A Kantian and a postmodernist walk into a bar.
- Posted by Paul Gowder on January 2nd, 2009 filed in philosophy
- 21 Comments »
I recently stumbled across this post, by someone who seems quite intelligent (whose blog I hadn’t caught before). S/he (I gather from the writing style that the author is female, but such things can be deceptive — I’ll use female pronouns for simplicity) is complaining that her students aren’t quite able to get a grasp on the postmodern approach to truth. I’ll excerpt the bits that particularly struck me:
Our commonsense sense of representation works this way too: there’s the thing itself, and then there’s the word for the thing. It’s echoed by truth: truth is thought as the adequation of knowledge to the thing itself. The thing itself, though, is ‘out there,’ existing all by its lonesome, unchanging and forever just the way it is.
What’s intriguing, I think, is the hard work it takes to sustain an alternative conception, at least for a while. I have seen students grasp the complexity of, say, the idea that the body doesn’t exist prior to culture and then enter into it, but only becomes a ‘body’ within a given cultural context. Then, the next week, they’re back to arguing that this conception doesn’t make sense. Most often, these claims are premised on the assumption that in order for what I’m teaching to be ‘true’ (and it needs to be true, for them; some even stick with calling what we’re learning ‘objective’) it needs to cohere with what ’science’ (and this, I think, has less to do with science itself, which is often much more circumspect about such claims, and more to do with the authorisation of what has become commonsense).
* * *
In other words, there’s a semi-willingness to challenge ideas of Truth. But there’s a less sustained attention to how and why particular things are made to count as truth, or why we might live as if they are, and so on. It’s like the stories about postmodernism the mainstream media likes to tell: it just destroys everything. They miss the construct in deconstruct; and they miss that deconstruction is not about making things false, it’s about highlighting their contingency. This issue comes up a lot: it’s like deconstruction has to be set back within a world view in which it is possible for things to be true or false, and deconstruction will tell us which is which. Strange, but it happens a lot. In conversation with someone online a while ago, I suggested that there were strategic ways that one could attempt to tell big-t-style Truths as a way of negotiating with the political efficacy of big-t Truth, whilst at the same time critiquing and deconstructing both the ‘truth’ and what let it count as truth, and the fact that it was politically effective. My interlocutor commented that this was disingenuous: to claim things were true because it was politically efficacious, but not thinking them actually true was to be, in essence, false. This line has been kicking around in my head with all this other stuff for a while now, and it just intrigues me how notions of authenticity and truth seem to remain throughout a critical approach. My interlocutor was very far from foolish, and grasped much of poststructuralist theory. But nonetheless, this theory was implicitly, it seems, set back within an ontology and an epistemology: in which there was a world out there that we couldn’t really touch but could use words that were adequate to it, represent it, and that that adequation bore with it a political and moral responsibility.
I don’t have much of great profundity to say about this. It does, though, seem to point out how thoroughly our habitual styles of being-in-the-world are inflected by these ontologies. My students come to class, and for some of them at least, their perception is shaken up. Yet they leave, and go and order coffee, and sit with friends, and chat and read and catch the bus and sleep and cook and work… and when they come back to class, their perception has settled again.
The strong Kantian streak in me started jumping up and down and shouting right about here. Like, dude, that’s exactly the point! We can’t function without a notion of external capital-T truth. This is so in two senses: first, in the basic psychological sense: our ways of existing and reasoning — ways of existing and reasoning that work — depend on notions like there being a chair upon which I might sit or not sit and someone with no legs not being able to walk. In that sense, the following claim is just false:
What they usually forget, of course, is that ‘discovering’ there’s no big-t Truth is not the same as losing big-t Truth. When they freak out, they freak out as if now there’s no meaning. But the same significances still exist for them, just as they always did, because they never did depend on a big outside Truth. All it shows is that truth is given within a context, by a set of shared discourses; not that it’s any less true.
I mean, no. Just no. One can’t sit on a set of shared discourses. One sits on a chair. One might, admittedly, conduct a shared discourse consisting in a set of sentences asserting that one is sitting on a chair. But that way lieth global skepticism.
But second, this kind of postmodernism walks straight into the gaping maw of the biggest transcendental argument of them all. Do none of these people realize that the first critique refuted them nineteen ways from Tuesday?
Also, surely “there’s no big-T truth” is trivially self-defeating, as it purports to be uttering a big-T truth, and must purport to be uttering a big-T truth, for if it merely purports to be uttering a little-t truth of the sort that is nothing more than a “shared discourse,” then it seems open to the interlocutor to simply decline to participate in the shared discourse that includes the claim “there is no big-T truth.” Insert another Habermas reference here.
Perhaps that’s a little too fast? What kind of claim could those who say “there is no big-t truth” mean to be making?
1) “The statement ‘There is no big-t truth’ is a big-t truth.” Self-defeating, as noted.
2) “The statement ‘There is no big-t truth’ is a little-t truth.” Interesting, but what could it mean? Here are some possibilities
2a) “The statement (P) is a little-t truth is something that is true in our shared discourse.” This is flat-out false, for the point of uttering the claim is that one is denying a claim that the other party makes. Her students believe there are big-t truths.
2b) “P is a little-t truth is something that is utterable, something that could be true in some shared discourse.” This is true but pointless. This is true of “there is no big-t truth,” but it is also true of “the CIA is sending thoughts into my brain with space alien technology,” “the king of France has a jehri curl,” Jupiter is three feet wide,” and “Saddam Hussein has, to this very day, weapons of mass destruction.” Coherent utterability is not beliefworthiness.
2c) 2b, plus some other facts about P that make it beliefworthy. But this just walks smack into a regress: those other facts can be expressed as utterances Q1…Qn, have to be either big-t truths, and then self-defeating as above, or little-t truths, in which case they, too, are either not beliefworthy or have to appeal to further other facts…
Also, here is a hand.
Am I missing something here? Is there some subtlety in the pomo position on this sort of thing, at least as WildlyParanthetical seems to be suggesting, that is nonetheless coherent and makes out something like an argument? Shorter: what the hell are these pomo people talking about anyway, and why can’t they just say it, except that just saying it would reveal it as simply false?
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
One sits on a chair.
In our culture, sure.
What might happen if we dropped a chair into some past culture or on some desert island? What might they use it for?
There’s actually been some interesting studies done with, I think, plastic containers.
I could say, well, this soda bottle is a container. That’s the Truth.
Someone else might consider it a drum or use it like the red necks used whiskey bottles – like a musical instrument.
You can also silence a pistol by affixing a soda bottle to the barrel of a gun. So the bottle is a silencer.
Who is right? What is the Truth of a soda bottle?
We can play these games with many items.
The thought experiment is to imagine we are not part of our culture. This is hard to do. Yet that is the essence of transcendence.
When you transcend you culture and even your humanness, you realize there there is no Truth.
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
But should you find yourself sitting, there is something on which your ass is placed, and that fact is surely true regardless of what you might say or think about it.
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Seems to me that postmodernism consists in uttering literal falsehoods that evoke trivial truths. Mike’s comment suggests an interest not in ‘truth’ per se, but in the practical question of how an object might be conceptualized and made use of differently in different situations. Similarly with the quoted talk of how a body “only becomes a ‘body’ within a given cultural context.” Presumably what they really mean is that a body is only conceptualized as a ‘body’ within a given cultural context (or conceptual scheme). That’s true enough, but also pretty vacuous. So they make it sound more controversial by using the wrong words.
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Hmm… Richard, I think you’ve nailed it as usual.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:20 am
Although it occurs to me that my regress argument doesn’t quite go through because the facts that support the 2c version of the claim could be 2a types of facts s.t. it’s true that there’s a shared discourse in which the original poster’s recalcitrant students participate that holds them true. (Of course, then, we have to wonder about the status of the truth claims about the content of the shared discourses, etc.)
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:31 am
Ooh, I do like *seeming* ‘quite intelligent’… no, really, very cutting. A nice open opening…
Yes, we’re probably going to continue to disagree, particularly given the hostility that these conversations always seem to produce (e.g., moving from ‘am I missing something’ to ‘if you just *said* it, it would be false’); but I’ll wade in anyway, hmm? See if I can clarify anything. For the record, it’s not that poststructuralists use the ‘wrong words’, or are being deliberately obscurantist. It’s that innovative language is needed to intervene in received grammars, and the ontological claims they implicitly make. I’ll come back to this.
First, I should note that the post wasn’t actually just a simple complaint about my students, nor a step-by-step laying out of poststructuralism, but more about how entrenched modernist habits of thought are. But more meatily, and secondly, I don’t understand how the claim that ‘we can’t function without truth’ works in relation to what I’m arguing. Why can’t we? (and I don’t mean this to say ‘We ought not to’, but as a real question). What is assumed by such a claim? That there’s a particular kind of human psychology, on the one hand, which pre-exists any epistemological endeavour. But why do we assume that this is the case? Certainly, contemporary culture cannot comprehend any alternate ways of engaging with the world (and tends to read those ways of engaging with the world back into history, if they look at history at all), but the question that I am wanting my students to ask is *why*, and what is precluded by such assumptions? And there are good reasons for wanting them to ask these questions: these truths may indeed work, but they also function (and have to, given current ideas about big-t truth) to naturalise particular ontologies, a short-cut to conservative politics. The ‘truths’ of evpsych are just one particularly crude example. And this blinds us to the possibilities of *other* ways that *also* work, but are less unjust… which is why I don’t accept your ‘Habermasian’ point that I should just not talk about big-T truth…
As far as your breakdown (the numbered section), Paul, my response would be to ask why we assume that these kinds of logical claims give us truth. To ask why and how particular legitimising techniques work. I’m not simply arguing that we should suspend all of these techniques of legitimising, and this, I think, is where you and almost everyone else mistakes postmodernism. The point, as I repeatedly claimed in the original post, is *not* about *falsifying* truths; it’s about making them and the modes of discourse that produce them as truths (and thus as politically significant etc) open to critique. For example, you appeal to logic in order to demonstrate the falsity of what I (and other poststructuralists) claim. That’s a well-worn gesture in contemporary culture, and not necessarily one that I want to simply get rid of: these techniques are very effective, and have broad appeal. What’s interesting, though, is to turn to the *history* of logic, which mostly coheres around a history of European, male, educated thought, codified over time (a history invisibilised by the alleged neutrality or ’self-evident truth’ of logic). And when we can actually interrogate what logic legitimises and delegitimises, we discover the means for the (re)production of conservative ontologies, and the silencing of alternative ways of not just ’seeing’ the world, but engaging with it. These might be, historically, women’s experiences, or the experiences of the colonised, or the experiences of the disabled and so on. Such positions are habitually silenced through the presumption that since they don’t adhere to any recognised logic, they couldn’t possibly be true; they are, of course, usually dismissed as irrational, emotional, insufficiently well-conceptualised and so on. What gets to count as truth is thoroughly political; and not least because it (re)produces the world in particular ways. So for example the truth, widely held in earlier times, that education would wither women’s reproductive organs, reproduced a system in which women were not educated, until that truth was challenged. We could say it was simply challenged by a ‘more-true’ truth; but the real question, then, is why do we assume that our current truths are any more true and just than that truth back then? A little bit of self-reflexivity would seem to demonstrate that we need to be more critical about how we think about ‘truth’.
And this brings me to Richard’s point. On the one hand, yes, I am talking about how a body is ‘conceptualised’ as a ‘body’ in a given cultural context. But on the other, this isn’t just conceptual work, detached from the ‘real stuff-ness’ of the world. This is the real distinction poststructuralism critiques: that there’s the world out there, and cognitive work is separate from it, and it’s what the overused word ‘construct’ is intended to get at (both a building of and an understanding of). It allows, for example, the not just logical, or rational, experience of our bodies as radically differentiated from our minds, and situates the (‘my’) body as a possession of the ‘real self’, the mind. Think, for example, of the frustration we often feel when we get sick. This distinction, often (not altogether accurately) attributed to Descartes, is what has allowed contemporary bodies to be projects: as more or less adequate presentations of the self (usually less, given our obsession with normalisation) and as things to be worked on, improved, made more adequate. It allows the increasing construction of various ways of being as ‘pathological’ yet radically separable from the self: for example, the configuration ‘people with disabilities’ or the way that depression is thought of as a ‘thing’, or more often, a ‘chemical imbalance’ one has, but not part of who one ‘truly’ is. It enables a Lockean conception of property that then shapes contemporary legal engagements with bodily property, which are being strained by new biotech. I’m thinking particularly of the way the law only allows one to *donate* bodily tissue, ceding all rights in it, including rights to money made from vaccines etc developed from one’s tissues. The point of all of this is that the body, and our experiences of it, is *shaped by* being designated as ‘the body’. This isn’t just conceptual work, then, as if that conceptual work were radically distinct from ‘the thing itself’: it has all kinds of effects *on* ‘that thing’ (and here we see the problems of received grammar, which sets up a ‘prior’ and ‘post’ even when I am trying to avoid that logic which is insufficient to these cases): it shapes bodily existence, experience, and what can be done with that which is produced as ‘the body’. This is a deeply contextual production, bound up especially with how science constructs the body, but one which has all sorts of effects which are very far from vacuous (e.g. the suffering of those with disabilities, the suffering of those who experience their body as abnormal, the (potential) exploitation of those who donate bodily tissues to science.)
I don’t actually think it’s possible to transcend one’s culture, as Mike claims. Nor do I think, or suggest *anywhere*, that it’s possible to sit on a set of shared discourses (but congratulations for managing the same cheap shot as every other ‘critique’ of postmodernism; at least you have a history!). You might call my position global skepticism, if you like, but what that seems to imply is that I don’t think there’s truth. I *do*, but what I mean by that is very different from what you mean by it. Yes, we might say that it’s true that one’s ass is on the chair. But even here, there’s an implicit ontology being instituted. Since we’re invoking dead white men, let’s point to Hegel’s examination of the ontological premises of everyday grammar. One’s ass (and being from a slightly different culture from yours, even the use of the colloquial here points to the specificity of this truth, given that for me it primarily invokes a donkey…) is taken to preexist the seating of it upon the chair, also taken to preexist the interaction. There is, then, a particular temporality of this ontology, too. I get that you’re trying to evoke a really banal sense of truth; and so my analysis of it looks pretty banal too. But in order to identify your ass as *yours*, there’s already a sense of proprietariness going on. And in order to identify it as an ‘ass’, there’s again a whole history at work which slices up ‘the body’ into identifiable parts, some of which are thought of as more sexualised and mildly rude, for example, than others (not wanting to sexualise you textually, Paul!). Chairs are chairs because they are produced as such within a given context. Yes, this seems banal, but when we observe what the cartesian dualism makes possible, and what the fragmentation of ‘the body’ also institutes – amongst dozens of other things, the possibility for the commodification of elements of the body – this ‘truth’ taken more broadly hooks into a whole series of political effects which I think need to be interrogated. And it’s that that I’m trying to help my students to grasp. Happily, by the end of the course (that post was written early on) they did indeed comprehend it.
Okay, I’ve gone on for way too long here. The alternative, of course, is that we could just down a few beers. I’ll buy this round, if you cover the next. :-)
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:58 am
Paul,
One does not need to turn to pomo to doubt the notion of an objective Kantian capital-T truth. There’s a healthy philosophical literature on truth, and many quite plausible defenses of either or both a deflationary or redundancy notion of truth. I’m quite partial to Paul Horwich’s theory, in which he argues that a true proposition is simply one which satisfies an instance of the t-schema. Note that this is a deflationary theory but not quite a redundancy theory, because Horwich thinks truth is a useful concept in our language, but that the deep meaning often assigned to it is absent or incoherent.
(Horwich also has a new book on W I’m desperate to read).
You may or may not buy this, but my point is simply that there are effective critiques of truth that do not result in a reductio and that do not lie down pomo paths, either (although as a critique there is much I find compelling about some aspects of pomo).
And I don’t really see how anything you’ve written here establishes that without the notion of a Kantian, objective, capital-T truth, meaning is impossible. Kripke, among others, has defended the notion of an assertability condition of meaning in context of W; even without truth conditions, we can still get alone quite well, IMO.
January 3rd, 2009 at 1:30 am
Hi WP,
I didn’t mean to be cutting with “seems very intelligent.” I know, judging from the other posts on this blog, that’s hard to believe, since I usually eat my breakfast cereal with acid rather than milk, but it’s true. Your blog reads like the blog of a very smart person, and that’s all I know about you, so I said as much. :-) (Also, I confess that I’m sufficiently perma-vicious that the cutting-sounding phrasing may have just been all that my brain could produce.)
Anyway, thanks for the thoughts. Some further thoughts of my own…
On the point re European white males, etc., it strikes me that you want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. That is, the claims that were made to justify the oppressions of the past, and the claims that are made to justify the oppressions of the present, were and are capital-f false, and that’s one of their greatest weaknesses. Aristotle was wrong when he claimed that some people were natural slaves, just as those who said that education withered women’s reproductive organs were wrong. The capital-t truth is that there are not natural slaves and education does not wither women’s reproductive organs. Similar points could be made about evpsych: a lot of people make a lot of false claims about that stuff, and just about the most powerful way to deal with those claims is to point out their capital-f falsity. It is mistaken to say that natural slavery or many of the evol psych claims are truths at all. They’re not truths. They’re mistaken beliefs. And they’re open to critique as such. The flipside is also true: those who deny that the experiences of women or the disabled or colonized peoples are worthy of consideration because they fall to follow some kind of logic are under a (capital-m) misunderstanding about what logic is and does, and ought to be criticized accordingly.
Of course, you might just point to what you already said about the risks of saying that the bad old claims were replaced by more-true truths. I acknowledge those risks. But the solution to them is to not to deny the existence of big-t truth altogether, but to deny the certainty of big-t truth status of those claims that we currently think of as justified. Since I’ve already appealed to one of the arch-philosophers of the enlightenment in this discussion, I’ll go ahead and bust out the other: in addition to defending liberty of expression, the beginning of chapter 2 of Mill’s On Liberty reads like a brief for this kind of fallibilism. If we hold before us the possibility that any belief might be wrong and the certainty that some of our beliefs are in fact wrong, but at the same time recognize that we are working hard to ensure that our beliefs best match the evidence, then we can have a reasonable level of confidence in our beliefs now without sacrificing either critical reflection or the notion of big-t truth. We can also have some confidence that our beliefs are better than the beliefs of the past, if only because we’ve had the benefit of more evidence and more argument… sometimes the simple approaches work best.
Your paragraph in answer to Richard’s point is, I think, completely true (likewise the one after), but at the same time perfectly consistent with the existence of capital-t truth, even about the body. That is, I agree completely that the sorts of beliefs we hold about the body, including highly contestable ones, the kinds of thinking that implicitly reply on silly dualist intuitions, etc., have real physical effects (albeit mediated by our actions)… but so what? The body is still there in the following strong sense: there are still proteins and amino acids and skin and bones and hair. There are doubtless immense cognitive and political consequences and, yes, physical ones too, from our calling them skin and bones and hair, and identifying them as “our” skin and bones and hair, and treating them as property, and also treating them as instantiations of personal identity, and so forth. And we ought to point out those consequences, and ask ourselves if we really ought to be speaking and thinking of that set of objects which we call “bodies” that way… but none of that counts as a denial of the claim that there are actually true facts about those objects. Similarly, the fact that we might be on uncertain territory in identifying the ass as something that is owned or distinguishing it from other body parts in the particularly sexually and interpersonally loaded way we do does not undermine the fact that some atoms have shifted in space when I move from standing to sitting: ass-atoms are in contact with chair-atoms (or booty-atoms and funny-shaped-piece-of-wood-atoms, or schmass atoms and schmair atoms, or unspecified-body-atoms and unspecified-furniture-atoms, or self-that-is-thinking-body-atoms and house-that-consists-in-walls-as-well-as-furniture-and-is-owned-by-nobody-atoms — but atoms, all the same, or electrons-and-protons-and-neutrons, but entites that bear properties about which truth claims can legitimately be made all the same!), and that fact is a capital-t truth. In other words, your answer to Richard’s point is basically an affirmation of it.
I’m really more of a wine kind of a dude than a beer kind of a dude, but I’m always up for downing a few drinks of one sort or another. :-)
January 3rd, 2009 at 1:40 am
Daniel,
I don’t think deflationary or redundancy notions of truth can do that much work. They can’t claim what those who make a lot of pomo-style hay about denying truth often seem to want to claim, namely that there are facts about the world separate from cognitions. Deflationary or redundancy notions of truth are, at least to the extent I understand them, logical claims about the usefulness of truth-predicates rather than metaphysical or ontological claims. I have no quarrel with them (well, I think they’re boring, a bit silly, and not useful for any work worth doing, but I don’t think they’re flamingly false the way the metaphysical or ontological versions are).
You can check that by looking at a chunk of WP’s original post:
It’s that commonsense sense that I mean to be defending (well, except the unchanging bit, since, unless one is a four-dimensionalist, one must think that facts about the world change over time… but since I am a four-dimensionalist, I’m cool with the commonsense sense), and it’s one that the deflationists ought not to have a problem with. Nor, for that matter, those who take an assertability theory or anything like it.
January 3rd, 2009 at 1:59 am
(Also, Daniel, you should take a look at WP’s blog if you haven’t seen it — lots of interesting stuff about disability that may be relevant to your own work.)
January 3rd, 2009 at 4:58 am
Hi Paul,
I’m not at all sure I agree that a central pomo project is the denial that there is a world of facts separate from cognitions. I rather think the (much more plausible) point is that what we call facts and consider to be facts are deeply and profoundly influenced by a great many historical, social, legal, political, and cultural factors, such that the notion of objective facts pertaining to capital t truth conditions turns out to be extremely thin, even if they are valid.
In any case, does it concern you that the vast majority of Western philosophers, including robuts objectivists and rationalists, tend to agree that later W demonstrates quite well the notion of a logical, rule-antecedent notion of linguistic meaning is totally incoherent?
Of course, it doesn’t follow that there is no truth and there is no meaning; quite the contrary, but it does seem to me to be quite devastating to those who would hold to a Kantian notion of truth. (Again, please bear in mind I love Kant). It’s no wonder W. loathed philosophy and philosophers so much . . .
I also don’t think you can dismiss deflationary theories of truth nearly as easily as you think. If Horwich and his ilk are correct, it implies that the deep significance you assign to truth is invalid. Truth does not function in language as you would have it; it doesn’t mean what you think it means (!!!). You can’t so neatly disentangle the ontology of truth from its semantics, which tends to be why some theorists — think Larry Solum, for one — seem to believe that thinking deeply about what language means is simply crucial to defining its ontology.
Given the interchange in the comments to Mike’s view on language, I’m somewhat surprised to see you defending a rigorous distinction between the notion of a fact and its representation in language. While Ben was correct to point out that the indeterminacy of translation is controversial, my understanding is that the implausibility of a dichotomy between the world of brute facts and the conceptual schemes used to construct them.
Again, pace W. and others like Davidson, this does not mean we can’t have a certain conception of truth, and it may or may not mean that some concepts are incommensurable, but it does suggest that the notion of truth and/or facts you want to defend can be challenged on a variety of philosophical non-pomo grounds.
(And again for the record, there’s much I like about pomo-style critiques, though I think they also have some significant weaknesses, and I expressly choose not to write in pomo style).
Last thing: interesting discussion you guys are having about the body. Paul, you would love some of the work of Charles Rosenberg, whom is not so ready a rationalist as you but who also holds no brief for pomo-style criticism. He writes quite a bit about the interplay of biological facts and social construction (relax, it’s innocuous in his usage) of disease. He’s also the preeminent historian of medicine in the U.S. if not the world, and is my single favorite author I’ve encountered in grad school. Add him to your reading list!
Last thing: dude, let go of Moore’s hand argument. It’s preposterous. There are lots of good arguments for the notion of truth you defend, but that ain’t one of em.
;)
January 3rd, 2009 at 5:10 am
[...] of my blog glaring balefully at me from my bookmark bar, and third of all by Paul Gowder’s engagement with this post. If you want to see where I’ve been waxing lyrical, it’s been over there [...]
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:53 am
Daniel, I think we’re talking past one another in two ways:
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?
January 3rd, 2009 at 4:48 pm
I don’t have anything to add to this most recent exchange. But returning to WP’s comment for a moment (especially her misuse of the word ‘truths’ in place of mere ‘convictions’, beliefs or assertions), I can’t resist linking to my old post on truth and certainty. Conflating these leads to jumbled talk about how we need to be “more critical about how we think about ‘truth’”, when really the objection is not to our concept of ‘truth’ but to our claims to have attained it (at least if such claims are made with excessive/unjustified confidence).
January 3rd, 2009 at 6:17 pm
hey Paul,
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!
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Yeah, this definitely requires wine to go much further (which means you’ll have, alas, to leave Houston, since I won’t go there for all the poppies in Afghanistan). But I can’t resist saying one more thing: arguments from self-evidence work when the proposition being asserted really is self-evident.
January 4th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Yes, you wouldn’t fit in very well in our Republican hellmouth. ;)
January 6th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Oops, sorry, I am getting back to you lot. Had stuff on :-)
January 7th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Okay, everyone seems to have moved on, but I promised a response. First, Richard, no, I’m not talking about convictions. Second, I don’t understand why people think I’m saying that I doubt the existence of stuff; the denial of a correspondence model of truth is not a denial that there is a world. I’ve suggested no such thing; this is a regular slippage that happens when one assumes that the correspondence model of truth is correct, and then attempt to assess an alternative by that standard. My position is not compatible with a correspondence model of truth, so it will always appear to be lacking if that is taken as the measure.
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.
January 8th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Thanks for more interesting thoughts, WP.
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?
January 8th, 2009 at 3:51 am
Okay, when I said ‘correspondence theory of truth’, I was basically referring back to what I said in the original post (which yes, not entirely correct usage of the phrase, but nonetheless): “Truth is thought as the adequation of knowledge to the thing itself. The thing itself, though, is ‘out there,’ existing all by its lonesome, unchanging and forever just the way it is.” And of course, in academic discussion, the law of non-contradiction might be up for grabs, not necessarily bound to the idea that the truth is a transparent re-presentation of the world. In my students’ eyes, though, and in the ‘common sense’ understanding of truth, it’s a simple given. As for reasoning coherently, the question for me is why is the desire to be able to continue to reason coherently the grounds for the rejection of non-contradiction? That seems to be about an investment in reason that disallows alternatives (and alternative “forms of reasoning”). As for your response to the Haraway example (the quote), the point is that behaviours are both patriarchal and not patriarchal, depending where you’re looking from; not that we simply need to be more careful. The point is not that the men were wrong and the women were right, but that they both look at the situation and saw something different, both of which are (or could be said to be, by those who are invested in such ideas, as so many are) true. They both form different truths, contradictive truths, and it demonstrates that truth is not just there, but constructs that which is claims to name.
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’?