ELEPHANT AGAIN, TO PLATT ON TRUTH, A P.S.:
The summary of the summary of the summary.
Carrying on from where I left off, I guess that Plato thinks there is
something fundamentally incoherent, and thus untrue, about all our synthetic
intellectual patterns. Those patterns are created in pursuit of The Good.
But every time we chose a pattern, we have to be choosing a pattern *instead
of* the Good, because the Good is not a pattern. Like Prisig says, the
creation or synthesis of static patterns aren't carrying us or Lila towards
the truth, but away from it. That's why truth lies in the direction of
analysis, not synthesis. But even analysis, while it is a kind of
abstainence from the synthesis or creation of these patterns, is itself a
linguistic function, and analytic truths are linguistic truths, because
truth necessarily attaches only to linguistic entities. But the mystic
reality isn't a linguistic entity: it isn't an intellectual pattern. So
what Plato teaches is that we have to learn how to have the right analytic
beleifs, only as a stage on the path towards realisation of the mystically
real. At that point, one conjectures, perfect inner silence reigns.
But given that we do need to lower ourselves to intellectualising from time
to time (747's don't just make themselves!), Plato's theory of forms is
supposed to give us something to concentrate on that leaves the door open,
so to speak, to the mystically real, while allowing us the intellectual
resources to appreciate, or criticise, such intellectual patterns that close
the door.
The sort of objection I expect to receive to this is the moral: viz that
individuals who spend all their time concentrating on a purpose-built
transcendental escape ladder are likely to self obsessed unworldly types. A
familiar objection, and it is atleast the right kind of objection, because
all philosophy is moral philosophy here. However, this is something that is
dealt with to some extent in the Republic. Given that the first bit of
synthesis to be analysed away is the Self, people who *really* have their
eye on Plato's transcendental escape ladder ought to be OK. Hence the
Buddhist emphasis on compasion and other-centeredness. Hence the emphasis,
in the Republic, on the absolute duty on the Philosopher to return to the
Cave and work to free those imprisoned there.
You do know the similie of the Cave, don't you?
FROM REPUBLIC BOOK VII:
"AND now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened
or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which
has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they
have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so
that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the
chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is
blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a
raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way,
like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which
they show the puppets.
-I see.
-And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of
vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and
various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking,
others silent.
-You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
-Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the
shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the
cave?
-True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were
never allowed to move their heads?
-And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only
see the shadows?
-Yes, he said.
-And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose
that they were naming what was actually before them?
-Very true.
-And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other
side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that
the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?
-No question, he replied.
-To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of
the images.
-That is certain.
-And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are
released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is
liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and
walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will
distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his
former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to
him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is
approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real
existence, he has a clearer vision, what will be his reply? And you may
further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass
and requiring him to name them, will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy
that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are
now shown to him?
-Far truer.
-And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a
pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the
objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in
reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
-True, he said.
-And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged
ascent, and held fast until he 's forced into the presence of the sun
himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the
light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at
all of what are now called realities.
-Not all in a moment, he said.
-He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And
first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other
objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze
upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he
will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of
the sun by day?
-Certainly.
-Last of he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in
the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another;
and he will contemplate him as he is.
-Certainly.
-He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the
years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a
certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been
accustomed to behold?
-Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.
-And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and
his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on
the change, and pity them?
-Certainly, he would.
-And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on
those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which
of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and
who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you
think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the
possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer, Better to be the poor
servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they
do and live after their manner?
-Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain
these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
-Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be
replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full
of darkness?
-To be sure, he said.
-And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows
with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was
still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would
be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable)
would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he
came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of
ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the
light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
-No question, he said.
-This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the
previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the
fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the
journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world
according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether
rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that
in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen
only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal
author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of
light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in
the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act
rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed. "
Have a think about that the next time you go to the movies.
Elephant.
----------
From: PzEph <etinarcardia@lineone.net>
Date: Wed, 03 Jan 2001 23:15:05 +0000
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Subject: Re: MD Plato's "essences"/Forms
ELEPHANT TO PLATT
O.K. Platt. Since I offered, I will try to explain the essence of truth,
according to (my view of) Plato's view of it, and to compare it with
Prisig's. It's a long one.
PLATO AND PRISIG ON TRUTH.
1. What sort of thing can be true?
The first thing to ask about truth is: what is truth an attribute of?
Beliefs? Sentences? Statements? Propositions? These seem the likely
candidates. However, Quine famously argued that it is not singular
statements which face the test of experience alone, but rather that whole
systems of beleifs face the trial of daily life as a corporate body. This
is something like what Wittgenstein argues when he says that that beleifs do
not come and go singularly, but that "the light dawns slowly on the whole".
Holism. Quine's observation, I think, is an observation about the role of
theory in beleif formation. And the observation is: there's really no doing
without theory. Beleifs and statements that are true are true because
authorised by how they fit with the practical theories that we have found to
work to the Good. It used to be thought by empiricists of a certain ilk
that the facts test the theory, and that the testing goes only that way.
According to Quine the theory tests the facts too. It provides us with the
conceptual apparatus for detecting something as a fact, and it constitutes a
practical liveable program in the way that an isolated hetrogeneous
observation, one which really doesn't 'fit', seems not to. This Quinean
observation fits well into the general tradition of American Pragmatism in
which Prisig also belongs (in a way Quine wasn't saying anything so new, but
just drawing on the existing resources of american pragmatism to chide the
logical positivists). There is the a famous philosophical example of the
natives in the bay who simply did not see Cook's ships, because they could
not conceptualize them. They just didn't fit any lived theory. This is
something which Prisig talks about a great deal.
So, we now have two candidates for the sorts of things that can be true or
false: (a) Sentences. (b) The whole book: our conceptual way of life. But
the interesting thing to note about both these alternatives is that they are
both *linguistic entities*. Static patterns of the intellectual kind, if
you like. This seems to be a point of agreement that can be embraced by
all, from the logical positivists to the pragmatists, and, also, by Plato.
2. Data and continuum
But Plato isn't so interested in exactly which kind of linguistic entity
(the sentence or the book) we should attribute truth or falsehood to, and
more interested in the consequences of the fact that it does have to be a
linguistic entity. What, he wonders, is the basic characteristic of any
description - what is the essential feature of language use? What always
happens to reality when you try to take it down in words? Well happily this
is something that Prisig talks alot about too. We have covered this under
the topic of 'Mysticism', and it is central to their differing veiws of
truth that both Plato and Prisig are Mystics (and I think the differences
will turn out to be differences of emphasis).
Mysticism, in this context, is the idea that reality is of a fundamentally
different character to our words and books, and fundamentally different to
the world of facts and theories which those words and books represent.
According to both Prisig and Plato, language and conceptual thought always
paints a picture of discrete units of identifiable stuff: objects, data.
Whereas in reality there is no data, there is only the "undifferentiated
aesthetic continuum" (Prisig's quotation of Northrop), or "flux" (Plato's
quotation of Heraclitus). The differentiatedness of data has a lot to do
with the conceptual tools by which it is arrived at. Dichotomy -the cutting
in two: there would be no language and meaning without this simple analytic
tool, and no objects or data either: the all-powerful word-knife. 'Red' -
this is a word knife: a way of cutting up the continuous spectrum. The
logical positivists have forgotten that the dichotomies which the existence
of data pressuposes are our creations, and that therefore the facts are
always conditioned by theory. But this is something that some pragmatists
(amougst them Prisig), and also the singularly uncategorisable Plato, are
all too aware of.
A certain kind of empiricist beleives that the reason statements are the
basic units of lingusistic truth, and not theories, is that an individual
statement can be directly tested against individual units of experience.
This implies a picture of what experience is, an ontology. The ontology of
these empiricists holds that experience comes prepackaged, so to speak, into
"simple impressions" (Hume) or "Sense data" (Ayer). They hold that at a
basic level there can be a one to one correspondance here of data to
statement, and whatever statement doesn't correspond, isn't true. Through
the truth of individual statements, theories could be tested - never the
other way around. But given that their ontology of experience (their
metaphysics) is wrong, if follows that their whole account of truth is wrong
too. The empiricists and logical positivists always denied that they had a
metaphysics, and now we know why - they had a really duff and embarrasing
metaphysics which is fatal to their whole position. The embarrasing member
of the family who is never mentioned in polite soceity.
The argument I have just gone through in relation to 20th cent logical
positivists is exactly the argument that Plato goes through in relation to
the Anceint Sophist Protagoras. The Protagorean position is a kind of
relativism, but the important point here is that Protagoras supposes a
relation to hold between ourselves on the one end, and discrete objects in
experience on the other: "nothing is hard, hot, or anything, just by itself
- we were actually saying that some time ago - but that in their intercourse
with one another things come to be all things and qualified in all ways
[Theaetetus 156e9]". For Plato, the problem with this Protagorean picture
isn't the relativism as such, but what the relativism is supposed to be
plugged into: the ontology. Reflection on the Mystic reality of the
aesthetic continuum, and the artificiality of data, suggests to Plato that
the Protagorean relation between perceiver and perceived must be fictious.
Plato repeats the Protagorean position and then knocks it smartly on the
head with a club marked 'flux': "nothing is one thing just by itself, but
things are always coming to be for someone... nor ought we to admit
'something', 'someone's', 'my', 'this', 'that', or any other word that
brings things to a standstill. We ought, rather, to use expressions that
conform to the nature of things, and speak of them as coming to be,
undergoing production, ceasing to be, and altering; because if anyone brings
things to a standstill he'll be easy to refute in doing that. [Theaetetus
157b1]". I quess that club could just as easily be marked 'dynamic
quality'. Yes?
To return to Truth. Plato's point is that truth or falsehood can't attach
to correspondance or the lack of it in some relation between the perceiver's
linguistic formulas and any perceived object or datum: because no such
relation in fact exists. There are no objects or data in raw experience:
there is only flux. You can call this the 'mystic objection' to a
correspondance theory of truth, and it is a common theme in both Plato and
Prisig.
(in parenthesis, I think Phaedrus is wrong about what the Protagorean slogan
"man is the measure of all things" originally means - it isn't as
conveiniently pragmatic as Prisig would like it to be - it's about this
interactive relation which is supposed to hold between man and data - the
'all things' are allowed to be pretty substantial before man-the-measure
gets on the scene. For protagoras man is the necessary but not the
sufficient condition of the measurement, for Prisig man's purposes in the
world are both the necessary and the sufficient conditions of the
measurement)
3. Holism V. Transcendence.
At this point we get a slight parting of the ways between Plato and most of
the Pragmatism / Radical empiricism tradition. What lessons should we learn
from the failure of the correspondance theory of truth that some empiricists
held, and which we saw to depend on some very shaky ontological foundations?
Well, obviously the 'data in raw experience' ontological postulate has to be
dropped - we can all agree on that. Everyone agrees to that. But what
then?
Plato thinks this means that there is just no way in which there can be
truths about the flux, and that therefore we have to look for truths that in
no way pretend to report that restless aesthetic continuum. We will get
back to this veiw shortly.
James thinks that you can drop the bad ontology which underlaid the old form
of empirism, recognise the mystic reality of the continuum, but still
remain some kind of empiricist. Quine would be following on in that
tradition, and the way they work it is via some form of Holism about what
gets to be called 'true' or 'false'. This takes us back to where we
started. Quine wants us to think of whole bodies of belief, large scale
static patterns, as facing the test of experience together. What the
sceintists are really testing with all their experiments is not a single
propsition, but the question "does physics work?", and the answer which
reliably comes back is "yes - you can really rely on anything we've managed
to integrate into this body of beleif - we deliver all right". Now most of
the things which Prisig says suggest that this is the tradition about what
'truth' means which he fits into best of all: empiricist, but also mystic
too. It's a powerful combination if you can pull it off. You can call this
'radical empiricism' or 'empirical holism': Recognise that experience is
something continuous, but say that our 'truths' can still face 'the test of
experience' because they face that continuum as a large corporate body,
rather than through one-to-one correspondances with 'data'.
For myself, however, as I have said in a previous post, I just don't think
that the word 'empiricist' can be stretched this far and still mean anything
much. The 'empiricism' part in 'radical empiricism' is there to assure us,
correctly, that we are still paying attention to experience. But then, what
else is there to attend to? The whole conflict in philosophy is between
different characterisations of experience, and different concepts of what
sort of thing it is that passes the 'test of experience'. If attending to
experience makes you an empiricist, then Plato is an empiricist, Sartre is
an empiricist, Hegel is an empiricist. Obviously, in a way this is just a
question of terminology: you can define "empiricist" any way you please. But
what I have argued is that any method for defining empiricism which makes
out Plato to be an empiricist has got to be dead wrong, not least because it
doesn't do any kind of useful work: if doesn't really cut out any
philosopher as anti-empiricist, what's the point in having the word?
So much for pragmatic Holism. Now for Transcendence, and back to Plato's
conception of truth - 'empiricist' or not. Plato has being paying close
attention to the 'test of *continuous* experience', and the mystic
conclusion he has come to is that only silence can really pass the 'test of
experience'. Everything else is some kind of falsification, a lie. All our
static patterns, simply in virtue of being static patterns, are false as
reports of experience, which never is static: "not even this stays constant,
that the flowing thing flows white, but it changes, so that there's flux of
that very thing, whiteness, and change to another colour, ...since that's
so, can it ever be possible to refer to any colour in such a way as to be
speaking of it rightly? -How could it be Socrates? Indeed, how could it be
possible to do so with any other thing of that kind, if it's always slipping
away while one is speaking; as it must be, given that it's in flux?
[Theaetetus 182d1]" and again: "can we rightly speak of a beauty which is
always passing away, and is first this and then that? Must not the same
thing be born and retire and vanish while the word is in our mouths?
[Cratylus 439e1]" and again, in general summary: "you cannot get any further
in knowing their nature or state, for you cannot know that which has no
state. [Cratylus 440a3]" You cannot know that which has no state - that
puts Plato's veiw in a nutshell.
Plato would say that all the supposed 'truths' of our wonderfully effective
scientific theories cannot, logically, be any such thing. They may *work*
alright, these theories which face the test of experience as a coporate
body, they may indeed be *good* theories, even beautiful, harmonious,
virtuous. But to say that these theories are *true* is downright bizzare,
because, for Plato, if something is true, this can only be because there is
something that it is true *about*. And this is precisely what the natural
sciences, in Plato's veiw, lack: a referent, the thing they are true of. For
our conveinience, we act as if the subject of biology were species, natural
kinds. But Plato would point out that all the conceptual apparatus of
species etc was part of Biology itself - and Biology can't be about itself
now, can it? But what *is* biology about then? There aren't any discreet
packets of information in the aesthetic continuum.. which is what we used to
think it was about.... So we pragmatists have to say that Biology isn't
about anything as such, and that it's usefulness to us doesn't arise from
it's being about something: it arises from what it ennables us to actually
do. Plato, on the other hand, takes the veiw that useful statements that
aren't about anything cannot, in any sense, be truths: however fantastically
useful they are. In effect, he puts biology into the same analytic pigeon
hole with great fiction, inspired drama, classic cinema: they can all be
fantastically useful in helping us to get to places we want to go - they can
be good, beautiful, harmonious etc, but ofcouse they aren't actually *true*
in the sense of being a report of what actually exists and happens. Moving
pictures, just moving pictures.
In short, for Plato, none of the practical theories with which we navigate
the world we live in are actually *reports*: and only a report of what is
can be 'true' in the Platonic sense. Plato's truths are the truths by which
we transcend those movies, and recognise them for what they are. At the end
of Lila Phaedrus speculates about whether Lila had it in her to break free
of all the static patterns and out the other side - Plato's truths are all
about that 'other side'. Plato's truths are transcendental, not practical.
They are analogous, therefore, to the kind of truth by which pragmatism is
true.
4. The Good and The True
Some of the above can serve to obscure a remarkable similarity between
Plato's account of Art and the Pragmatic account of practical theory. This
similarity emerges the moment that we remove the word 'true' from the
equation. Because the way Plato describes Opinion, and the kinds of
considerations that are relevant in selecting the right Opinions, entirely
fits pragmatic Truth, as opposed to the Truth by which pragmatism is true:
Good is what every soul pursues and for which it ventures everything,
intuiting what is, yet baffled and unable to fully apprehend its nature.¹
(Republic 505e.). One nature which the soul is unable to fully apprehend
can be, I suggest, the nature that all our useful scientific theories are
directed at understanding. For Plato, there will never be a final peeling
of the atomic onion, never a unifying theory of everything that sees into
the interior of a singularity: for all such theories are constructions of
discreta, not matched to the mysterious continuity of the mystically real.
But we can have good and bad opinions about such matters, and that the world
is flat is certainly a bad opinion, because it really doesn't help us trade
with Japan. If we want to pursue the good, we will say that you can fly to
Japan in about 15 hours, and that you won't fall of the edge. This is the
kind of commonsense statement that James will want to say to us is 'true':
true as a species of the good. But Plato's point (tangentially backed up by
Tarski etc) would be: what, actually, is 'true' adding here, to the accepted
claim that such and such is a 'good' opinion? Nothing much. Jamesian
pragmatism makes 'true' so much a species of the good that 'true' becomes
entirely redundant: why not just stick to 'good'? What difference does
'true' make, when it comes to it? Well Plato thinks that there is one
excellent difference which it could make, if only we reserved the word
'true' to express the difference between "Japan is 15 hours flight from
here" and "scientific theories are static patterns in search of dynamic
quality". The latter kind of statement is the philosophical sort, about the
relation of our patterns to the continuum, rather merely a statement within
a pattern. Plato wants us to keep 'true' in reserve, like a swear word
whose impact we need to conserve, for use only in the clearly exceptional
cases.
We have seen that Good has a lot to do with the 'truth' of the lower,
pattern-contained sort of statement. So much so that I have suggested that
'true' adds nothing in particular to 'good', beyond being the kind of good
that we attribute to statements. But what does Good, or The Good, have to
do with the second kind of truth? A great deal, but the relationship is
very different.
In the former lower kind of truth that Plato calls Opinion the situation is
that the 'true' statement has Quality. Althought there have been correct
reservations expressed in this forum about saying that Quality is an
attribute, it is nonetheless the case that in this situation Quality is
treated *as if* it were an attribute. The same would apply reading 'Good'
for 'Quality'. Quality, or The Good, is put into a synthesis when we say
'that's a good statement'. The Good gets made into one property of the
statement, alongside others: in Plato's language, an element in a complex.
I think the situation with the higher kind of truth is something else, and I
find this something else very hard to convey. It seems to me that for
Plato, there is, for the enlightened, a convergence between the Good that we
may previously have experienced as an attribute of fast cars, beautiful
theories, shy virgins etc, and the cold, hard, 'empty' analytic
philosophical statements about the forms (which I find I have not much
discussed - this is what makes it 'hard to convey' the higher truth at this
point). In the end, those high altitude philosophical truths don't *have*
Quality, for Plato, they, in some way we simply cannot yet comprehend, *are*
The Good. (to explain this further I would have to talk about Plato on
pleasure and pain - about how a proper understanding of the pleasure we seek
leads to a positive desire for austerity as the highest pleasure - something
buddhists understand). For the form of the Good is to be understood as both
as the ultimate object of desire after which we have all along been
striving, and as the referent of all the fundamental that is to say, cold
and analytic, truths we have been talking about. Indeed, in terms of static
patterns, there are only those cold truths to identify it with, and only
those truths to point to as it's 'essence'.
At this point I remember why I had some sympathy with Prisig's criticisms of
Plato in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Prisig thought that,
imprisoned in these high altitude truths, the good is betrayed by Plato: a
dynamic power turned into a static entity. I undestand the point. But I
think Prisig is too quick to condemm, because Plato never loses sight of the
fact that these truths are verbal truths, linguistic entities. And it isn't
though language that the good exercises it'd power over us, it's through
Eros. We agreed at the start, because we found that we had to, that truth
attaches to linguistic entities. Well, Plato is just working that point
forward towards it's natural conclusion. The Good that we can fix with
truths is a cold and high-altitude affair, and that is because it is a
linguistic affair, tailored to our analytic capacities. But then, mystic
reality itself is not a linguistic affair at all, is it? Indeed that was
the problem with logical positivism. So what Plato has produced, in the
Form of the Good, is, if you like, a Linguistic 'Buddha', a meditation
object to keep the dichotomy-loving object-creating intellect under control
and in the right place, thinking of no thing at all (since things, objects,
are sytheses: complexes of elements, and the forms are just those elements).
We have to escape dichotomising language, which means to escape 'true', if
ever we are to open to the real, the mystically real. This is the purpose
which certain koans serve. The indians had Peyote. Might it also be the
point of Plato's Forms? Plato: the mathematician's mystic.
5. Coherrence and truth
Back to the linguistic. So what are Plato's necessary and sufficient
conditions of truth? Oh dear. I have to go, and the summary of the summary
may have to wait. Probably the best thing is to look at is what Plato's
reasons are for rejecting each competing suggestion about truth along the
way (in that respect it's a shame i didn't get to discuss Parmenides). First
we decided truth had to attach to linguistic entities. Then we showed that
it couldn't attach to statements that were grounded on a false ontology
(logical positivism). In what respect was the ontology False? In that it
did not correspond to mystic reality? Well yes. So Correspondance is
important? Maybe, except that we showed that no linguistic entity in the
world can correspond to the mystic reality - this was kind of an analytic
point about what lingustic entities are. Perhaps there is something else to
correspond with? Yes, the theory of forms. But the beings fit the
perfectly coherent analytic truths, not the other way around? Yes, so
correspondance is a mark, but not a condition, of truth (not the way we find
out what is true), and the way we find out the truth is by searching for a
coherent analysis. And what about James's 'truth'? That was rejected
because 'true' didn't make a difference over and above 'good' in ordinary
statements. So making the right kind of difference is necessary? Indeed.
Anything to add? Not this side of the funny farm, jim bo'.
-Elephant
[A biblio/biographical digression. A while back I came in ranting and
raving about evolutionary nutters. I've calmed down a bit since then, as I
have been reasured that few round here take quite the attitude to the
hierachy of the 'evolutionary' levels which either the heirachical or
non-hierachical Darwinists take to evolutionary species. A serious
discussion of the ultimate status of the levels ensues. But something was
lost in the process of MOQ naturalization: me. Elephant is not an Elephant.
I am a human being, with a set of prejudices, preferences, opinions,
history, and even a website, all of my own. I certainly don't intend to
produce, in answer to specific questions, a list of references to site
addresses, and I bear in mind that it is in live discussion where one runs
the real and valuable risk of being 'found out'. However, since I will be
trying to follow lines of thought that I have been down before, it may be as
well for me to arm you with access to my website:
http://website.lineone.net/~david.robjant/index.html - there are two things
that *may* be of interest there: a short article on Murdoch and a long
thesis on Plato. I reach no conclusions about truth until Ch. 4 (p).]
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