From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 15 2003 - 00:27:07 GMT
Erin,
To tie in what you are also saying to Kevin, the pragmatist has no idea how
to sustain a distinction between correct knowledge and incorrect knowledge.
Once we get rid of an idea of Reality sitting "out there" judging our
opinions as "correct knowledge" and "incorrect knowledge," we get rid of
the only way I know of that can hold that distinction up.
Since you're using colors, to help see the consequences of what pragmatist
is talking about, let's take your khaki couch. You see a khaki couch. If
100 people all came in a said that that couch was red, what would you
think? Could be, those 100 people are insane, they are conspiring against
you, playing a big joke, are all color blind, etc. But you begin to notice
that what you called "khaki pants" everybody else calls "red pants." You
notice that khaki shirts are called by everyone else "red shirts." What
would you think then?
To draw this example a different way, how did you find out that your couch
was khaki? Did you look at the couch, having never before seen khaki, and
say, "My couch is khaki colored." Probably not. You probably had the
color khaki identified to you before. What the pragmitist is getting at is
that we don't have any in-born sense of colors. We can differentiate
between colors, but calling color A "khaki" involved it being called khaki
by someone else (usually when you're young and the other person's older).
So when you call your couch khaki, you aren't "correctly" identifying in
the sense that the couch's innermost desire is to be called khaki. You are
correct insofar as the community you speak in all agree in calling the
couch khaki. If you go to Japan, I doubt they'd call your couch "khaki."
They probably have there own word for it. In their language community,
your word is incorrect. To commensurate the two language communities
involves translation, meaning you notice that everytime you say "khaki" and
point to your couch, they say "[insert Japanese word "khaki" here]".
After we take "truth" to be a property of sentences, the differences
between two languages strikes up the fact that, though the causal pressures
we feel may be from the same world, what marks and noises we call true are
different, depending on what set of marks and noises you are using. To
call a couch "khaki" as opposed to "[Japanese word]" seems arbitrary, but
that is only if you don't identify with any community. If you indentify
with an English-speaking community, "khaki" is part of your language
tradition and so calling your couch khaki is just what everyone in your
language community happens to call it.
Matt
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