At 03:14 PM 9/8/99 -0400, you wrote:
>
>It seems to me that you've interpreted pragmatism to be a theory of
>necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be valid/true, which,
>I'd argue, no sane pragmatist would actually claim to do. Indeed, any
>theory of truth which establishes necessary and sufficient criteria for
>something to be true is inherently circular. Pragmatism isn't a theory of
>truth. It is a theory about what we should believe, which grounds itself
>in the philosophy of ethics.
Dan: I think you are expressing your own approach to pragmatism and probably that of many self-described pragmatists, but some of the original pragmatists certainly *did* present pragmatism as a theory of truth. I understand why you would want to distance yourself from such a view, but it *has* been reasonably called pragmatism. Perhaps it would be useful to distinguish between truth-pragmatism and belief-pragmatism?
Max
Implications of Advanced Technologies
President, Extropy Institute: http://www.extropy.org
EXTRO 4 Conference: Biotech Futures. See http://www.extropy.org/ex4/e4main.htm