Richard & all, – from an email today –<\/p>\n
I think the statement from Rorty:<\/p>\n
\u201cTruth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human
\nmind because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is
\nout there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of
\nthe world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by the
\ndescribing activities of human beings – cannot.\u201d
\nFrom MAKING TRUTH: METAPHOR IN SCIENCE, by TL Brown (2003).<\/p><\/blockquote>\nis interestingly \u201cgarbled\u201d in the usual way self-consistent language has problems referring to inconsistent things.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not talking about the difficulty of even narrowing down what \u201ctruth\u201d means. I’m talking about a suspicious distortion that his thinking seems to add in the process.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s that in emphasizing how the meanings in our minds are distinctly our own, and different from the organization of the \u201cworld out there\u201d, he ends up seeming to say that the outer world has no language of its own. \u00a0What would make more sense is that the rich world of natural\u00a0languages that\u00a0systems evidently develop on their own, seem incompatible with what we are able to fit in our minds.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Both our own varied private thoughts, and what we can share with each other with language, also seem to be phenomena of the \u201cworld out there\u201d. \u00a0 Where the sharing most completely breaks down seems to be in the applicability of our thoughts and language to others.<\/p>\n
I think the organization of nature can be \u201ctrue or false\u201d in its own terms, i.e. internally consistent, conflicting, etc. \u00a0What nature\u2019s organization can also do, somewhat defying logic, is be most successful when full of inconsistent independent self-consistencies. That’s part of what I think people are discussion as “heterogeneity”, or “heterarchy”.<\/p>\n
Nature\u2019s \u201cthoughts\u201d seem to display much more variety of individually different kinds of organization than our minds can capture. Our clumsily designed models for them, our invented \u201cgloves\u201d intended to imitate nature’s moving hands, are not presently serving us well at all.<\/p>\n
So it’s important to discover that most rules arise from locally developing systems that are quite beyond full understanding, and quite diverse. \u00a0My thought then is\u00a0that discovering how nature is changing<\/em> rather than how it is fixed, would make the glove seek to fit the moving hand rather than resist it\u2019s movement.<\/p>\n
Seeing\u00a0nature as a moving target for our rules follow would let them\u00a0be much more successful.<\/h3>\n
Is that included in Rorty\u2019s sense of things?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
ed 2\/13\/12<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Richard & all, – from an email today – I think the statement from Rorty: \u201cTruth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can … Continue reading Rorty\u2019s elusive line between the world & meaning<\/span>