From: Erin N. (enoonan@kent.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 14:11:33 GMT
Is it true the man ran around the squirrel in James example?
erin
>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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