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Sunday, July 14, 2013

Truth Exchange

I rarely have occasion to do my Rorty impression, so I thought I would highlight part of this ongoing exchange from the Moot with reader "Jay"/"Unknown":

I wrote (this is an excerpt halfway into the conversation):
[A]s a term of art, "perspectivism" happens to be associated in scholarship specifically with Nietzschean views I doubt you actually would endorse. Your more or less commonsense view of scientific practice is roughly the same as my own and is perfectly compatible with a pragmatic characterization. That is, I agree that in the matter of instrumental belief -- beliefs from which we aspire to facilitate prediction and control -- those beliefs on offer are better that will have been warranted by the usual criteria, testability, publication, evidenciary substantiation, coherence with existing knowledge, saving the phenomena, and the rest. As a pluralist, I will note that not all beliefs are instrumental, and that reasonable moral, aesthetic, ethical, legal, political beliefs will be warranted by different criteria related to those domains (I wrote about that topic a bit a while back, here). As for my claim that proper scientific practice is democratic, what I mean by that claim is likely both more complicated but also more sensible than you probably think: Is Science Democratic? Hope that helps you understand where I am coming from.
The relevant part of my interlocutor's response:
I tend to reserve the word "truth" for what you call "instrumental beliefs", and to refer to the other stuff as conventions, arrangements, policies, laws, tastes, or some such. It seems to be mostly a semantic difference.
To which I reply:
You may think you do this while you are arguing your point here and now, but I doubt you really feel that way as you live your actual life. I daresay you hold at least some political and moral beliefs you would bet the house mortgage or even your life on, and when it comes to it instrumental beliefs never yield more substantial confidence than that even if one decides to be all drama diva about this confidence and claim it to be "certainty."

Be all that as it may, since there is no criterion of warrant that has selected as the best belief among those on offer a belief that has not subsequently been supplanted by another better belief, it is wrong to think instrumental beliefs are any less conventional than moral or political ones.

And let me be very clear about this: In making this claim I am not claiming that there is no external world, I am not claiming that beliefs are not beliefs about the world, I am not claiming that every belief is as good as every other belief, I am not claiming that every belief that is a well-warranted belief will be supplanted by later beliefs, I am not claiming that there is no basis for claiming some beliefs more reasonable than others.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

It's not a question of certainty. It's a question of objectivity, or at least intersubjectivity.

The sorts of things I call truth are the sorts of things that can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of a skeptical but openminded audience. By referring to repeatable experiences, we can build some common ground.

On the other hand, if we don't agree that utilitarianism the the best way to describe moral duties, then we're stuck. We can debate and score points, but at the end of the day the issue will remain unsettled as it has for centuries now.

Unknown said...

Be all that as it may, since there is no criterion of warrant that has selected as the best belief among those on offer a belief that has not subsequently been supplanted by another better belief, it is wrong to think instrumental beliefs are any less conventional than moral or political ones.

This is your revenge for the parsing thing, isn't it?

Dale Carrico said...

The sorts of things I call truth are the sorts of things that can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of a skeptical but openminded audience.

Those sorts of things can still be subsequently defeated by other candidate descriptions on the basis of the very same demonstrations to the very same skeptical but openminded audience. Hence conventional. This isn't revenge, it's just my point.

Unknown said...

I can't say I've ever heard of a time that that has happened as you say. If it did, then the obvious thing to do is devise an experiment in which the two candidate explanations predict different results. If you can't, then the models are practically indistinguishable for the time being and either is as useful as the other.

Dale Carrico said...

I said subsequently not simultaneously. New evidence, new experimental results, new applications, even new paradigms pop up all the time. The proper application of the relevant criteria of warrant don't secure certainty or finality even when they yield reasonable belief (I assume you now agree with this point given the above). But with finality lost we lose eternity -- hence warranted instrumental beliefs are contingent, conventional -- hence they aren't as different from mores or taste as you seemed to be saying before (I will spare you a long lecture on the idea of "taste" and embedded in emerging empirical standards in the enlightenment that might actually interest you in this connection) -- hence my point before.

Unknown said...

Nothing human is perfect. Still, it seems useful to me to semantically distinguish ideas which can be tested experimentally against competing ideas and found better or worse with some word like "facts" or "truths". I use words like "arrangements" or "mores" to cover matters where disagreements cannot be settled in such manner.

Dale Carrico said...

Well, pluralism is all about attending to differences that make a difference. I fear your distinction is too crude a tool to manage that, however. For one thing, though the criteria of warrant that select for reasonable moral or aesthetic or political beliefs are different from the ones that select for reasonable instrumental belief, I don't think the difference is one of more or less objectivity, intersubjectivity, or experimentalism.

As an example, on my conception moral beliefs -- from mores, we-intentions -- confer a sense of legibility from belonging to a community or dis-identifying from other-formations. One has to take great care in attending to the reality of the norms that confer such belonging and one often has to experiment quite a bit to accommodate one's performance of legible belonging given that every self really always only partially belongs anywhere and always also belongs multiply. Don't get me wrong, there are differences in the way objectivity, intersubjectivity, and experiment function morally as compared to instrumentally -- I do distinguish, recall, both the substantiation of instrumental beliefs and the ends of instrumental beliefs from beliefs in other domains.

But what I am taking care against here is a fetishization of instrumentality that would declare it more indispensably or more quintessentially reasonable than other modes of warranted belief. I'm not saying you are indulging in such fetishism yourself, but that accepting a distinction between hard scientific truths and soft customs uncritically facilitates such fetishism at the expense of the very reasonableness such distinctions fancy themselves to be policing into firmness.

I don't happen to agree that when we are doing science we are more rational or more perfectly human or more in touch with the external world than when we are doing other kinds of believing reasonably. This matters, because I think trying to elevate instrumentality above other modes, trying to apply instrumentality to other domains, trying to re-write the heterogeneity of reasonable belief in the image of instrumentality yields profoundly unreasonable outcomes, mutilates selfhood, disables the capacity of instrumentality to do its proper work in its proper domain.