SUO: Re: Question about Example in KR Book
Tom and Jay,
This gets into another issue: the attempt to separate
epistemology from ontology. Some of my favorite philosophers,
including Aristotle, Peirce, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein
didn't believe that such a separation was desirable or
likely to lead to any useful resolution.
TJ> I believe that what you (and the author John cited) refer
> to as the difference between metaphysical realism and scientific
> realism is pretty much the difference I referred to, this morning,
> between realism from the perspective of theories of truth, and
> realism from the perspective of methodology.
The fundamental point is there is no clear-cut distinction, not
even in principle, between a criterion for truth and a criterion
for determining truth. Every attempt to make such a distintion
has been a failure -- often interesting and instructive failures,
but nonetheless failures to come up with any useful criteria
for truth that do not include some reference to methodology.
TJ> My email to John this morning tried to bring the metaphysical/
> truth-theory perspective to bear on the perspective John seems
> most concerned with, the methodological perspective.
I am very concerned with both. My metaphysical/truth-theory
assumption is the correspondence theory of truth. But any
meaningful definition of correspondence leads you directly
to the question of how you determine whether or not there is
a correspondence. You can't answer one without the other.
And by the way, I did not mention Peirce in my earlier notes
because some people have complained about my just citing chapter
and verse from CSP. But all of my positions are essentially
paraphrases and reapplications of points made by CSP (who
said that he was a nominalist early in life, but later came
to a realist position along the lines of Aristotle and the
Scholastics, but with a strong infusion of ideas from modern
science, of which he was an outstanding practitioner.)
Just for the record, following is a quotation from Peirce,
which summarizes the position I have just stated:
That truth is the correspondence of a representation with
its object is, as Kant says [1787, A58, B82], merely the
nominal definition of it. Truth belongs exclusively to
propositions. A proposition has a subject (or set of subjects)
and a predicate. The subject is a sign; the predicate is a sign;
and the proposition is a sign that the predicate is a sign of
that of which the subject is a sign. If it be so, it is true.
But what does this correspondence, or reference of the sign
to its object, consist in? The pragmaticist answers this
question as follows... if we can find out the right method
of thinking and can follow it out, -- the right method of
transforming signs, -- then truth can be nothing more nor
less than the last result to which the following out of
this method would ultimately carry us. (EP 2.379-380)
And for Peirce, that right method of thinking is scientific
methodology as supplemented with a theory of signs, which
includes logic as a subset. I have never seen any statement
more complete, thorough, or cogent than that. And if you
want to see the more detailed analyses that support his claim,
see the references (EP 2 stands for _Essential Peirce_, vol 2).
John