Thread 24710106

>"You see, truth is just what we find useful to affirm. It's entirely pragmatic. It's a compliment we pay to our beliefs. Truth is just what our peers let us get away with saying."

Uh, since most people think this is bullshit, wouldn't this be false according to its own definition? People don't find it useful to go this far down the "pragmatism all the way down" volanturist rabbit hole, therefore it is simply a false theory. It seems to refute itself as long as it isn't popular (which it isn't).

Also, why would I find it useful to think that only sharp knives cut or that penicillin cures bacterial infections if it wasn't *already* true.

>"B-but you're smuggling in that things are true in virtue of some pre-existing actuality."

Uh, yeah. Things aren't useful for no reason at all. People didn't decide it was useful to have to scrape a life from agriculture or gathering because they didn't "find it useful" to eat rocks, they didn't find it useful to eat rocks because it was already true that you cannot eat fucking rocks.

How is this not the very sort of sophistry Plato rolls out as a sort of joke to kick off his dialogues?

>>24710149
>There are no interpretations and no thoughts, selves, or intentionally. All can be eliminated in favor of the purely physical and mechanistic.

How do you handle the extreme amount of beliefs that have little to no basis in what we consider today to be material reality yet were widely considered to be true in their original context? Like, say, the four classic elements, Aristotelian physics, astrology, folk medicine, false history, or anything superstitious?
This is just assuming you're a physicalist with a correspondence theory of truth, if you're a tradcath bashing prots then you're in hot water.

>>24710106 (OP)
>Also, why would I find it useful to think
Why would you find it useful to think disemboweling cattle gives you rain if its not true? Why did we sacrifice thousands of people to make the sun rise if it doesn't work?
Obviously these things work anon, otherwise people wouldn't have done them for millennia

>>24710191
>Refuting yourself is ok because people have been wrong about things in the past!

>Because people disagree, nothing is really true or false!

Ok, so people also disagreed on the shape of the Earth for much of human history. And which shape people thought the Earth tended to vary by which culture they lived in. So does the Earth lack a shape or does the shape change depending on which cultural context you're in...?

>>24710207
>Some beliefs have been false.
>Therefore no beliefs have been true!

>>24710865
How do you know which beliefs are true or not?

>>24710873
>We all know nothing!
>Therefore my self-refuting statements about truth are true!

> [With the skeptic] the scope is universal: one expresses a general reluctance to claim truth, “absolute knowledge,” in any particular instance. But note: this stance implies that the question of whether or not one’s ideas, in one case or another, are true in fact is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. The phrase “all intents and purposes” is particularly appropriate here because the stance willy-nilly absolutizes pragmatism.

>But there is an outrageous presumption in this: if pursuing the question of truth requires one to venture, as it were, beyond one’s thinking to reality, dismissing this question means resolving not to venture beyond one’s own thinking as one’s own, which is to say that one keeps oneself away from the world and in one’s own head [or perhaps language game] — which is to say, further, that one absolutizes one’s own ego over and against God, reality, others, whatever it may be, all of which is equally irrelevant to that ego.

>What reason does one have for dismissing the question of truth and suspending one’s judgment? While it could turn out in a particular case or another that suspending judgment is prudent, there can in fact be no reason at all for a universal suspension of judgment, insofar as accepting a reason as true requires suspending this suspension. It follows that this suspension is strictly groundless; it is a wholly arbitrary a priori, which claims preemptively that no statement will ever have a claim on one’s judgment without obliging oneself to listen to and consider any given statement. It may be that one opinion or another that one happens to hold is in fact true, but the suspension of judgment neutralizes its significance for me qua truth, again for no reason. I thus absolve myself of all responsibility: if I make no claim on truth, then truth never has a claim on me.

>>24710914
So you can't put your thoughts into your own words? And you can't even use a quote that gives a serious alternative to pragmatism? How sad

>>24710106 (OP)
In English "truth" has been mostly distinct from "fact." and the uses of "true" which relate to fact mostly don't carry over to "truth.' Truth as a synonym for fact was mostly considered vulgar and only very recently becoming anything approaching accepted. When you tell the truth that does not mean you speak the facts, you may not even know the facts but you can still be truthful. Truth is more the lack of deceit or the abundance of belief, depending on the context and it can also be something which is fact but doesn't have to be.

>>24710940
>and the uses of "true" which relate to fact mostly don't carry over to "truth.'
Actually, I don't think that is quite right, I suspect, true = fact is also fairly recent. If you look into the history and the usage you see the lack of deceit being what differentiates truth from fact, something which needs to demonstrated is not true, it is not what it seems, there is a deceit. The truth is readily apparent, as God is for someone whose faith is true. Going off memory here, been awhile since I read the OED entries for these words but think I am going to revisit them tomorrow.

>>24710106 (OP)
You’re completely right.

>>24710106 (OP)
North American philosopher = opinion discarded

>>24710154
Even Nietzsche denied mechanistic interpretations as well

>>24710983
What third world shithole do you hail from, Rajesh?

>>24710940
I don't know where you are getting this from. In philosophical discourse usage followed from the Latin scholastic usage in which "true is said many ways" (Aristotle) and is predicated analogously. Truth is primarily in the intellect, since it is the intellect's grasp of being. It is parasitically in words, "propositions," models, etc., words generally being taken as a sign of truth, behaviors as symptoms, etc. The same term involves both lying versus "telling the truth," and "speaking what is so." Per the Doctrine of Transcendentals, truth is coextensive with being yet adds nothing to it (being a conceptual distinction, being qua knowable). A model or statue is "true to life," if it corresponds to what it signifies for instance.

The use of "fact" for "is the case" is not new, it dates to the 16th century. The idea that to speak "what is the case" is to speak truly is as old as Aristotle.

>>24711036
Well, the idea is clearly older than Aristotle, but he provides the textbook definition in the Metaphysics. True does come from a word meaning "faithful" but the epistemic use is older than modern English, and the use of it in phrases like "true knight," or "a true scholar" fits very well with the epistemic usage in the via antiqua's way of conceiving universals and signification.

>>24710863
>>24710865
>>24710914
>things being pragmatically true means nothing is true!
>what, problems in belief formation? no, I don't need to address that
>don't you know you're contradicting yourself?
In practice, what we call truth is based not on the ultimate reality that grounds our existence, but on the ideas that people agree upon by loosely relating the phenomena and information they encounter, which are oftentimes flawed. It's not solipsistic to point this out, it's just the regular behavior we can observe.
The only way to ever truly establish something as fact is through repeated experiments, thereby proving the utility of a belief in its capacity to reliably predict and manipulate the world, but you are a tradcath and your faith is anathema to cold verificationism, you don't have any answers beyond bluntly repeating yet again that your case for truth is obviously right and everyone from the Renaissance onwards is wrong.

>>24711325
So it wasn't true that the Earth was round before people ran experiments to verify this? Then why would the experiments verify this if it wasn't already true. This is nonsense.

>>24711325
>>24711436
Basically, you are conflating the conditions of knowledge, possession of the truth (union with it) and truth itself.

Fallibalism doesn't require Rorty's ridiculous "pragmatism all the way down." Making an argument for the former doesn't support the latter.

Second, your empiricist epistemology is clearly deficient, since it leads to positions like moral anti-realism, which is also self-defating since even if it were true, it certainly couldn't be good to affirm it, since if nothing is truly good, truth simply cannot be truly better than falsity. So too, good argument, good evidence, good reasoning, etc. would simply be whatever sort of evidence, argument, or reasoning we currently prefer.

It's worth pointing out that the original Empiricists were skeptics who selected their epistemology precisely because it led to underdetermination and skepticism, since they thought lacking beliefs aided dispassion, ataraxia. Hence, when people committed to empiricism, conflating it with science, and then "discovered" it led to skepticism, this is just what it was designed to do. But rather than reject their dogma they just doubled down on theses like "words never refer to things," and "it's impossible to know when you are doing addition," or "truth is just whatever people accept." It's dogmatism in its terminal stage, only kept in place by steadfastly isolating all philosophy outside the empiricist dogmas.

How do I know? Because the actuality of what is known must be in the intellect on pain of arbitrariness, acausality, and solipsism. Noesis.

>>24711436
People across the whole world considered the Earth being flat to be true, yes, and if you asked anyone about it they would tell you that's the case because they plainly observed the Earth to be flat, the theory was in accordance with the data. Only after making new observations, like the visibility of stars being determined by your location, could anyone reasonably argue otherwise, as Aristotle did (and even then his same theory required geocentrism). There was a basic, obvious fact that after tens of thousands of years turned out to be not so factual, and this shows truth and understanding is historically conditioned.
Happy?

>>24711495
>is also self-defating since even if it were true, it certainly couldn't be good to affirm it, since if nothing is truly good, truth simply cannot be truly better than falsity.
But this is precisely putting utility above ultimate truth.

>>24711517
>and this shows truth... is historically conditioned.

So when people thought the world was flat is truly was flat? You either affirm this absurdity, that truth is whatever we currently think it is (Protagorean relativism) or else admit that you have *once again* conflated truth and knowledge.

>>24711525
Right, which Rorty and co think supports liberal pluralism but which really just bottoms out in might makes right.

Science is how you find out if something is true.
Yelling "BASEDENENCE BASEDENCE" won't change this.

>>24710149
based
>>24710154
white people psychosis.

>>24711637
>Science is how you find out if something is true.
Then why hasn't science figured out what "dark matter" is? Oh right, because it doesn't actually exist.

This is like 90% right in the sense that most people don't actually know jack shit about what is true in the most empirical sense (nor could they find it) and most of common life is subjective and doesn't involve that to begin with.
He's just phrasing this in a way that is easy to disagree with even though it is mostly right. "Truth" is maybe not the right word but that's also the point. The point is you have to accept that there is a sort of colloquial pragmatic truth separate from the "real" unwieldy truth. It's a language game thing.

>>24711646
>if something isn't found out immediately it will never be found out
Why do you say things that you know aren't true? And more importantly, why do you SEETHE and MALD about science, to the point where you'll say silly stuff like this?

>>24711652
>if jesus hasn't appeared before us immediately it will never happen
Why do you say things that you know aren't true? And more importantly, why do you SEETHE and MALD about christianity, to the point where you'll say silly stuff like this?

>>24711637
>Science is how you find out if something is true.
>Yelling "BASEDENENCE BASEDENCE" won't change this.

Ah, so you find out that it's true that World War I ended on 11/11/18 by running the war in a controlled experiment 100 times and observing when it tends to end in an armistice. Let me ask, which experiments should I run to confirm who won the last World Series? When I cross the street, which experiments or research journals do I consult to know that no cars are coming? To find out that a woman is interested in you, which sciences do you consult? Which science do we use to spot recurring motifs in Virgil or Dante?

>>24711649
>It's a language game thing.
Languages aren't games. It's a shitty analogy that people run with without ever questioning if it is a shitty analogy or not.

>>24711659
You're genuinely a fucking idiot.
We disproved Christianity. However I didn't say anything about Christianity, so you're just showing again that Christians are mentally ill retards.

>>24711669
Yes, you are indeed a mentally ill retard with your magical progress narrative that boils down to gambler's fallacy aka magical thinking. Eat shit and die.

>>24711620
>world was flat is truly was flat
No
>truth is whatever we currently think it is
What we call truth is
>else admit that you have *once again* conflated truth and knowledge
He never did that. How do you think we can gain definite knowledge of the noumena?

>>24711620
Truth is whatever best explains reality at the moment. If you decouple truth from the context in which it is formulated, then not only was everyone wrong about literally everything in the past, but we are wrong about everything today respective to the future, and ultimately truth ends up becoming totally inaccessible to any sort of living being. You are the one banishing the possibility of truth away from anyone other than an omniscient God.
>might makes right.
Not really, because an army doesn't have the power to redefine physics. The standard model reigns today because it's the most accurate and useful, but it has glaring issues and therefore cannot be the whole truth either. We just teach it as such because it's the best we have.

>>24711715
>Noumena
An incoherent notion based on a dogmatic philosophy. No thanks. Kant projecting his era's brain dead empiricism onto past philosophy doesn't make it so. What he dismissed as "twaddle" he hadn't even read. In fact, if you pick up something like Eriugena's opus you'll see that he affirms that essences are inexhaustible while not being stuck with the conclusion that one must know everything to know anything.

>>24711729
No, the epistemic problems you cite are all the result of empiricist dogmatism. The idea that "we could be totally wrong about everything" flows from a denial of the act of understanding as the primary datum of epistemology.

>>24711760
Empiricism et al originates in natural philosophers a.k.a. scientists walking away from Aristotelianism around the 1600s, and trying to construct a new science that wouldn't make the same mistakes. It wasn't that Descartes woke up one day and said "gee today I feel like ruining philosophy", it was a development caused by the same scholasticism you cling to.
But you said before dark matter isn't real, so how about evolution? What do you think of quantum mechanics?

>>24711760
>>24711796
By the way, I didn't say "could", I said WOULD be wrong, necessarily. You clearly don't believe the current scientific consensus to be correct, and it's not like we're already at the endpoint of knowledge, so you shouldn't ignore that "dogmatism" that you yourself uphold.

>>24711796
>Everyone in this thread is one person.
>The New Science was motivated by scientific concerns and not theology.
The New Science was motivated by religious beliefs, first nominalism and fideism within Catholicism, and later by the Reformation. Volanturism is the biggest factor. The complaint was that, if things had natures, then God would somehow be constrained by natures. He couldn't make the good of a horse "whatever he wants," and if loving God is the good of rational creatures then somehow God would be unfree because God couldn't make it good to hate God (Ockham's example).

This had nothing to do with scientific advances, which basically kept up their same basic pace until industrialization, centuries after the New Science (nor did growth in economic and military power corelate with an adoption of empiricism, nor is there any shortage of great scientists and inventors who rejected the mechanistic metaphysics, nor am I aware of any empirical support for the claim that empiricism makes people better scientists).

The language of the New Science is, of course, theological not scientific. The idea of "natural laws," and things "obeying" those laws is a product of volanturist theology where God commands and things obey. This is more John Calvin than Albert Magnus.

At the same time, Reformation politics led to a bunch of good ideas simply being thrown out in a wave of iconoclasm, while even in Catholic areas these ideas hit hard. At the same time education expanded to the growing middle class and away from career contemplatives who lived a life of study and praxis. The result was that more people got educated, a good thing, but at a much lower general quality. By the time of Locke, or even Descartes, core concepts like substance have already morphed into ridiculous parodies of the form they had from Aristotle to high scholasticism. Hence, the via antiqua wasn't so much displaced as forgotten. To the extent it was displaced, it was on account of (bad) theology.

But sure, just roll out the dogmatic Whig history of empiricism everyone has crammed down their throat at school. If it gets repeated enough it apparently becomes true according to luminaries (sophists) like Rorty.

>>24711826
Nigger, Aristotle's natural philosophy is riddled with sensible mistakes. Take On the Heavens, where he argues that lightness and heaviness lead to linear movement away or towards the center of the Earth as a consequence of the kind of mixture of the four elements that compose something, that the uppermost part of the atmosphere is a layer of the element of fire above air, and that the planets in space have to be made of the unknown element of perfect aether because that's the only way they could have natural circular movement. It's all logically necessary as a part of his system yet it's factually untrue, if you believe that such a thing as absolute truth exists you should be able to admit this fact and that it indeed caused trouble later on, neededing to be torn down.
It happened in astronomy, in chemistry, in biology, and I'm not talking about Ockham in the 1300s, I'm talking specifically about the 1600s as I said. Even the Jesuits had to leave behind the Ptolemaic model and move on to the Tychonic, because the creation of the telescope allowed them to see the phases of Venus and the imperfections of the planets, contra Aristotle. Descartes was perfectly aware of this, and shelved his scheduled publication on astronomy once he heard of the inquisition taking action against Galileo's retardation. It doesn't mean everything you dislike is a theological aberration, there were scientific reasons to move on to something else and that's not Whig propaganda.

And yes, I do have that image saved. It's a great piece of art.

>>24711961
>Argument over whether mechanism and empiricism are flawed.
>"W-well Aristotle wasn't right about everything!!!!"
No shit, that's a total strawman. Aristotle being wrong about some (unrelated) things doesn't prove that the New Science wasn't deeply flawed (indeed, it arguably retarded scientific progress in a number of areas, most obviously information theory and the social sciences).

Notice, you didn't address a single post I made about the (factually true) reasons for the rise of mechanism and empiricism. You instead go off on some irrelevant tangent about specific models, as opposed to philosophical presuppositions that lie prior to those models.

Note that underdetermination of theory was known since ancient times. Epicures writes about it, as does Aquinas. It's only empiricism that makes it utterly intractable such that you get post-modern power theories and anti-realism.

>>24711961
>It doesn't mean everything you dislike is a theological aberration, there were scientific reasons to move on to something else and that's not Whig propaganda

Also, please explain how any of the specific things you mentioned require empiricism, a denial of natures, and a framing of science in terms of "law" and "obedience" or reductionism, or the claims like "values, color, etc. aren't real," only extension in space is real. Only what is quantifiable is real. And also there are no cats and trees, only particles arranged in such and such a way (all claims that come out fairly early with this new philosophy, which had fuck all to do with astronomy, which had been challenged and reformed for ages. Aquinas is writing about how the Ptolemaic system is underdetermined centuries earlier, and that we can posit all sorts of theories to "save appearances," because that sort of theory always involves quia demonstrations. What empiricism does though is claim that there is no real abstraction and so all demonstrations are quia, and essentially turns abstraction into induction and pattern recognition, not by "scientific proof," but by theological fiat.

Bump for an interesting thread.

>>24711961
I'm less big in older philosophy, but it is absolutely true that the radical reshaping of "natural philosophy" (what Newton thought he was doing) was heavily influenced by theology. That's why it is kind of funny when New Athiest types fight tooth and claw for mechanistic views of nature—it's legit just Protestant theology they have inherited.

Aristotle had plenty of errors but he looks to be having the last laugh since the information theory and complexity studies revolutions (chaos theory too) might easily be the biggest revolutions since Newton (or with AI, possibly even more consequential). They are even remaking the physical sciences with systems theory and cybernetics. But those areas refer to Aristotle as their progenitor influence all the time, for good reason.

He was also a lot more right on biology than many of the key early moderns on just this sort of point. Hence, "the master of those who know," is still a pretty good title, given what he had to work with.

Also his ethics is vastly more coherent than Kantianish and utilitarianism, the key stuff shit out by modernity. So there is that.

>>24711992
>>24711999
It would indeed be foolish to deny the theological underpinnings of nominalism, I agree that there really was an atmosphere of iconoclasm, and I have read Aquinas' explanation of saving the appearances, but it would be very wrong to decry later developments as all stemming specifically from this movement and this particular narrative, when we do not see it all around. Kepler, who was brought up in monasteries reclaimed by the Reformation so they could specifically pump out more Protestant teachers and priests, never spoke of any "laws", only harmonies as he was taught (see Harmonice Mundi, 1619), but he nonetheless needed to oppose saving the appearances to make astronomy from a mathematical science into a physical one and prove the elegance of God's plan, because he had to tackle the mistaken fundamentals that saving the appearances was trying to rescue. It's not unrelated, because putting into question the process through which we come to know these fundaments does also raise problems for all belief formation, and has historically led to things like the 1632 ban on infinitesimals, again because of it going against Aristotle.

By admitting that Aristotle was wrong about all sorts of things you weaken the system of scholasticism and remove many of its claims about the world, except for some relating to human nature and more abstract principles which you take as articles of faith. But you do not explain how, if absolute truth is cognized through inherent human features, these truthful doctrines could've become lost 700 years ago simply due to debate between normal, studious human beings. This gap is the main issue with your argument. If we instead understand what is called truth to be the product of a certain context, then there's no real mystery to dispel, and it much better fits the last century's research into the human intellect, even if its implications are highly problematic. Besides that, eliminativism of the sort you describe is not held by many biologists or neuroscientists, they will tell you that cats are part of the lineage of felidae, that trees are a convergent phenomenon in plants, and that color empirically exists as an experience not unlike consciousness. It's smug philosophers like Dennett who'll pursue it instead, and everyone else will continue to operate according to the values they hold even if told it's not real. It's not all or nothing, you could even say there's a golden mean to it.
>>24714104
>But those areas refer to Aristotle as their progenitor influence all the time, for good reason.
Interesting, could you post a reference for that? The best I could find was a book from 1971, Rosenfield's Aristotle and Information Theory.

>>24710106 (OP)
I feel like pragmatism explains so much. For example, I think most would agree that the statement "The Earth is round" is more true when compared to "The Earth is flat". Even though the earth is clearly not completely round, we would still say that the first statement approximates truth. In what sense does it approximate truth? It does so by providing us a good practical model for viewing the world. This does not only apply to the Earth but all forms of communication. We can never communicate concepts clearly; we are always forced to use approximations.

Another example, the statement "The car is red" is one we consider to be able to be true or false. However, our concept of red is by no means universal. There are classic problems, such as inverted spectrum, and we also have no clear outline of where the color "red" starts and ends on the spectrum. Instead, we approximate and communicate as much information as possible, hoping that the other person develops a proper mental model to work with.

>>24710106 (OP)
Yeah this is bullshit. Truth is statements and belief systems in acordance with reality.

What Rorty is describing is not truth, but some sort of social consensus.

>>24710149
Litcels play word games, STEM places men on the moon.

That truth doesn't exist is what retards tell themselves to cope with their wrong beliefs. It's the ultimate and most pathetic form of denial.

>>24716997
what's your favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics

>>24711961
In the Categories, Aristotle also argues that 'bigger' and 'smaller' can't be opposites because a horse might be bigger than a mouse but is smaller than an elephant and no thing can be itself and its opposite at the same time.

This is very retarded.

>sensible mistakes
But it's not sensible because Plato, who predates Aristotle, gives a far superior account of the issue:

>"‘It’s obvious that nothing can do two opposite things, or be in two opposite states, in the same part of itself, at the same time, in relation to the same object. "
(The Republic, Book 4)

Aristotle makes constant retarded mistakes. Kuhn even mentions this as a motivation for writing on philosophy of science.

>>24716997
Meanwhile my pick up skills put me on your moms pussy

>>24711796
Ought we go back to pre modern or classical thinking? It leads to the same path

>>24710149
How do we know if this statement is true?

>>24717389
>In the Categories, Aristotle also argues that 'bigger' and 'smaller' can't be opposites because a horse might be bigger than a mouse but is smaller than an elephant and no thing can be itself and its opposite at the same time.
>This is very retarded.
That's not retarded, that's you rejecting his accounts of relative and oppositional terms because you use the English word opposite differently. That's not really the same as the above discussions about rejecting Aristotle for his cosmology or accounts of the elements and motion or whatever.

>But it's not sensible because Plato, who predates Aristotle, gives a far superior account of the issue:
Aristotle readily accepts this expression of non-contradiction almost word-for-word in Metaphysics Gamma.

There are obviously wrong conclusions in Aristotle's work, and at times reasoning we would reject for this or that reason, but this seems like a strange quibble.