[lit-ideas] Re: Inner Moral Law
- From: "Phil Enns" <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 23:30:00 -0400
Andy Amago wrote:
"I said what works for millennia."
Why pick millennia? Why not decades or months? Seems a bit arbitrary.
But this is the least of Andy's problems.
First, whatever else we mean by 'truth', we mean that it gets right the
way things are. On Andy's account of 'what works for millennia', it is
obvious that we have various competing accounts, that have endured over
millennia, of how things are. I gave the example of religions, several
of which have worked over millennia, but there are many other examples.
On Andy's account, we could have at least two incompatible 'truths'.
Given what we mean by 'truth', this is incoherent.
Second, also when we talk about 'truth', we mean something that won't be
'not true' in the future. On Andy's account, there is no reason why
something that works for millennia might stop working. The world
changes, so why shouldn't what works in the world? On Andy's account,
we could have something that is true but shortly thereafter not be true.
Given what we mean by 'truth', this is incoherent.
Third, there is still the problem of how to reconcile the particularity
of 'what works in this case' with Andy's 'what works for millennia'.
The problem is that Andy elides the difference between principle and
application. For example, there is the principle 'Tell the truth' but
there is an important difference between the answers to the questions
'Do you love me?' and 'Does this outfit make me look fat?'. What works
for one question most likely will not work for the other. How can we
understand this difference when we are told to look for 'what works for
millennia'? The principle certainly does extend over millennia but how
can the knowledge regarding inter-personal relations? The fact is that
very little of 'what works' extends over millennia, something especially
true over the last century.
There are philosophers who do think that practices enduring over a long
period of time are significant, but only as an indication of something
being true. For some philosophers, what matters is that a practice is
'long term coherent' and that such coherence lends justification to
holding a proposition as true, or a practice as aiming towards producing
true propositions. The difference between this approach and Andy's is
Andy's claim that what works is true instead of merely justified.
Andy's claim is incoherent but there is reason to think that 'what works
for millennia' can be a kind of justification. Just ask the Pope.
Sincerely,
Phil Enns
Toronto, ON
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