If we suggest that we just need to be more careful, well, the problem is that it simply seems to ‘move the problem back’: so we can say we need to be more careful with scientific truth, attempt to ‘transcend’ our particularity, whatever that might mean, in order to reach the real truth. But why is abstraction or generalisation more true? What differences need to be excised in order to produce them? And as a result, who is, in the end, represented by this supposed ‘truth’?

I certainly don’t mean to be defending a correspondence theory of truth. I happen to hold one, but I don’t mean the arguments I’ve offered here to be in defense of it. I didn’t take that to be what you were arguing against.

The law of non-contradiction (LNC) (“That’s the biggest problem with the correspondence model of truth: it supposes that two statements which contradict each othr cannot both be true.“) has nothing to do with the correspondence theory of truth, for example. Indeed, those who defend all kinds of theories of truth accept the LNC, if for no other reason than if you reject LNC, things start going boom (unless you’re messing around with paraconsistent logics and other bizarre things).

I’m not sure how it would even be possible to reason coherently without the LNC. Nor do we need to throw it out to address things like your Donna Haraway example. We can say about that example things like the following: “the question ‘is the world naturally patriarchal’ is improperly formed, because we don’t know what it would mean for the world to have such a nature. We ought instead to be more careful about paying attention to when and how patriarchal behaviors are displayed in nature and when they are not.” Also see the work on the theory-ladenness of observation, which doesn’t deny either LNC or ultimate metaphysical truth, but recognizes, as you also rightly do, that our observations of scientific phenomena are highly colored by our prior theoretical perspectives.

I think from the fact that only one of us thinks we’re talking about the correspondence theory of truth it’s obvious that we don’t understand one another’s positions generally. Let’s try and fix that. Can you clarify exactly what error you think your students were making? That is, what belief do you think your students held that you think is false? What do you mean by big-t truth?

Third, I don’t think there was baby and bathwater to begin with. My emphasis on the injustices that various ‘truths’ have accomplished in the past was a response to the idea that my position was ‘vacuous’. Your response, Paul, that we achieve more-true truths through more investigation… well, I’m not sure how you can know this, given that at each moment in time assumes *it* has the Real Truth, or at any rate the Closest Possible Truth, and that this must be because of more investigation. There’s no possible way to assess this because there is no god’s-eye view here. I don’t disagree that in a political context which owes so much to modernism, the strongest political claim is going to be the untruth of the current position and the replacement of it with the ‘really true truth’. Yet this does not mean that correspondence is correct, only that, as Foucault consistently observed, what counts as truth has serious political consequences.

I’m also not clear how moving from bodies to atoms makes anything more ‘true’, just smaller and more of the domain of the Grand Arbiter of All Truth, science. I agree that bodies are made up of atoms, hormones etc; I just don’t think that that is referential to a detached reality, but rather is constructive of it.

The common sense model is not correct because it is common sense. Common sense is only common because we share particular ways of seeing, engaging and talking about the world. Some will say that stuff is naturally given. I disagree. I don’t think that there’s a common human essence that can be used to ground this stuff. In the end, it’s all very well to say that women, and disabled and colonised people ought not to have their positions dismissed because they are illogical. Yet their positions are regularly dismissed because they don’t fall in with the (allegedly, and here we see why this is importantly) “common” sense understanding of truth. Racism is often dismissed because an action ‘wasn’t racist’; sexual harrassment is often dismissed because ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’ Or further, and perhaps more provocatively, women who undergo circumcision are treated as if they have false consciousness when they claim any of the following: a) that they chose to be circumcised, b) that they have not lost feeling, and c) that they are glad that they underwent the procedure. Now, we can get into discussions about nerve endings and genitalia, but in the end, we’re supposing that contemporary western science knows more about the bodies of these women than they do. We’re supposing that western science has the truth, and circumcised women are comforting themselves with falsehoods, because these two ‘truths’ are incompatible. That’s the biggest problem with the correspondence model of truth: it supposes that two statements which contradict each othr cannot both be true.

To draw a contemporary feminist scholar into the mix of dead white men, Donna Haraway observes that originally, natural science saw the social interactions of gorillas as yet another demonstration of the natural domination of the male of a given species, and thus as as reflection (and justification) of the patriarchal structures of human society; that the truth was that the world is naturally patriarchal. When women began making their way into this research, they saw something different: they saw the females caring for the young and ensuring the basic calm and good behaviour of those within the group of gorillas. Occasionally the silver back would stomp around, pound his chest; everyone would let him do that, without challenge, he would settle down, and the group would go back to having the females ‘in charge’. The world was not, according to them, naturally patriarchal. Which is true? Well, both are, really. Both ‘describe’ this ‘reality’. But each description, in a human context, has different consequences: one justifies and reinforces the superiority and authority of men, and the other suggests that perhaps women have more influence than is usually thought. This demonstrates that ‘authority’ and ‘dominance’ can be more complicated than we might have thought, and that if we want to take ‘the natural world’ as a normative determination of ourselves, we need to be aware that our perceptions are not neutral but construct nature for ourselves. Now we could just pick a truth, or we could ask why a particular truth is picked, why it’s thought to be true, and what the consequences of it are; because often the consequences of deeming something to be true is that we work at (re)producing a world in which it becomes so.

Respectfully, I don’t see what is question-begging about my argument. It may or may not be persuasive to you, but I don’t see where I am assuming that one can “read off ontological claims from propositions about language.” Instead, I think I’ve tried to suggest several reasons for thinking that one can’t really separate the ontology of meaning from the way we actually use language in practice. As such, the argument, pace Horwich, that we do not rely on a robust conception of truth to have meaningful discourse suggests to me that we can get along perfectly well without such a conception, which seems to undermine your point that we need such a notion of truth.

And I don’t think it’s fair to simply assume the notion of prelinguistic facts; the entire point of the conceptual scheme stuff is to challenge both the coherence and the thickness of such a notion. If such facts do exist, they are incredibly thin, conveying little of sense and meaning until they are actually used in practice, in a form of life.

Confused by your reference to On Certainty — my reading of that is W. was deeply troubled by the notion of certainty, and was problematizing it, not that he was defending a robust conception of capital C certainty. In any case, I’m more partial to Barry Stroud and Peter Unger’s work on certainty . . .

As for Moore, I don’t think there’s an answer to someone who rejects the existence of the hand

This is why it is a preposterous argument. Moore set out — look at the title of the goddamn essay — to PROVE the existence of an external world, not to suggest some reasons for thinking it might be there, but to refute the skeptics’ argument and to prove the existence of an external world. And he did nothing of the sort. He did exactly what pisses you off about the undergraduate students using “refute” when they mean “object.” It’s really quite a silly effort as a “proof” of anything at all.

But once the hand’s existence is conceded, does the rest not simply bloody well follow?

Yes.

And dare you really deny the existence of the hand?

Dare I? No, mostly because the phenomenology of the body is really important to me. But that isn’t b/c I find moore’s “argument” convincing. It’s not an argument really, just an appeal to self-evidence, which I find lazy and unpersuasive to those not already inclined to agree.

(In case I’m perceived as being too uncharitable to Moore, I like much of his work, actually. But not this paper.)

But, adopting the mantle of the skeptic for the moment, the answer is “Of course. That’s exactly the point.”

Too many simply see skepticism or appeal to difficult paradoxes like the Liar and throw up their hands and say that following the reasoning leads to absurdity. But that’s precisely the point; that isn’t a reason for discounting the reasoning, it is a reason for following it and trying to understand the social (and for me, moral) implications of the possibility that we are brains in a vat.

Too many, such skepticism is deeply impractical. To me, and to someone like Montaigne, such skepticism is a way of life, something that is deeply practical, even if I do not live my life from moment to moment doubting that I have a hand. IMO, those who think that one cannot be committed to skepticism without acting in every moment as if they believe the latter are badly confused about the point of such thinking (not saying this is you, but it is something I encounter an awful lot).

Anyway, interesting conversation. Should be continued over wine sometime!

1) I don’t want to be held accountable for defending a whole “Kantian notion of truth” — I’m not even sure we’d agree on what that entails. I’m only defending the existence of a world of true facts separate from representations, one that happens to be defensible by, among other things, Kantian transcendental arguments like (but not identical to, perhaps) the refutation of idealism section in the 1st critique.

2. I think the following form of argument is question-begging and yours:

P: There is distinction between fact and representation in language! (Which should be read as “there is a distinction between [fact] and [representation in language],” not not not not not “there is a distinction between [fact and representation] [in language].” The latter reading would miss the point entirely.)

D: No there isn’t, look at all this philosophy saying that pre-rule linguistic meaning is problematic and all this stuff about the indeterminacy!

This is question-begging because, of course, whether one can read off ontological claims from propositions about language is the precise point under dispute. And the claim I just attributed to D counts as a rejection of an unproblematic world of true facts only if one can do so. It seems to be open to me to simply concede any and all claims you might care to make about how truth functions in language and still quietly go on believing that there are true facts about the world, without any contradiction whatsoever.

(And appealing to the guy who wrote On Certainty for the contrary position seems at least troubling.)

Coincidentally, Richard (who I’d like to drag back into this discussion… are you reading? wanna chime in on this?) has a very, very, good recent post on the ontological argument, which, once you remove the irrelevant stuff in the comments about negative existential claims, seems to express the same fundamental point, viz., claims about what goes on in head cannot be the only premises in an argument about claims that are true in world outside of head.

As for Moore, I don’t think there’s an answer to someone who rejects the existence of the hand — the whole point of the hand argument is that the existence of the hand is known without proof. But once the hand’s existence is conceded, does the rest not simply bloody well follow? And dare you really deny the existence of the hand?