From: Maggie Hettinger (hettingr@iglou.com)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 12:44:08 GMT
Thank you, Glenn.
It looks to me as if an Aristotlean is focusing on the intellectual
reality of "truth", whereas James was focusing on the reality of
"truth" as a social pattern.
maggie
On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 10:53 PM, Glenn Bradford wrote:
> 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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