Re: BHA: truth

["Howard Engleskirchen,WSU/FAC" <howarde@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis and all --

The thing I've missed from the discussion so far is the place of practice in all
this.

> Any correspondence theory is based on the idea that
> on the one hand we have a lot of concepts at our mental disposal and on the
> other hand we can identify a lot of things in the world, so we judge truth
> by seeing if our concepts match up with the things in the world.  The
> problem is that we need concepts in order to identify things in the world
> that match up with out concepts!

As far as I understand it we match our ideas about the world with the truth of
things (real or actual), by engaging in the causal transformation of the world, by
using them to absent an absence of one sort or another.  In other words
alethia, the truth of things, cannot be understood by us apart from our agency,
and it is the historical error of philosophy to suppose that it could.   We access
the truth of things through transformative negation.  If correspondence means
we match up concepts with things in a process of interpreting the world, then it
is problematic for the reasons Louis identifies.  But if we match up concepts
with things in the course of changing the world, then all that we do is still
mediated by concepts, but the world talks back in a way that does not regard
our concepts.  So it seems that we can speak of a correspondence between
our ideas and the way things are confirmed by practice in the sense that we
are able to realize this or that project of our design, though no one is there at
the end of the day to give any stamp of certainty to all this.  We could be wildly
confused.

Howard

Howard Engelskirchen
Western State University




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