Pragmatism and ‘post-truth’

Get this: A man who claims that an Invisible Wizard progressively revealed the secrets of the Whole Big Universe to successive generations of an obscure tribe of goatherders over the course of 1500-years says science bears the responsibility for our ‘post-truth era.’

Professor Sartwell’s immediate concern is to insist that this debate over truth doesn’t date back to the fall 2016. Rather, it dates back to ancient philosophy and the earliest academic and philosophical conversations. But he goes on to make some admissions that many observers might not understand. For instance, he says,

“Philosophers may not know what truth is.”

Now that’s been a fundamental problem in the Academy for a very, very long time. And as he makes clear, there are rival theories of truth that have ancient rootage but continued conversation. It’s also interesting that he points out that in the American Academy it is a pragmatic notion of truth that has often held sway, going back to philosophers such as John Dewey and Charles Peirce, and most particularly, William James.

[ … ]

William James went so far as to say that truth actually doesn’t exist. There are no true ideas or propositions in themselves. Instead, he said, truth happens to an idea. Now that’s a very subversive theory of truth, and yet the thing to understand is that that theory of truth has held sway, even a dominant position, in much of the American Academy for a century or more now.

Yes, that’s Albert Mohler, who should always be ignored. Unhappily, a lot of idiots look-up to him, so it’s worth a few minutes to explain what is going on here.

For starters, all scientists and engineers are trained by default to the pragmatic habit of thought. As Richard Dawkins once so famously said, “It works, bitches.NOT, mind you, the vulgar pragmatism of a Richard Nixon, say, an attitude of amoral expediency, but pragmatism as a set of specific epistemological propositions about knowledge, truth, and meaning.

In the late 1800s, a mathematician named Charles Sanders Peirce was working for the Coast and Geodetic Survey, preparing tide tables. As time went on, he wondered what his tables actually meant; after all, it’s hardly as if the tide is still. Eventually, he formulated what is known as the pragmatic maxim, and which he intended to be applied exclusively to science: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” What Peirce is saying here is not complicated: What we actually know about things is how they interact with the world.

Because the pragmatic maxim is convoluted and awkward, it eventually became the object of simplifications, the most notorious of which is “the truth is what works.” In science, that’s an adequate statement of the perspective. Every engineer in the universe has solved thousands of permutations of the infamous block-on-an-inclined-plane problem, for instance (I actually dreamed about blocks on inclined planes when I was an undergraduate.), but few working engineers have ever literally solved a problem involving blocks and inclined planes. We pretend circumstances in the real world are like blocks on inclined planes, apply a safety factor to bias the analysis in a safe direction, and that’s good enough; it works. And, of course, scientists and engineers are always aware that their equations model reality, not define reality.

Along came William James, a Harvard psychologist and philosopher who attempted to apply Peirce’s insights to psychological problems. That effort became a set of lectures published with the name The Will to Believe, and James tried to massage “the truth is what works” into the resolution of psychological/spiritual problems. Though James’ effort was grievously misunderstood, in no small part because of his own clumsy explanation of his ideas, that was widely construed to mean “the truth is what makes you feel good.” With respect to religion, specifically, James held a position similar to Pascal — that …

  • Whether or not there is a supernatural being is not knowable, but …

  • You might miss out on Heaven if you don’t believe, therefore …

  • It probably is best to believe.

In matters susceptible of resolution by appeals to fact, James thought it was psychologically unhealthy to ignore the facts. As for Peirce, he was so annoyed with James’ application of his scientific ideas to psychological problems that he renamed his philosophy pragmaticism.

And much of John Dewey’s career was taken-up with undoing the confusion created by James.

Though there may be plenty of room for disagreement about how to interpret a particular set of facts, and whether or not there is a consciousness somewhere ‘out there,’ we should all be able to agree that the truth is often a moving target, and we should always be prepared to update the 4-dimensional matrix that is our understanding of the world and how the pieces all fit together. That is the essence of adulthood, and what John Dewey meant when he said that “education is life itself.” The healthy mind is a voyager.

But according to Albert the Pious, we are at the End of Knowledge. All truth has been set out, all ethical questions have been answered — on and on; there is no longer any need to think; all the answers are to hand. It is the perspective of a fearful child, and contemptible. And it doesn’t work — just look at the Niagaras of bloodshed that such as Mohler have visited upon humanity.

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