiny. Meaning that the self is not “absolutized” as you say but continually corrected within shared practices, so the charge of self-immunisation only applies to a crude subjectivism, not to more developed pragmatist positions.
I confess, I still find your Scholastic vocabulary hard to parse (actuality, potency . . . ). But I think I see what you’re saying, and I agree that you’ve pinpointed the question: whether there is “some noumenal reality that is ‘behind’ appearances.” You say that you reject this, and that it seems to be what I assume.
Actually, I reject it in some cases but not others (it would be a long digression to explain how and why), but maintain that the way you’ve laid things out doesn’t allow you to do so at all. I’m saying that any notion of better and worse, more or less accurate, appearances commits one to the idea that there is a reality behind the appearance. “Behind” is of course a spatial metaphor, but it doesn’t matter which one you choose.
I’ll use your Mahler example to illustrate.
You say, rightly, that no set of performances can “exhaust” the symphony. Again, we’re dealing with a metaphor, but I’m taking this to mean that there can still be further performances that will reveal aspects of the work that are new and valuable. But there are also performances that do not do this – inadequate appearances, if you like. My question to you is, How do we know this, if there is nothing to Mahler’s Second but its performances? I’m guessing you’d reply, We have the score. Precisely: we have a non-performative entity (not mysterious at all) that lies “behind” all performances. Can you say how this differs from the sort of thing you believe is “the reality of the symphony”?
Right, or another way to put this is that knowledge is progressively actualized. The ways in which knowledge are actualized for man, the “political animal,” are abound up in history, culture, etc. So, much as Hegel says moral understanding is progressively made objective through institutions and historical development, one could say the same for science, as it is made concrete through techne, ways of life dependent upon new arts and technology, and institutions.
But, for something to become actual in history and culture is must exist potentially first.
In general, most philosophies avoid saying the intellect is either wholly receptive or wholly constructive. Indeed, to be receptive is itself a structured power (ordered potency). Whereas, if the intellect is wholly constructive, it ceases to “construct” and begins to create ex nihilo. But it seems easy for philosophies to drift towards the former.
For one, if all causal priority is temporal (an assumption of mechanism) and the truth of “the Earth is round” is dependent on language, are we committed to the absurdity that Earth lacked shape prior to man?
Likewise, in terms of ontological priority, the same problem emerges with radical formulations of nominalism and theories of composition. Was nothing round or a plant, etc. prior to man? If we say that we specify universal terms and wholes in terms of what is “useful” this appeal to use can indeed be informative vis-á-vis the historical development of knowledge. The problem crops up when we refuse any measure by which a universal or whole can be said to be “truly useful,” as opposed to merely apparently so. If there is no measure for error, and a term is “useful” just in case we currently happen to use it, then the explanation amounts to “we use the universal terms we do and recognize the wholes we do because those are the terms and wholes we currently use,” which is not only viciously circular, but utterly vacuous.
Yes, I recall the mousetrap analogy. You said that a better mousetrap is better at capturing mice than a worse one. So what is a better belief better at capturing than a worse belief?
Also, you keep pushing this false dichotomy between truth and situatedness. But we don’t need to deny situatedness, finitude, uncertainty or any other truth about the human condition in order to acknowledge the transcendental necessity of truth. All that’s required is to recognize that inquiry itself presupposes the existence of that which outstrips currently justified belief (the for-us vs. the in-itself).
Nor must we construe truth in terms of mirroring in any crude sense. Most of what we know is given in terms of intelligible relations. Understanding is not a “mirroring” but a “grasping” of these relations, and knowing is not an decontextualized view-point, but a situated affirmation of what is the case.
The distinction between lateral and transversal dimensions of subjectivity is helpful. That said, I think there’s yet a third dimension that @j_j is overlooking (or perhaps, underselling): the vertical dimension, which is the immanent and norm-governed movement from experiencing (confrontation with giveness), to understanding (grasping of intelligible relations within what’s given) to knowing (affirmation of the real existence of what is grasped) within the agent itself. This is something that is most explicitly thematized in the Thomistic tradition, though it shows up in Kant, Husserl and their progeny to varying degrees as well. The vertical dimension grounds both the lateral and the transversal in the subjective operations of the individual knower, without which there could be neither giveness, nor socially articulated meaning.
Define what you mean by absolute here? You often attach predicates like “absolute” and “transcendent” to truth and it’s unclear to me what they are using.
If there appears to be a false dichotomy here, it would seem to me to lie in what is being assumed in those terms. In particular, I am not sure how “metaphysical certainty” and a rejection of falibalism are getting mixed up in this.
And what determines what constitutes “good” evidence, “good” argument, and “good” standards of justification?. Surely, these can be better or worse, no? Or would a standard of justification be good just in case the community holds it?
But it seems obvious that survival is not the same thing as truth. And at any rate, something merely surviving would not appear to give it any normative force. And if we say that whatever survives (whatever we keep doing) = what is useful, then the explanation of universals, composition, etc. in terms of usefulness ends up being vacuous.
The problem isn’t an appeal to usefulness per se, its the reduction of what is “useful” to whatever just so happens to be used.
Whereas “success” is clearly more normative than “survival,” but then what is the measure for success?
The more relevant rejection is not of the noumenal itself, but of the idea that any distinction between appearances and reality can only ever be cashed out in the Enlightenment notion of the phenomenal versus the noumenal (subject/object dualism).
I use older terminology precisely because more recent terminology is defined with the metaphysical assumptions that lead to this outcome (or is repurposed older terminology; objective and subjective essentially now have the opposite of their original meanings).
As to the metaphor, the score is not the reality of the symphony in the relevant sense either. It’s also a means of accessing reality. You could burn every score and the symphony would still be what it is. Burning all the scores of the Second wouldn’t make a recording of it into a different symphony. The score is just another *mode of givenness;" albiet a particularly stable and revisable one. The score isn’t some mysterious thing-in-itself though. We can access it.
The reality of the symphony is its form, which is the intelligible structure that the score encodes, and which performances instantiate, analysis articulates, musical understanding grasps, etc. The form is not reducible to some canonical presentation or corporeal object, yet it is genuinely knowable, being precisely what is known when you know a symphony.
The reality isn’t mysterious or hidden, or a sort of remainder. It’s just not a thing in the narrow empiricist sense.
Perhaps I’m focusing on the wrong thing but I thought the discussion was about pragmatic truth, something that proves reliable and survives testing in practice, versus absolute truth, what is supposed to hold independently of experience, use, or human perspective.
No idea. You’d have to consider particular examples. In the case of medicine it might be that a drug works. And we may even not know why it works, like lithium.
Is pragmatism circular in the way you suggest? Sometimes, perhaps. But the point surely would be that a pragmatic approach is continually refined over time through criticism, results, and new ideas. Isn’t that how knowledge develops?
I would have thought that success is measured by how well beliefs solve problems, predict outcomes, and remain open to revision, not just by mere acceptance or survival.
I completely agree with you here. The object is given but only ever partially given. Time hides as its shows. Each aspect occludes a vague, infinite system of other potential aspects. What Husserl describes below about spatial objects is easily generalized to things like difficult texts, which leads us toward Gadamer’s Truth and Method.
External perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that, by its very nature, it is not in a position to accomplish. Thus, it harbors an essential contradiction, as it were. My meaning will soon become clear to you once you intuitively grasp how the objective sense exhibits itself as a unity in the unending manifolds of possible appearances; and seen upon closer inspection, how the continual synthesis, as a unity of coinciding, allows the same sense to appear, and how a consciousness of ever new possibilities of appearance constantly persists over against the factual, limited courses of appearance, transcending them.”
“Let us begin by noting that the aspect, the perspectival adumbration through which every spatial object invariably appears, only manifests the spatial object from one side. No matter how completely we may perceive a thing, it is never given in perception with the characteristics that qualify it and make it up as a sensible thing from all sides at once. We cannot avoid speaking of such and such sides of the object that are actually perceived. Every aspect, every continuity of single adumbrations, regardless how far this continuity may extend, offers us only sides. And to our mind this is not just a statement of fact: it is inconceivable that external perception would exhaust the sensible-material content of its perceived object; it is inconceivable that a perceptual object could be given in the entirety of its sensibly intuitive features, literally, from all sides at once in a self-contained perception.
Exactly. The sensible/intelligible distinction is a product of theory. Our default mode of being is circumspective coping, “at home” among familiar objects, handling them more than theorizing about them.
To me this appeals to the non-instantaneousness of selfhood: The performance of selfhood is essentially temporal or “stretched” between past and future, as it acts in the present.
Just for clarity, I’m very much pro-open-ness. And I’m explicitly against the move associated with pragmatists that defines truth in terms of utility. I’m suggesting that we can just drop truth as a theoretical concept altogether. Even truth minimalists still seem confused to me. Instead of defining belief as “taking to be true” and then trying to figure out what truth is, we can take belief as the fundamental concept and just discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various beliefs. To me the smashing of the mirror metaphor seems very open indeed.
I wouldn’t equate truth with models. I’d equate beliefs with models, and treating a belief as a model is keeping some distance from it. I call a belief a “model” when I hold it tentatively and self-consciously as a belief that might not work out. Or some other person’s belief/model that I may even reject or find serious fault in. I need not accuse the beliefs of others of failing to mirror a pre-articulated true reality. I can just think they are inferior to other models/beliefs.
As Gadamer puts it, we are “constituted by prejudice.” We never get behind our having been thrown. If I try to doubt everything, I do so in English, trusting “blindly” and “unconsciously” in semantic norms. For me it’s not plausible to lay down some theoretical foundation on some ur-terrain unpolluted by inherited belief.
I appeal again to the “animal” situation of needing the pain to stop. This pain is a particular animal’s pain. Pain is “owned” or “situated.” One problem with “truth is whatever works” is that it leaves out who the belief is working for.
In general, I do not want to define “truth” at all. I think it suffices, for science and philosophy, to work with belief. What makes one belief better than another ? I’d call this a pseudo-question, because it is yet again “de-situated” or “dis-owned” or “inauthentic.” A belief is better or worse than a rival belief according to someone. This is of course my own self-consciously owned-situated belief about belief. It is not, incoherently, presented as mirroring true reality.
I understand that concern if it’s aimed at someone else. As I see it, the subject is without an interior. The self is just one more entity in the world. But a philosopher embraces the second-order tradition described by Popper in Conjectures and Refutations. Rational discussion, as rational, transcends every participant but not participants in general.
In my view, any rational explication of our shared situation has to account for perspective and what makes the situation ours and the normative concept of rationality meaningful.
According to Apel, in light of these innovative traditions, the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant must be fundamentally reconceived. In particular, the conditions for intersubjectively valid knowledge cannot be explicated in terms of the structure of consciousness or the cognitive capacities of the individual knowing subject but only through a systematic investigation of language as the medium of symbolically mediated knowledge. The pragmatic turn, initiated by Peirce and Charles W. Morris (1901–1979) and continued in the early twenty-first century in speech act theory, further implies that an adequate explanation of how meaningful communication is possible cannot be achieved by a semantic theory alone. Rather, it must be supplemented by a pragmatic study of the relation between linguistic signs and the conditions of their use by speakers. Apel’s strong thesis is that his transcendental semiotics yields a set of normative conditions and validity claims presupposed in any critical discussion or rational argumentation. Central among these is the presupposition that a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a member of a counterfactual, ideal communication community that is in principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the force of the better argument. Any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge (scientific or moral-practical) implicitly acknowledges this ideal communication community as a metainstitution of rational argumentation, to be its ultimate source of justification.
I should emphasize that “better-in-God’s-eyes” just repeats the unneeded move I’m criticizing as empty. I don’t believe in "the-best-mousetrap-in-God’s-eyes. Whether Mousetrap A is better than Mousetrap B is a situated or owned judgement.
I think the Apel quote handles this well enough. All inquiry requires, if even that, is pain and/or confusion. Rational inquiry requires “the forum.” But discordant ontological perspectivism allows for the forum, without the assumption of an already “articulated” truth-making substrate.
In short, we can believe that our current beliefs can be improved somehow without the assumption that beliefs are trying to mirror the world as a philosopher’s god understands it.
To me a “situated affirmation of what is the case” is more simply described as an articulation of situated belief. I “live in” my belief as “how things are ( for me ).” This is why I call my own beliefs “true,” even if this addition of “true” is redundant.
I haven’t been following closely. Are you influenced by Rorty here; all that talk of mirrors?
I’m never sure where the idea of true comes in except in correspondent cases such as London is in England or empirical cases such as cigarette smoking is bad for humans. Strikes me calling such things true has utility. How would you frame these matters?
How do you determine the advantages and disadvantages of particular beliefs? What counts as better or worse? Do you just follow Rorty’s example and say we can assess a belief if it works more effectively for our purposes, helping us cope, solve problems, and gain agreement within a community.
The word “true” is handy for indicating belief. I definitely wouldn’t try to talk people out of using the word in ordinary life.
To me the assertion that “smoking is unhealthy” is best thought of as the expression of a belief. To say “it’s true that smoking is unhealthy” is to say, basically, " ( I believe that ) smoking is unhealthy." The word “true” is redundant. Handy for most people, but ( as I see it ) confusing for philosophers who want to articulate how “empirical science” is best understood.
To me it’s very important to emphasize here that individuals offer their own judgements, as individuals, that one idea is better than other. As I see it, there is no leaping beyond standpoint. I can explain why I prefer Belief #49. Some may adopt Belief #49 themselves. A change in belief is a change in the “structure” of the world from the believer’s POV.
Does this mean you don’t see philosophy as part of ordinary life?
I am also assuming for you a belief proves itself justified and useful within our shared practices of inquiry and conversation, while “false” beliefs are those that fail under those same standards.
It’s a bit more complex than just “I believe,” isn’t it? Not all beliefs are equal. Here I believe on the basis of a vast body of evidence and decades of scientific inquiry, so I’m really trusting claims that have been built up through a rigorous evidential process within an intersubjective community. Or something cumbersome like this. Thoughts?
Well, we could have a lively discussion about whether this is a good idea! My own two cents is that you make yourself much more difficult to understand than you need to, and the jargon obscures many excellent insights. But, as we know, that puts you in good company, philosophically . . .
It’s definitely not reducible to any single instantiation, for all the reasons you give. But my question remains:
And I’ll add, if it helps, “or the score”. Your answer, it seems, would involve the form of the work, the particular arrangement of music within silence. What I’m getting at is, at what point can a normative account begin to surface?
I’m sure it’s obvious how this question can be extended to the overall topic of the OP. I’m still pondering @Pierre-Normand 's thoughts on this.
Ah I see, but this is exactly the false dichotomy I am also trying to dispell with my posts to @Jay and @j_j. At least, it seems to me that these conversations very easily drift towards truth requiring the post-Reformation dichotomies of objective versus subjective, phenomenal versus noumenal, mind-independent (physical) versus mind-dependent (mental), etc. Or at the very least, problems that emerge from these dichotomies are used to advance opposing metaphysical theses, using arguments of the form:
Either A or B,
Not-A
C. Therefore B.
Where A (this view of “mind-independent truth”) and B (alternative metaphysics of truth where truth becomes posterior to human desire and culture) are clearly not mutually exclusive, precisely because A is itself a relatively late historical development related to the concerns of Western Europe during a distinct period.
Indeed, as I’ve said before, defining moral realism as the belief in “mind-independent” or “objective” moral truths itself seems misleading in some ways, in that it arguably excludes plenty of people we think of as classically realist. The issue here is akin to how “natural law” ethics has becomes a form of “non-naturalism” in analytic parlance. Terms are defined in ways that are loaded (which is, to be fair, unavoidable). The problem is when this isn’t recognized, which leads to false dichotomies.
One thing to keep in mind is that Truth and Goodness are recognized as conceptual, not real distinctions in the classical tradition. There is not a thing, and then some separate, other thing, its truth (as in analytic theories of propositions as abstract objects), or its goodness (as in theories derived from voluntarism, where goodness is imputed extrinsically through divine command, or later man’s will, or reason’s self-legislation, etc).
I should probably stress that I find plenty of use for appeals to “usefulness” in descriptions of how ethics and universals, etc. are developed, or how things work in practice. But what we have been discussing in this thread and others is a metaphysical thesis about the nature of truth.
And if I were to try to boil this down to its essence, I would say the main difference lies in the ontic and causal priority of truth, my qualm being with truth becoming posterior to specific embodiments of in culture, history, individual understanding, etc. No doubt, these are constitutive of truth/understanding in the human mode (tropos) of knowing, however. Hence, a secondary issue here is the absolutization of the human tropos re knowledge into truth/knowledge tout court, such that truth is posterior to man.
I would like to say rather that truth is much wider, simply “being qua knowable/intelligible.” So, truth must first be “in” things, analogously, then “in” the senses, and most properly “in” the intellect. But this is precisely where a vertical dimension and the flexibility of analogy is wanted, because otherwise truth must be the same in all its modes.
This has nothing to do with being “better in God’s eyes”. Focus on what actually happens when you judge that one mousetrap catches more mice than another. In that act, you affirm that the conditions for your judgement have been fulfilled — this mousetrap really has caught more mice than the other trap. The fact that judgement is situated and owned doesn’t undermine the fact that the structure of the act itself depends on the very distinction you wish to deny.
Your appeals to “the philosopher’s God” are a red herring. Pain and confusion are an impetus, not a terminus. And, as previously argued, appeals to the forum only push the issue back rather than resolving it. You haven’t yet addressed those arguments head on. The forum cannot account for its own normative authority, and treating it as the ultimate source of normative authority and object synthesis renders the possibility of intellectual progress and individual insight/dissent unintelligible.
But it’s not redundant. People who can’t distinguish between “my current beliefs” and “the way the world actually is” aren’t capable of engaging in rational inquiry and discourse. Imagine trying to engage with someone who genuinely couldn’t make this distinction. There would be no basis for rational discussion with them.
I’ve had a chance to think over your interesting take on these questions. I’d say you’re substantially on the right track, but maybe you can clarify one thing:
I’m struck by the repeated use of “we”, “us”, and “our” in this account. Ordinarily, such terms are neutral, only indicating that the perspective being offered is meant to be more than personal. But on this topic, the question of the “we” seems more loaded.
So – who do you mean to indicate by “our” in the above quote, for instance? Whose practices need to be taken into account when we examine the “progressively stabilized field” of the shared world? Should we be picturing a Habermasian space of public communication? At what point can some particular “we” begin to stand in for a larger, philosophical claim to intersubjectivity?
Great account, although it’s a little abstruse for me. I guess this matter comes down to our presuppositions. I don’t have a background in philosophy, so comparative metaphysics isn’t my bag, and all knowledge seems to me to be entirely human: it all looks like perspective from where I stand. The idea that truth is somehow present in reality itself isn’t something I can get behind. But I have plenty of friends who think the way you do.
Keeping things simple, what does it mean for you personally to hold such a view of truth? What does it add to your everyday choices and decisions?
Of course all beliefs are situated, but it doesn’t follow that they are all undecidable. We can tell whether any particular belief is undecidable according to whether we can provide empirical evidence or logical justification for it.