Truth as convenient friction

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 100, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 167-190

  Price, Huw ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750010551     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil200310048     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright," in his Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (New York: Cambridge, 1998), pp. 19-42.
2. "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth," in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (New York: Cambridge, 1991), pp. 126-50, see p. 128.
3. Jonathan Rée makes a point of this kind against Rorty: "[C]ontingencies can last a very long time. Our preoccupations with love and death may not be absolute necessities, but they are not a passing fad either, and it is a safe bet that they will last as long as we do" - "Strenuous Unbelief," London Review of Books, XX, 20 (October 15, 1998): 7-11, here p. 11.
4. "The Status of Content," Philosophical Review, XCIX, 2 (April 1990): 157-84.
5. "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright," see p. 21.
6. Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970).
7. Truth (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990).
8. Robert Brandom makes a similar point in "Pragmatism, Phenomenalism, and Truth Talk," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXII (1988): 75-93.
9. Cf. Rorty's remark that, "[f]or any audience, one can imagine a better-informed audience" - "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright," see p. 22.
10. "Three Norms of Assertibility, or How the MOA Became Extinct," Philosophical Perspectives, XII (1988): 241-54. The present section and the next draw significantly on that paper.
11. This is another place where circularity threatens. We need to be sure that the psychological states mentioned at this point are not thought of as already "factual" or "representational" in character, in a way which presupposes truth. In so far as it is truth-involving, the "factual" character of the domain in question needs to be part of the explanandum - something that emerges from, rather than being presupposed by, the pragmatic account of the origins and consequences of "truth talk." In my view, one of the attractive features of this approach is that it offers the prospect that the uniformity of "factual," truth-involving talk might be compatible with considerable plurality in the nature and functions of the underlying psychological states. It thus offers an attractive new form for expressivist intuitions. Cf. my Facts and the Function of Truth (New York: Blackwell, 1988), chapter 8;
12. "Metaphysical Pluralism," this JOURNAL, LXXXIX, 8 (August 1992): 387-409, §IV
13. and "Immodesty without Mirrors: Making Sense of Wittgenstein's Linguistic Pluralism," in Max Kölbel and Bernhard Weiss, eds., Wittgenstein's Lasting Significance (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
14. As Rorty notes (in "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth," see p. 130)
15. Michael Williams makes a point of this kind: "[W]e have no idea what it would be for a theory to be ideally complete and comprehensive...or of what it would be for inquiry to have an end" - "Coherence, Justification, and Truth," Review of Metaphysics, XXXIV (1980-81): 243-72, see p. 269.
16. Meaning and the Moral Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1978), p. 108.
17. I defend the first of these two options in "Naturalism without Representationalism," in Mario de Caro and David Macarthur, eds., Naturalism in Question (Cambridge: Harvard, 2003)
18. and the second in "Metaphysical Pluralism"; and "Naturalism and the Fate of the M-worlds," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. LXXI (1997): 247-67.