Theory-Change And The Logic Of Enquiry: New Bearings In Philosophy Of Science

Review of Metaphysics, The, Sept, 1999 by Christopher Norris

In the same way, Rorty suggests, we can surely go along with the realist's case for the existence of an objective, mind-independent, causally efficacious "external world" which is not just a construct--as the incautious relativist might have it--out of our various language games, conceptual schemes, interpretive conventions, or whatever.

However this gives absolutely no grounds for holding that our own or other people's beliefs concerning that world are in any way constrained, or their truth value decided, by the causal link that "ties s to its objects." Rather, such beliefs are arrived at through an ongoing process of interpretive trade-offs or a Quinean pragmatic redistribution of truth values and predicates. Thus for Rorty, as likewise for Davidson and Quine, there is no sure route--perhaps no route at all--from a naturalized (causal) epistemology to a theory of rational belief formation that would take due account of this process and the normative values it brings into play. These latter belong to the inside view, that which we occupy in our role as self-conscious, reflective subjects for whom the word "true" is a term of praise applied to beliefs which optimize our sense of overall purpose and coherence. From the externalist viewpoint, conversely, "true" is a term which properly applies to just those utterances or items of belief which display the right kind of causal history as tracked by a Quinean radical interpreter with access to the relevant information sources but lacking any kind of privileged epistemic warrant. What is more, this restriction is equally in force when we adopt an externalist perspective on our own processes of knowledge acquisition. For in this case also, as Rorty puts it, we should resist "the urge to coalesce the justificatory and the causal story," since they involve entirely different and incompatible orders of truth claim.(25) Epistemologically speaking, "there is nothing more for us to know about our relation to reality than we already know" on the causal account, that is, as a result of simply observing how we and other people respond to certain stimuli under certain ambient conditions.(26) To jump from this to a normative story about what we ought or ought not to believe as a matter of rational inference is just the kind of error that philosophers typically fall into when they fail to take the pragmatist's simple point about the various senses of "truth." Thus (Rorty again): "the understanding you get of how the word `true' works by contemplating the possibility of a Tarskian truth theory for your language is utterly irrelevant to the satisfaction you get by saying that you know more truths today than you did yesterday, or that truth is great, and will prevail."(27) Least of all should we suppose that the causal sense of the term--applying as it does to the rock bottom level of unmediated stimulus response--could possibly figure in a normative or justificatory account of our various holdings-true.