From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 02 2003 - 20:35:50 BST
David,
Davidson is Rorty's favorite philosopher of language and the creator of the coherence "theory" of truth (its not really a theory anymore, but that depends on when you read Davidson). His analogy of triangulation is that what propositions we call true is triangulated between us, others, and the world. Davidson says that the world causes us to believe certain things, but it does not give us reasons. Reasons are internal to linguistic practices. When you think of the world as giving us reasons, you start thinking of the world as talking to you, which makes you think that Nature has a special language that it speaks and that our job is to figure it out. That quickly leads to thinking in the key of correspondence, which pragmatists suggest has caused enough philosophical illness already.
On the inescapability of metaphysics, that begs the question in your favor. Pragmatism, when its careful, doesn't say that metaphysics is impossible, it says that we've spent a lot of time on it with nothing we could call progress because we can't even agree on what that progress would look like. It changes the assumption the "metaphysics is inescapable" to "metaphysics is optional" and sees where that leads.
Pragmatists agree that you can't demonstrate your assumptions, that all such reasoning is visciously circular. But that doesn't mean anything metaphysical unless you think that all assumptions are metaphysical, which pragmatists don't. They think of assumptions as contingent starting points for thinking, starting points that are as malleable as the world and other people will let you get away with.
Matt
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