Mental Models of Purpose of College
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Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Moral truth?
This may not make any sense but at this point in the book I found it useful to go back to the four truisms to understand Lynch’s justification against other arguments about truth and his belief in his own definition. Truth is objective, in his argument Lynch refers to the distant past as something which is objectively true but not verifiable by scientific standards. “It rained here 15000 years ago” could very well be objectively true but not verifiable or pragmatically useful. In addition he may refer to things beyond scientific knowledge such as the number of stars currently in the universe. There is no verifiable way to represent this, but objectively there are either an odd or even number of stars and the number is defined by what is objectively true about the number of stars in the universe. True is good, how can you scientifically prove that something is good or bad, too many factors must be tested and eventually it comes down to a matter of saying that it is good because it is true and this is just backwards thought. Truth cannot be proven good by saying that it is true, that is like saying “truth is good because it is good to believe what is true”. Additionally, in order for something to be meaningful, it must be good. Therefore how can pragmatists ever say that anything that is true is not worth believing if true and good are so interchangeable? Truth is a worthy goal of inquiry. According to pragmatists, we inquire what is useful to us, and we inquire truths based on our one system of values and beliefs. We inquire as a means of verification. If truth and verification goes hand in hand then it is worthy o inquire and seek the truth regardless of certainty. In saying this, does that mean that it is important to justify what we see as morally true? I am not sure. Truth as a value. It is impossible to prove a value, which is by definition relative to what we believe to be morally valuable. Therefore how can truth and verification be interchangeable? That is like saying it is possible to prove anything that we find morally justifiable. Lynch’s example of the death penalty gives us a great example of this.
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Whitney, this post was really helpful to me in understanding exactly where Lynch is going in these past few chapters. However, I am still unconvinced about some of Lynch's truisms. First, in response to his idea that truth is good in and of itself and that we would always prefer to know what is true as opposed to what is false. He says that it doesn't necessarily mean that it is morally good, but can we examine truth independently of morality? Isn't morality such a large part of our lives that it would be impossible to see truth outside of a moral means in most contexts. Are we able to ever do anything indenpendent of our moral truth? Does it or does it not interfere with almost every decision that we make? Also, in a somewhat related point, I'm not sure that truth in and of itself is worth looking into. You brought up the example of the stars. Sure, we may not be able to find out if there is an even or odd number. But what good would it do anyone to know the truth about that? I think that after reading chapter 6, I am more convinced by the pragmatist argument that truth is something we seek only when we have a question about it. And, if that is so, then it's important to note whether the answer will get us anywhere or if we just want to know so we can say we know the truth.
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