File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1998/bhaskar.9805, message 55


Date: Thu, 21 May 1998 18:11:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: Re: BHA: truth


Thanks Louis and Colin and Wally for all of your responses!  

Louis your last message was really clear and helpful, but in a way I'm left
back where I began, in that I still don't really understand how deflationism
avoids the problematic of correspondence.  I mean, if "It is true that the
cat (my cat, actually) is black" is equivalent in meaning to "There exists a
(smart, wonderful) creature who really is a cat and who really is black,"
then what have we gained, or lost, by holding that you can say something is
true about the world without actually using the word "true"?  I just don't
get it.

[Also -- and not terribly important -- could you say that something like the
inverse of this deflationary thesis is held by Habermas (and whoever he
learned about language from)?  That is, I understand him to be saying
something like: "To state that `The cat is black' implicitly commits one to
affirm the validity of one's statement."  (The difference, of course, being
that the concept of truth is considered redundant in the one case and as
transcendentally required in the other.)  Or is Habermas talking about
honesty rather than about validity, so that this whole comparison is silly?]

I'm sorry to be doing so much thinking out loud here, but here's the crux of
what I've been preoccupied with: in so far as truth is an idea, I'd be
inclined to think that, like other ideas, it doesn't exist on, say, the
moon, where, apart from the occasional visits by us, there don't seem to be
any cognizers on board.  This is what sparked my curiousity about just what
ontological commitments are involved in deflationary and correspondence
theories of truth respectively.  

But some questions come after this.  First, can I hold that ideas don't
exist where there aren't any thinkers (indeed that the question of whether
they do borders on the unintelligible) and still maintain that the idea of
truth describes a relationship between concepts, produced by thinkers, and a
reality which is not itself contingent upon thinkers for its existence?
Second, what about those pesky mathematical ideas?  I mean, they're produced
by thinkers, but they seem to capture relationships which are *NOT*
themselves contingent upon anyone's intellectual agency.  So it's a lot more
tempting to say that the relationship captured by the concept of pi exists,
whether or not there's anyone around to call it pi, similar to how objects
fall (or not), regardless of whether there's anyone around to explain this
state of affairs through the idea of gravity.  Is the concept of truth more
like the idea of pi in this respect, or more like the idea that capitalism
is prone to crisis?           



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