on “being right”

This gives material for a more general thought… In some circles, too much emphasis is placed on being “right”. If there is a real world, then there should also be a correct verbal expression of that world.

But how does Nancy Cartwright put it… something like: she’s an ontological realist but a theory anti-realist. (I may have mangled the wording.) I’m on board with that. Maybe I’d say I’m an anti-pragmatist in ontology but a full-bore pragmatist when it comes to knowledge… We humans are not granted to know the truth. I believe that there is one, but that it cannot survive translation into any particular form of knowledge without distortion.

So, the best we can hope for is to move the ball forward. (This is why I have such visceral contempt for sniping know-it-alls who do nothing but critique. You have to move the ball. You have to have your own position. Ultimately, if not immediately, that means you have to publish. Sorry: publish your idea, or perish.)

Now, I happen to think Braver’s book is wrong about a good number of things. But I don’t care. Why not? Because he has given us a desperately needed consolidation of things that other continental authors have been afraid to say openly: above all, that continental philosophy has been and remains a largely anti-realist movement. The chic way of dealing with this issue has always been to pose as if one were beyond the superficial realism/antirealism dispute. But in fact, continental philosophy has always taken the anti-realist fork in the road, and Braver bluntly admits it. The quality of the debate has greatly improved thanks to his book, and in the end we’re all wrong anyway; only the world itself is right. (Whitehead said this, by the way… If we have to answer whether a given proposition is true or false, then it must be said that every verbal proposition is false. Why? Because every verbal proposition is an abstraction.)