From: Glenn Bradford (gmbbradford@netscape.net)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 03:53:20 GMT
All,
I've recently read a very eye-opening chapter called "Why I am not a
Pragmatist" from Martin Gardner's book "Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener".
The chapter explains that the heated philosophical debate between pragmatists
and realists in the early part of the 20th century was caused merely by a
confusion over the pragmatist's use of language, and not some genuine gulf in
belief. What follows is a recapitulation of Gardner's chapter in my words.
James lived in a time when philosophy was dominated by metaphysical beliefs
that claimed the existence of timeless and absolute truths that could be
established by rational arguments, while at the same time science was
claiming that all our ideas about the world were provisional and had to pass
empirical tests to be considered to some degree true. James, following
Peirce's ideas, thought it would be useful to re-interpret the definition
of truth in philosophical discourse to be more in line with that of science.
That is, a statement about the world is not considered true (or false) until
some empirical testing is done to corroborate that the statement corresponds
to the world (or not). This is subtly contrasted with the Aristotlean view
which says that a statement about the world is true or false regardless of
whether tests are subsequently performed to decide which it is.
To demonstrate this distinction, consider a shuffled deck of cards spread
face down. One is selected at random but is kept face down. What does it
mean to say that the statement "The selected card is the queen of hearts" is
true? An Aristotlean would say the statement is true if the card *is* indeed
the queen of hearts. A pragmatist would say that the truth of the statement is
the passing of a test (such as turning the card over) to determine if the card
is the queen of hearts. To an Aristotlean, there is a distinction between
truth and methods for deciding a truth. To a pragmatist, there is no
difference.
An Aristotlean would say that "the number formed by 317 repititions of the
digit 1 is prime" is a timeless statement of truth (it is either true or
false). It depends solely on accepted definitions of "number" and "prime",
not the algorithms which determine the primality of a number, or
the running of such algorithms.
Both camps agree essentially with the correspondence theory of truth. James
would NOT agree, for example, that the card suddenly attains its number and
suit at the exact moment it is flipped over. There is instead a lateral
shift in the pragmatist description of the correspondence theory, which
demands that a statement of truth also include the results of empirical tests.
Gardner says "The question here is one of linguistic preference. Is it best
to preserve the language of the old correspondence theory, or is something
gained by modifying it along the lines proposed by the pragmatists?"
The problems for James started when he became too enamored by this new way of
speaking about truth. He would say that truths are *made* by acts of
verification. James' ambiguous writing got himself considerably misunderstood.
This is from his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking:
"The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in
it. Truth *happens* to an idea. It becomes true, is *made* true by events.
Its verity *is* in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its
verifying itself...." James is just saying that as science's methods improve,
there is more certainty about assertions made about the world. He's not
saying, for example, that the Earth's core changes every time scientific
tests show something new about its composition. This, however, is the kind
of thing fellow philosophers thought he was saying.
How do we know James was being mis-read? Gardner prints a letter written to
James by philosopher Charles A. Strong, who registers enormous surprise
at what he thinks is an astonishing "change of face" on the part of James,
whom he'd considered an idealist. James responded with amiable anger,
insisting that "Epistemological realism" had always been the "permanent
heart and center" of his thinking.
Gardner sums up his feelings about pragmatism near the end of the chapter:
"...in ordinary discourse *pragmatism* has now degenerated into a synonym
for practical... In this trivial sense everyone is a pragmatist. Even in the
more technical sense of insisting that scientific hypotheses can be tested
only in experience, every scientist and philosopher is a pragmatist. When
I say I am not a pragmatist I mean only that I agree with most philosophers
today in seeing no pragmatic reasons for adopting the epistemological
language of pragmatism...The notion that a statement can have an absolute,
timeless correspondence with the world, whether verified or not, is too
useful a notion. Abandon it and at once you have to invent another way to
say the same thing."
Glenn
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