Ichthus77

A statement is superassertible if its “‘pedigree would survive arbitrarily close scrutiny’, or whose truth would b sustained if all the evidence were in and assessed by a maximally competent subject under ideal epistemic conditions.”

Some problems with this, of course.

1. Does not accept the “two most basic tenets of any realist conception”—(i) it involves relation between truth-maker (reality) and truth-bearer (statement), (ii) the statement can possess objective value apart from our ability to judge its truth or falsehood.
2. There is nothing at stake between the realist and the advocate of superassertibility—they will just agree on the truth-value of many things, but for different reasons—the realist will say “It is because statements are true that they are superassertible” (Socrates) and the superassertibilist will say, “It is because statements are superassertible that they are true” (Euthyphro).
3. Wright explains it “is, in a natural sense, an internal property of the statements of a discourse—a projection, merely, of the standards, whatever they are, which actually inform assertions within the discourse.” “[I]t supplies no external norm—in a way that truth is classically supposed to do—against which the internal standards might sub specie Dei themselves by measured, and might rate as adequate or inadequate.”
–So, little difference with Wittgensteinian “discourse-internal criteria”.
–Using the phrase “external norms” rigs the debate, as does Rorty’s use of “God’s eye view”—but these ways of phrasing things, confuse “truth and knowledge (or truth and certainty” (or world and mind).

That road leads to and ends at Dummett (see chapter one, sections II-III). “Dummett may differ from Kripke in maintaining that assertible utterances (thus defined) are fit candidates for the assignment of truth- and falsehood-values as opposed to Kripke’s more thoroughgoing skeptical view that their warrant comes only from the fact—whatever sort of ‘fact’ it may be—of their playing some communally recognized role in our various rule-following practices.”

Realist solution:

Adopt “a properly ‘stratified’ approach to the different kinds or levels of explanatory method and procedure involved in various disciplines or subject areas. This it can achieve only by allowing for the full range of reciprocal interactions between physical (real-world) properties and structures, causal powers, experimental situations, investigative methods, observational contexts, descriptive paradigms, explanatory theories and the level at which our understanding of these diverse factors is itself influenced by the social conditions of scientific and everyday knowledge production.”

Skipping Bhaskar discussion. It seems Norris is trying to say that RD (with the exception of Philip Pettit) does not take into account that humans can taint the object by mere observation (due to seeing through a lens shaped by social conditions, etcetera)…leaving it open to obvious objections (and also indirectly admitting the object is not its observation).

In short, truth is true regardless our grasping of it, and we can make every effort to take account of and attempt to reduce the influence of the “social conditions” (etcetera) which only effect the grasping (epistemology), and not the “truth” (ontology). That does not put truth beyond our reach, otherwise there would be no talk of grasping. But ‘grasping’ (epistemology) must never be said to ‘be’ ‘that which is grasped’ (ontology). Otherwise you’re just grasping at grasping (anti-realism)…reducing to total skepticism—an avoidable result. If we recognize that truth and its grasping are not the same thing, and if we take into account the social factors (etc.) of the grasping, then we can “prevent the chronic oscillation between an individualist (even solipsistic) approach to the ‘problem of knowledge’ and a full-fledged communitarian approach like Kripke’s so-called ‘sceptical solution’. What critical realism thus holds out is the prospect of explaining both how this situation arose (through a ‘fetishized’ empiricist idea of perceptual warrant and its origins in Locke) and how it might be resolved—or transcended—through a fruitful conjunction of ideas and methodologies from philosophy of the natural and social sciences.” (“Fetishized” means “naturalized” I guess.)

Interesting that he refers to “reified or non-dialectical” conceptions of knowledge as being deficient. Love it.

McDowell’s revision attempts to de-transcendentalize the Kantian idea “of knowledge as resulting from the interplay of ‘spontaneity’ and ‘receptivity’”. This is supposed to overcome the subject/object duality and the ‘problem of knowledge’ “conceived in terms of establishing some correspondence-relation between mind and world, concepts and intuitions, or truth-bearing statements and truth-making factual or objective states of affairs,” – as opposed to Kant’s requiring that “phenomenal intuitions be ‘brought under’ adequate or corresponding concepts” which prompted reactions from those like Fichte, mentioned in chapter 3. Instead, McDowell sets all that aside and focuses on “Kant’s cardinal point about the interplay of ‘spontaneity’ and ‘receptivity’ as strictly inseparable aspects of the process by which mind and world are always already brought together in the act of knowing.”

Spontaneity: “the mind’s active role in the process of knowledge acquisition.”
Receptivity: “ensuring its compliance with certain empirical constraints, thus placing due limits on its otherwise boundless freedom to interpret the world in accordance with its own subjective or projective ideas.”

Norris says McDowell oscillates between spontaneity that goes all the way out (a world dependent on mind), and receptivity that goes all the way in (no active role for the mind in knowledge acquisition). Norris says this reflects the impossibility of naturalizing Kant’s thought, and that RD theory is a continuation of this effort in futility.

McDowell’s approach, although it would “be one that accorded a central role to the exercise of human judgement in its jointly ‘spontaneous’ and ‘receptive’ aspects [and] made full allowance for the mind’s active contribution while also acknowledging the kinds of constraint exerted by a due respect for the empirical evidence” (and so be an epistemic theory) – “it would allow no room for that trouble-making gap between ‘mind’ and ‘world’ that has pitched the realists against the anti-realists, or those who endorse an objectivist version of realism against those who fail to see how we can possibly (‘realistically’) conceive of truth as recognition-transcendent or epistemically unconstrained.” Since there is no gap, such issues would not arise, he thinks. However, he clearly comes down on one side of the quarrel, his being an epistemic approach wherein truth is dependent on the interplay between spontaneity and receptivity, rather than on the way things stand in the world.

Schlick, Neurath and others in the Vienna Circle attempted to “construct a purely phenomenalist or sense-datum language that would restrict itself to reporting just those observer-indexed sensory episodes and eschew all reference to a notional ‘reality’ outside or beyond experience. At any rate empiricism can scarcely be regarded as a strong candidate for ensuring that measure of objectivity or ‘receptive’ constraint upon the mind’s ‘spontaneous’ powers which McDowell ascribes to it.” [ Note that McDowell does not think receptivity constrains ‘despite or against’ spontaneity, but from within the same sphere, much like the conscience acts on the subject while being a part of the subject—so the constraint of receptivity is rational. This is how McDowell’s approach avoids, he thinks, the “pitfall of the Given”. ] All objectivity is lost when “reality is located inside the boundary which ‘encloses the conceptual sphere’, that is to say, something like the Fichtean idealist doctrine that reality is somehow a projection or creation of the mind’s autonomous world-constitutive power. Thus … McDowell can be seen to swing right across—despite his contrary claim—to a standpoint that asserts the priority of ‘mind’ over ‘world’.”

Epistemological issue: (1) “What constitutes truth? best opinion or the way things stand in physical reality?”
Moral and socio-political issue: (2) “What is constitutionally just? a Supreme Court verdict or those standards of right conduct that properly apply in matters of collective human concern?”

Enter Euthyphro and Socrates and the set-piece exercise.

According to Norris, the RD (Crispin Wright) reading of the Dialogue with Euthyphro goes like this: Euthyphro (“best opinion” anti-realist) says the gods are optimally qualified to determine the good (the standard), whereas Socrates (“the realist”) says the gods are optimally qualified (or “cognitively responsive”) to recognize the good when they see it; they don’t determine the standard.

[ Aside: The Euthyphro dilemma is actually solved by God being the standard, by willing in accordance with his good nature. That he is the good, is not its justification (that would commit the is-ought fallacy) but if he is not the good, to claim there is a real good, a fulfilled standard, would commit the fallacy of reification. ]

The Dummettian anti-realist will appeal to accepted rules, and the Kripkensteinian skeptic will respond with the skeptical solution to the rule-following paradox (last section). The RD theorist attempts to avoid the skeptical dilemma by mediating between Euthyphro and Socrates with the duly provisoed biconditional (last section). The best opinion (Euthyphro) is cognitively responsive (Socrates).

This dilemma brings into sharp focus the question of “just how far…best opinion must be taken as constitutive of truth, or truth-claims subject to qualification through the various kinds of RD proviso that assert their dependence on normalized human (rather than godlike) perceptual capacities,” (etc.). So, it turns “on the realist’s claim that truth is in principle recognition-transcendent, as against the anti-realist’s claim that it cannot make sense to conceive of truth in this way since we should then be incapable of acquiring or manifesting any kind of knowledge.”

As mentioned in the last section, RD theory’s emphasis is on what comes after “if and only if,” to “privilege issues of perceptual response or judgements arrived under normal (suitably provisoed) epistemic conditions.” This has “the result that more predicates can be treated as requiring specification in terms of normalized (or optimized) human response.”

For example, Peter Railton and Ralph Wedgwood criticize the tendency for an RD approach to ethical issues to “maximize the role of those distinctively human responses to the point where any argument concerning, say, the wrongness of … will be thought of as primarily a matter of our normal inclination to judge such actions wrong … which precludes the possibility that certain kinds of action are intrinsically and objectively wrong whatever the deliverance of best human judgement or the state of (maybe community-wide) consensus opinion.” They see this as running dangerously close to Hamlet’s “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” and to the highest constitutional authority determining what constitutes “valid judgement in matters of moral, judicial and socio-political concern,” (a reference back to the 2000 election).

The Euthyphronist would counter that someone with “best judgment” will arrive infallibly at the same class of pious acts as the objectivist about moral values. However, Norris points out that humans are not infallible. To reply that “‘best moral judgement just is what comes out right by all the morally relevant criteria’…reduces to something very like a straightforward tautology,” and so the RD theorist can take a stronger Euthyphronic line and assert that moral attributes or predicates are response-dependent in a way that involves substantively specified human dispositions, priorities, concepts of social good, political justice, human or animal welfare, etc.,” but realists then object that truth is recognition-transcendent.

These issues may seem to be strictly insoluble, but they “mostly take rise from a regular confusion between ontological and epistemological issues which cannot but lead to some skeptical outcome.”

Response-dependence (RD) has its roots in Locke’s discussion of secondary qualities (like color, taste and odor) as distinguished from primary qualities (objective attributes like shape and size). The secondary qualities depend on a respondent, and some RD theorists expand this to other areas of debate as an alternative to hard-line realism on the one hand, and hard-line anti-realism on the other.

“The chief purpose is to specify these various provisos with maximum precision and thereby establish a class of perceptions and judgments which, although they lack objective (observer-independent) truth conditions, can nonetheless be treated as subject to normative standards of veridical warrant. By doing so, its advocates believe, one can make a strong start in heading off those skeptical arguments that have often traded—at least since Locke—on the subjectivity of color-perception and other such secondary qualities.” It also provides a way to distinguish between areas where this approach is adequate, and areas where, “according to the realist, our statements must be taken as possessing an objective truth-value quite aside from the vagaries of human perceptual response or the scope and limits of epistemic warrant.”

RD theorists take issue with Kripke’s “skeptical solution” to Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox. Kripke accepts Wittgenstein’s anti-foundationalist claim that standards of correctness for any rule-following depend on communal warrant. When a person produces an outcome different than the outcome we would produce when following accepted rules, s/he either hasn’t understood the rules, or s/he is following different rules. However, Kripke argues that if s/he produces the outcome that we would produce, that doesn’t guarantee s/he has understood accepted rules—s/he could have arrived at the same outcome via different rules. He says this conclusion follows from “the twin Wittgenstein considerations” that 1) the meaning given to the signs we use to communicate the rules—that meaning is not a “fact” and 2) every rule has a rule for its correct application, creating an infinite regress of rules, and no objective bedrock. So, Kripke says the only possible ‘solution’ is to take “a lesson from Wittgenstein in viewing our communal practices, procedures or shared ‘forms of life’ as the furthest we can get by way of justification for maintaining” our rules against the other’s “idea of what counts as properly or correctly following a rule.”

Crispin Wright’s “chief motive for adopting an RD approach is the hope of finding some alternative to ‘Kripkensteinian’ skepticism that would register the force of such arguments while yet making room for a realist-compatible conception of those areas of discourse where, intuitively, truth cannot be just a matter of conformity with accepted practices and norms.” BUT—Wright still has issues with the objectivist idea of arithmetical rules being true before we’ve grasped them (like Fermat’s Last Theorem before Andrew Wiles’ proof)—the same idea of which Alex Miller’s “humanized Platonism” stops short.

This is because RD theory’s emphasis is on what comes after “if and only if,” to “privilege issues of perceptual response or judgements arrived under normal (suitably provisoed) epistemic conditions over issues of objective truth or those that might more aptly be addressed by the methods of the physical sciences.”