Sunday, June 5, 2016


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].   


[i] e.g. Richard Rorty in his Essays on Heidegger and others.
[ii] I have not checked with the literature on Hegel whether this has perhaps already been said and is warranted.  
[iii] ‘Continental’ is a misnomer, since American pragmatist philosophy is also non-analytic.
[iv] As argued by Wittgenstein.

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