It strikes me as ill-formed. It rides on the ambiguity in its setup. The impossible world — there is considerable work on this topic — is stipulated using our usual notion of addition, yet denies that very stipulation. The result is that it is very unclear what is meant by “adding one rock to three rocks”. Having three rocks already assumes a counting practice; as does recognising any supposed difficulty.
So whatever is going on remains ill-formed; and is not addition, or is not identity, or it’s not three and four. If we did have a world of this sort, we could simply reinterpret their use of “plus”, “equals”, “four” and “three” so as to maximise agreement, in a properly charitable interpretation. The apparent difficulty would dissipate. It’s only an uncharitable reading that appears to lead to contradiction.
Motivation doesn’t break warrant. Insulation from revision does that.
So what would it take for a system to escape that pattern instead of repeating it? I think it requires the impossibility of transcendence to be a derived result the system has to honor in its own operation — not a humility performance, but real constraints on what the system can claim.
Does postmodernism doubt all universal truths or only contingent truths dressed as universal ones?
1+1=2 isn’t that kind of truth because how we came to recognize 1+1=2 might be environmental, but what 1+1=2 is isn’t. Two distinct things are two things not because of how we evolved, but because distinctness is what two means.
You could have different symbols for two. You couldn’t have a counting system where one thing and another thing aren’t two things.
Indeed, but surely those sorts of assertions are false within the context of alternative traditions that take the relevant positions to be false.
But if truth is truth in a tradition, and a tradition denies this, is that tradition simply wrong?
Anyhow, hardly anyone denies the point above in a basic sense. But that also makes it trivial. The difficulty isn’t the truism that all human traditions are situated in history, but rather the wide ranging epistemic and metaphysical consequences that are drawn from this, which are far from obvious. The leap from “all traditions occur in history and shape the thought of their participants,” to “being is unknowable outside one’s tradition (or language, interpretation, subjectivity, etc.),” or “nothing exists outside of traditions/interpretations,” is itself going to require metaphysical commitments that not all traditions share.
Although there is a further complication: traditions are not monolithic and often have their own fierce internal debates about truth, including schisms and outliers.
I was flippantly summarizing the viewpoint that seemed to be held by a certain forum poster in this thread, who indeed seemed to hold the view that math is merely a human creation, a social construct, with no objective basis, as if 4 plus 1 could equal 3 if everyone just agreed to it, and who specifically called out postmodernism and enactivism as the basis for their position in their comments.
The fact that they explicitly called out both postmodernism and enactivism in the same comments makes me suspect that they believe that even just human consciousness itself is a social construct, but that is just my suspicion.
I guess we need to understand what is meant by “truth” and “tradition” in such a statement. Can you put this into action by way of a simple and breif example and see what it brings us?
That would be strange. So with the map/territory analogy, for these people the map and the territory are one and the same thing?
That’s a good point, but Plato’s thought evolved, and what is known as Platonism today is not consistent with Plato’s later work. Plato had to adjust his ontology to account for the epistemological problems he encountered. This was required in order for the ontology to stay true to what was required of the epistemology, similar to what I explained. There’s a significant difference between Aristotle and Neo-Platonism, and Aristotelians will argue that Aristotle is more of a true Platonist.
Yes. Rationality is a second-order belief that first-order beliefs ought to remain tentative. Motivation is no problem. I agree with Gadamer/Heidegger that “stand-point-less-ness” is nonsense. We arrive on the scene “as” prejudice.
Sort of. Our evolving “belief” is the evolving “form” of the world. Instead of contrasting map with territory, we focus on “time” as the transformation of belief/world. The “articulation” of the world is not “other than” what is articulated. Something like that !
Maybe only silence is an escape. And not talk about silence.
Or we might say that escape is relative. A coherent relativist doesn’t pretend to offer truth. He or she only offers chains of signs that others may find helpful.
Yet this desire to offer helpful signs is likely to include the desire that these signs are enduringly helpful, which is to say “valid” or “effective” beyond their original context.
If “anti-philosophy” tries to “prove” the limits of philosophy, then it’s again presenting the “form” of the future as present now. This projection beyond the present is the essence. Isn’t this the weirdness of Kant ? Who is a “logical positivist” metaphorically speaking ? A shield against nonsense ? But only at the cost of a grand theory of the eternal ?
To prove the impossibility of transcendence would seem to need an enduring “logic” or “nature of things” to “forbid transcendence forever.” This logic itself — in its “forever” — is transcendent.
What is proof ? Kant complained about the lack of a proof for the “external world.” This was absurd, because “proof” implies an intense “externality” in the sense of interpersonal validity.
If we understand genesis as merely the external history of the emergence of an idea, then we treat that genesis as irrelevant to the substance of the idea’s truth. If, however, we view genesis in terms of the formation of the system of meaning within which the criteria of truth of an idea get their sense, then this genesis does have a bearing on the idea’s truth. But not by determining whether it is true or not. Rather, by revealing the contingency of its criteria of intelligibility.
There’s the Sumerian nam-lu-u-lu (human condition) we might contemplate. The belief is that humans were made from clay mixed with the blood of the rebellious god We-ilu. We’re mortal because we’re human and we’re endowed with temu/rationality because we’re half-divine.
Jesus is the Logos/Logic/The Word.
Agrippa’s trilemma is an unsolved problem that menaces the enterprise of grounding logic.
Logical nihilism also presents itself at awkward moments.
That’s already very far from the account offered. What is being rejected is the very framing of the situation as inside/outside. I sometimes voice this by saying that we are in direct contact with the world; and some will immediately misunderstand this as advocating direct realism, and off we go in yet another direction. So again I’ll quote Davidson:
In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth - quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.
Tim may be making a point not so far from “the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality” that results in relativism, and thinking that Davidson and I are offering relativism in some form. That’s not the argument, since “Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board”. Relativism requires an adherence to the conceptual schemes that Davidson, and I following him, entirely reject.
Consequently, Tim’s argument addressing that if all truth is merely “true within a tradition,” then this very claim cannot be asserted universally without contradiction, does not address what was proposed. Truth is not truth within a tradition, because the notion of such incommensurable traditions is itself muddled.
Something like that. Doing other things - I’ll come back to this.
Sorry, I’m not sure what Count Tim is saying in that paragraph, and what Davison means is elusive to me, so I’m not really in a position to make much of it.
Who determines whether a truth is universal or contingent? One person’s truth may be another person’s contingency.
Is Helen of Troy being the daughter of Zeus a universal truth founded in Greek mythology or a contingent truth founded in the office of a Hollywood film producer?
Is heteronormativity a universal truth founded in the science of biology or a contingent truth founded in postmodern feminism?
Postmodernism challenges truths once held to be universal as being contingently culturally situated.
For Nietzsche, a precursor to postmodernism, the Western concept of the “I” has arisen out of our belief that we are responsible both causally and morally for any of our actions that benefit or harm others. For Nietzsche, however, the “I” is not a necessary truth that determines how we should interact with society, but rather the “I” has been shaped by the society within which we live. It follows that the concept of the “I” is a contingent social construct and personal moral responsibility becomes an illusion. We are an integral part of society rather than a passive observer of it (SEP - postmodernism)
Postmodernism does not doubt all universal truths, as this suggests they accept that there are universal truths, but rather, the postmodernist treats truth as contextual rather than foundational.
The OP raised the question “Does logic reveal something about the structure of reality itself, or is it better understood as a human tool shaped by our contingent cognitive and linguistic practices?”. The postmodernist might say that the “I”, with all its subjective feelings and logical reasoning, has been contingently shaped by the society within which it lives, rather than being founded in any universal truth.
In other words, the postmodernist might say that society imposes logic on the world rather than the world imposing logic on society.
