[7.1.2.3.] James on Truth: Against Correspondence.

 

Rorty illustrates anti-essentialism by citing James’s claim that truth is “what is good in the way of belief.” (638)

 

Rorty is referring to this passage from James’s “What Pragmatism Means”:

 

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. ...

‘What would be better for us to believe’! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying ‘what we ought to believe’: and in that definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is better for us to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?

Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. (305-306)

 

Rorty seems to be less impressed by James’s positive statements about truth than by the fact that these statements are all James says about what truth is:

 

[James’s description of truth] has struck his critics as not to the point, as unphilosophical, as like the suggestion that the essence of aspirin is that it is good for headaches. James’s point, however, was that there is nothing deeper to be said: truth is not the sort of thing which has an essence. (638, emphasis added)

 

But Rorty takes James to be implying, not simply that truth does not have an essence, but, more specifically, that the correspondence theory of truth is of “no use,” that it is not “enlightening.”

 

Rorty emphasizes the fact that James rejected the correspondence theory of truth.[1]

 

[James’s] point was that it is no use being told that truth is “correspondence to reality.” Given a language and a view of what the world is like, one can, to be sure, pair off bits of the language with bits of what one takes the world to be in such a way that the sentences one believes true have internal structures isomorphic to relations between things in the world. When we rap out routine undeliberated reports like “This is water,” “That’s red,” “That’s ugly,” “That’s immoral,” our short categorical sentences can easily be thought of as pictures, or as symbols which fit together to make a map. Such reports do indeed pair little bits of language with little bits of the world. Once one gets to negative universal hypotheticals*, and the like, such pairing will become messy and ad hoc, but perhaps it can be done. James’s point was that carrying out this exercise will not enlighten us about why truths are good to believe, or offer any clues as to why or whether our present view of the world is, roughly, the one we should hold. (638, emphases added)

 

*[An example of a negative universal hypothetical: “It is not the case that if salt is poured in pure water , it will explode.”]

 

This raises a number of important questions for Rorty:

·         Why does what James says about truth not count as a theory? Rorty says that a theory of truth is something like an answer “to the textbook problems” about truth. Presumably, “what is truth?” counts as a textbook problem. And what James says (“The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.”) at least looks like an answer to this question.

·         Why does James’s view of the idea that truth is correspondence (viz., that it is not useful or enlightening) necessarily count as a rejection of the idea that truth has an essence? Rorty seems to be adopting a false dichotomy: either the correspondence theory of truth is useful/enlightening, or there is no essence of truth (and thus no accurate philosophical theory of truth). But there are a number of philosophical theories of truth besides the correspondence theory! Why think the failure of one theory implies that there is no useful/enlightening theory of truth to be had?[2]

 

 

[7.1.2.4.] Truth as What It Would be Beneficial to Believe.

 

Having praised James and Dewey for their refusal to give theories of truth (and of knowledge, morality, etc.), Rorty begins making positive claims about truth:

 

... it is the vocabulary of practise rather than of theory, of action rather than contemplation, in which one can say something useful about truth. (639)

 

He illustrates the point by describing a spectrum of sentences:

 

The correspondence theory is more plausible for theories at this end... . . . . . ... but not at all plausible for sentences at this end.

“This is red” “Jupiter has moons.” ... “The earth goes round the sun.” ... “There is no such thing as natural motion.” ... “The universe is infinite.” “Love is the only law.” “History is the story of class struggle.”

 

About sentences at the bottom of the spectrum, Rorty says:

 

The whole vocabulary of isomorphism, picturing, and mapping is out of place here, as indeed is the notion of being true of objects. If we ask what objects these sentences claim to be true of, we get only unhelpful repetitions of the subject terms—“the universe,” “the law,” “history.” Or, even less helpfully, we get talk about “the facts,” or “the way the world is.” The natural ap­proach to such sentences, Dewey tells us, is not “Do they get it right?”, but more like “What would it be like to believe that? What would happen if I did? What would I be committing myself to?”  ... When the contemplative mind, isolated from the stimuli of the moment, takes large views, its activity is more like de­ciding what to do than deciding that a representation is accurate. (639-40)

 

Rorty’s point seems to be that instead of thinking about truth in terms of correspondence or picturing, we should think about truth in terms of what it would be beneficial to believe.[3]

 

 

[7.1.3.] No Strict Boundary Between Fact and Value.

 

Rorty’s second way of characterizing pragmatism is as follows:

 

...there is no epistemological difference between truth about what ought to be and truth about what is, nor any metaphysical difference between facts and values, nor any methodological difference between morality and science. (640)

 

Rorty is picking up on a theme we’ve seen in Dewey and that also appears in James’s works: the rejection of the idea that there is a deep distinction between fact and value.

 

 

[7.1.3.1.] The Fact-Value Gap.

 

The traditional view of knowledge, truth, reality, etc., has frequently been accompanied by the assumption that there is a real and deep distinction between fact and value...

 

facts	Values
the way things are	the way things should be
descriptive	prescriptive / normative
the realm of science	the realm of ethics / moral theory
known empirically	known by some other means, if they can be known at all

 

The distinction is illustrated nicely in a famous passage by David Hume (1711-1776):

 

Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice ... You can never find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, toward this action. Here is a matter of fact; but ‘tis the object of feeling, not reason. (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1738)

 

Hume’s famous view was that we cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” The way things actually are implies nothing about the way things should be. A description of all the facts of a murder scene will not include statements like “The murder was wrong,” nor will it imply such statements.

 

 

[7.1.3.2.] James and Dewey.

 

Both James and Dewey held views that imply that there is no sharp distinction between fact and value.

 

James’s views that tend to blur the distinction between facts and values include the following:

·         James described himself as a “radical” empiricist, meaning: (1) he took sense perception to be an important source of our knowledge about the world, but (2) he was open to beliefs about things which could not be perceived with the senses, e.g., religious and moral beliefs. (“What Pragmatism Means,” 293)

·         James’s view of truth as “the good in the way of belief” (305) and “the expedient in the way of our thinking” (322) implies that truths are not limited to claims that can be confirmed empirically. If a claim proves to have some value for our lives, if it shows itself to be useful on the whole and in the long run, then it is true. This counts for factual descriptions as well as for moral claims.

·         James held that moral inquiry relies on experience just as much as scientific inquiry. There is no complete, and completely true, system of morality in the here and now, waiting for us to discover it; ethical inquiry cannot be complete until “the last man has had his experience and said his say.” (“The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” 248).

 

Dewey’s views that tend to blur the distinction between facts and values include the following:

·         According to Dewey’s conception of experience, experience is not limited to sense perception of the world outside the mind. Experience is the interaction of a complex organism with its (equally complex) environment, an interaction in which the organism continually adjusts its own actions in anticipation of thereby changing its environment in order to bring about improved experiences in the future. Traditionally, experience was thought of as being limited to sense perception, and on the traditional view, values are not revealed to us in experience. But on Dewey’s new conception of experience, values are revealed in experience, and are thus real: “If experience actually presents esthetic and moral traits, then these traits may also be supposed to reach down into nature, and to testify to something that belongs to nature as truly as does the mechanical structure attributed to it in physical science.”[4]

 

 

[7.1.3.3.] Rorty on the Fact/Value Gap.

 

One plausible way of interpreting James and Dewey is as trying to make moral inquiry just as legitimate as scientific inquiry. They are responding to the denigration of moral claims and trying to show that such claims are just as important, have just as much claim on our attention, as factual, empirical claims. Some of Rorty’s description of James’s and Dewey’s pragmatism supports this way of reading those classical philosophers:

 

The great fallacy of the tradition [i.e., the tradition of Western philosophy from Plato through Descartes and into the early 20^th century], the pragmatists tell us, is to think that the metaphors of vision, correspondence, mapping, picturing, and representation which apply to small, routine assertions will apply to large and debatable ones. [Think of James’s example of a true visual image of a clock being a copy of it, but our idea of the elasticity of the springs inside the clock not being a copy in any ordinary sense. See p.311] This basic error begets the notion that where there are no objects to correspond to we have no hope of rationality, but only taste, passion, and will. When the pragmatist attacks the notion of truth as accuracy of representation he is thus attacking the traditional distinctions between reason and desire, reason and appetite, reason and will. For none of these distinctions make sense unless reason is thought of on the model of vision, unless we persist in what Dewey called “the spectator theory of knowledge.” (641)

 

Again, a  possible reading of James and Dewey is that they are trying to make moral beliefs and judgments, which do not “copy” reality, just as legitimate as empirical, scientific beliefs and judgments, the simplest of which (at least according to James) do “copy” reality (in some sense).

 

But Rorty seems to be trying to show that scientific inquiry is no more legitimate than moral inquiry. He seems to be responding to the elevation of factual claims over moral claims and trying to show that scientific claims are no more important, should have no more claim on our attention, than moral claims:

 

Even nonpragmatists think Plato was wrong to think of moral philosophy as discovering the essence of goodness, and Mill and Kant wrong in trying to reduce moral choice to rule. But every reason for saying that they were wrong is a reason for thinking the epistemological tradition wrong in looking for the essence of sci­ence, and in trying to reduce rationality to rule. For the pragmatists, the pattern of all inquiry—scientific as well as moral—is deliberation concerning the relative attractions of various concrete alternatives. The idea that in science or philosophy we can substitute “method” for deliberation between alternative results of speculation is just wish­ful thinking. (640, emphasis added)

 

·         In ethics, there is no mechanical, rational procedure we can follow to figure out, in any situation, what’s right and what’s not. The best we can do is discuss and deliberate about the “relative attractions of various concrete alternatives.”[5]

·         But according to Rorty, the same is true about all other areas of inquiry (including science and philosophy): there is no uniquely rational method available to scientists or philosophers that give them access to truth. The best they can do is what the rest of us do in moral inquiry: deliberate about the “relative attractions of various concrete alternatives.”

 

In summary:

·         neither ethical nor empirical inquiry is constrained “by the ahistorical and nonhuman nature of reality itself. ...” (641)

·         in both sorts of inquiry, all we are constrained by, all that we can appeal to, are “the ordinary, retail, detailed, concrete reasons which have brought one to one’s present view.” (642)

 

 

Stopping point for Monday November 14. For next time, finish reading Rorty’s “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” (643-54). [We are one day behind the reading on the original schedule.]