From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 16:28:08 GMT
Glenn,
Gardner has an interesting attack on pragmatism. To balance the piece on
Gardner, I offer this pragmatist response. Like Platt, I think he's
misunderstood what "correspondence with reality" is supposed to cash out
to. If its just "observations," or "empirical evidence," then naturally
all pragmatists are on board. However, the highly sophisticated
philosophical duel is not about empirical testing and here is where I think
Gardner has misinterpreted James. When James says, "It becomes true, is
*made* true by events," he's making the point, in contemporary
philosophical parlance, that "truth" is a property of sentences and, rather
than discovering the Truth of what the world is really like, we have a
belief we haven't decided on, we take in some oberservations, and then we
make the belief true, or we discard the belief.
So, yeah, in a trivial sense we all are pragmatists, and that's exactly the
point. Pragmatists want us to discard the entire notion that there is
anything philosophically interesting about "correspondence with the world"
that will eventually lead us to "Truth." And that's why they want us to
trade in our "dicovering" metaphors for "making" metaphors. If we
"discover" truth, then that implies truth is "out there" just waiting for
us to attain it. The world's already decided what's true, we just have to
find out. If we "make" truths, then that implies that truth is a property
of our beliefs. All we need then are suitable causes or reasons for
changing the status of those beliefs (like experimentation).
One of Gardner's last statements is why I think he's recontextualizing to
make it look like James is on his side (which is entirely possible, James
was notoriously wish-washy; a good biography of all the early pragmatists
that I recommend is The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand): "The notion
that a statement can have an absolute, timeless correspondence with the
world, whether verified or not, is too useful a notion." This is at the
very bottom of the realist v. pragmatist debate. The realist says that he
finds use in the notion of absolute, timeless correspondence, but every
time the pragmatist asks he finds the answer less than suitable. The
pragmatist not only can't find any use out of it, he can't even understand
what "correspondence to the world" is supposed to mean, in something other
than its trivial sense. Gardner wants to cast doubt on contemporary
pragmatism by showing that James wouldn't have even followed it. The
pragmatists, on the other hand, want to update the Founding Father
Pragmatists to a changed intellectual landscape (an idea taken from Dewey).
Matt
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