Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 10:08:34 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Bhaskar's theory of truth


Hi Ruth,

Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca> writes
>You wrote, "Why don't people who wish to contest it at least look it up.."  
>This I think is unfair.  I've looked it up, anyway.
You omit the rest of the sentence, which reads >and try to come to grips
with it.> The point I've been trying to make is that, though the debate
has ostensibly been about a key component of Bhaskar's theory of truth,
nobody has tried to spell the theory out as a whole or come to grips
with it in any detail. As a consequence, perhaps, the debate has
arguably been largely beside the point, i.e. has largely been about
something that the theory does not claim (see below).
>  
>And I understood
>Bhaskar to mean just about what you say he does.  
Well, as you say, not *quite*. You do not mention the point I make
(referred to above) in regard to what you have been consistently saying,
and on which the debate has larely turned, viz., that Bhaskar's claim is
that things (that we come to know) in the ID may properly be said to be
*true*, whereas on my interpretation his claim is that they may come to
be known as *true of*, in the sense of being the cause of, other things
in the ID. To put this slightly differently, you have been debating the
claim that the world may come to be known as true. Bhaskar's claim is
that truth may come to be known as in the world (in the sense
indicated). These are radically different claims. (Heikki spoke of truth
as being in the world, but this seems to have been ignored in the
subsequent debate.)

Nor do you say (or have you said that I can recall) anything about the
stratified nature of the theory, about bridging rather than collapsing
the TD/ID distinction, about the dialectic of truth...

>>Are we just involved in a terminological dispute in which what one side
>>calls 'causal mechanisms' etc the other wants to call 'alethic truth'
>>(also)? 
>
>I actually think that this is basically so.  
You don't say why, taking into account the points I made.

>But I'd take out the "just,"
>and maybe the "terminological" as well, because both connote the idea that
>the disagreement is fairly trivial, which I think is incorrect in this case.
I don't know how you can omit "terminological", given that you've been
consistently saying that the dispute is about what to call the same
thing.
>
> 
>You continue, 
>>I don't think so. First, what is being resisted is the apparently
>>non-relativist implications of truth as ontological and objective. 
>
>This is of course untrue of me.  If I have ever said anything to suggest
>that I hold a relativist theory of truth, 
OK. I should have said that what is being resisted is the notion that we
can come to know objective truth (see below).

>Finally, you wrote,
>>But truth is still relative to the processes in the TD...Even alethic truth
>has >to be expressed in language, and is subject to revision as our theories
>>change or are superceded. 
>
>I would think that you would want to be a little bit more careful here.  
>
>As I understand it, neither (a) the fact that propositions concerning the
>alethic truth of given phenomena are, like other propositions, expressed in
>language, nor (b) the fact that our best theories (i.e., our best efforts to
>correctly identify given alethic truths) change; neither (a) nor (b) implies
>that any given alethic truth will or should itself change accordingly.  
>
>I mean, it's the *identification* of the alethic truth of x which may change
>over time, not the alethic truth itself.  Like x itself, the alethic truth
>of x is part of the intransitive dimension, and will only change if x
>changes.  That's why they call it "alethic"!  I assume you will agree here,
>with this correction.   
I agree with what you're saying - it is what I was trying to say. The
first sentence you quote is certainly misleading - I should have said
'knowledge' rather than 'truth'. However, I do go on to say:
>When this happens, while the phenomena identified by them are for the
>most part 'saved', the theories themselves are discarded as false or
>inadequate, giving place to a new ('emergent') theory that could not
>have been predicted. 
So the theories/language/description change, but but not the phenomena
they are 'about'.

>>(Doubtless, however, this is not relativist enough for some, and less
>>relativist perhaps than the epistemic relativism of CR seemed prior to its
>>dialecticization.)
>
>As I know I said before, I never took the "epistemic relativism" of RTS to
>have anything to do with the question of truth.  It was merely the claim
>that knowledge is socially produced and changes over time.  
I'm not sure that Bhaskar's epistemic relativism doesn't have anything
to do with the question of truth (it states eg that truth-values are
within historical time), but in the context of the debate, and in
particular because I was thinking here of Heikki's objections to the
notion of objective truth, I should have said '(inter)sujectivist'
rather than 'relativist'.

>Then there was a
>separate claim to the effect that our judgments are, nonetheless, rational.
>(What this meant, as late as RR, was the somewhat vague idea that we accept
>theory a over theory b if the former has more "explanatory power" than the
>latter.) 
First, on Bhaskar's account (another point I made) the claim is not
'separate': judgemental rationality is practically entailed by epistemic
relativism (see eg DPF 9) - and there is a 'constellational identity of
the possibility of judgemental rationality [in the IA] within the
actuality of epistemic relativity [in the TD] within the necessity for
ontological realism [in the ID]' (231). On what grounds do you dispute
this?
Second, I don't find the notion of greater explanatory power at all
vague. See in particular his accounts of the epistemological dialectic
in science.
Third, I think the argument for judgemental rationality is much wider:
given epistemic relativity (that our theories change), we couldn't act
at all if judgemental rationality were not possible (if there were no
good grounds for preferring one set of beliefs to another); ie, it is a
transcendentally necessary condition of intentional action.

Hope you find this constructive. Bye for now.



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