Pragmatism and truth

Metaphysics & Epistemology
121

That’s a fair question! I did not primarily mean a particular empirical community like, say, modern Westerners, TPF participants, scientists, or the members of some Habermasian public sphere. And I didn’t either mean that truth is constituted by whatever some actual “we” happens to agree upon. I may be referring to what it is j_j refers to as “the forum” (singular) though my account of truth may be somewhat different than theirs. Contingently being a participant in our specifically human form of life just is what it is to be a member of the forum.

My use of “we” was therefore meant in a more Wittgensteinian and practical-transcendental sense. A judgment can be my judgment only if it is an exercise of a capacity that is repeatable, correctable, and intelligible as the same kind of act across occasions. If I judge that something is blue today, and later wonder whether I judged rightly, or whether I now mean by “blue” what I meant before, I am already treating my judgment as belonging to a persistent pattern of use. That pattern is not an instantaneous private occurrence. It belongs to a form of life.

And such a form of life is essentially shareable, even when it is not actually shared by everyone. The same features that make my judgments answerable to my own past and future uses also make them, in principle, answerable to the uses, corrections, and challenges of others who can participate in the same practice of giving and asking for reasons (both reasons for believing things and for doing things). My having two takes at different times on the same object is not, in this respect, fundamentally different from two speakers having different takes on the same object at the same time. Both cases presuppose criteria of sameness, correction, and possible disagreement.

So the “we” in my formulation is not a sociological placeholder for a privileged community. It names the essentially shareable structure of judgment and agency (which also constitutes a locus for potential disagreement). Of course, actual communities are historically situated, unequal, fallible, and often in conflict. But the very possibility of criticizing a community’s standards, expanding them, translating between allegedly different “forms of life,” or discovering that some voices were wrongly excluded already presupposes that judgment is not a sealed private episode. It is answerable both to the world (our world) and to norms that can, in principle, be endorsed, challenged, and revised by others.

122

To me there’s ( roughly ) life philosophy and philosophy of science.

Basically. But I am adding a perspectivist point. Judgement is owned or situated or personal, just like perception. People can disagree about whether a particular belief is justified as they disagree about whether the chili is too spicy. I can’t find any sense in vague phrases about “actually justified,” as if in the judgment of a philosophers’ god.

To me belief is not internal psychical stuff. It’s the way the world shows up for someone and the way they act in that world. I’ll gladly grant you that I judge some beliefs to be far better than others, basically those “built up through a rigorous evidential process within an intersubjective community.”

My point is that we don’t need to paint such beliefs with the word “true.” In practical terms, it’s harmless. But it’s messy to try to include truth in a positivistic explication of our shared situation. Ayer’s LTL is one of my favorite books, and generally I love logical positivism, but even they, for all their virtues, didn’t sufficiently address “standpoint.” For instance, they might talk of “nonsense” in the sense of “nonsense in God’s eyes.” Which is nonsense, in my view.

123

Thanks. I am certainly sympathetic to your description.

I guess they are saying that a given statement or position is so lacking in meaning that not even an omniscient being can identify any truth. Irony?

124

People can more or less agree on a metric, if we ignore for now the ambiguity that haunts communication. But perception is already situated, so two people might not agree on how many mice were caught. The world shows itself differently to each of them.

We need a relatively coherent shared world ( generally overlapping beliefs) for the forum to function, but I don’t see that we need to assume the faultless univocity of the world.

I grant the forum includes shared objects. When I share my take on Middlemarch with Joe, I am pointing with words to a maybe-unseen-by-Joe aspect of this novel. I do assume that the novel is available to Joe, if only “through” Joe’s situated appropriation. Joe might think my take is bad or find it unintelligible, without doubting that he and I both intend the same book.

In this thread, I am trying to point out a certain “absoluteness” of perspective. “From-a-point-of-view-ness” goes all the way down.

Of course. As Peirce saw.

The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry, though it must be admitted that this is sometimes not a very apt designation.

The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief. It is certainly best for us that our beliefs should be such as may truly guide our actions so as to satisfy our desires; and this reflection will make us reject every belief which does not seem to have been so formed as to insure this result. But it will only do so by creating a doubt in the place of that belief. With the doubt, therefore, the struggle begins, and with the cessation of doubt it ends. Hence, the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion. We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion. But put this fancy to the test, and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false. And it is clear that nothing out of the sphere of our knowledge can be our object, for nothing which does not affect the mind can be the motive for mental effort. The most that can be maintained is, that we seek for a belief that we shall think to be true. But we think each one of our beliefs to be true, and, indeed, it is mere tautology to say so.

Peirce is already on the edge of the point I’m trying to make.

The forum is just the “interpersonal structure” presupposed by rational conversation. It is not an entity, like God, who makes one person actually-right and another actually-wrong. It’s just our sharing of a single world that is manifest differently to each of us. But manifest in the same enough way so that debate is possible. Discordant ontological perspectivism is still mostly harmonious.

A person’s current beliefs are the “structure” of the-world-for-that-person. I will grant you that any rational person understands that the world has more to show them. We understand this implicitly, and there’d be no point in perceptual reports, etc.

All that’s required is that people are willing to revise their current beliefs and/or adopt new beliefs.

I think we agree on the forum ( as the set or system of conditions for the possibility of science), but I leave out truth as not necessary after all.

125

Thanks, good response.

OK, so it’s the precise articulation of what it is to be “essentially shareable” that concerns us here. You note that @j_j 's “the forum” may be a similar idea, and their response below bears that out:

I too believe that something like this must be right. But I remain uneasy about phrases like “essentially shareable” and “our sharing of a single world”, phrases which seem to gloss over the need for clearer description and analysis, and just assume that we already understand what these phrases refer to.

It may be that, in practice, we do already understand – but here the question of “we” re-emerges. I personally may display no doubts or confusions about how to inquire and justify within the forum or the shared world, but now we’re talking about a situated practice, not something that can be shown to be essential or somehow necessitated by McDowell’s “space of reasons” itself. That is, my practice may be secure, because it’s situated in a comfortable, clear shared world for me. But my philosophical understanding still needs further depth. I know what I do, but I don’t know how I am able to do it, nor do I know what the normative implications are. Of course some philosophical perspectives would claim that the distinction is meaningless, but I don’t think it is.

126

For whom? Any recording would seem to reveal something to the person who has never heard it, right? And even if you’ve listened to the same recording over and over, so that it becomes played out for you, you might return to it after studying music theory and find something quite new.

And sure, once we understand something well, at least in relevant modes and contexts, it will cease to surprise us. We could hardly say we had attained any measure of understanding otherwise.

As Heraclitus says, one never steps into the same river twice, and one may never listen to the same song twice, or pet the same cat twice, and yet in another sense this is not true. A cat or song is not wholly other every time we encounter it, there being something that stays the same in order for us to even judge that it is this or that cat (and a cat versus a dog, etc.).

It allows you to have an understanding of the rational appetites, and in turn how they are essential to self-determination and freedom. A notion of freedom as rational self-determination, and ignorance of what is truly good/desirable as a limit on freedom is, today, an extremely useful pedagogical counter to dominant voluntarist conceptions of freedom. The latter reduce freedom to sheer choice, and thus the ability to inflict one’s will on the world, and satisfy one’s current desires, regardless of what they are. This makes the freedom of any individual necessarily in conflict with all others; freedom becomes a good that diminishes when shared.

And this becomes important for education and formation (and what could be more practical?), since, at some point, part of education has to involve understanding why virtues are virtues, and why rightly ordered desires are considered such. Dewey and the whole progressive education movement were quite right on this front. It does no good to teach people purely from authority, if they cannot understand what they are being taught and grasp the principles themselves.

And, if virtue is required for self-determination/freedom, and if doing what is good requires both knowing what is truly good and being free to do so, what could possibly be more practical?

It’s not just that the world has more to show them, but that it what will be shown is not utterly arbitrary or random (lacking all intelligibility, even potentially). Otherwise, inquiry, etc. will be, by definition, useless, because there is simply nothing to know.

But then, if we are supposing some sort of prior, intelligible actuality to which belief and inquiry are open, it seems to me that we are just importing truth in through the back door.

I don’t even know if this is contradictory re your position per se, since all your objections to “truth” seem to be targeting a narrow band of philosophical history.

So maybe it’s a difference in terminology to some extent. It just seems odd to me to say that inquiry is open to a world that is such that man can discover that the Earth is round, but then to deny that it was true that the Earth was round before man discovered it was so. Far from dissolving the subject object dualism here, this seems to simply absolutize it in favor of the subject.

127

I had in mind a bad performance, such as an amateur group might do – not nearly good enough to record. This is where the normativity question is most obvious. Why are we confident in saying this is a bad performance, if there is nothing we can refer to except what you’re calling the “form” of the work? I can only tell you that, as a musician, I’d be referring to the score to back up my judgment.

Do you want to say that a score reveals the form of a work, more so than any given performance? Indeed it may do, but when debates arise about good and bad performances, all we have is what the score may tell us about specific musical details. So I’m not sure what you want “form” to do here. I don’t think you’d find a competent musician saying, “Well, yes, I see what the score says, and what possibilities may be open for interpretation, but the ‘form’ I hear allows this [something wacky]”. To dispute this, another musician would not initiate an argument about the form of the work, as if a “form” could be normative. They would insist on examining the score, along with whatever musicological facts we may have about performance practice in Mahler’s day.

128

Thank you. Not really sure what that answer means. It seems idealistic. Are you saying that we can teach moral realism and thereby avoid conflict? If people understand why something is good or bad they will make better choices? But that’s more of a pedagogical reason. And I wonder if it’s true. What difference does it make for you?

129

I find the distinction meaningful. Phenomenology/positivism , as I grok them anyway, are “only” trying to make the forum explicit. What have we already “assumed” as those who come together for “rational” conversation ?

The “positivist” is not trying to explain the total fact of the world with a cosmic narrative and not try to be a pseudo-quasi-super physicist.

Instead he or she just works at a tentative, cooperative explication of our shared situation. Note that I need other people if I aim to sketch our situation and not just my own. I have only an “aspect” of the shared world, just as I only have aspects of objects that show themselves differently to others. A man born blind experiences watermelons but not everything that a watermelon can give. Likewise no one person experiences “all” of the world. Yet experience is world, in my view. It’s all “real” and it’s all “world.” But it doesn’t all matter in the same way.

The hard part of making it explicit is that inherited blocking assumptions get in the way. Gadamer writes that we are “constituted by prejudice.”

The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are necessarily involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue (and there is, it should be added, an essential alterity that obtains even in those cases where our engagement is primarily textual). In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.

To me it makes sense that you react with caution, exactly because what is “obvious” is often “rootless” or “floating.” “Everyone knows” but no one remembers why.

130

Exactly. The “substance” of the entity is “logical.” We “enact” the sameness of the river. It’s “there” in our way of being in the world.

Again, total agreement. My jargon for this is that the entity is a “system” of “aspects” or “moments.” I’m of course influenced by Husserl here. The object is “really given” but never completely given. Any object as such, as a temporal-interpersonal-enacted synthesis, is endlessly “ajar.”

To me it’s cleaner and it suffices to just talk about the transformation of belief, with is basically the transformation of world-from-POV. “Reason is purposive activity.” Hegel sounds like a neopragmatist there.

Consider that the “high level” primarily verbal inquiry that we do here is largely a joy, a recreation, a luxury. But most inquiry is a creature trying to get out of a jam. Try this, didn’t work, try that, worked. New problem. New inquiry. But with the imperfect repetition discussed above. "We’ve been lost in the woods before. What did we do ? "

FWIW, I understand that my “ontological perspectivism” can definitely come off as idealism. But I “deny the existence of consciousness.” Experience is not internal psychical stuff. The “subject as consciousness” is “empty” ---- just the pure presence of world-from-POV. Strangely ( given the reputation of positivism ), this “ontological perspectivism” is already in Ayer’s LTL, where he sums up J. S. Mill’s phenomenalism and goes beyond Mill in explicitly “dissolving the empirical subject” into “world” in terms of phenomenal streams. The streaming-experience-like “manner” of the world’s revelation/discovery is not denied, but this “experience-likeness” is not taken as an excuse to “hide” the world in lots of craniums. Which would be absurd, because craniums are “public physical things.”

131

To me belief and perception are situated, and belief is the “articulation” of world-from-POV. And world, so far as I can make sense of it, is only the-world-from-a-POV. One popular use of “truth” suggests a “reduction” or “overcoming” of “perspectivity” that I don’t find plausible or even intelligible, however familiar.

If the object is an “open” or between-us “system of its moments” then each of its moments is “genuine” ( we might even say “true”), but some are better than others, or so we individually judge, for judgement too is someone’s. Of course all this is just my own self-consciously situated judgement, which is to say an articulation of how this component of the world manifests to me.

132

I love logical positivism, so I hear you. But I mean that beliefs about evidence or about the validity of an inference are also situated.

133

Yes, this is important.

Yes, which makes one wonder how deeply or clearly the knowledge extends. It may be the task of philosophy to constantly remind us that a comfortable situation for shared inquiry is not enough. It’s the very results of such an inquiry that call into question the issue of truth, justification, and our continuity with nature.

134

Sure, but as I replied to @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus above, music is more than recording-worthy performances. Is a bad performance by an amateur chamber group also revelatory (other than negatively)? What standards are we appealing to when we talk about good and bad performances? This is the normativity issue, and it’s a hard one to settle.

135

But this isn’t about whether people can agree on a metric, whether communication involves ambiguity, whether shared belief is required for the forum to function, or whether perception is situated and perspectival. It’s about what is presupposed in the individual act of making a judgment. When we judge that this mousetrap caught more mice than that mousetrap, we are explicitly staking a claim on what is the case. Do you disagree?

But if there is no fact of the matter regarding whether one mousetrap caught more mice than the other, then there is no basis for the comparison of beliefs, no possibility of being wrong, and no basis for belief revision. You can’t have the space of reasons without the norm of correctness, and you can’t have the norm of correctness without the acknowledgement of an independent standard that all beliefs are answerable to.

I agree, the forum isn’t what makes our beliefs actually-right or actually-wrong — that’s what the world is for. But the current state of the forum can’t be taken as equivalent to the world for the same reason that the current state of an individual’s belief can’t be taken as equivalent to the world. If it were, there would be no independent standard for the forum to be accountable to. And without an independent standard, there’s no basis for being wrong, no basis for the norm of correctness and, consequently, no possibility of a space of reasons.

I don’t agree. Any agent who acknowledges the possibility that their current beliefs might be wrong simply cannot identify the world with the content of their current beliefs. To do so would be to foreclose the possibility of being wrong and, as we’ve seen, recognizing that possibility is a precondition for the space of reasons.

It’s worth noting, though, that Peirce didn’t follow you over the edge.

136

Might I suggest this is asking the metaphor to do the wrong sort of work. I don’t think good versus bad music/performances is really the key issue.

A better example might be that experiencing a sick cat still informs you about cat; particularly if you’ve never seen a cat before.

137

Do you mean they are “situated” just as all beliefs are in that they are human beliefs? I wasn’t referring to positivism, as I don’t think metaphysical beliefs are meaningless or useless. Rather I think they are, in contrast to decidable beliefs about what has been observed or what is self-evident, logically and empirically undecidable.

138

Maybe I’m on the wrong track, but isn’t it the case that forms of pragmatism associated with Richard Rorty are not denying that there are differences between various approaches? The point is that some things work better in certain circumstances than others, and that we judge beliefs by how well they function in practice, fit experience, and survive criticism from other people, rather than by comparing them to some final, perspective-free truth.

139

One often knows why it is that one believes what one does or why one intends to do what one does. To the extent that one can articulate (for oneself or for others) what one’s rational grounds for believing or doing those things are, then one’s beliefs or actions become intelligible. How it is that one comes to acquire such rational abilities (to orient oneself within the space of reasons) may be a matter of natural evolution, cultural evolution, and personal upbringing. The end point of those processes is the acquisition of rational autonomy, or the ability to criticize or assess the credentials of a form of life from within it (and hence in a situated fashion). I take @j_j and @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus both to be arguing that the grounds for beliefs and actions (or aesthetic judgements) can’t be traced from anything outside of one’s situated form of life (j_j’s forum). And in my view (and likely theirs also) the space of (human) reasons and the structure of the (human/natural) world that we inhabit are co-extensive. Knowing how to soundly and perspicuously navigate the space of reasons (i.e. deliberate and/or justify what it is one ought to do or believe in particular cases) and knowing how to navigate the human world well are one and the same thing. This, I think, brings together situatedness, essential shareability, and normativity.

I’m here bracketing issues regarding the relationship between belief and truth within a fallibilist/disjunctivist epistemology, which I may later address.

140

Well said ! Rationality “chews on itself.” The “strong” philosopher drags complacent presuppositions into the light, where they can be examined for the first time.