From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 16:40:35 GMT
Erin,
>So truth is determined by majority vote?
Not you, too? ;-)
No, truth is not determined by majority vote.
I said this to DMB yesterday:
Pragmatists don't
suspend evidence if everyone's agreed on what's true. What they say is
that the truth of sentence is decided by individuals, and that when we say,
"All dogs are mammals," we aren't stating something that correctly
corresponds to Reality and Truth, we are stating that almost everybody we
know believe's that sentence is true. Individuals determine the truth of
the sentences they hear and read, and then if a lot of people all think the
same thing, it moves further from opinion and closer to knowledge. In the
West, we have notions of logical consistency, agreement with experience,
and economy of explanation that serve as good bench marks for making our
beliefs useful, and thus improving consensus if a belief gets high marks in
those categories. I talk more about this in the "Solidarity" thread Platt
started.
Erin said:
Actually when I asked that question that wasn't exactly
what I had intended. I was thinking more of
folk knowledge of something (majority opinion) and
expertise knowledge of something.
Matt:
Well, on folk knowledge I think the pragmatists would stand as a
empiricists and traditionalists. Because we believe in the Loch Ness
monster doesn't mean that we will be able to find the Loch Ness monster. A
pragmatist would think that folk knowledge is knowledge that might not be
useful. The urging for things to fall under expertise is the urge to
demystify the folk knowledge so it falls under some of our more
conventional categories of use: logical consistency, agreement with
experience, economy of explanation. If the community of Loch Ness all
believe in the monster, then sure, its true for that community of
language-users. However, because that belief fails in some of our more
conventional requirements, and doesn't have much use for people living
outside of Loch Ness, we feel safe in not believing it. Believers in the
Loch Ness monster may have some use in believing in her, however, so it may
be good for them to hold on to the belief in spite of our continued failure
in finding her.
Is that what you were asking?
Matt
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