Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
The Continental Origins of Postmodernism

Week 12: November 29-December 5 and Week 13: December 6-12

David Potts Comments on
Will Wilkinson's Review of Richard Rorty's
"Solidarity or Objectivity?" and "The Contingency of Language"

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 4:09 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: DP Comment on Will Wilkinson on Rorty

[From: ]David Potts

Reading through Will Wilkinson's excellent essay on Rorty, I found myself
stalled at the point where Will presents a general argument against any
"thoroughgoing pragmatist theory of truth." Here is the argument.

Suppose we have two beliefs, P and Q,...and we
want to decide which is most advantageous, which
is best for us to hold. And suppose Rorty says
that P is better for us to hold than Q. Immediately
we'll want to ask, "Is P's being better for us to
hold than Q, a bona fide fact, i.e., is it really
TRUE that P is better for us to hold than Q." ...
[In consequence, the pragmatist] is saddled with a
vicious regress. If it is pragmatically true that
P is good for us to believe, then it is good for
us to believe that it is good for us to believe
that P. And if that is the case, then it is good
to believe that it is good to believe that it is
good to believe that P. And so on. The regress is
vicious because if one begins on the regress it
becomes impossible to give any content to claims
about a belief's goodness or practical advantage.
... [Such a claim] fails to be a claim at all.

Let us examine this argument, and see what it has to teach us about the
relations between pragmatism and the other two traditional theories of
truth (the correspondence and coherence theories), about the philosophical
motivations behind these theories, and about their respective abilities to
withstand regress arguments such as the above. For purposes of this essay,
I will continue Will's lead and try to make my claims applicable to any
thoroughgoing pragmatism, not just Rorty. I will however change the
locution "is good for us" to the syntactically simpler "is useful." Also,
in what follows it will be convenient to choose some definite but ordinary
empirical statement for P. Let us say that P is the sentence "There's a
thorn tree in the garden." Q can be simply "Not P."

The first thing that occurred to me about Will's argument is that, if it's
a question of "_deciding which_" of P or Q is true, that is, a question of
confirming truth, then (my beloved!) correspondence theory of truth is at
least as susceptible to a regress, if not more so. For, how will we decide
whether P is true? Being good empiricists, I suppose we will check the
garden and see. So we can then say, "I saw a thorn tree in the garden"
(P'). But how did we decide that P' is true? Was the light adequate? Did I
look carefully enough? Was merely looking enough, or should I have felt it
as well? Some fakes can be extremely realistic; perhaps I should have taken
a sample from inside the "tree" for analysis. Is there really a root
structure? Each of these questions represents the need for a P'', e.g.,
"The light was adequate to see the tree in the garden" (P1''); "I looked
carefully enough to see a thorn tree in the garden under normal viewing
conditions" (P2''); etc. But there would appear to be no limit to this sort
of double-prime level statements. Therefore it is not possible to construct
a conjunction of all the Pi'' from which P' follows. Moreover, clearly for
each single Pi'' there will recur a further set of equally unlimited
Pij''', and so on and on, in a combinatorial explosion.

So even on the correspondence theory of truth there is a "verification
regress" when it comes to deciding which statements are in fact true - at
least when it comes to statements about the empirical world. Indeed, isn't
this the very problem that led people to embrace non-correspondence
theories of truth in the first place? Rorty thinks it is the principal
problem even today (_Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth_ [ORT] 6; his
phrase: "no way of formulating an _independent_ test of accuracy" [emphasis
his]). I believe coherence theorists like Hegel have traditionally been
interpreted as reasoning, essentially, "if only empirical truth were
'inside' the system like mathematical truth is, then logical consistency
alone would determine what is true, and there would be no need of 'an
independent test of accuracy.'" (Whoops, there I go mentioning Hegel. Now
ol' Chris Sciabarra [hi, Chris] will be sure to pop in and say that the
latest of Hegel's many interpreters have raised the question whether he
might not be a correspondence theorist after all. I suppose it must be a
testament to the depth of that philosopher that after 200 years we still
aren't clear about whether he was an idealist or a realist.) Pragmatism
works the same way: by bringing truth inside the system of sentences (or
ideas, or whatever), pragmatism attempts to eliminate the need of an
independent test of accuracy. (I will say more below about how pragmatism
brings truth inside the system of sentences.)

But is the verification regress actually a serious problem for the
correspondence theory? I don't see why it should be. In fact we justify
statements like P by reference to statements like P' all the time in
everyday life without difficulty. When a greater degree of justification is
needed, we commonly appeal to statements like P1'' and P2'', adding further
such statements to meet specific challenges or concerns as they arise.
[note 1] Without launching into an elaborate theory of evidence and
justification - which I confess to lacking anyhow - let me just say that I
think we can conceive this process as essentially similar to the process
whereby evidence is brought to bear in a case before a law court. That is,
like the process of evidence and justification in a law court, the process
of justifying statements such as P by reference to perceptual judgments
like P', P1'', and P2'' is similarly fallible and perhaps even subject to
certain biases, but also - similarly - fundamentally unproblematic.

What is supposed to start the verification regress for the correspondence
theory? What would make us suppose that P' is inadequate without, say,
P1''? It is our knowledge that we can more easily make perceptual mistakes
in poor lighting, so that, if it is especially important to be right about
P', we ought to bring in P1'' as well. But what is the nature of the
"inadequacy" attributed to P' if P1'' cannot be produced? It is like one
side of a court case missing evidence that would be expected to be
available and whose lack is therefore damaging. It is _not_ that of a
deductive conclusion lacking a necessary premise. Therefore, P' lacking
P1'' is not like a promissory note that can't be redeemed. Quite the
contrary, it is critical to see that P' has epistemic weight all by itself.
To see something is to have evidence of it, and indeed in the scenario I
have described P' is the _main_ evidence for P. The Pi'' statements (as
well as the triple-primes, quadruple-primes, and so on) are important only
as supplements to P' (but also as potential falsifiers, if for example
closer inspection reveals the "tree" to be a fake). Notice in this
connection that P' continues to support P even if P1'' _is_ lacking - even
if the contradictory of P1'' is true. One sees what one sees, after all,
even in very poor light.

In short, since the Pi'' are not required in order that P' constitute
evidence for P but only in order to investigate further the status of P',
and since such further investigation is not automatically necessary but
only becomes necessary when specific problems arise about P' or when it
becomes critically important to be right about P', there is nothing vicious
about the verification process. But isn't this just to admit that
perceptual judgments like P' are fallible? Yes, but why is that a problem?
Who ever imagined that knowledge would not be fallible? Plenty of
_philosophers_! Plato, for starters. I believe that the requirement that
knowledge be indefeasible is a key error which has brought many a
philosophical program to grief, and which is at the root of
anti-correspondence theories of truth.

Well, so if the verification regress is not vicious for the correspondence
theory, what about Will's regress about deciding the usefulness of P in
pragmatism? Do we have to decide whether it is useful that P is useful,
useful that it is useful that P is useful, and so on? Is there really a
problem here? Since "usefulness" without further explanation is a tad
vague, I propose to begin by asking the same question of the coherence
theory instead. As I have already indicated, coherentism and pragmatism,
qua forms of anti-correspondence, are essentially similar strategies
motivated by essentially the same perceived problem. So we can ask, upon
being told that P is logically coherent with all our other beliefs, whether
the coherence of P itself coheres with all our other beliefs. But offhand
there seems no logical problem about it. (The problem would be if we tried
to say that P's coherence was _not-_ coherent.) More fundamentally, it is
hard to see why we should have to ask about the coherence of P's coherence
to start with. For the statement that P is coherent is perfectly
intelligible. The standard of coherence is referred to specifiable rules of
logic, applicable to any statement in the system. This is just what I meant
by saying that coherentism avoids the supposed need for an "independent
test of accuracy" by bringing truth inside.

I can't see that the situation is any different when we change the standard
from coherence to usefulness, other than that usefulness is slipperier. But
usefulness presumably refers to being instrumental in achieving goals. Some
appropriate set of goals rather than just any, no doubt, but the point is
that once again the criterion is determinable inside the system. Therefore
the statement that P is useful is in principle decidable and does have
content. So, although the question whether P's usefulness is useful is
intelligible, there is no particular reason to ask it and a regress of such
questions would not be vicious.

For that matter, if the question were about the _correspondence_ of P (does
P's correspondence to the facts itself correspond to the facts?), the
question would be askable though rather pointless, in just the same way. In
fact, on all three theories it appears to me that the truth of P actually
_guarantees_ the truth of the statement that P is true as well as all
subsequent recursions of this reflexive statement. Which brings me to say,
what has probably been apparent to most readers for some time, that there
are really two distinct kinds of regress involved here. The first is the
verification regress, which arose when Will said we wanted to _decide_
whether P is true (i.e., useful, coherent, or corresponding). The second is
a reflexive regress on the assertion that P is true, which arose because
that is the regress Will actually develops. We saw that the verification
regress affects the correspondence theory because, on the correspondence
theory, truth is a relation between a given sentence and the facts and
consequently not itself a part of the system of sentences. We found that
the view that this is a problem results from the (false) premise that
knowledge must be indefeasible; nevertheless it has historically been
regarded as an insuperable difficulty, leading to attempts to bring truth
inside the system of sentences, two important of which attempts have been
coherentism and pragmatism. As for the reflexive regress, we found that it
is not the least vicious for any of the three theories under review, since
for all three the sentence "P is true" can be explicated in the given
theory's own terms and particularly without recourse to the question
whether it is true that P is true.

But it would be going too far to say that there is nothing at all in the
argument Will presents. I think the core of Will's point lies in his
question, "is P's being better for us to hold than Q a bona fide fact?".
This question suggests that pragmatist truth is not really inside the
system of sentences after all. For it is a matter of fact whether P is
useful for us to hold - a matter of fact _outside_ the system of sentences.
Therefore the problem that supposedly plagues the correspondence theory is
not really avoided. However, the question is not whether there is a fact of
the matter about the usefulness of P. The question is whether the
pragmatist can articulate his theory of truth and adhere to it without
recourse to any extralinguistic facts about usefulness. I think the answer
is that he can. Usefulness is a matter of promoting the achievement of
goals. Goals are stateable in language, as are outcomes and whether
outcomes measure up to goals. The usefulness of propositions such as P can
be assessed by measuring whether their adoption leads to achieving goals
(such as predicting future observations). The scheme is similar to
instrumentalism in the philosophy of science.

The comparison with instrumentalism, however, raises just what I myself see
as the key difficulty for pragmatism. Instrumentalism claims that the
theoretical objects referred to by scientific theories (atoms, forces,
charges, and the like) should not be taken literally but rather as
convenient fictions; scientific theories do not make discoveries about
unobservable nature but instead only enable us to make reliable predictions
about future observations. (Once again, notice that the motivation for
instrumentalism is to avoid the need for an "independent test of accuracy"
concerning the unobservables.) I think that the pragmatist is driven
ineluctably to the same conclusion - that words and sentences do not refer
to extralinguistic entities - but this time for _all_ entities, not just
unobservables. For suppose that P is taken to refer to a factual tree being
in a factual garden. Once this is admitted, it is inevitable that the
question arises whether the putative facts to which P refers obtain in
reality. For why do we refer to extralinguistic facts at all if we are not
interested in them? Therefore, to admit that sentences refer to
extralinguistic facts is to admit that the pragmatist (or coherence, for
that matter) theory of truth is inadequate. It follows that to insist that
the pragmatist (or coherence) theory of truth is adequate ultimately
requires one to deny that sentences refer to extralinguistic facts. [note
2]

Of course, we all know by now that this consequence, which the uninitiated
might regard as a reductio of pragmatism, is not only accepted but insisted
upon by Rorty. "[T]here is no sense in which _any_ of these descriptions
[e.g., scientific, poetic, or political] is an accurate representation of
the way the world is in itself. These philosophers [whom Rorty recommends]
regard the very idea of such a representation as pointless" (_Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity_ [CIS] 4). Again, "The pragmatist...does not think
that his views correspond to the nature of things" (ORT 23). Derrida is
even more explicit: "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte [There is no
outside-the-text]" (_Of Grammatology_ 158). Yet Derrida acknowledges that
the "logocentric" idea that there _is_ an "outside" to which language
refers is so deeply embedded in "phonocentric" language that we are
presently incapable of escaping it. This is the root of the deep
incoherence of "phonocentric" language: it presents itself as referring to
an antecedent world outside itself, although it cannot so refer.

I see Rorty as very much a Derridean, though one who still tries to make
positive claims (i.e., that are more than merely emotional or rhetorical).
For example, "A liberal society is one which is content to call
'true'...whatever the outcome of undistorted communication happens to be,
whatever view wins in a free and open encounter" (CIS 67). This sounds very
much like Rorty thinks he can say what it is to be "free and open," that
is, that he has access to a standard of being free and open that is not
just a matter of whatever view "won" in some previous "encounter" (which
need not have been itself "free and open" at all and probably wasn't,
having taken place prior to the "winning" of the "free and open" standard).
In the clinches, of course, he would deny having any such access. For
instance, "it _just happened_ that rule in Europe passed into the hands of
people who pitied the humiliated and dreamed of human equality...
Socialization...goes all the way down, and who gets to do the socializing
is often a matter who manages to kill whom first" (CIS 184-5, emphasis
his). Again, note these remarks about socialization: are they supposed to
represent Rorty's view of how the world _is_, or only a view to which our
own socialization has compelled us? The answer has to be the latter, but
that's not the way the sentence sounds. I think it is a point we can take
from both Derrida and Rorty that, so long as we're doing philosophy, or any
other form of "logocentric" inquiry, our sentences _have_ to appear
representational. This being the case, the up-to-the-minute intellectual
should begin doing poetry vel sim. instead of philosophy. Derrida, and
Rorty too, in spite of his inconsistencies, both seem to embrace this
point. Derrida apparently puts it into action (see Rorty's rhapsody on
Derrida's _The Post Card_ in CIS chapter 6). Rorty doesn't. But maybe he'll
come around.


NOTE 1
In what follows I will be referring to perceptual judgments (e.g., P')
without reference to the acts of perception that justify them. Not only
would introducing a theory of perception involve an enormous amount of
complexity, I do not believe a proper theory of perception would resolve
the "verification regress," or even address it, since on such a theory
perceptual judgments are not indefeasible by other claims. Readers should
assume that any perceptual claim such as P', P1'', etc., has been properly
supported by a percept.

NOTE 2
I am very much aware that this argument is, shall we say, enthymematic. But
this essay is already overlong so I won't try to expand it. The basic
argument is that you can't very well say that language is a
representational medium and still say that truth has nothing to do with
success or failure in the representational endeavor. Notice by the way that
therefore rejection of the correspondence theory implies denial of the
representational function of language. The result is assorted doctrines
claiming in effect that language is a world by itself, where "meaning is
use" (Wittgenstein) or percepts are determined by abstractions, not the
other way around (Kuhn). If we combine this with Rorty's often repeated
point that the "language" and "sentences" of contemporary philosophy are
just the twentieth century's version of early modern philosophy's "mind"
and "ideas," we see that twentieth century attempts to make language a
world by itself and the only world to which we have cognitive access are
just forms of nineteenth century idealism in new garb. This is one of the
main points I have gotten from our current reading of Rorty.

[David Potts]


*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************

Sent: Monday, December 13, 1999 11:59 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Rorty: Neo-pragmatist Or Neo-pyrrhonist?

David Potts@IMMC
12/13/99 10:37 AM

Pyrrhonism was the most thoroughgoing school of skepticism in the ancient
world. In a nutshell, the pyrrhonist held nothing - not even that he held
nothing. Pyrrhonism distinguished between appearances and judgments about
the appearances. For example, there may appear to be an apple, which might
appear to be red, to taste sweet, to satisfy hunger, etc. It might even
appear, with some thought, that apples are nutritious. But none of the
corresponding judgments - that there _is_ an apple, that it _is_ red or
sweet, that it does allay hunger, that it is nutritious - is assented to by
the pyrrhonist.

The reason is that for any judgment a contradictory judgment can be
proposed with an equally strong claim to our assent. Since the competing
claims are equally strong no choice between them is epistemically
justified. So the pyrrhonist _doesn't_ choose. About _any_thing. The works
of Sextus Empiricus (a pyrrhonist) consist mostly of arguments, one after
another, against representative beliefs from all walks of life.

The pragmatists found that their policy of believing nothing brought them
"ataraxia" - tranquility. That is, rather than struggle to discover the
truth about things in order to eliminate their troubles, they found that by
relinquishing that very struggle inner peace followed as it were
serendipitously. Or so it appeared. :-) They therefore proposed to live
strictly by appearances, including not only sense impressions but the
thoughts which naturally flow from them, as well as natural impulses (e.g.,
hunger), conventionally transmitted attitudes (e.g., that piety is good),
and social practices (e.g., Sextus himself was a physician in his "day
job").

Note finally that pyrrhonism, like virtually all ancient philosophies, was
not an "academic" theory but was conceived as a way of life and had popular
adherents. That is, there evidently were people who attempted to practice
pyrrhonism (as for that matter epicureanism, stoicism, platonism, etc.),
just as today we can say that Phil Jackson and others practice Buddhism.

I hope the parallels between pyrrhonism and Rorty are clear. Rorty calls
himself a "pragmatist," but I believe traditional pragmatists thought that
the pragmatist standard of truth provided objectivity at least in the sense
that everybody could be brought to agree about what is most useful. That
is, they thought that what is most useful is something we had to
_discover_, not something we _make_, not just whatever we _happen_ to agree
on.

For Rorty, statements do not represent facts at all. Language is better
conceived as a tool, like a lever, than as a mirror of antecedent reality.
Therefore all the old quarrels and oppositions in metaphysics and
epistemology - subject/object, mind/matter, knowledge/opinion, fact/value,
absolute/relative, etc. - simply dissolve. In fact, we can stop doing
metaphysics and epistemology altogether (ORT 22). We can simply "relax and
enjoy" (ORT 44) a life in which we have learned not to worry about whether
our statements correspond to reality. This amounts to recommending that we
"live by appearances," whether Rorty would express himself that way or not.

[David Potts]


*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Monday, December 13, 1999 11:59 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Rorty: Neo-pragmatist Or Neo-pyrrhonist?

David Potts@IMMC
12/13/99 10:37 AM

Pyrrhonism was the most thoroughgoing school of skepticism in the ancient
world. In a nutshell, the pyrrhonist held nothing - not even that he held
nothing. Pyrrhonism distinguished between appearances and judgments about
the appearances. For example, there may appear to be an apple, which might
appear to be red, to taste sweet, to satisfy hunger, etc. It might even
appear, with some thought, that apples are nutritious. But none of the
corresponding judgments - that there _is_ an apple, that it _is_ red or
sweet, that it does allay hunger, that it is nutritious - is assented to by
the pyrrhonist.

The reason is that for any judgment a contradictory judgment can be
proposed with an equally strong claim to our assent. Since the competing
claims are equally strong no choice between them is epistemically
justified. So the pyrrhonist _doesn't_ choose. About _any_thing. The works
of Sextus Empiricus (a pyrrhonist) consist mostly of arguments, one after
another, against representative beliefs from all walks of life.

The pragmatists found that their policy of believing nothing brought them
"ataraxia" - tranquility. That is, rather than struggle to discover the
truth about things in order to eliminate their troubles, they found that by
relinquishing that very struggle inner peace followed as it were
serendipitously. Or so it appeared. :-) They therefore proposed to live
strictly by appearances, including not only sense impressions but the
thoughts which naturally flow from them, as well as natural impulses (e.g.,
hunger), conventionally transmitted attitudes (e.g., that piety is good),
and social practices (e.g., Sextus himself was a physician in his "day
job").

Note finally that pyrrhonism, like virtually all ancient philosophies, was
not an "academic" theory but was conceived as a way of life and had popular
adherents. That is, there evidently were people who attempted to practice
pyrrhonism (as for that matter epicureanism, stoicism, platonism, etc.),
just as today we can say that Phil Jackson and others practice Buddhism.

I hope the parallels between pyrrhonism and Rorty are clear. Rorty calls
himself a "pragmatist," but I believe traditional pragmatists thought that
the pragmatist standard of truth provided objectivity at least in the sense
that everybody could be brought to agree about what is most useful. That
is, they thought that what is most useful is something we had to
_discover_, not something we _make_, not just whatever we _happen_ to agree
on.

For Rorty, statements do not represent facts at all. Language is better
conceived as a tool, like a lever, than as a mirror of antecedent reality.
Therefore all the old quarrels and oppositions in metaphysics and
epistemology - subject/object, mind/matter, knowledge/opinion, fact/value,
absolute/relative, etc. - simply dissolve. In fact, we can stop doing
metaphysics and epistemology altogether (ORT 22). We can simply "relax and
enjoy" (ORT 44) a life in which we have learned not to worry about whether
our statements correspond to reality. This amounts to recommending that we
"live by appearances," whether Rorty would express himself that way or not.

[David Potts]


*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************

Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 1999 12:01 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Will Wilkinson's vicious regress argument

[From: Eyal Mozes]

David Potts questions the validity of Will's argument, that a pragmatist
theory of truth leads to a vicious infinite regress. However, I think David
misses an important point regarding Will's argument.

I agree with David's analysis of the "verification regress"; but I think
David misses the point regarding what he calls the "reflexive regress".
David writes:

>The question is whether the
>pragmatist can articulate his theory of truth and adhere to it without
>recourse to any extralinguistic facts about usefulness. I think the answer
>is that he can. Usefulness is a matter of promoting the achievement of
>goals. Goals are stateable in language, as are outcomes and whether
>outcomes measure up to goals. The usefulness of propositions such as P can
>be assessed by measuring whether their adoption leads to achieving goals
>(such as predicting future observations).

But what does it mean to say "I have achieved my goals", or "the outcomes
have measured up to the goals", or "I have successfully predicted future
observations"? Does it mean that the goals have been achieved in fact, in
reality? That the outcomes have in fact, in reality, measured up to the
goal? That my predictions of observations have in fact, in reality, turned
out correct? A consistent pragmatist would have to answer: "no; when I say
that acting on belief P will lead to achieving your goals, I simply mean
that if you act on belief P, then it will be *useful* for you to believe
that you have achieved your goals, or that the outcomes have measured up to
the goal, or that you have successfully predicted future observations. I.e.
it means that after you act on belief P, then acting on the belief that you
have achieved your goals would help you to achieve your goals, or that
acting on the belief that you have successfully predicted future
observations would lead to successfully predicting future observations." And
of course, the same question can again be applied to the next stage: do you
mean that after acting on belief P, and then acting on the belief that I
have achieved my goals, then my goals will be achieved in fact, in reality?
And again, the consistent pragmatist would have to answer no, continuing the
infinite regress.

To put this symbolically: let Q stand for the proposition "your goals are
being achieved", or "the outcomes measure up to the goals", or "you are
successfully predicting future observations". Then on a pragmatist theory of
truth, any claim P can be expanded into: "if you act on the belief that P,
then Q will become true"; which can be further expanded into: "if you act on
the belief that P, then if you act on the belief that Q, then Q will become
true"; further expanded into: "if you act on the belief that P, then if you
act on the belief that Q, then if you act on the belief that Q, then Q will
become true"; and so on, leading to the vicious infinite regress Will has
pointed out.

David compares the pragmatist theory of truth to instrumentalism in science.
While there are serious problems with instrumentalism, it is not subject to
the same vicious regress, because it is limited to non-observables. E.g., an
instrumentalist will deny that the statement "electrons exist" refers to
anything in reality, saying that the statement means that if we act on the
belief that electrons exist, that will help us to, e.g., build electrical
regrigerator that successfully cool their contents. But the instrumentalist
can still consistently affirm that the statement "this regrigerator cools
its contents" is a factual statement, subject to a correspondence theory of
truth, because the refrigerator and its contents are observable entities.
This prevents the infinite regression, a solution that is not available to
the pragmatist.

In sum, I think the problems with the pragmatist theory of truth are more
serious than David claims. I agree with Will that this theory leads to a
vicious infinite regress, and cannot be stated consistently while still
having an intelligible meaning.

Eyal Mozes


*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 1999 2:43 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Re: Will Wilkinson's vicious regress argument

David Potts@IMMC
12/14/99 10:19 AM

I am very happy to see the always incisive Eyal Mozes weigh in with a
comment. I personally think there has been too little discussion and too
little debate among our group, and Eyal raises an interesting and important
point. I do not agree with his analysis, of course. :-)

Eyal says, in response to my claim that pragmatism holds an "internal"
standard of truth, as opposed to the "external" standard of the
correspondence theory:

But what does it mean to say "I have achieved
my goals"...? Does it mean that the goals
have been achieved in fact, in reality? ... A
consistent pragmatist would have to answer: "no;
when I say that acting on belief P will lead to
achieving your goals, I simply mean that if you
act on belief P, then it will be *useful* for you
to believe that you have achieved your goals...

Eyal is perfectly right to say that there is a reflexive regress if all you
can say about "P is useful" is that it is itself a useful thing to believe.
But my claim is that the pragmatist can explicate usefulness in terms of
goal achievement, where goal achievement is understood as something
ultimately subjective such as feeling satisfied or successfully predicting
observations. In the language I used in my essay, goal achievement is
something the pragmatist cashes out as something "inside the system of
sentences." And I said furthermore that to bring truth inside the system of
sentences and thus "solve" the dreaded verification regress is what induces
the pragmatist to say that truth is usefulness to begin with.

Therefore the pragmatist can indeed say quite a bit more about the
usefulness of P than that it is itself useful.

But, Eyal asks, is this more, this goal achievement, something "in fact, in
reality"? This phrase "in fact, in reality" is unfortunately ambiguous. If
"reality" refers to something extralinguistic, then no, the goal
achievement in question is not asserted to be "in reality." It is rather,
as I have said, inside the system of sentences. On the other hand, if
"reality" refers to the system of sentences itself, then yes, goal
achievement is "in reality" - at least, it is if the internal conditions
are "really" satisfied. For example, one might find that certain beliefs
lead to what seem like good consequences only to find that they conflict
with other important goals or that they cause problems in the long run. All
this is an internal matter, however, and so not a threat to the pragmatist
standard of truth.

In short, the facts the pragmatist wishes not to rely on in articulating a
standard of truth are only those outside the system of sentences. But it is
not an embarrassment to the pragmatist to talk about the "facts" about the
sentences themselves.

-David

PS - There's a significant typing error in my last post, "Rorty:
Neo-pragmatist Or Neo-pyrrhonist?". The second word of the third paragraph
should be "pyrrhonists," not "pragmatists."


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Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

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