I hope I will be forgiven for abusing the term “skepticism” here — for what I have in mind is not a perfectly innocuous “claims require evidence” epistemic prudence, but rather Cartesian skepticism.
According to the Cartesian skeptic, one can be perfectly certain about one’s own mental contents and yet also be in total doubt about what really corresponds to those mental contents. Hence she needs an argument that will justify her belief that there is any external reality at all, and that at least some of her mental contents can correspond to it.
There are many responses to Cartesian skepticism, and here I want to pick up on one strand in the pragmatist tradition that, on my view, cuts deepest into what is wrong with Cartesian skepticism.
I think that one cannot talk, in any intelligible sense, about justification in the first place without also committing oneself to a belief in other minds with whom one shares a world. (Not that I like that way of putting it — “a belief in other minds” is a much too intellectualistic interpretation of the myriad ways in which we experience the sentience of nonhuman animals and the sentience-and-sapience of other human animals.)
I say this because justification is itself a social practice — and one that we ourselves are taught how to participate in. (In the contemporary jargon, I’m a social externalist about justification.) For what is justification? It is a normative assessment of the evidence and reasons for one’s claims. But that normative assessment necessarily involves other rational beings like ourselves.
Think of it this way (taking an example from Wittgenstein): suppose I’m waiting for a train, and I want to know if it will be on time. I could look up the schedule. But suppose further that instead of doing so, I imagine the schedule: I look up the time in my imagination. Why isn’t that the same thing as looking up the actual schedule?
The answer is that there’s no constraint on how I imagine the schedule. It could be whatever I want — or subconsciously desire — it to be. But without constraints, there are no norms or rules at all.
Justification is much the same: it is a normative assessment of evidence and reasoning according to rules or norms, and there are no private norms. (Though Wittgenstein doesn’t put it this way, he might say that the very idea of a “private norm” is a category mistake — a category mistake on which Cartesian skepticism and several hundred years of subsequent philosophy have depended.)
So whereas the Cartesian skeptic thinks that we need to justify our belief in the world and in other minds, I think that this makes no sense at all. We cannot justify our belief in other minds and in the world because there is no such thing as justification at all in the first place without also accepting (what is indeed a manifest reality to everyone who is not a schizophrenic or on a bad acid trip) that there are other sentient-and-sapient beings other than oneself with whom one shares a world.
.A further point to make (and the subject of my current article-in-progress) is that justification and truth require both sentience and sapience.
The clue I’m following is Davidson’s triangulation argument: suppose there are two creatures who are each responding sensorily to some object in a shared environment. How is an onlooker supposed to know which object they are both responding to? If both creatures can compare its own responses with the responses of the other creature, then each can determine whether or not they are cognizing the same object.
The point here is that two (or more) sentient creatures — intentional beings that can successfully navigate their environments — can each have a grasp of objectivity if and only if each creature can
(1) represent the similarities and differences between its own embodied perspective and an embodied perspective occupied by another creature and
(2) be motivated to minimize discrepancies and eliminate incompatibilities between its own action-guiding representations and its action-guiding representations of the other creature’s action-guiding representations, and in the process
(3) attain the metacognitive awareness whereby it can take its own embodied perspective as an embodied perspective, and thereby be aware that how it subjectively takes things to be is not (necessarily) how things really are.
This process is facilitated by a shared language that allows each creature to monitor how each is representing the other’s representations and revise its own representations when incompatibility between representations is discovered. The function of norms — of discourse and of conduct — is to motivate each creature to revise its representations when incompatibilities are discovered.
One important implication of this argument is that sentient creatures cannot distinguish between their own subjective orientation on things and how things really are. They lack an awareness of objectivity and an awareness of their own subjectivity. By contrast, sapient creatures are aware of both objectivity — how things really are, as distinct from how they are taken to be — and subjectivity — how things are taken to be, as distinct from how they really are.
This line of thought also explains why I have been adamant that objectivity does not require absoluteness: sapient creatures can be aware of the difference between how things are and how they are taken to be, and thus be aware that they might have false beliefs, even though no sapient creature can transcend the biological constraints of its form of sentience.
Then from your point of view, you cannot say anyone is wrong or mistaken. But you can hold a justified belief that you are incurably blind.
WOW I missed that comment.
I would like to point out that KNs speculation is nothing less than a description of the inner life of the Christian God (an eternal Trinity in dialogue with itself).
It’s never ceases to amaze me how someone can get close enough to touch it but still miss the boat.
Again just WOW
peace
Don’t animals act like they’re justified in “believing P”? Of course they’re not thinking, “this is justifed” in any kind of language or code, but they’re putting their confidence into stalking their prey, picking the can with the treat under it, or going off to where they know that they can drink.
It just seems to me that the fact that we think in words, often, is being held to be a crucial difference in coming to any and every “justified belief,” when it isn’t (unless you define “justified belief” as one involving language). Language certainly makes much possible that isn’t without it, but being without it doesn’t mean that non-verbal animals can’t realize things with varying levels of confidence–including very high ones in some cases–puzzle things out rationally, or take steps to shore up the confidence level of their knowledge.
They don’t consider statements and justify them or debunk them, of course. That takes words, we know. They do manage to figure out whether or not knowledge is backed up sufficiently to act upon it, much as “justification” does, but do so non-verbally. I can’t see what the point is, except that non-humans aren’t verbal. The thing is, we knew that.
Glen Davidson
If I understand what is being said It’s not about thinking in words it’s about comparing inferences with other persons.
The article I linked to explained that the deaf think in “signs” instead of English words.
peace
No. Justification does not entail truth.
FWIW, I’m not sympathetic with that position. My conception of truth has nothing to do with any such community or any such infinite duration of inquiry. That stuff is completely irrelevant to whether some statement is or isn’t true, IMO.
Let’s hope that nobody holds the view that no one can be justified in believing something who doesn’t use English words.
I’m kind of with on this, Glen, though I don’t think the vast majority of animals care if (or even act as though) their beliefs are justified. Personally I doubt most animals “believe” anything; they mostly just act without considering whether there need be any “truth” to the reasons for their actions.
This is partially why I find the arguments (oh…sorry…”hypotheses”) of folks like FMM silly. Why should anyone care if their actions are based on “justified true beliefs” or whatever. If they result in success (given the context of the action in question, what more is there for me to consider? If I “feel” (whatever that means in some relativistic sense) like eating a particular food at this moment (or just “feel” like eating), what needs to be justified if I can find a way to satisfy (or change) the “feeling”?
Technically you are correct but that is beside to point,
Justification is the reason why someone properly holds a belief, the explanation as to (why) the belief is a true one, or an account of how one knows what one knows.
You aren’t justified in holding a belief that is demonstrably false even if you are persuaded otherwise.
peace
Presumably that’s how it arises, but KN’s not claiming that one can’t justify things oneself (indeed, saying the opposite), having learned to do so in a social context.
Anyway, that it really is about comparing inferences (among other things) with others seems to be what can be properly claimed. But that’s rather obvious, so “JTBs” seem to be elevated to some category somehow very different from an animal’s “justified knowledge.” Which is the problem. Of course verbal interactions allow for knowledge one does not have without language, but, other than that the “belief” takes on verbal characteristics and is the result of social interactions, it isn’t clear that the result is intrinsically different from the “justified knowledge” of the non-verbal animal. It’s (largely) empiricism either way, language just increases the possibilities enormously, as well as allowing greater understanding.
Glen Davidson
Andrew Wakefield was persuaded that vaccines cause autism. Was he justified in that belief?
It seems to me that whether we are persuaded depends on a person evaluation of evidence. Whether we are justified depends on whether the evidence satisfies societal standards.
Yes, that’s my view. Their knowledge is knowhow, not justified true belief. (And so, too, is our knowledge.)
The Peircean view is not about a view about the nature of truth, but a view about the criterion of “absolute truth”, based on Peirce’s pragmatic maxim as a theory of meaning.
No, I used deafness as a stand-in for the argument that we are products of language communities, and have no purely objective means of thinking and communicating.
The closest we come to objectivity is empiricism, and even that is fraught with language traps.
My best evidence is threads like this, which go on forever without resolving anything. It does not seem to be an accident or a coincidence to me that people who argue on these threads for objective truth, also tend to be the ones who reject science.
I really thought that I was coming across as both arguing for objective truth and embracing science. Is that not the case?
In any event, I actually think that language is what gives us a partial & fallible & corrigible grasp of objective reality precisely because it gives us a way of comparing and contrasting each of our embodied perspectives.
Sentient animals are semantic and epistemic “islands”, unable to assess how their representations are similar to and different from those of other animals. That’s why none of their epistemic activities can count as genuine justifications.
Technically, according to testimony, Mr. Wakefield was persuaded by certain ‘conflicts of interest’ to make dishonest statements. So the better question would be, was he justified in lying?
I would say the word justified, in this context, is either worthless, or actually malignant.
Societies endorse or rationalize whatever works, and that changes from era to era. At the moment we are in an era dominated by engineering successes, which gives us reason to believe that science produces truths.
I would say science produces reliable knowledge, but not truth.
Science solves problems related to how things work. It is not conceptually different to the knowledge produced by a squirrel learning to rob a bird feeder. It has been very successful, and people who doubt large chunks of its success are — to my way of thinking — delusional.
But I don’t think science produces truth. I don’t think truth is a useful concept, except to mean high confidence.
That is my position as well. Science is possible only because objective truth exists. Science is simply “thinking Gods thoughts after him”.
peace
I think this is true for some animals, but not all. Almost all predators learn to hunt and there is a distinct correlation between better parent-teachers and those with the most success. This is particularly true of the big cats. Cheetahs, for instance, who do not have mothers or who do not have particularly skilled mothers, end up not being able to care for themselves. Lions tend not to have as much of a problem because most lions learn from a community rather than a single parent. To take another example, Coopers hawks that live in or around urban environments die at a rate of 1 in 5 to 1 in 4 (at least hear on the east coast of the US) if they don’t have a successful mother-teacher who knows how to hunt bird feeders and where to find them. So, while I don’t think the birds consider whether their beliefs about urban environments are justifiably true and I don’t think that cheetah cubs care if their beliefs about closing distance is true, clearly those that are successful in such environments “know” those subjects. And that knowledge was clearly communicated in some sense.
Robin,
That’s all interesting and helpful, but there’s an important difference here between an animal’s just acquiring way-of-life species-specific information from observing the behavior of an older conspecific and learning how to give reasons to others for why one takes one’s subjective orientation on the world as a reliable indicator of how things really are.
It does both.
A scientific theory is a system of useful empirical practices and constitutes reliable knowledge. But a theory is not a true belief.
However, using a theory, we do come up with true beliefs.
I mostly agree with that. But we present the results in the form of true statements in a natural language. And our use of language allows the cooperative work of large teams of investigators, which is what allows us to be more successful than the squirrel.
This, to me, exemplifies a misguided concept of science.
Science, to my mind, doesn’t investigate or say anything about “objective truths”. All of science is provisional and at best, science offers a conceptual framework for understanding – within some degree of accuracy – some aspects of the world and universe. From that, we can create predictive models – again within some degree of accuracy – to help use navigate the world and create better tools to help us live longer more healthy lives. But science doesn’t really care about whether any of those elements are “true” in any actual, objective sense. Perhaps one could argue that science illuminates some truths in a relativistic sense, but I think that would be quibbling and frankly would be irrelevant to the larger point.
To site a great example:
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The point is, there’s nothing “objectively true” about Newton’s Law of Gravitation or even Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. And while Einstein’s Theory is far more accurate at certain scales, for the vast majority of humans, Newtonian Laws and models work just fine. In fact, it would be ridiculously difficult and highly impractical to land a human on the moon and get him or her back to Earth using Einsteinian relativity models; much easy to do so using Newtonian ones. So while Einstein’s insight and model is probably closer to how things “actually work”, that doesn’t make Newtonian mechanics “wrong”. Because science isn’t really about “absolute truths”, but rather about “conceptually accurate and useful”.
To cite another example, the aether theory wasn’t abandoned because it was determined to be “objectively untrue”. It was abandoned because no one could reconcile it against Special Relativity. Einstein tried for years, but gave up in 1905. He even introduced a “new aether” concept, but it never caught on in the physics community. To this day, it’s not considered “objectively wrong” (though the vast majority of physicists have abandoned the idea) in any absolute sense; it’s basically just that the concept doesn’t work with the current quantum math.
So the idea of science saying anything about or deriving anything from “object truth” strikes me as completely erroneous.
Robin,
I mostly agree with what you say there about scientific progress, but inferring that scientific theories therefore don’t yield objectively valid statements seems wrong. That rests on a conflation of objective truth with absolute truth, and Ive argued against that conflation in this thread and elsewhere at TSZ.
Fair enough. I’ll go with that distinction.
Just read the OP (well, I’ve been busy and attacked by wind) and seems perfectly reasonable to me. We can never get closer to “objective” reality than modelling our observations with the hugely ratcheting advantage of being social animals and able to share and store experience.
I’m reminded of parallel discussions elsewhere on the futility of claims of an “objective” morality from the likes of kairosfocus and the impermeable Mr. Murray.
I didn’t mean to suggest that scientific theories don’t yield objectively valid statements, if by “objectively” you mean consistent with others’ assessments. I think that is the very foundation of modelling in science and why models are useful.
I just differentiate between the concept of “valid” and “truth”. For instance, the flat-earth concept is, at certain scales, an “objectively valid concept”. It just so happens that it isn’t “objective truth”. The distinction to me is that “validity” is about conceptual logical/reasonable soundness; “truth” is about accordance with reality or intention. Thus, the two terms are not synonymous to me. I’m not even sure that I could come up with something to exemplify an “objective truth” outside the evaluation of the accordance of some person’s statement about reality, and even then I’d have my reservations.
Put another way, to me something deemed “objectively true” must always have that valid. “Object truth” in my mind is like switch value or condition: it is either “on” or “off; “true” or “false”.
Otoh, to me something deemed “objectively valid” is a contextual or situational assessment. Assessments of “objective validity” can, to me, both accord and not accord with observation and reality at the same time.
To cite an example, I would say that the statement, “northern cardinals are red” is objectively valid within a loose conceptual context. “Male norther cardinals are red” would be objectively valid within a more narrow conceptual context. And then, “excluding genetic anomalies, all male northern cardinals are red” would be objectively valid within a very narrow context. So, while not identical assessments, I find them all objectively valid. The key is context. However, I don’t think any of the statements can be said to be “objectively true”.
Right. I don’t agree with any of that. Putnam used to, but I’m happy to say he saw the light (again) before he died.
IMO, “arriving at the truth” roughly means coming to believe what is the case. Nothing epistemological about it at all.
Can you describe what you mean by “what is the case”? Sounds like it requires a God’s eye view to me, but I suspect that it not what you mean.
I’m sorry but it’s not ‘beside the point.’ The distinction is crucial both to epistemology and to metaphysics. True beliefs may be unjustified, and justified beliefs may be false. In my view, the Peircian take–and ‘internal realism’ generally–muddles that matter to a faretheewell.
petrushka,
I was responding to FMM’s post, not yours, so your ‘No’ is odd unless you were speaking for him.
It’s not definable, but has nothing to do with any ‘view’–God’s or anybody else’s. That was my point. The best I can do to indicate what truth is is to repeat Tarski’s schema.
ETA: BtW Matti Eklund (of Cornell) uploaded a draft on deflationism at academia today. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s probably good.
I disagree here. Tarski’s schema stipulates the meaning of “is true” in formal languages, but that tells us nothing abiut natural languages in the absence of an argument that what works for formal languages also works for natural languages.
Kantian Naturalist,
I know that you and I are not in agreement on thisn KN. We’ve been through it before! In my view we can learn a lot about what ‘truth’ and it’s translations mean in various natural languages from the Tarski schema. And, in fact, there’s not much else one CAN learn about truth. I think it’s a mistake to worry too much about the inability to put it ‘correctly’ into, e.g., English. Few things of real philosophical interest can be put ‘correctly’ in natuarl languages. We do what we can.
ETA: this point is made reatedly in the Tractatus. It’s just insufficiently grasped.
I disagree.
And I disagree with that, too.
That is how I read it. That is my position as well.
IMO Science is possible only because objective truth exists. Science is simply “thinking Gods thoughts after him”.
I would go so far as to say that Science is one of the primary ways that we communicate with God. How accurate our science is is a measure of how well our inferences correspond to his.
When a theory is falsified it simply means that our inference is incorrect as demonstrated by that comparison.
like I said this will always come down to the question of other minds.
KN’s and my position is completely consistent with everyone else here as long as we assume that there is a mind behind the universe.
peace
Ok then, tell us something else about truth that we can learn.
That’d be pretty hard since the other positions aren’t even all consistent with each other.
When we look at people trying to settle disputes about truth, we find that their arguments depend on standards for whatever the dispute is about..
So I suggest that truth is conformance with standards. Here, standards might include formal standards and conventions as well as social norms.
In practice, there’s a wealth of standards around, and they are sometime mutually contradictory. But we seem to be able to use context to decide which standard is appropriate.
I apologize if I painted with too broad a brush.
By “other positions” I meant the “beliefs are justified if they conform to the way things actually are” position and variants of it that seems to be the dominant take here .
peace
I appreciate your response, Neil, though I don’t think I understand it very well. Where are you on excluded middle, identity, and non-contradiction?
Those arise in formal logic. They aren’t a particular concern in ordinary life.
If you want to look at those in mathematics, then traditional mathematicians and intuitionists disagree over them. But that’s consistent with them following different standards.
Are they a “particular concern” in science? I think the answer is yes.
I don’t care for Neil’s position at all, because it’s contrary to the facts. Sorry Neil.
Where would science be if everyone knew that the statements of science about the world neither refer to the real world nor convey any truth about the real world?
Why aren’t more people here actually “skeptical” about science?
You believe this. Has this belief of yours been empirically demonstrated to be reliable? Let’s assume, for the sake of being honest, that the answer is no.
Are you going to abandon this belief because it lacks objective empirical evidence? What name shall we give your forthcoming lack of belief in that which you believe to be true?
Yep. My position only requires that the world has some modal and causal regularities and irregularities detectable by some finite and contingent cognitive capacities.
A “mind behind the universe” is pretty much nonsense on my view, and anyway adds nothing of explanatory value to metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics. We don’t need it to understand the objectivity of knowledge or of morality.
Demonstrate how you understand knowledge or morality to be objective while having no “mind behind the universe”. You do this by conflating intersubjective with objective, I assume.
That happens a lot at Uncommon Descent. The conflation is usually between “objective” in the sense of confirmed by (especially repeated by others) experiment or observation and “absolute” in the sense of “God-given”. I find it helpful when people define in what sense they are using a word open to more han one interpretation.
But morality is not objective. If it was the world would be vastly different then it is.
If you disagree, simply list the tenants of objective morality.
You could assume that. You’d be completely mistaken to assume that, but that’s never stopped you before. Given your track record here, that you have any confidence in your ability to interpret correctly my claims is rather astounding.