File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-03-08.181, message 107


Date: Sat, 08 Mar 97 00:30:51 CST
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Hi all--

I've been out of town for a while, so I'm trying to catch back up.  Sorry if
I'm a little out of phase, but a couple thoughts:

Having discussion of *Dialectic* alongside our reading of RTS seems sensible
to me at this point.

On the issue of truth and "correspondence," Katherine Hayles has an
interesting article called "Constrained Constructivism" (in Levine's *Realism
and Representation* volume), in which she argues for something along the
lines of a "consistency" theory of truth.  It's been a while since I read it,
but at the time it seemed compatible with CR.  Has anyone else seen this
piece?

A tangent: Gary wrote:

> As Bhaskar has pointed out DCR can sustain such an account while
> conventionalists, and Peirce's notion of consensus among scientists is
> surely an instance of conventionalism, fail to do so.

For what it's worth, while I agree that Peirce's consensus theory of truth is
problematic, I don't think it is conventionalist (though it may appear to be
so out of context), at least not the way most poststructuralist theories are.
 For one thing, he doesn't tie the consensus to the present moment: instead,
he's thinking in terms of a consensus to be reached at some distant future. 
For another, Peirce insists on the existence of reality outside the mind and
outside discourse (in fact he distinguished between an "inner" and "outer"
world in a way that comes close to RB's transitive and intransitive
dimensions) and argues that we have access to reality, while avoiding
positivist notions of *direct* (unsemiotized, theory-free) access to it.

Unluckily I had to return all the Peirce books I've been hoarding back to the
library, or I'd offer citations myself.  But if you want to dig through the
volumes, check in the indexes under "community."

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-gwi.net
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce



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