Segment 5
List,
As Jerry Chandler has commented, how much weight the scientific
community places on the concept of sincerity may be open to doubt.
However, there is little doubt about the weight the community places
on the concept of truth. The fifth segment of the paper, "Sciences
as Communicational Communities," which is composed of paragraphs 22
and 23 (reproduced below), focuses directly and mainly on the concept
of truth.
Given the interest that has already been shown in this concept on
previous posts, and the expertise many listers have already
demonstrated with respect to philosophical discourses focusing on
this concept, I am going to leave the main points of this segment
open for response by those who have much greater philosophical
understanding of them than I. I will attempt little more in what
follows than a reprise of the contents of the segment that identifies
a few instances where more elaboration, definition, and discussion
from those who would be inclined to provide it would be particularly
helpful. I hope that listers with greater knowledge of Peirce's
thinking with respect to the concept of truth will come forward to
fill in the record in these and other respects.
JR's language seems to depart more markedly from the letter, if not
the spirit, of Peirce in this penultimate segment than in any other
part of the paper. JR acknowledges this somewhat at the outset of
the segment, but claims that what he is presenting is an original
insight from Peirce, forging one of the strongest explicit links to
Peirce that appears in the paper in so doing. JR uses the concept of
"assertion indicator" to identify the "force" of truth in the
predicate "is true." "Assertion indicator" is the first of several
concepts, such as "speech-act," "communicational act," and
"appropriate responsiveness" that appear to be referencing something
other than Peirce's own terminology. I am guessing that Austin's
speech act theory is in the background here, but I doubt this is the
only non-Peircean frame of reference. Additional identification of
what literature JR is most likely drawing on here would be much
appreciated. JR indicates that he has gone further elsewhere in his
work with these concepts. Perhaps we will see them again in a later
paper.
In any case, JR's key point in paragraph 22 is that truth ought to be
understood, for the purposes at hand at least, in terms of its
manifestation in relation to a verbal sign, and a predicate sign
specifically, a sign that does not convey "content" (as the subject
of the sentence would be doing). Rather, the predicate sign directs
those who are interpreting the sentence to do so in a manner that is
in accordance with the norms that govern their communicational
processes generally speaking. In other words, the phrase, "is true,"
is a signal designed to compel normative communicative action,
nothing more, nothing less. JR specifies that this signalling is not
to be confused with any function that speech-act theory might
identify. The contrast here is not explicated, however. This is
another moment where listers with expertise in speech act theory and
communicational act theory (although I wonder if this latter is JR's
own original concept entirely) might provide some additional
commentary.
What strikes me about JR's remarks in this paragraph is his move to
the analysis of the phrase "is true" immediately after raising the
more general question about the definition of the concept of truth.
I read it as his way of keeping the focus of the paper on
communicational practices, which makes the shift to discussing a
verbal sign and how it functions in utterances understandable. JR
seems to be using this focus mainly to show how the analysis of truth
can be related to his earlier comments about the norms that govern
scientific communication and the definition of its membership.
In paragraph 23, however, JR leaves the issue of what "is true" means
and returns to the more general question, "What is truth?" It would
seem that part of his agenda here has been to make it clear to his
audience how different these two questions in fact are. JR then gives
what must have come across as an extraordinary answer to the larger
question: that truth is a form of life, and one that scientific
inquirers themselves embody. He claims that this is fundamentally
evident in their communicational conduct, to the extent that their
conduct conforms to the community's norms. I find this statement
extraordinary in that it locates truth entirely within the "life" of
the inquirer, not in the subject matter that determines the
inquirer's inquiry, and not in any relation that the inquirer and the
subject-matter might be maintaining to one another (via "the data",
for example, as Jerry Chandler referred to it in his last post).
JR's phrase, "the overall form of life," has to be interpreted very
carefully, in this regard. Is this a reference to Wittgenstein,
perhaps, in addition to Peirce? Exactly how must it be read so that
it does speak, unambiguously, in the spirit of Peirce? JR's view
might be seen to change substantially depending on what this phrase
is understood to mean.
My final question, then, is this: How best to interpret JR's final
claim in paragraph 23 as it relates to Peirce's thinking on truth?
I hope to post on the final segment of the paper in the next 3-4 days.
Best wishes to all,
Sally
Paragraphs 22 and 23 of "Sciences as Communicational Communities"
But what about truth? Charles Peirce was perhaps the first to
recognize -- and recognize it he did, even if he did not phrase it
precisely as I do -- that the force of the truth predicate "is true"
is that of an assertion indicator, adding nothing to content but
functioning instead to signal the way in which what is being said is
to be taken. Taken by whom? By whomever it may concern, i.e. by any
given member of the communicational community addressed, which exists
distributively not collectively, and includes any persons -- some not
yet living, perhaps -- who share the same sort of interest in that
subject-matter as the person making the assertion or claim. The
analysis of truth is the analysis of assertion of this special type,
which is not capturable in a speech-act conception of assertion but
has to be explicated in terms of a communicational act instead. I
cannot go further into the conception of a communicational act here
other than to say that the effect of an assertion of this sort--which
is the same as the act of professional publication--is to invoke the
norms of communication of this community as relevant to critical
response in respect to what is put forth in the claim, both as
regards its form and its content. The act of publication signifies a
commitment on the part of the person publishing to an essentially
interminable responsibility to being appropriately responsive to
anybody else who is appropriately responsive to what is asserted in
the publication. This is not the place to spell out what is
appropriate, but common sense and some acquaintance with publishing
practices in the sciences or in professional intellectual life
generally is all that is required to understand much of what that
entails.
[23]
In brief, then, if we ask whether something is true we are
asking about a subject-specific property, not about something called
"truth", and the answer will always take a subject-specific form. The
person who seeks the truth about the constituents of matter wants to
know about matter not about truth. But if we are asking the very
different question "What is truth?" the answer is that it is the
overall form of life of the scientific inquirer as such. I have only
attempted to describe it in one respect here, but I believe it is a
fundamental one.
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