Rorty on Truth and Justification

 

     One more related line of thought today. The relationship between truth and justification. I am thinking in particular about Richard Rorty on truth here. If I understand him he is basically saying that x is true (fine in ordinary language) philosophically reduces to x is justified, which always means to a certain time and place, a certain practice with its own criteria for justification. Truth in this sense if always open to change, and thus more proper to speak of justification. Does this undermine the line of thought I have been exploring?

 

     Rorty is reacting against the idea that truth is a fixed correspondence between thought and reality, independent of our practices. So he says, in effect that “true” (philosophically) just means “justified according to our current standards.” And since standards change, perhaps for the better, truth is always revisable. Therefore, it makes more sense to speak of justification. In short it seems that truth collapses into justification and justification must always relative to time, place, practice. I hope that is Rorty but if not, it doesn’t really matter. That is the position I want to deal with.

 

    The position I am trying to make sense of is that truth is adequation to reality, the mind conforming to or being conformed by reality. But our adequation is always incomplete. Therefore, I want to say that truth is not reducible to justification but justification is how we approach truth. How to make sense of that? I must hold firmly that truth and justification are not the same thing but that they are related: truth is how things are whereas justification is our best reasons for thinking we have got things right. Rorty is right about something important: namely, we never have access to truth except through justification. We argue, give reasons, etc. And we rely on practices like science or philosophy. Thus all our claims to truth are mediated by justification.

    But Rorty seems to conclude from the fact that we only have justification

to the conclusion that there is nothing more than justification. In other words, justification is our way of getting at truth, but truth is not reducible to justification. Justification may change, but truth does not: only our grasp of it does. That is what I must make sense of.

     This does relate to my previous entries. Essence means the thing has a nature independent of us and our definitions approximate it. Truth as disclosure means reality shows itself and we respond with concepts. Reality is intelligible in principle and we grasp it partially. Thus justification means our current, fallible articulation of what reality discloses whereas truth means the reality disclosed. Think of the apple again: the apple is what it is. We judge: “this is a good apple.” Our judgment is justified by taste, by experience, i.e., by shared criteria. But whether the apple is in fact good is not created by our justification. We can be justified but wrong or unjustified but right. Justification concerns our reasons for holding a belief within a given practice, whereas truth concerns whether the belief is in fact adequate to reality; our justifications may change, but what is true does not, even if our grasp of it is incomplete. Justification is our best attempt to get things right; truth is whether we have in fact got them right. Because our knowledge is incomplete, justification is always provisional; but because reality is independent, truth is not.

    Rorty reminds us that all claims to truth pass through justification. I insist that what they are claims about is not created by it. I claim that truth is the mind’s adequation to reality, and that means: whether something is true does not depend on whether we are justified in believing it. This is the point Rorty rejects (I think). Whereas I maintain that we may be justified and wrong and that we may be unjustified and right – and agree that justification can improve toward truth – Rorty cannot consistently say this, because for him “true” just means “justified under our best conditions.” Reductionism again. Thus for him there can be no gap between truth and justification, no sense of “we thought we were right, but were not” except retrospectively within a new practice. I agree that knowledge is always provisional, but what it is about is not. Our finitude explains that fact that knowledge can always in principle be revised. But the standard of adequation to what is disclosed as real makes conceptual space for truth, objectivity i.e., finitude limits our access to truth, not truth itself. If someone says that truth is nothing beyond what we can justify, given that we can never assume an absolute correspondence between mind/language and reality, then they would be with Rorty. But I want to say that there is more to truth than we can ever fully justify. Because our knowledge is finite, our justifications are always revisable; but because reality is independent, truth is not reducible to those justifications. I keep trying to get that out. Think of a landscape in fog. You see part of it clearly and revise your map. Thus your map improves. Rorty would say that the map is all there is. But I agree with those who say that the map is always partial, but there is a landscape that it is a map of. The difference is ontological.

 

   Rorty denies the distinction because he is smuggling in an ontology of a meaningless universe. Or more cautiously, he smuggles in a concept of reality that rejects a priori the idea that reality can be intrinsically meaningful in a way that grounds truth. Because he suspends or rejects that ontological claim, he ends up saying that truth is nothing but what we can justify, that there is no standpoint “outside” our practices, no appeal to reality as an independent standard. Why not? Because given the nature of reality as he assumes it to be (without argument, without thematizing it), as does modernity, the collapse of truth into justification follows. So what he is actually doing by avoiding metaphysics (his pragmatism) is drawing some consequences of the (unquestioned) modernist ontology.

   I hold with those who say that our judgments are always provisional because our knowledge is finite, but the truth they aim at is not provisional, since it depends on reality and not on our current justifications. Reality as disclosed within life, within the world, is not meaningful. But the modernist sees the world as if from nowhere in it (Nagel), like Data, the Star Trek android. That is the fault line that runs through philosophy even if it is rarely acknowledged. The Rortys take for granted the answers to all the interesting questions, and crank out consequences. An intellectual-spiritual map of modernity.

 

. . .

 

     Hinge beliefs, moreover, show that some things are not justified by argument and yet they are not arbitrary: for example, that there is a world; that others are real; that inquiry is meaningful; that sadistic cruelty is evil.

These are not “justified” in Rorty’s sense but they are not mere conventions either. They point to a background of intelligibility that is not reducible to justification.