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Lecture 10: Truth, Objectivity and Naturalized Epistemology

Putnam: "Why reason can't be naturalized"

428: “In the present essay I shall examine attempts to naturalize the fundamental notions of the theory of knowledge, for the example the notion of a belief’s being justified or rationally acceptable.”

429: “Truth, in the only sense in which we have a vital and working notion of it, is rational acceptability (or, rather, rational acceptability under sufficiently good epistemic; and which conditions are epistemically better or worse is relative to the type of discourse in just the way rational acceptability itself is).”

429: “we have no way of identifying truths except to posit that the statement that are currently rationally acceptable (by our lights) are true.”

429: why reason can’t be understood as those belief forming mechanisms that promote our survival. “there is no contradiction in imagining a world in which people have utterly irrational beliefs which for some reason enable to survive, or a world in which the most rational beliefs quickly lead to extinction.”

430: Can’t define reason as belief forming processes which produce true belief reliably, since such accounts (like evolutionary epistemology) presuppose a ‘metaphysical’ account of truth according to which it is understood independently of rationality.

430: If Tibetan Buddhism was true and the Dahli Lama really was infallible on ethical matters, it wouldn’t make it rational to believe an ethical proposition just because the Dahli lama said so.

431: “(1) talk of what is “right” or “wrong” in any area only makes sense against the background of an inherited tradition; but (2) traditions themselves can be criticized.”

431: “the ‘standards’ accepted by a culture or a subculture, either explicitly or implicitly, cannot define what reason is, even in context, because they presuppose reason (reasonableness) for their interpretation.” 2

431 [234]-"reason is, in this sense, both immanent (not to be found outside of concrete language games and institutions) and transcendent (a regulative idea that we use to criticize the conduct of all activities and institutions)."

431: Cultural relativism as a form of naturalized epistemology

431: Rorty and Foucault as cultural relativist

431 [235]-"the physicalist’s paradigm of science is a hard science, physics (as the term 'physicalism' suggests); the cultural relativists paradigm is a soft science: anthropology, or linguistics, or psychology, or history, as the case may be. That reason is whatever the norms of the local culture determine it to be is a naturalist view inspired by the social sciences, including history."

431-2: “At bottom, there is a deep irrationalism to cultural relativism, a denial of the possibility of thinking (as opposed to making noises in counterpoint to the chorus).

431 [237]-"Moral: don't be a methodological solipsist unless you are a real solipsist."

433 [238]: “Other cultures become, so to speak, logical constructions out of the procedures and practices of American culture … the transcendental claim of a symmetrical situation cannot be understood if the relativist doctrine is right. And to say, as relativists often do, that the other culture has 'incommensurable' concepts is no better. This is just the transcendental claim in a special jargon."

433: “Just as the methodological solipsist can become a real solipsist, the cultural relativist can become a cultural imperialist.”

434: How even cultural imperialism has trouble with the fact that our many claims are neither assertable nor refutable by norms universally recognized in our culture.

436 [244]-"positivism produced a conception of rationality so narrow as to exclude the very activity of producing that conception."

436: Naturalized epistemology, as possibly ‘eliminating the normative’ and replacing epistemology with psychology.

437: “If one abandons the notions of justification, rational acceptability, warranted assertability, and the like, completely, then ‘truth’ goes as well, except as a mere device 3 for ‘semantic ascent,’ that is, a mere mechanism for switching from one level of language to another.”

437: “The elimination of the normative is attempted mental suicide”

438: “Let us recognize that one of our fundamental self-conceptualizations, one of our fundamental ‘self-descriptions’, in Rorty’s phrase, is that we are thinkers, and that as thinkers we are committed to there being some kind of truth, some kind of correctness which is substantial and not merely ‘disquotational’. That means that there is no eliminating the normative.”

438: “We don’t have an Archimedean point; we always speak the language of a time an place; but the rightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place.”

Rorty: Solidarity or Objectivity

21: Two ways to place self in larger context 1. Solidarity, which ties one to some particular community 2. Objectivity, which ties one to some non-human reality.

21: Philosophical tradition starting with Socrates typically represents a turn away from solidarity towards objectivity.

22: Realists: concerned with objectivity and want justification to be natural, not local. Pragmatists: concerned with Solidarity, and thus don’t require worked out epistemology and metaphysics of justification.

23: Pragmatists account for difference between knowledge and belief in terms of those issues upon which agreement is easy to reach, and those for which it is hard.

23: Relativism vs. Ethnocentrism: i) Every belief is as good as every other. ii) “True” has as many meanings as there are procedures for justification. iii) Nothing can be said (by us) about truth or justification aside from what is familiar from our own procedures of justification.

23: The ethnocentric position (iii) is not a relativistic one. 4

24: Realists are inclined to treat (iii) as if it were (i) or (ii), since they can’t believe that any philosopher wouldn’t have some sort of positive theory about what truth was.

26: The same arguments that undermine the analytic/synthetic distinction also undermine the anthropologist’s intercultural/intracultural distinction.

27: Putnam’s idea that there is a ‘grenzbegriff’ to rationality that the dialog stands against (it is not ‘just the dialog’) is just a slide back to the sort of Realism he condemns elsewhere.

27: “Positing grenzbegriff seems merely a way of telling ourselves that a non-existent god would, if he did exist, would be pleased with us.”

28: Ethnocentrism and the realization that we are all on Neurath’s boat. From our own point of view, there are lots of positions that we can’t take seriously.

30: Everybody is an ethnocentrist when seriously engaged in debate.

32: Need for objectivity is a disguised form of the fear of death.

32: Ultimately there is only the dialog.

33: Sense of community needs ethical rather than metaphysical foundations.

34: Nothing wrong with the hopes of the enlightenment, even if we must reject the metaphysics behind it.