Re: Universality as warrant for relative truth value

It seems that most correspondence theories not only assert that a
truthful statement corresponds to the world, but that it it an accurate
copy of it. So I'm only partially a correspondence person: truthful
statements are analogs that only probabilistically and partially
correspond to the world, although truth nevertheless in large part
consists of that relation.

Coherence theory folks object that there are other determinants of truth
than simply mirroring the world, and these determinants constitute a
system. As I describe the position here, I would agree. Language, logic,
and the criteria that are existentially embraced such as simplicity. But
I'd not privilege these other determinants to the point I ended up an
idealist or rationalist. I suspect most coherence theorists see truthful
statements as an emergent property of the system that does not reduce to
any one determinant. I think I'd agree with the idea that truth is a
property of the whole that arises from the interaction of these
determinants, but particularly the one I bring up next which is usually
not included in a coherence theory.

I agree with constructivist theory in that truth is constructed by
social processes, although I'd not make these the sole determinant of
truth, but merely probabilistically related to the formation of a
truthful statement. I see social construction as necessary for the
creation of truthful statements about the world, and the universality of
one's social location as a measure of the potential truth value of our
statements, but I'd disagree with the the social constructivists who
hold that truth reduces to these social determinations.

And I'd definitely agree with pragmatic theorists that truth represents
a succession of approximations. Peirce, for example, suggested that all
truthful statements are necessarily one-sided and inaccurate, and urged
us to admit that right up front. I agree with this, and indeed it is why
I came out with my request for citations for discussions that the the
degree of the potential truthfulness of our statements is a function of
the universality of the domain of which we speak and our own social
universality. However, I'd disagree with Peirce's suggestion that we
test truth value of our statements by putting them into practice. If
this is a fair characterization of his view, I'd object that the proper
test is not observing the results of our practice (which is empiricist
and raises the issue of the measure of success [nicely discussed by
Timpanaro, _On Materialism_), but the power to engage in the practice in
the first place (that is, I'd disagree with his empiricism and make an
unobservable a test of truth: our having causal potency).

Finally, I've got to admit that the deconstructionists have some
important things to say in that we need to look critically at our
Enlightenment presuppositions and slough off some of the baggage of
presumptions we carry about us. However, I don't see that a
deconstruction should lead us to elitism, skepticsm, agnosticism, or an
abandonment of truth.

Sorry to drag you though this, but you want to put me into a
conventional philosophical category, and instead I kinda mindlessly find
virtue in all positions, but am too dense to be entirely persuaded by
any of them. Perhaps you can put me into one category or another based
on what I sketched above, but I avoid such categories myself, and simply
think of myself as a dialectical materialist.

Thanks for taking the time to put that down, I see I was barking up
the wrong tree. I'm trying to understand you in my own terms which
have been fleshed out in philosophy. I certainly don't want to box
you and I'm glad you can't be.

Do you agree with parts of Marx, Hegel or Gadamer's notions of truth?
I really like Gadamer's in that truth is fundamentally a movement.
That truth is the shock we experience when we come to a new
understanding bought about by communication with other people, art,
the world, etc. If I finally understood your notion of truth, the
"ah!" moment would be the synthesis of world-views in action.

A little while ago I was looking a correspondence theory of truth that
used language as the prime concept. The idea was that the world and
our understanding of it are linguistic in some critical sense. It
went something like: the world's "language" is far richer than our own
human language and as such can only cast a shadow onto it, like
Plato's cave analogy. We would each have our own idiom and so our own
unique cave and therefore shadows. My plan was to capture points of
view without going relativist, and to capture Gadamer's idea. I
spelled out the idea mathematically using Hilbert spaces and
projections onto sub-spaces. The account of truth becomes... not
really probabilistic, but hazy or partial. It accounts for dialectic
synthesis, the coming together of world views (idioms), as the union
of sub-spaces.

More recently I've abandoned the idea of truth all together and, like
consciousness, I don't really believe in it anymore.


Thanks for the reference but I don't really believe in consciousness.

Interesting statement. Would you mind telling me just what you mean and
why? The old empiricist position was to accept only brute facts that are
justified by direct observation. However, practicing scientist have
never held that position, and in the last couple decades even
philosophers of science have to a significant degree come around to
admitting the realist position that unobservables are real. This
"consciousness" is presumably such an unobservable.

The problem is, how do we warrant our claims about unobervables. Here I
take a narrow definition of unobservables (some, perhaps the
pragmatists, would argue that we shouldn't attempt the definition at
all), and feel that unobservables are causal potencies. As a result I
feel that the existence of unobservables can be inferred from processes
- not simply observing their outcomes, but from a knowledge that there
is a process at work. So, to warrant the existence of consciousness, I'd
assume that its presence is necessary to understand action in the world
and is a necessary condition for it (I'm a bit of an existentialist
here).

But I didn't put this forward to challenge your own position on
consciousness, but instead would really like to know more about your
position.

I believe that to explain human behavior, we don't need terms like
"consciousness", "awareness", "experience", "qualia", "something that
it is like to human", etc. A full picture can be expressed, at least
in principle, without the need to hand-wave at some "thing" that's
really quite ineffable. I don't think there is this hard problem of
consciousness. I think we've created the problem with the terms we
use and our assumptions they carry.

Same with "truth" and "knowledge". I don't think it exists outside of
human discourse. I don't think there are any propositions or ideas in
our head that correspond to the world. The terms are handy, but I
think we could live quite happily without their metaphysical
assumptions.

If pressed, I'm currently trying on the idea that consciousness is an
illusion, fully aware of the regress in there. It's not a position
though, it's a direction.


Yes, the reason for my raising the issue is that I'm writing a paper
(perhaps "The Incubus of Theory". You would have to be familiar with
historiography to understand the reason for "incubus" here). There's a
new e-journal in formation (http://history.theory.googlepages.com),
_Critical Studies in History_, and I've been asked to write a paper for
its premier issue which should come out later this year. This journal is
associated with a history and theory forum that meets in New York
(anyone having an interest in this forum should contact me privately for
more information).

Great! I'd be interested to read it.
.

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