Ethical foundations of the left

Ian Murray seamus2001 at home.com
Sun Jul 29 16:03:05 PDT 2001



> This would be treating truth in a non-propositional form, it is so
18th
> century. Habermas is beyond this. We can no longer talk about truth
in a
> representationalist way, the truth we have takes the form of
propositional
> statement about the world. They only have meaning in the sense of
validity. ======== To speak of aboutness is to speak representability.


>
> If only one person in the world see the world in the way that they
see it,
> they may in fact have the truth, but we institutionalize them
because it
> they are deemed insane. I'm not saying it is good, right, correct or
> anything like that, but 'truth' is something that we identify as
truth
> through the idea of validity.
>
> We ought to have universal health care.
>
> If we all agree, then this statement can be considered valid. Its
validity,
> in principle, is open to criticism from any person or any direction.
There
> is no such thing as Truth, only validity, which is always subject to
> revision, insofar as we do not see ourselves as gods.
========== Reflexivity alert. If some don't agree that doesn't mean we should forego operationalizing the ought. Unanimity ain't gonna work with stipulative/injunctive norm creation; thus always leaving minorities to speak of oppression. Otherwise we're stuck with the paralysis problem via the meta-acceptance of leaving the issue always open to criticism. Once a significant majority accepts the validity of the norm claim, as long as they're not commiting violence/robbery against the opponents, they should proceed to operationalize the norm they recognize as valid.

To the extent these aren't Pareto improving, using Kaldor-Hicks compensation principles may alleviate harm claims [speaking neoclassically for the moment]. The meta-valuation we must consider is whether the society has a live-and-let-live ethos or is loaded with agents that make vindictiveness part and parcel of their epistemic practices. It's only slightly different from whether groups want to fund research on extratarrestrials.


>
> >... there are other kinds of truth than the factual
propositional...
>
> And I would respond by saying that outside the propositional model,
no
> understanding of truth can withstand the criticism that has already
be
> leveled against it. If you want to reserve the idea of truth for
something
> that isn't universal and is decoupled from a concept of knowledge,
that's
> fine, but why would you want to do this other than to supply
ammunition for
> idiots who want to say that the earth is flat, and we know this
because it
> looks flat to me. I always try to think the most unfair situation:
how
> could this concept be abused? The propositional model of truth,
which
> relies on consensus, seems to me to be the least authoritarian
concept of
> truth that we can have, and all it requires is reasoning and
communication. ======== And the external world with it's ubiquity of possible patternings, partially contingent on the perceptual and cognitive abilities of agents.


> In any event, any definition of truth one wants to adopt must be
acceptable
> to other people, and thus only achieves legitimacy through its
acceptance
> by others... in other words, one has to accept argumentation from
the get
> go, ie. you can't use a propositional form (a truth claim about
truth) to
> make a case for non-propositional understanding of truth....).
>
> ken
================= Yes, but the whole problem we've been bouncing around is criteriology of acceptance and the ? of whether H's models get us past the refinements of skepticism in a multitude of every day contexts, economic, legal, philosophical and otherwise. It's the damn *not* operator in language/logic/explanatory/justificatory practices. Pilate 1, Habermas 1/3......heading into the 6th inning......

Ian



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