264. Useful, warranted, or workable?
In this blog I have adopted the notion of truth as ‘warranted
assertibility’. The warrant is to be based on arguments and facts. In this blog
I have also adopted pragmatist philosophy, found in American philosophers
Peirce, James, and Dewey, but also in Nietzsche (see item 149) and
Wittgenstein. Some people[i] claim that pragmatism
demands that we no longer claim or ask whether someone or something is ‘right’
but only whether it is useful. That is not my view.
As I argued in item 246 of this blog, it is still
useful and warranted to claim one is right, compared to some rival claim, in
the sense that one has better arguments. Without any such claim, what is the
point of debate? To stand behind one’s
arguments is to claim one is right.
Note that there is a pragmatist argument here. If
usefulness is the criterion of warrant and we can argue that debate is useful
and that for debate claims of being right is useful, then claims of being right
are warranted.
While some (American) pragmatists indeed claim that
something is true if it useful, what I make of it is the wider criterion that
‘it works’. To be useful something must work, but if it works it need not be
useful. What does ‘it works’ mean? Dutch has the expression ‘het klopt’. That
expresses exactly what I have in mind, but is difficult to translate. It means
something like ‘it fits’, ‘hangs together’, ‘stands up’, ‘works’.
In science, something is taken to be true if it ‘works’
in the sense that its implications accord with logic and experience. For
warranted assertibility I propose that an assertion should work either in that
sense or in the wider sense that it has implications for action that are effective,
reach some goal, are indeed useful in that sense, or for which there are
arguments also in a moral sense. In the latter, warranted assertibility becomes
what I called ‘debatable ethics’. In sum, I render ‘warranted’ as ‘workable’,
which is wider than ‘useful’.
I recall that the philosopher Hegel said, in German,
that ‘Das Vernunftige ist das Wirkliche, und das Wirkliche ist das Vernunftige’.
‘Vernunftig’ means rational, or reasonable. ‘Wirklich’ means real or actual,
but literally it says ‘workable’. So perhaps what I am saying in this piece is
attributable to Hegel.[ii]
‘Working’ has several dimensions: logical, empirical,
practical, moral, validity, …. Thus warrant is relative to which of these
aspects one is talking about. These, in turn, depend on perspective, context, purpose.
The question then is what or who determines whether
‘it works’, or what criteria apply. Here I arrive again at Foucault’s view that
it is determined by established,
institutionalized ‘regimes of truth’.
In philosophy, one such regime is analytic philosophy,
and another is ‘continental’ or ‘non-analytic’ philosophy (see item 158 of this
blog).[iii] They have different
views on what are interesting and legitimate assumptions and questions.
In economics, mainstream, neo-classical economics
gives priority to formal rigour, in the use of economics. Heterodox economics
attaches more importance to plausibility and realism of assumptions.
If in one such system one disagrees and does not
conform, one needs to accept the price of ostracism, go in a hiding of some
sort, or opt out, or switch to a different system.
Genuine novelty does not fit, offers new meaning, ‘does
not work’, lacks recognized warrantand hence is not accepted, until it is shown
to ‘work’ in novel ways and gathers cognitive, social and political clout the
break the old frame. It is ‘untimely’, as Nietzsche called it.
Are there assertions, questions or expressions where it
does not make sense to ask for a warrant? Consider poetry. Is it not the point of poetry
to escape from warrant, to say something unwarranted? Even there one may
debate, as among literary critics, whether or not, and in what way, a poem
‘works’, in terms of rhythm, sound, tone, rhyme or alliteration, metaphor,
originality, ….
Consider illocutionary
speech acts, such as ‘go read that book’. One could ask ‘why,
explain’. And consider expressions of
feeling, in the following exchange: ‘I love you’, ‘that is not love’, ‘why
not?’, ….. There is a saying that there can be no dispute about taste, but why
not? One can explain the liking of something by comparing it to something else
that is evidently likeable. But at some point argumentation must stop, as I
argued before (in item 173 of this blog). At some point the debate will end in
‘that is just how I feel’, or ‘that is just how it is done’[iv].
[ii] I have not checked with the
literature on Hegel whether this has perhaps already been said and is warranted.
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