> Jon Johanning <zenner41 at mac.com> wrote:
>
> On Dec 30, 2004, at 11:42 AM, Chris Doss wrote:
> I maintain that there is only one kind of logic and one kind of
> truth. Do
> you have a problem with that?
>
>
> Manjur's Response:
>
> Actually Richard Rorty would. Any undergrad who took the time to read
> "Philosophy and the Mirror of Knowledge" should know that for Rorty,
> truth is communicative, it is a matter of an intersubjective agreement
> within a community. Truth does not have any independent existence
> outside that communicative setting. (Actually Rorty doesn't have a
> simple relativism either, but that's another debate). It boggles my
> mind how are you so fond of quoting Rorty yet failed to notice that
> "simple truth" about him.
OK, try it this way. I am sitting on a chair in my room. There is one other chair in the room. Looking into the room, Rorty (and everyone else) would say that there are two chairs in the room. I don't think that he or anyone else could imagine a serious intersubjective agreement according to which "there are more (or less) than two chairs in the room" would be true. (Unless we came to an agreement that the desk was actually a chair, because you can sit on it. But this is simply a misuse of English, not a serious philosophical point.)
What about religious language? If I understand him correctly, he does not object to religious language because it contains untruths, but because he thinks that secular language ought to replace it -- for various reasons, including the increase in human welfare and solidarity that would result. I would agree that secular language is not "truer" than religious language, but not quite for his reason, perhaps. My reason would be that religious language is not the sort of language game it makes sense to call "true" or "untrue," just as it doesn't make sense to call poetry "true" or "untrue." Religious language and poetry have entirely different purposes from stating truths.
> But from a social theory perspective, numbers are parts of
> classification systems and like any classification systems, they are
> constructed.
Then you are talking about the mathematical concepts human beings construct, not the actual numbers themselves. I see.
> If I can't count, in other words, I am not being able to situate
> myself in the discourse of mathematical language, numbers don't have
> the same meaning for me.
That would be a fact about you, not about numbers. The problem I have with "social theorists" is that they systematically confuse the real world with what is in people's minds.
> Besides, even assuming a common socialization in the mathematical
> language, whether you see "two chairs" or "twelve pieces of wood stuck
> together" or "millions of particles," or "one aesthetically pleasing
> scene" depends on the discursive perspective that you are taking.
> There is nothing "objectively logical" about it.
These are various ways of talking about the world. The world is not the same thing as talking about the world, even though "social theory" seems to have a problem telling them apart. In the world of my room, there are two chairs, no matter how you decide to talk about them.
On Dec 30, 2004, at 4:10 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
> So what interests LW is how claims like "God exists" become
> certain statements in specific forms of life. In contrast,
> creating or refuting philosophical arguments about the
> existence of God was in LW's view a ridiculous waste of time.
I would agree, except that I think refuting God-existence "proofs" has a certain value in keeping one's mind on an even keel, as it were. If one came along that I had to accept as sound, I would have to do a rather radical re-thinking of my whole view of the world. So philosophical arguments keep you on your toes intellectually.
Of course, Wittgenstein would no doubt scornfully reply to this that these "world views" are not worth bothering with. But that's one point on which I would respectfully disagree with him.
On Dec 30, 2004, at 9:54 PM, BklynMagus wrote:
> How in a pluralistic universe can there be only one truth?
> As James said: the truth is what works. Isn't the claim
> that there is only one kind of truth what the Catholic Church
> claims?
There are many claims to truth, and many ways which have been proposed to find truth, but of any pair of statements S and not-S, only one of them can be true. If someone maintains that both S and not-S are true, which is what the "truth is relative to a discourse" people end up asserting, then one is throwing out logic, and that's a sacrifice I for one am not willing to make.
Also, there is a difference, a big one, between maintaining that only one of S and not-S is true, and claiming that one *knows* which is true. That's where people often get into trouble. Adherents to a dogmatic religion make that claim, that they *know* what is true. And they don't back their claims up with anything but "I believe it's true," which isn't good enough, by a long shot.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax