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Philosophy of Language Research Seminar: Giorgio Volpe on Truth and Justification
12 May 2010 10:30
12 May 2010 13:00
Europe/Rome
- Speaker: Giorgio Volpe
- Title: Truth and Justification: A Difference that Makes a Difference
- Venue: Sala Rossa, 3rd floor, via Azzo Gardino 23, Bologna
- Abstract. Classical pragmatists like Peirce and James thought that the property of corresponding to an unknowable thing-in-itself could not be something the possession of which made any difference to the course of our experience. This thought, together with the belief that ‘there can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere’ (James), led them to conclude that correspondence truth cannot be meaningfully regarded as the aim of our inquiries. Peirce and other pragmatists went on to describe that aim in terms of epistemic notions such as belief, agreement, rational acceptability and so on. Apparently, however, no account of truth, epistemic or not, will save us from having to admit that truth and epistemic justification are normatively indistinguishable - how could following the norm ‘Believe that P if and only if the belief that P is true’ possibly differ from following the norm ‘Believe that P if and only if the belief that P is epistemically justified’?. So the conclusion may appear inevitable that the distinction between truth and justification, however it is drawn, is pragmatically superfluous, because it cannot make any difference ‘when the question is about what I should believe now’ (Rorty). The thrust of this paper is that such a conclusion can (and should) be resisted. I will argue (1) that the fact that truth, as distinct from epistemic justification, must be invoked to explain the practical success of some of our actions shows that hypotheses concerning the truth of our beliefs can make a difference to the course of our experience; and (2) that, if this is the case, distinguishing truth from epistemic justification can make a difference ‘to what I should believe now’ even if the two properties are indeed normatively indistinguishable.
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