Hmm. This one I think I can attach to. > On Oct 16, 2024, at 12:00, Prof David West <profw...@fastmail.fm> wrote: > > I do not believe there is anything in postmodernism that argues for an > infinity of truths or denial of a definition for truth.
Rorty seems to me to be essentially the latter. Or one who asserts that there is no referent for such a term to point to. > Indeed, I believe it is pretty much exactly what glen asserts, "Truth(s) can > be something like moments or high order stabilities that allow us to settle > contested claims, even if only temporarily." I think there is both room, and warrant, for a richer conceptual system that has more than one kind of thing in it. To represent it by only one kind of thing will bleach out distinctions that for certain kinds of argument become important. My other post thisAM tried to say something constructive on what that might look like (aka TL/DR). > However, such truths are still "owned" and promulgated by some consensual > group, at some specific time, and in some specific context. I think this was the reason for some famous debate between Popper and Kuhn. Kuhn was a relativist to the core. In an interesting bit of history that I didn’t learn until recently, the Weiss-Curie picture of ferromagnetism was just coming into understanding at the time, and Kuhn saw it and said “I can do that for social phenomena!”. Very SFI, and Kuhn was 60 years earlier. SFI is still re-using the model that way (maybe sigh; or maybe not). But Kuhn had little interest in whether this social-polarization model, when applied to science, was affected by something else (what is actually correct) that had relevant structure. Hence Kuhn’s social dynamic would apply in about the same form to any fashion or herding phenomenon. I don’t think Kuhn went on a campaign to assert that there was _no_ difference of scientific dynamics from any other fashion (that would be very PoMo, and would have to wait some decades for Latour’s clowning and similar — read for entertainment A Relativist’s take on Relavitity); rather it just wasn’t that interesting to him compared to his other concerns. But Popper objected, and wanted to argue that his own Falsifiability was the missing ingredient that had to be added before Kuhn could be talking about scientific understanding as opposed to just-whatever. Of course, Popper’s belief that he had the both necessary and sufficient missing ingredient has its own problems. But his objection that there _was_ a missing ingredient is more enduring for some of us (I know; not for everybody). > This is true even of "close to the metal brute facts." Dr Johnson's stubbed > toe was an eloquent assertion of a truth, at that time. There continue to be stones and toes, and the relation that toes impacting stones get stubbed is not restricted to the place and time of one stone and one toe. In more or less the way that any general statement is not identified with one instantiation under the statement. One may, of course, simply reject out of hand any general statements, at the price of atomizing experience. > Bishop Berkeley's truth is a lot closer to current quantum physic truths, > today. No, actually. Or at least I can speak from the quantum side. > Although the group 'owning' truths about the established hard sciences and > mathematics might be very expansive, even that is not universal (e.g., > psycho-nauts and Zen-ists). > > In 'new' sciences (e.g., psychology) there are almost certainly >2 up to 7 > +/- 2, different contending truth groups. > > In the realm of culture-through-politics, I am pretty sure the postmodernists > have it right. Truth, in that context, is little more than a cudgel to be > used to flatten those that disagree. Pretty sure, and little more. Again, that cup is full, no need to pour. Eric
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