From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 22:32:08 GMT
Erin said:
I think knowledge is awareness of truth.
Matt:
Therein lies the bugbear, so thinks the pragmatist. If you think of truth
as "out there" and our knowledge having to correspond to it, then naturally
the idea of "knowledge as consensus of opinion" will look pretty shabby.
The pragmatist argues that no one has yet to make sense of the idea of
"correspondence of reality" outside of its trivial sense, so we should just
own up to the fact that when call something knowledge, we are just saying
that "Everybody I know (or respect) thinks this way" or more specifically
"Everybody in my community thinks this way."
That's the heart of the disagreement. If you still hold onto the idea that
"knowledge is awareness of truth," then pragmatists will look sick and
disgusting. The suggestion of the pragmatist over the Platonist's
suggestion (Truth is "out there") doesn't actually change any of our
practices. Scientists wouldn't suddenly start behaving differently. They
might, however, start talking differently and that might lead to a more
general cultural change in which self-transformation becomes easier. The
pragmatist thinks that it will be easier to proliferate vocabularies (and,
therefore, find better ones) in a culture that hands in its "discovery"
metaphors for truth and takes up "making" metaphors.
Matt
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