Hi John, Joe and Platt
Great new thread John. Thanks for starting it.
I too recently read the Felipe Fernandez-Armesto book and wrote some thoughts
down in the margins and back cover. Later I cleaned them up and moved some
to my journal. Here are some of them...
"The author never understands what truth is. He is stuck on an existential,
transcendent truth without acknowledging that his concept is an assumption.
Truth is the measure of quality of models of reality. It measures their
correspondence with behavior. It is evaluated partially by its accuracy at
predicting experience.
Truth is the "is" which we "ought" to have. It is the best interpretation at
the time. Its test is in its outcome...in its consistency to prediction, to
correspondence with other predictions, to lead to future truths and to life,
freedom, creativity and knowledge.
Theory is subservient to value. Value has a long history of evolutionary
pressure toward that which lasts. And that which lasts tends to be stable
and dynamic.
Cutural relativism is the trap of seeing that truth is contextual and
therefore assuming that it is totally relative. The weakness is in not
recognizing that the contexts can differ in value too."
Those were most of them -- minus some jabs at postmodernism.
I agree with Joe that truth is a subset of value, and that Hume and company
were wrong. There is no dilemma of deriving an ought from an is, because the
is was an ought from the start. But I could be wrong.... Comments?
Rog
jhmau in the 'MD what a mess' strand quotes Pirsig quoting James on the
subject of Truth. The quote is
"James said, 'Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed,
a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it.' He said, 'the true
is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.'
"'Truth is a species of good.' That was right on. That was exactly
what is meant by the Metaphysics of Quality. Truth is a static intellectual
pattern within a larger entity called Quality."
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, an Oxford historian, in his recent book 'Truth - A
History and a Guide for the Perplexed', writes
"We need a history of truth. We need it to test the claim that truth is just
a name for opinions which suit the demands of society of the convenience of
elites. We need to be able to tell whether truth is changeful or eternal,
embedded in time or outside it, universal or varying from place to place. We
need to know how we have got to where we are in the history of truth - how
our society has come to lose faith in the reality of it and lose interest in
the search for it." (p2)
"When people stop believing in something, they do not believe in nothing;
they believe in anything. Crackpot cults prosper, manipulative sects thrive,
descredited superstitions revive. Trapped between fundamentalists, who
believe they have found truth, and relativists, who refuse to pin it down,
the bewildered majority in between continues to hope there is a truth worth
looking for, without knowing how to go about it, or how to answer the voices
from either extreme." (p3)
"We need a history of truth ... because truth is fundamental to everything
else. Everyone's attempt to be good - every attempt to construct happy
relationships and thriving societies - starts with two questions: How do I
tell right from wrong? And how do I tell truth from falsehood? The first
question has more practical applications but it depends on its apparently
more theoretical twin. There is no social order without trust and no trust
without truth or, at least, without agreed truth-finding procedures." (p3)
"Every act of assent implies a truth-test. Every use of language represents
an attempt to reflect the real ... it is, I think, impossible to be human
without having a concept of truth and a technique for matching the signs you
use to the facts you want to represent as true." (p4)
Fernandez-Armesto identifies four ways in which people identify truth, and
makes the point that all four have long histories and still co-exist.
The first is "'the truth you feel', which is detected affectively or by a
kind of apprehension"
The second is "'the truth you are told' ... truth must be mediated by
various human, oracular, divinatory or scriptural sources of authority. I
include the notions of poetic truth, revelation and
truth-detected-by-consensus and the concept of innate truth."
The third is "'the truth of reason' or 'the truth you think for yourself',
and covers phases when truth is understood as what reason determines ... a
history of rationalism ... and of techniques of reasoning which are commonly
called logical."
The fourth is "'the truth you perceive through your senses' and covers the
history of belief in the reliability of sense-perception ... a duel history
of science and empiricism". (pp6-7)
[At this point I intrude to point to a superficial 'fit' between these four
ways of identifying truth, and the biological, social, and intellectual
levels, together with James' radical empirical system that Pirsig goes on to
discuss immediately after the introductory quote above (near the end of Ch
29 of Lila)] [John B]
Fernandez-Armesto identifies three main responses to relativism, which dates
at least from Protagorus, with whom Socrates disagreed, and which he
defines as "Truth is just a name we give to our opinions. Everyone has his
own reality - as if each of all possible universes, or as many as there are
people to experience them, were separately embodied in particular
individuals. What is true for you is not necessarily true for me." (p 204)
"Three more-or-less positive ways of confronting Protagoras are popular
today. First, religious fundamentalists respond in panic by irrationally
affirming beliefs most people cannot share. Secondly, seekers of an escape
route turn to oriental traditions; there they hope to find an understanding
of truth invulnerable to criticisms which have arisen in western thought.
Finally, professional philosophers use the traditional resources of their
discipline, with effects which tend to make matters worse by gutting all the
traditional strength out of the concept of truth." (p 207)
"Zen is the favourite 'orientalism' of western revellers in uncertainty
because it seems to represent par excellence an ancient tendency of Buddhist
philosophy: the claim that every perspective is evanescent and that none is
objectively correct. So the oriental temptation leads back to relativism or
to a more radical denial that truth is meaningful or expressible. The
orienteers return disorientated.
For example, the locus classicus of the western appropriation of eastern
philosophy in the attempt to escape the limitiations of subjective thinking
is Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' ... (1 page
summary omitted) ...
The enlightenment imparted by Zen is like the indifference enjoyed by
ancient Greek and Roman sceptics - 'forgetfulness of the sky, retirement
from the wind'. Yet there is a difference; ancient western sceptics
professed contentment with things as they seemed, on the grounds that
appearances could do duty for truths no one can know. The indifference of
Zen is the inertia of being, beyond thought and language ... Perhaps Zen is
... a bid by mere humans for the reality and objectivity of a clod or a
rock." (pp 215 - 216)
Philosophers have adopted three approaches to rescuing truth, namely
correspondence, coherence and consensus. Fernandez-Armesto examines the
varied outcomes of each, including Rorty's, and dismisses them. He is left
with Habermas, who "has come to value 'unconstrained consensus-formation'
... he prefers to be guided towards truth through collaboration and
communication ... his greatest enemy is the self; so he directs his readers
towards reverence for society; his greatest bugbear is 'subjective
reasoning', which alienates us and drives us into the hell of Huis Clos; so
he advances 'communicative reasoning'. The search for truth is a collective
enterprise, in which we learn from each other ... it has merits which so far
have been insufficiently praised: it is humane, undogmatic, solidly rooted
in tradition, optimistic, and in effect, good for the individual who
practices it and the society which benefits from it." (p 222)
I will not comment further on this thesis here, as the post is already long.
If anyone has read this far there may be scope for debate.
John B
In the margin next to where this conclusion was proposed I jotted, "No!.
P.C." I interpreted the idea of "communicative reasoning" to be the
social level attempting to swallow the intellectual level. But, an
interesting book, highly recommended to all who seek to understand
how we confirm our assumptions.
Platt
Joe:
Thanks, John, for pointing me to a book I have not read. I, also, want to
thank Persig for writing Lila and pointing to something I find interesting.
I agree with the above quote and ask this question: How do I go from 'I
trust' to 'I experience?' If I don't know it I don't want it! I am not
certain of all that I read, but I certainly do what I do. The social order
based upon communication in its evolution to higher order intellect depends
on trust. My experience of quality, existence, value is instinctive and
certain. I would like to say that by trust good is a species of truth, but
by certainty truth is a species of good.
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