>At 02:36 PM 7/29/01 +0000, you wrote:
>
>>Maybe Kennth has in mind something like the following. There is only one
>>truth, so that versions that differ from it are just false.
I guess the following shows that my speculation about why you rejected the idea that literature might teach us truth was mistaken, at least as an attribuition to you or your Habermas. Let me comment, however, on your remarks.
>
>This would be treating truth in a non-propositional form,
Huh? THe idea I sketched presupposed that "the truth," the one truth, is an attribute of the unique total system of propositions that defines the world. "Unique," because of the logical law of noncontradiction: anythings follows from a contradiction (this is a theorem), so the total set of all true propositions is ipso facto unique. "Total" because it contains all and only the true propositions that state of what is, taht is , and of what is not, that it is not. In sort, I was being a propositoonalist as you care to about the truth, Matter of fact, I see no errir in speaking about nonpropositional truths, the truths of, e.g., demonstrative representations such as good likenessness, bearing in mind that they will not be amenable to Tarskian formalization.
it is so
>18th
>century.
Ooh, ikkey. We are _so_ beyond the 18th Century.
Aside from this being a dumb putdown--dumb, because even if something is 18th century doesn't mean it's passe (after all, the Enlightenment was 18th century, and it's still a good idea), I have no idea what it means as applied to a theory of truth. The (utterly standard) theory of truth I jsut sketched is a 20th century notion, basically a version of Davidson's application of Tarski to natural language, taht could not have been formulated before Frege's development of mathematical logic in the late 19th 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.
Can't we? See if you can stop me. What could truth be if not an accurate represention of theworld? As Tarski teaches, "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.
They only have meaning in the sense of >validity.>
>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.
So what's that, consensus? But then of course, by definition, the dissident doesn't have the truth, cause he's a dissident. And this view leads to the silliness Rorty gets tangled up in when he lapses into his consensus theory of truth, like the earth used to be flat, when everyone agreed it was flat. Of course, there are truths that no one knows, such as (once upon a time) "The earth is round," but it was still round, even though no one knew it. Replacing truth, good old semantic, representationalist truth, with validity, warranted assertinility (Dewey), what "works" (James), leads us into absurdity by forgetting that truth is a pure semantic notion, a relation between a proposition and what it's about, and not an epistemological relation.
>
>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.
Hey, Kenneth, I am a pragmatist. That means my one fixed point is that all statements are open to revision. That doesn't mean that some of them aren't true, or that if we know a true one, then we cannot revise it (we just shouldn't, if we want to believe truths), or that we can ever be absolutely certain that any statemenr we believe happens to be true. So the "gods" objection is a further example of confusing epistemology with semantics. We are not gods, jsut limited, falluible mortals who, however, can know truths like "Snow is white," "The earth is round," and "National health care is a good idea."
>
> >... 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.
What, the criticism that an objective notion of truth commits us to being gods?
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.
Seems to me that the notoon of validity does exactly this. On its version of truth, if we all agree to some such proposition, it becomes true because we agree to it. Anyway, the representationalist notioon of truth has nothing to do with how we know truths. That is episytemology. It's semantics.
I always try to think the most unfair situation:
>how >could this concept be abused?
As a pragmatist, I can hardly object to bringing in values in construction of philosophy of language. However, I can't see that the notion of truth I'm pressing is susceptible to the sort of abuse you suggest. I also am very suspicious of important political criteria directly into thsi sort of discussion, however. "That can't be true because it would be terrible if it were" ia a weak argument. Perhaps things are terrible. But Davidson-Tarksi truth is not terrible.
The propositional model of truth,
>which >relies on consensus, seems to me to be the least authoritarian
>concept of >truth that we can have,
The representationalist notion (Davidson would have a fit for calling it that) is neither authoritarian nor non-authoritarian. Actually, if you are going to get political on me, Orwells shows, in the colloquy between Winston and O'Brien on "2+2=5" that representationalist truth is a powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressed.
and all it requires is reasoning and
>communication.
>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....).
>
You keep returning to the idea that if I ever argue for anything, I must accept Habermas whole hog, or I am contradicting myself. I don't buy it.
--jks
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