169. Truth on the move

 

The best-known notions of truth are static, concerning a state of knowledge. Here I add a dynamic notion, concerning a process of learning.

In item 25 of this blog, I discussed static notions of truth. The dominant notion was that of correspondence of ideas and knowledge with reality, on the basis of objective sense data. A second notion is the view of truth as coherence with a relevant body of knowledge, including accepted facts and logic, or in other words plausibility. A third is the pragmatic view, where something is true if it is fruitful, i.e. contributes to successful practice.

I combine the coherence and pragmatic views into the notion of warranted assertability. This includes both practical success in action and consistency with accepted facts, related knowledge and logic. It is a matter of debate what the relevant existing knowledge, logic, and accepted facts are.

A different notion of truth concerns truth to form or fidelity to some ideal, in ethical and aesthetic truth, as in ‘he is a true friend’ and ‘that is a true work of art’.

 

I adopt a wider notion that includes both warranted assertability and fidelity to ethical and aesthetic ideals, which I call adequacy. This re-establishes the ancient idea of bringing together the true, the good and the beautiful.

Truth in a dynamic sense lies in a process of trying to achieve truth in a static sense.

The most notorious dynamic notion of truth lies in the philosophy of Friedrich Hegel. In his view, absolute truth, in an absolute spirit, manifests, realizes itself step by step in the course of history. This notion was adopted in the historical materialism of Marx.

An ominous result was that an appeal could be made to people to submit to suffering as a sacrifice to progress towards a horizon of truth and justice. And what is to be sacrificed is up to the ideologues, the Politbureau or the apparatchiks, to decide, as the visionaries of historical necessity.

Nietzsche’s view is closer to my heart: what matters is the ongoing search for truth, not the illusory claim to have reached it. 

Final truth cannot humanly be achieved. In this blog I argue that adequacy is imperfection on the move. Things will come to be seen as truths that now seem absurd, unthinkable.

Can the static and dynamic notions of truth be reconciled? I propose two ways for this.

The first way is this. My ideal, my view of the good life, a flourishing life, is to utilize one’s talents in a creative contribution to the hereafter that one leaves behind, in a dialogic fashion, in debate and collaboration with others.

Then, truth in the form of fidelity to that ideal yields a dynamic notion of truth, in the ongoing striving for truth in the form of adequacy, defined above, combining warranted assertability with fidelity to ideals of ethics and aesthetics.

For the second way to reconcile the static and dynamic views I use the notion of the regulative vs. the constitutive. This is related to a distinction made in the philosophy of science between the context of justification and the context of discovery. The regulative, in justification, lies in criteria for good argument, such as factuality, logic, and coherence with what we know, and fidelity to ideals. The constitutive, in discovery, lies in the process of achieving such adequacy. How that may work is a different story (see item 31 in this blog). 

The first and second ways of reconciling the static and dynamic views of truth amount to the same.             

168. Word as process

 Following the preceding item in this blog, the puzzle now is this. On the one hand words can refer to things (objects or abstractions) that have some identity, i.e. some stability across different contexts. On the other hand meanings are context-dependent. They arise in relation to meanings of other words in specific action contexts or ‘language games’. So how can we reconcile this ‘identity’ across contexts with dependence on context?

What is the identity of these spooks that change as they move from room to room, while retaining their appearance?

The solution I proposed earlier in this blog, using established theory of meaning, is that meaning has two faces. One face is static reference to something, when one identifies something as something (a chair, say), and the second face is the dynamic sense or of how one does the identification, and how that is affected by contexts of action old or new. Reference stands to sense as a picture to a film.

Features by which we identify, in making sense, constitute the connotation of an expression. Which features are picked out depends on the context. ‘Chair’ refers to one thing in talk of academic appointments and quite another in talk of interior decoration. And new kinds of objects may turn up to serve as a chair. Connotation is a moving penumbra, as it were, which accompanies a word as it is applied across contexts. It is a bundle of shifting potentialities.

Saying that features are selected for identification would suggest some deliberate, rational choice. In fact the features are picked up, largely tacitly, in ‘framing’, prompted by the context.

I elaborated this in terms of the hermeneutic circle (in item 36 of this blog). Meanings of sentences are functions of the meanings of individual words in it, as recognized in analytic philosophy, but at the same time the meanings of the words depend holistically on that of the sentence, which does not sit well with analytic philosophy.

As recognized by Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the crux and cradle of meaning lie in practice. Semantics (theory of meaning) follows and arises from pragmatics (language use). There, I think, lies the fundamental basis for pragmatism.

While analytic philosophy neglects the birth of meaning in practice, pragmatic philosophy neglects the abstraction of concepts from practice. In that abstraction most of the fuzzy set of connotations is shed. The sun is at its zenith and the penumbra is slight. Abstraction violates, kills perhaps, what Wittgenstein called the ‘form of life’ of words.

But we need abstraction to go from one context to another, plucking experience to employ it elsewhere. But when applied in a novel context the abstraction needs to be enriched again, cloaked in connotation, as a form of life, as it is absorbed in the crucible of the context, being amalgamated with other words there.

All this is reflected in the double meaning of being as a thing and being as a process. Old philosophy was built on the first, and later philosophy (of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger) on the second. It is both, along the hermeneutic circle.

167. Word and object

 Here I start a series that continues an earlier discussion on language, meaning, and cognition.

 In ‘old’ philosophy, ideas, reason and meanings are seen to be foundations, preceeding and guiding action in the world. Looking at the world objectively, from outside, we are supposed to analyse, plan and act. Ideas are seen as representations judiciously attached, item-by-item, to things in the world. Meanings are seen as objects attached to words. The philosopher Quine used the ‘museum metaphor’: meanings are like exhibits in a museum, with words as labels. Words and their meanings are given, fixed, a-temporal.

That is boring, since it precludes novelty and surprise, scary even, since it imprisons us. 

As analysed by Braver[1], Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and before them David Hume, turned the logic around. Practice, action and habit in the world are primary, in time, origin and quality, and ideas and meanings arise from them, as frozen frames, snapshots cut from a film. Thinking is a response to action, and then also a basis for further action. Most of the time, competence is tacit; we have no reflective awareness of what we are doing. Meaning is not analytic, applying to independent items, but holistic: words have meanings in constellations of words in expressions. Meaning depends on the context of action. Meaning is not substantial but functional. To understand the meaning of a word one should look at how it is used. For this, Wittgenstein used the term ‘language game’. Meaning is a role in that game, and meanings vary across language games.

There is no rock bottom, absolute, unambiguous, context-independent, constant meaning. In justifying what we say or do we reach a point where one can only say: this is how we do it. Meanings and considerations of validity or justification are relative to a language game. As in chess one can say that a move is legitimate or not, while it does not make sense to ask whether chess is true.

It is meaningless to talk of the justification of linguistic conventions by describing what is represented, because any such justification presupposes the conventions. We cannot talk of what transcends our talk.

By postulating meanings independently from practice we impose a separation between subject and world and then question how meaning is connected to the world.

I sympathise with this analysis, but the problem now is this. One of the most pervasive and tenacious language games is to talk about things in the world, designated by words, in a separation of subject and world. If old philosophical intuitions arise from that game, and if language games form the basis for judging validity, aren’t those intuitions valid? Either old philosophy is justified or there is something not quite right with the story of language games.

So, where do we go from here, with what theory of meaning? I have discussed my view in earlier items of this blog, and I will return to it in a following item. I propose that it is entirely reasonable to use words to refer to things, as more or less independent entities, apart from practices. That is what we use language for.

As I argued before, a problem arises only when we use intuitions from objects moving in time and space metaphorically to grasp abstract concepts such as meaning, identity, knowledge, concepts, culture, etc. I called this the ‘object bias’.

Meanings themselves are not like objects moving in time and space. A word when shifted from one sentence to another shifts its meaning.

As I discussed earlier, in items 146 and 148 in this blog, a second problem with the story of language games is that it appears to imply radical relativism. If meanings are tied to language games and have no sense outside them, does that mean that meanings are incommensurable between language games, and that debate between them is hopeless? Or do meanings allow for some connection between games?

 
In different language games, some words are often the same. Their meanings vary with the game but are nevertheless connected, in the process of meaning development. Could this not yield a bridge between the games? The rules of chess and draughts differ, but they can be compared. Wittgenstein used the notion of ‘family resemblance’. That may apply to la

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[1] Lee Braver, 2012, Groundless grounds; A study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, London: MIT press.

166. Guilt of unintended harm

Is there a moral justification of harm that is foreseen but not intended? This is a puzzle in ethics (the doctrine of double effect).

What if I drive when drunk and cause an accident? What if I use excessive violence to protect myself? What if I protect someone while risking to harm others? What about collateral damage? What if bombing IS can be expected to also kill innocent bystanders? 

There is an ethic of consequences and an ethic of motives. On the one hand, if I am the cause of harm, I should take responsibility. On the other hand, surely, intention, the question whether I did harm intentionally, or from incompetence, or by accident, is ethically relevant. However, a claim of accident may be a mask of intention.

Consider the issue of free will, discussed in item 5 of this blog. If there is no free will, nothing is done intentionally, and if lack of intention is an excuse for doing harm, then no harm is morally wrong.

When does collateral damage become a mask of intention to punish a population, or to wreak vengeance, or to set an example?

In this blog I have argued for a debatable ethics that takes both consequences and motives into account, as well as competencies, multiple obligations, and circumstances. How does that work out?

Enzio di Nucci gives an answer.[i] Look at how courts of justice operate. One should distinguish between guilt and punishment. To establish guilt one should look at one’s responsibility as a cause of harm. For punishment, on the other hand, mitigating circumstances are taken into account.

Was the harm an accident, a fluke of hazard, or lack of competence, lack of attention, an act of fear or panic, or a matter of conflicting obligations?

I push someone and he/she falls down the stairs. I claim that it was a playful push, but was it? Or was it a devious murder?

For punishment, past conduct and expectations of future conduct also matter. Did the culprit admit guilt, express regret, and was that credible in view of past conduct?

In my work on trust I proposed that just ‘saying sorry’ is not enough. To recover trust one must explain how things went wrong, what one intends to do to mitigate the harm and to prevent similar harm in future.

Even in establishing guilt, in some cases mitigating circumstances are taken into account, as in manslaughter (accidental, but still culpable) versus murder (intentional). That may happen even in case of intentional harm. For example: in panic, you shot a harmless intruder.

A celebrated recent case was that of Pistorius (the ‘blade runner’), who shot his girlfriend, unseen, through a door, and claimed that he thought she was an intruder. He was cleared of the charge of murder but convicted of ‘culpable homicide’ (manslaughter). Was that a just verdict? It depends on the further evidence.

Collateral damage makes guilty: one has been the cause of it. But the defense may be that it was justified by a larger purpose, and proportionate to it. That would matter before the International Court of Justice. Is there evidence for hidden intent, with collateral damage as an excuse?

One may also be found guilty of neglecting to act, as when one stood by as someone was drowning. Was this culpable? Was there a good reason, such as inability to swim? Or mitigating circumstances, such as freezing cold water? Or conflicting obligations, such as having to leave one’s child unattended on the slippery embankment?

The practice of courts appears to illustrate well how debatable ethics works out.

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[i]  Enzio di Nucci, 2014, Ethics without intention, London: Bloomsbury Press.