Friday, December 31, 2010

Realism, Pragmatism and Neo-Pragmatism.

Rorty has charged his interlocutors with two points that are quite true. I want to tease out what these points come to in an effort to dissolve any disagreement that they might perpetuate.

The first point is that when a belief is justified, calling it true doesn't add anything; for after an application of the pragmatic maxim, one can only be sure that one has a justified belief. When D. Vaden House made the objection, I responded saying that 'justification' does not add anything to true belief because if true, it would be justifiable. The reason is that a belief if true to what it is about is justified because it is true to what it is about. That it is justified, or justifies itself, or in relation to us, that we could justify it to ourselves, is already given in the point that it is true to what it is about. So, literally, justification doesn’t add anything. Does 'truth' add anything?

Of course, Realists, note the capital ‘R’, would want to say that a belief is Correspondence true, if it is true, and that does not depend on what you, I, or anyone else may think about it. So they might want to insist that verifiability has nothing to do with the truth of a belief (and therefore that justification is an addition). I think Realists are right in a sense. If a cat has a patch of white fur under her head, the fact that she does has nothing to do with our ability to verify that she does. But pragmatists are also right in that saying that she does have a white patch, and thereby making the very point against the pragmatists, surely does rely on verification. So, it would seem that we need to make a distinction. There is a difference between being verifiable at time t and being potentially verifiable at time t+k. The fact that you just read ‘this’ has already been verified; the fact that a diamond (at the bottom of the ocean) has the same properties even if it cannot be verified by any of us presently would be verified by any of us.

It is true that the fact that a diamond is hard does not depend on our saying that it is hard. Even if all the perceivers were to cease to exist, the diamond would still be hard. It is not true to suppose that if no one is looking, everyday things behave in ways out of the ordinary. So, a tree falling in a forest makes an unverifiable sound. Of course it does not make a verifiable sound; of course it makes a sound that would have been verified.

The view that facts—where facts are just real objects in real non-abstracted relations—do not depend on our verification, according to Realists, overrides the difference between ‘is’ and ‘would be’. Realists want to insist that even in the case of a verified (as true) belief at time t, that the belief is true does not depend on our calling it true. From this point, they insist, arguing from the simplest explanation, that the same follows for as of yet unverified beliefs. I must confess that I am in agreement with the view that the truth of a fact does not depend on verifiability. It is not the case that because something is verified it is thereby and thenceforth true. This point is important and brings me back to my original point.

I am not saying that a true belief would not be verified. I am saying that a fact may be unverifiable. In the latter case, if the fact is true, it is so independent of verification. But in that case we cannot call ‘the fact’ true. So a fact may be true/real, despite the point that we cannot call it true, despite the point that it hasn’t yet been verified, despite the point that no one has a belief that would be verified by any of us. From this all the traditional notions follow. The goal is to have beliefs that mirror reality, beliefs that are true to their facts. But if a belief is true, it would be verified, unless it cannot be called true. But again, just because something cannot be called true does not mean it cannot be true.

What’s the point? If a belief is true, the fact that it is true does not depend on our calling it true. Of course, it may or may not be verifiable. If it is not verifiable, we can neither call the fact true nor false, but it may be either. If the true fact is verifiable, then the fact that it is called true, does not make the belief any more true than it is; the objects the belief is about do that. So calling a true belief justified does not add anything, to use Rorty’s rhetoric.

It seems to me that the difference between the neo-pragmatist and the pragmatist can be clarified by considering the following. Realists do not want to say that verifiability has everything to do with truth because they want to say truth is a matter of metaphysics, whereas verification is epistemological. Neo-pragmatists like Rorty want to say that metaphysics is empty if it is considered outside of epistemology. But it seems that the neo-pragmatist’s intuitions surrounding verifiability do not play well to the metaphysical norms that govern epistemological practise. Realism suggests that a belief is true because it corresponds to the fact it is about, and along with this point comes certainty. If verifiability follows from this point, as I suggested above, then it seems that all is well. The trouble with Rorty is that there is no certainty to be had—there is no norm outside of us.  It is this particular view that leads him in his anti-realist moments to say that while most of our beliefs must be true, any may not be true according to purposes to come. But if any our true beliefs may be false, then we are no longer working with the norm of truth, and we have undercut our knowledge claims.

Rorty wants us to believe that truths are true because they are verified; from this it follows that any of our beliefs may not be verified according to purposes to come. But if what I am suggesting above is correct that Rorty has simply ignored our realist intuitions—particularly those that stem from Berkeley’s shocking and silly thought experiment. There are beliefs that are justified because true to the facts they are about and thus called true, and beliefs that are called true because justified by the best of our lights. These latter beliefs may be false according to purposes similar to ours (e.g. preserving the truth). But, of course, while the Realist is right to suppose that a fact (or, possibly, an unverified belief) doesn’t depend on justification, calling a fact true presupposes justifying it, and that has everything to do with verification. The question then is how a realist can talk about a fact without calling it true—and that may just be a silly bit of rhetoric.

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