Very interesting discussion raging over the issue of verisimilitude in history. This one is fairly relevant to Mormons. The issue is one that came up in the never ending positivism discussion here last summer. If we say that a historical representation is accurate, how can we say that without knowing what the truth of the matter actually is? Put an other way, aren't all claims of historic accuracy fairly problematic? This is a bit of an old topic in Mormon apologetic circles. Different figures have come up with different approaches. But the problem of how historic claims are unavoidably theory-laden does pose significant problems for the very meaning of history.
Check out Hugo's first post on the topic at Studi Galileiani. Brandon over at Siris has a response. I tend to agree with Hugo that Brandon isn't addressing the fundamental point in question. The issue isn't whether the past is real or not, but the problem theory-ladenness poses for claims of accuracy. So I agree with a lot Brandon says, just that I don't think he's addressing the fundamental problem. Hugo's response to Brandon gets at those points. I must say that I disagree a fair bit with Hugo's critique of coherency. Not that I disagree with the claim that coherency theories of truth have problems. Just that I think the ultimate issue is the meaning of the "trace" and how it relates to history.
Hugo's point is that with regards to history all we have are traces of the past. However Hugo claims that these "traces are not 'left' but made." Those of you familiar with my various writings on Continental issues will quickly see that this is the problem of the icon that pops up in Derrida and Peirce. The history of the term goes back to Plotinus and the neoPlatonists. There we have a realism wrapped up in the notion of matter (or the sensible world) having a trace of the soul. Derrida ends up borrowing this terminology for how we don't have full signs (signs as a kind of complete presence) but only traces. The notion in Derrida though is still a kind of realism, albeit a realism with a kind of radical alterity in which the origin is "lost" and unapproachable.
Derrida, as I've mentioned before is largely following Peirce in his analysis of signs in On Grammatology. The big controversy is over the nature of icons - that is signs that signify through resemblance. One can quickly see that if signs signify through resemblance that then Hugo's claim becomes problematic. For a trace to be a trace it must in part share in the being of what it signifies. I'm not sure Derrida would agree - at least not in a straightforward way. However also note that Peirce accepts the theory-ladenness of our understanding. Indeed he was quite ahead of his time in this.
Of course Peirce would likely agree with Hugo in that I think he'd say that knowing how accurate our ideas are is ludicrous. At best we can say that, because of his realism, reality will continue to impress itself on us such that any inquiry conducted long enough will lead us to the truth. I should note that this does not mean it will converge on the truth, the way the scientific realists claim. Merely that because reality is affecting us, all our theories will eventually get better enabling us to reach the truth. However Peirce's thorough-going fallibilism would acknowledge that speaking of surety is silly. We can but conduct ourselves in an ongoing inquiry.
Just a note, since I've had over the past few months lots of inquiries of where to start with Peirce. The best systematic book on Peirce's philosophy is Kelly Parker's The Continuity of Peirce's Thought. However for more casual reading most of the important papers of Peirce are up at the Arisbe repository. The Essential Peirce (2 Volumes) is fairly cheap and has all his important papers. (Including several like "Issues in Pragmatism" not on the Arisbe site) Peirce was a very clear and concise writer. So it's not like having to dive into figures like Kant and being confused. He's probably one of the best writers of philosophy I've encountered. Be aware though that many of his papers are careful analysis of his system of logic and thus not that approachable for beginners.
With regards to the realism issue, I think his discussion in "Frazer's the Works of George Berkeley" is best and is an excellent place to start with Peirce. (IMO) A commentary on this paper is very helpful as well.
Kathy Legg's "Predication and the Problem of Universals" is fairly helpful for understanding Peirce's notion of realism as well.
Brandon's latest post is here.
My concern about the theory-ladenness issue is that I think it is unwarranted to assume that theory-ladenness imports any problem with accuracy, particularly if we are only worried about being approximately right, and particularly if it is actually a universal feature of our thought about the world. Whether theory-ladenness is a problem would have to be shown for each particular case; and it almost never is. But it certainly is at this point that I am deviating most from the common view.
Brandon, isn't this the same problem that the Bayesian folks run into in Bayesian epistemology? It seems that the claim that one is accurate is a claim due to methadology. i.e. we assume we're getting more accurate because we believe the methadology ought to lead that way. I'm not sure even Peirce would go that far, since a change in theory can produce radically different changes in meaning of facts.
The controversial point that I believe is that new theories don't always improve our accuracy. Consider, for example, 19th century views of light. The popularity of wave theories in certain ways were a step back in accuracy over particle theories of the 18th and 17th centuries. (Of course they were more accurate with respect to other phenomena) The assumption about accuracy is that new data and new paradigms are always an improvement in accuracy.
Now perhaps you're not making an appeal to this methadological claim. But it seems to me that one can't claim accuracy independent of methadology without the question "how accurate?" It seems that is the point Hugo is raising.
Note that I think methadological issues crop up in subtle ways. That's why I brought up Peirce's notion of iconicity and the old medieval notion that a sign transmits being in a certain way. (Somewhat related to the later notion of sympathies which got way out of hand in the Renaissance)
Now if you're point is that we needn't worry about degree so long as we are somewhat accuracy, then I probably start to part company with you. You said, "we are only worried about being approximately right." That almost suggests that all degrees of approximation are equally good and we don't care about how accurate we are. But I think especially with respect to history we most definitely do worry about that.
Realism about x, I take it, is in this context (minimally) the claim that x is probably approximately true. It's possible, of course, to have stronger realisms, but a minimal realism doesn't require much. I think a great many arguments that work (in particular cases) against stronger realisms fail against minimal realism, because the arguments trade on complications not with accuracy but with precise or exact accuracy. If we are interested only in approximate accuracy, we don't have such problems; and most arguments that we do make the mistake of assuming we need to know the exactly or precisely accurate thing in order to determine whether we are approximately accurate. But if this were so there would be no importance to recognizing something as approximately accurate/true/right at all. And it appears to be false: we simply do not need to know what is exactly right in order to know what is approximately right; and we do not need to know what is exactly right in order to know that what we know is (probably) approximately right. Now, given that we have identified some things as approximately right or accurate, we can in some cases go on to compare them, and see which fares better (is a better approximation) and why. But this is a downstream problem - it's something we get to only after we have determined that some things are approximately right; and any difficulties that might arise here don't affect our ability to recognize that we are approximately right. It's a problem that only arises when we have (as approximateness is likely to give us) several different approximately true things already.
I don't think I'm committed to saying that new theories or new data necessarily improve our accuracy.
I'm not sure I have an answer to the methodology issue. I think the question of realism is a question upstream from most methodological issues, and so realists who try to solve realism in terms of a particular methodology are probably doomed. But I could be wrong here.
The Peirce review on the Frazer edition of Berkeley is fascinating; thanks for the link.
Hmm. I think I've misread your posts then, since this is a use of "realism" I'm simply not that familiar with. Realism to me is either the claim that entities exist independent of any particular person thinking about it or, in the more narrow scholastic sense concerning universals.
The first option you mentioned is related to the one I'm looking at, I think; it's one way of parsing the minimal notion of realism I characterized above. In other words, I'm just looking at a much more generalized form that isn't committed to all the assumptions of the view that entities exist independent of any particular person thinking about it, since my concern was just to emphasize that the realist has more options than just views like this.
(If this is a double-post, apologies; it did something weird when I clicked 'post'.)
I guess I don't quite see the connection Brandon. Undoubtedly a fault on my part. But to me realism is a metaphysical claim while you seem to be considering it more as an epistemological claim. At least I don't see what possible relationship accuracy has to metaphysics. To epistemology, yes.
Now your second part I'd probably agree with. To say that something has mind dependent elements doesn't entail that there aren't mind independent elements. i.e. we might be antirealist about beauty and have the beauty of say a sculpture as part of our idea of the sculpture. But it sounds to me that Hugo is arguing something a bit different.
Still, I think I'll stick to my view that this is really just a question about the meaning of iconicity. I think asking about mind-dependence or mind-independence isn't the most helpful way to think about it. One might say, for instance, that in all cases we're talking about representations and inherently all representations of this sort require a mind to make them thinkable.
If the issue is more about idealism, and whether we are committed to idealism about the past, then perhaps that makes a bit more sense. (And I'd certainly agree with you there - although I'm not sure that is what Hugo was arguing)
I agree with most of the comment, but I'm not sure I see the distinction you are making in the first paragraph; surely the accuracy involved is something like 'accurately describing reality'? And if that is so, it is relevant to metaphysics. (I tend to think of epistemology simply as indirect metaphysics - asking what you know and how you can know is simply to ask what you know to be real/true and how you can know that. Asking whether you can be accurate is asking about whether you can be accurate about the way things are.) But you are right that accuracy is a more indirect way of talking about the subject than other ways.
Idealism is a form of realism. It doesn't require anyone to have a different view about what exists, only about its nature - e.g., Berkeley is a realist about the external world, he just thinks that the nature of the external world is that it is composed of ideas. Presumably an idealist about the past would be a realist, but hold that the past consists entirely of ideas (I'm not sure how one would get that to work). (Incidentally, my argument is influenced by Berkeley, although by his critique of materialism rather than his idealism. The point of Berkeley's critique of materialism is to allow us to be realists about the external world without getting mired in any of the skeptical problems of early modern materialism.)
The iconicity issue is interesting; I wish I knew more so I could comment more intelligently about it.
One last post by Hugo. This post actually clarifies a lot of misunderstandings I was having in the issue. I want to think about it a tad more, to see if my Derrida/Peirce appeal was correct.
Certainly idealism is a form of realism. Just that it is a different kind of realism, for sure. If statements about the past are true because they refer to independent ideas and not to entities as such, that would make more sense. But I don't think that is what Hugo wants to say. He wants to deny that there are any true propositions about the past. Which seems a radical position indeed. I thought he just wanted to problemitize the meaning of true propositions of the past.
My problem was more figuring out what exactly was being argued. But that last post by Hugo really cleared things up. I was missing the point in more than a few ways.
One more comment. Hugo has a few final thoughts, along with some useful links to discussion of philosophy of the past. The book he refers to, Tucker's Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Hisoriography seems quite relevant to certain debates in Mormon historiography.
Right; Hugo was arguing that historical statements are meaningless (although this position shouldn't necessarily be attributed to him; he's said that he's defending the line of argument against criticisms rather than putting it forward as his own - his concern is more to make sure that it is not dismissed too easily than to establish it).
I think this is a dispute where there was a lot of miscommunication and confusion; but, fortunately, instead of bogging down, things began to be clarified toward the end.
I very much agree with Brandon. We misunderstood one another at times but learned a great deal in the process. I'm glad to have had a minor hand in excellent discussions like this one, too, and to see others making the effort to understand my argument while taking it in new directions.
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