From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Fri Oct 24 2003 - 03:18:45 BST
Platt,
Platt said:
Faking, lieing, misrepresenting, deceiving, falsifying--all related to the concept of truth--will, if practiced on a large enough scale, break up a society as surely as a natural disaster.
Matt:
The reason why pragmatists don't get too uptight about Platt's criticisms of the pragmatist "theory" of truth is because we don't think the concept of truth or a theory of truth has much of anything at all to do with faking, lying, misrepresenting, deceiving, or falsifying. We do think these five things, if practiced on a large enough scale, would lead to the disintegration of a civilized society, but we don't think that being a Platonist, or Kantian, or Nietzschean, or Heideggerian, or Rortyan, or Pirsigian has much to do with us being truthful and honest to each other.
We also don't think the moral question of scientists being honest with each other is, pace Pirsig, a scientific question. We see Pirsig's attempt to extend science to everything as either residual scientism or ubiquitizing science to mean simply "activity" (I've flip-flopped over time on what I think it is, but I'm currently leaning towards the latter in practice, though its the former that causes it). Rorty has been much in favor of taking scientists as being very good moral examples, as exemplars of the kind of virtues that more people should have, but he doesn't think it has anything to do with the kind of activity they are involved in, particularly something uncashable as the "scientific method". If all philosophers are able to cash "scientific method" out to is "the same banal and obvious methods all of us use in every human activity" (Rorty, "Method, Social Science, and Social Hope"), then pragmatists can't figure out what is supposed to be so special about this met
hod and why we should retain the mantle "scientific" for it. Pragmatists don't think Galileo and Newton were doing anything all that different from what Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy did. The only difference was that Galileo and Newton came up with and used a better and more useful vocabulary than their predecessors did.
The rhetorical questions that pragmatists ask at this point are, "Was Galileo more honest than Plato? Did Newton check his examples against his criteria better than Aristotle did? Was Copernicus more trustworthy than Ptolemy? Did Kepler check his results with his peers more often than Socrates did?" Pragmatists think that all of these questions are out of point. If the concept of truth and a theory of truth are central to people being honest and truthful, than it must be clear that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy were lying, cheating, dishonest sons-of-bitches and when people utter their names we should wash their mouths out with soap (the utterers, not the Greeks). The reason being that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy were all working with different conceptions of truth and different theories of it, conceptions and theories us Pirsigians would consider to be wrong. So, if there is a connection, then they must be liars and cheats, right?
That's why pragmatists don't think there's a connection.
Matt
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