[Note to PEIRCE-L: this is a cross-posting from the special purpose list
for the Monist Project mentioned a couple of days ago. I am looking for
people to to show me what is wrong with it, if anything.
Joe Ransdell ]
Paul Healy said he wanted a straightforward statement of the relationship
of truth and objectivity in my view. I'll try. But first some preliminary
considerations.
Taken in extension, the truth is simply the body of beliefs or opinions
about whatever subject-matter is at issue, considered as descriptive of its
characteristics (i.e. properties, relational and intrinsic) rather than of
the characteristics of something other than it. This is, I suppose, only a
somewhat stilted statement of the "semantic conception" of truth, and
although straightforward enough, I should think, it is of no use whatever
when it comes to finding out the truth and avoiding falsity and error.
(Objections could be raised to the wording -- I can think of a couple myself
-- and I could tinker with the objections to take care of the
counter-examples, add qualifications, and so forth; but I see no point in
doing that sort of thing, and certainly not here). The only reason it is
worth mentioning here is to be able to say that any other attempt to
describe the truth in extension, not in a concrete inquiry that aims at a
particular truth about a particular subject-matter but simply in the
abstract and a priori, and therefore about no particular subject-matter at
all, can be of no more practical use than that one is. Like Bacon's jesting
Pilate (and tagging along behind J.L.Austin as well), we need not stay for
the answer to the question so conceived.
This is, of course, why philosophers focus instead on the question of what
the predicate "is true" or "is the truth" means. But if that is construed as
a question about what property it stands for or connotes, it looks as if we
are once again attempting an exercise in futility since asserting that
property of something, as in "p is true", introduces no property not
introduced simply by asserting that p (and similarly, mutatis mutandis, for
believing that p is true and believing that p). Thus it appears that
neither an approach by extension or by intension will yield anything
substantive or perhaps anything at all.
So we are now at the starting point of this account, which begins, in
effect, with the recognition that if there is something here that is
amenable to philosophical explication it must be in the function of the word
not as descriptive but in some other way, and of course that is the turn to
speech act analysis, which was in fact already undertaken by Peirce a
century or so ago though implicitly as a communicational act analysis
instead, given the context which he provides for it in his theory of
inquiry. My verson of this is then to say that the task is to explicate the
rationale of scientific publication as the paradigmatic case of assertion in
its most sophisticated, explicit, and effective form. (The claim is that
all professional publication is essentially the same as this, and that
indeed assertion and statement in ordinary life is capable of explication
along the same lines.)
Thus the question about the relationship about truth and objectivity
transmutes here into a question about the relationship of assertion (i.e.
publication) and objectivity.
The straightforward answer to the question, then, is that the function of
assertion (= truth claim) is to optimize objectivity in the discourse of the
community, and this could be put more succinctly by saying that its function
is to enable replication.
For what is replication of this sort? It is simply arriving at the same
conclusion that someone else has arrived at and anyone else can arrive at
and in the same way. Establishing replicability is providing the
instructions for replication, and scientific publication can be regarded
generically as having the general form of such an instruction set. Such an
instruction set can also be described as the providing of a conclusion and
the premises for it, with appropriate indicators of common context and
presupposition as required. (I should distinguish between primary
publication and publication which is in some sense ancillary to that, by the
way, but my assumption is that this is the fundamental form of publication
in scientific contexts and all else is in service to that in some way or
other.) And this is, I suppose, simply a special way of talking about
establishing in communication a world in common with others, i.e. coming to
share a world in common.
Joe Ransdell
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Joseph Ransdell <ransdell who-is-at hub.ofthe.net>
Dept. of Philosophy or <bnjmr who-is-at ttacs.ttu.edu>
Texas Tech University (806) 742-3158 (office)
Lubbock, Texas 79409 (806) 797-2592 (home)
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