Materialism and the Problem of Truth
II. The Argument from Truth
A second argument I provided was the argument from truth. Let us reflect for a moment on truth as an epistemic summum bonum or supreme good. It seems to me that the scientific enterprise, at least as classically understood, is based on a desire first and foremost to know the truth, and only secondly to manipulate and control the world. We are told, for example, that no matter how comforting it is to have religious beliefs, if those beliefs are not based on good evidence that they are true, then they ought to be abandoned.
But this raises some questions about what this property of truth is, that we should abandon beliefs that we may find comforting for the sake of truth. Here it seems that many “deflationary” accounts of truth are going to fail to capture why we care about truth so much. In William Hasker’s generally friendly response to me in Philosophia Christi he asks
And now consider truth: why should the naturalist find it problematic? That snow is white is true just in case snow is white; what would motivate (let alone force) a naturalist to reject this?
Here Hasker is adverting to a Tarskian disquotational theory of truth; truth is a matter of taking quotation marks of sentences. But truth has to have more to it than this if it is to carry the weight of being the supreme epistemic value. Timothy Erdel takes Quine to task for, at one point, saying that he rejected religion and politics in favor of the pursuit of truth, but then he defines truth in this disquotational way. As he says:
If truth is no more than Quine generally claims when he is describing or explaining truth (as opposed to when he is appealing to it as the grounding motive more his life’s work), namely, the removing of quotation marks from the names of sentences, then one senses some fairly significant equivocation in his use of the term, “truth.”
Presumably one does not cast aside all claims from religion and politics to pursue philosophy as a vocation solely to facilitate the removing of quotes from names of sentences…
So to make the sort of thing we ought epistemically to pursue, even at personal cost, truth must be something more than mere disquotation. But what can it be? I think that only the correspondence theory is the only one that adequately underwrites the intuition that many of us share that truth is the supreme epistemic good.
There is a problem with truth as correspondence, however, from a broadly materialist point of view. If truth is a relationship between someone’s belief that something is so and the reality that it is so, then what that means “there is at least one reptile” would not have been a truth during the Jurassic period, unless there was someone in existence during the Jurassic period who had confidence that his or her thought corresponded to the truth “there is at least one reptile.” And unless there is something like a God, we do not know of anything alive during that time that had confidence in the representation, “There is at least one reptile alive now.”
Because of this, the advocate of a broadly materialist world view may be inclined to accept the idea what can be true false are not states of the person but propositions. These propositions could exist timelessly, but not exist in anyone’s mind. If that were the case then the proposition “There is at least one reptile alive during the Jurassic period” would be a truth that would exist at that time, because it would be true at all times.
This account of propositions is hard to square with some versions of naturalism, according to which everything that exists at some place and time in particular. However, if we waive this requirement, there are still difficulties. The argument from reason based on mental causation maintains that naturalism cannot explain how one thought can cause another thought in virtue of its content. On this view, how would it be possible for our thought to be related to the truth that our thoughts are about, if our thoughts are completely products of the spatio-temporal-physical world, but the truth of our thought does not exist in any particular place or time. The physical, is supposed to be causally closed according to broadly materialist world-views, and as such nothing outside the physical, whether eternal propositions, or nonphysical souls, can affect what goes on in the physical world. Because of this, I regard this move to non-spatial propositions as the acceptance of a poisoned pawn, the taking of which will make the next argument, the argument from mental causation, impossible to answer.
Labels: eliminative materialism, truth
posted by Victor Reppert @ 10:46 AM
12 Comments
12 Comments:
"Presumably one does not cast aside all claims from religion and politics to pursue philosophy as a vocation solely to facilitate the removing of quotes from names of sentences"
Did Quine really believe that all he was doing was removing quotes from sentences?
I've not read much of his work, I'm afraid.
Can you point me to someplace in his work where he indicated that truth was to be found by removing quotation marks?
There is much that I agree with you in regard to the deficiencies of materialistic versions of naturalism. But I don't see your arguments having much force when directed toward other forms of naturalism.
There's not much to recommend in the correspondence theory of truth, imho. And one does not need to be a materialist to find that notion mistaken.
Also, I think the prime goal of philosophy is to attain understanding. Knowledge of the world is to be pursured through the sciences.
So if a philosopher can be said to be seeking 'truth' it is conceptual truth. If you want empirical truth, like whether or not there were reptiles living in the Jurassic age, one needs to turn to paleontology.
By the way how is it possible to reach a language-independent, mind-independent description of the de re essence of reality?
Broadly materialistic world-views, it seem to me, affirm a substrate without meaning and purpose, which is typically called the physical. It affirms that that substrate is causally closed. And it affirms that whatever else there is supervenes on that mechanistic substrate. There are no reasons for anything in the world that are not "physical" in the final analysis.
Now if you want to call a world-view "naturalism" that is not materialistic in this sense, how does it differ?
Anonymous' second question is easy to answer. But I am falling ill. It would only take 200 words to answer it to everyone's satisfaction, from the transcendental realist to the empirical idealist to the atheistic Christian.
but i am coming down with the flu so can't provide this simple universally satisfying solution.
(yes I meant to reverse kant's use of the terms)
I just don't see a problem where you do:
There is a problem with truth as correspondence, however, from a broadly materialist point of view. If truth is a relationship between someone’s belief that something is so and the reality that it is so, then what that means “there is at least one reptile” would not have been a truth during the Jurassic period, unless there was someone in existence during the Jurassic period who had confidence that his or her thought corresponded to the truth “there is at least one reptile.”
Fine, there was no proposition with the property of being true back then. But that doesn't mean there weren't reptiles back then. Why is this a problem?
Perhaps with mathematical truths you could rhetorically make it a bigger problem (the sideshow quote "So it WASN'T true that 2+2 was 4 100 years ago?" That at least gets into some interesting issues. This reptiles thing doesn't at all.
Are these quotes from your work?
Hi BDK,
I would appreciate an answer to Anonymous's question as well, if you have the time. Many have seen the 'comparison problem' as a major obstacle to correspondence theories. How is truth correspondence if we can't get access to a mind-independent truth to compare our beliefs with and see if they correspond? I haven't heard a good reply to this, so please do so!!
rino: Here it is my 200 word solution to idealism-realism. Oh no I suddenly feel ill and must repair to the doctor's office.
Now if you want to call a world-view "naturalism" that is not materialistic in this sense, how does it differ?
As I mentioned on your other blogsite, I think if one does not believe that supernatural beings act in this world, that would place them in the naturalistic camp. I thought you agreed with that as one possible view of naturalism.
And again, if one does not accept reductionism as a valid methodology for explaining everything, then your point about everything being physical in the final analysis is mistaken. The final analysis is not the reduction of everything to the laws and structures of reality at the 'base level'. The final analysis of any question depends on the question being asked and the context in which it is asked.
In its simplest and warranted form, materialism denies that there are mental or spiritual substances. In that sense only would I consider myself a materialist. But almost all materialists go far beyond that simple stance, so I think it would be misleading, in the final analysis, to portray myself as a materialist.
I can see no logical reason, having given that modest nod of approval toward materialism, to believe that the only things that can be said to exist are physical or are made of physical stuffs. Things like legal systems, laws, ethical norms, games, poems, etc. do exist and are partly constitutive of our social life. Without these things our human form of life would not exist..
I'm having some difficulty making sense of your attempt to shoehorn all naturalists into the materialist camp. I’m assuming that the only way that you can legitimately do so is by accepting many of the materialist doctrines that you claim to reject: that reductionism is an essential form of explanation, that the only things that can exist are physical or made of the physical, that if anything does supervene upon the physical that it can in principle be reduced to the most basic physical level, that science is a unity the goal being to reduce all the sciences to the science of physics, etc.
I don't believe the mind is a thing at all - it is not any kind of entity. It is not made of anything. Rather it is a way we have of talking about specific human capacities of thought, memory and will and the exercise of those capacities. If one is talking about ontological reductionism (as you appear to be doing here), why should I be required to reduce the mind to the brain or some other kind of physical entity?. Such a move certainly wouldn't be consistent with my belief that the mind is not an entity at all nor with my rejection of reductionism.
And as I've mentioned before, I don't accept mental causation as an adequate conceptual scheme for explaining human behavior. I wish more 'naturalistic' philosophers would drop that notion, but in the present climate of scientism and the unquestioned acceptance of scientific explanations as the paradigm for philosophical explanations, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Perhaps, in the final analysis, I shouldn't be called a 'naturalist.' I most certainly do not agree with many of the important tenets of mainstream naturalism: that science is the best tool and only tool we have for knowing and understanding the world, that philosophy should just be considered a part of science, that reductionism is a valid methodology, that the mind is the brain, that everything is really just physical, that thinking is some kind of computational process, that the human person is really just another kind of biological machine, etc., etc. But then I also don't see any good reasons why those disagreements with the mainstream should push me over into the theistic or idealistic camp.
Anon said "Rather [mind] is a way we have of talking about specific human capacities of thought, memory and will and the exercise of those capacities."
However you slice it, what do you mean by 'thought,' and what type of capacity is it? Digestion isn't a thing, but a process that we can give a perfectly acceptable biological spin. Also, what of conscious experiences? I don't care if you call them things or whatever, but there remain puzzles about how they relate to the world described by physics and biology.
It almost seems you think you can slip out of these puzzles by just calling them capacities. But they aren't merely behavioral capacities (I hope you aren't a behaviorist anyway), so what type of capacities?
However you slice it, what do you mean by 'thought,' and what type of capacity is it?
Thinking is one of the cognitive powers of the human animal.
There are varieties of thinking: the thinking involved in non-meditative activities like performing a surgical operation or conducting a complex experiment; a related type of thinking that is involved in performing an activity with cunning and ingenuity such as playing chess or engaging in a serious debate; and the thinking involved in intelligent speech, to speak with thought.
All of the above are the kinds of thinking that involve activities. One can also think of something: a random object of thought or the result of some question like where you left your keys or how to get to someplace. Or thinking of something as something, as when you think of an unpleasant task you have to do as a learning experience or think of a painting as an allegory.
There are many more varieties of thinking, but I fear I’m going to tax your patience by going into more detail.
Digestion isn't a thing, but a process that we can give a perfectly acceptable biological spin.
I don’t see how that warrants the mistaken assumption that thinking is a process. Although I do know it is quite a popular analogy for putative mental activity among physicalists or materialists.
Also, what of conscious experiences? I don't care if you call them things or whatever, but there remain puzzles about how they relate to the world described by physics and biology.
A lot of these puzzles are a result of the unquestioned acceptance of the Cartesian conceptual scheme: that the world consists of two categorially distinct domains, the material (being essentially characterized in terms of extension) and the mental (essentially characterized in terms of consciousness).
I simply don’t have the time to address this very good question adequately here. So I’m linking to one of Hacker’s online articles:
Is There Anything it is like to be a Bat?
It almost seems you think you can slip out of these puzzles by just calling them capacities. But they aren't merely behavioral capacities (I hope you aren't a behaviorist anyway), so what type of capacities?
No I’m not a behaviorist. Although behavior is the criteria we use for attributing psychological powers to animals. I’m approaching this from the later Wittgenstein view of the mind. If you’re familiar with his philosophy, you should have a fair idea of my methodological bias in examining these ‘puzzles’.
If you aren’t familiar with his later thoughts on language and the mind, then Glock’s A Wittgenstein Dictionary or some of P.M.S. Hacker’s commentary on the Philosophical Investigations would be good sources for an introduction.
If a puzzle really isn’t a puzzle but simply a result of conceptual confusion or misplaced assumptions then I can’t fairly be charged of trying to slip out of them.
By the way I hope your flu attack was a short-lived experience.
I sensed the Wittgensteinian impulse in you. I am not in that cult. I am in the naturalism cult. I think there are real problems here, not just little puzzles. That is, Popper was right. :)
Popper's The Open Society is a book I found to be very interesting and a joy to read. Will have to try and find time to take it down from the bookshelf and take another look at it.
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