Comments on: Why I Love Scott Sumner

By: huang

huang — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:15:50 +0000

cardy ugg boots On sale,Find newest Ugg Collection there.

cardy uggs Special sale,Order now,Save 38% immediately

cardy uggs boots This season hit the store,Only $99

Would you like a pair of classic short ugg home,make this winter warm,let you feet keep comfort every day.

Newest classic short uggs is in stock now,Save more off,Win lucky coupon code.

women's bailey button UGG this season hottest Short style UGG Boots,you should never miss it.

Bailey Button UGGs keep your feet amazing comfort,Special sale time is limited this week,Order now

UGGs Bailey Button Boots can't find?You can go our shop,Will save more 25%.

UGG Bailey Button Sale Come in stock,win more discount now.

Chestnut Bailey Button Boot this season hottest Ugg boots,every one is talk about that,Take them home now.

bailey button leopard Ugg boots let the fashion on your feet now,A pair of this will give you all.

Leopard Uggs New version of Ugg Bailey Button hit the store

UGG Australia Highkoo 2009-2010 this winter a new rasie trendy along with bailey button button.

UGG Women's Highkoo Will the best gift for christmas,for your girlfriend,your family member

UGG Grey Women's Highkoo keep rising,don's miss this opportunity to get them home with cheapest price you never imagin.

By: huang

huang — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:15:09 +0000

cardy ugg boots On sale,Find newest Ugg Collection there.

cardy uggs Special sale,Order now,Save 38% immediately

cardy uggs boots This season hit the store,Only $99

Would you like a pair of classic short ugg home,make this winter warm,let you feet keep comfort every day.

Newest classic short uggs is in stock now,Save more off,Win lucky coupon code.

UGGs Bailey Button Boots can't find?You can go our shop,Will save more 25%.

UGG Bailey Button Sale Come in stock,win more discount now.

Chestnut Bailey Button Boot this season hottest Ugg boots,every one is talk about that,Take them home now.

bailey button leopard Ugg boots let the fashion on your feet now,A pair of this will give you all.

Leopard Uggs New version of Ugg Bailey Button hit the store

UGG Australia Highkoo 2009-2010 this winter a new rasie trendy along with bailey button button.

UGG Women's Highkoo Will the best gift for christmas,for your girlfriend,your family member

UGG Grey Women's Highkoo keep rising,don's miss this opportunity to get them home with cheapest price you never imagin.

By: NicoD

NicoD — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:29:10 +0000

I'm basically on board with that. I think Rorty is incorrectly depicted as rejecting any notion of truth, when it seems like he's just rejecting the possibility of an authoritative account of truth beyond the pragmatic one.

My provisional stance is this: I'd like to keep open the possibility of future discoveries in something like epistemology. I think Rorty (from what I've read of him), takes too strong a stance. If you think about how much our knowledge has developed over the last 2000 years (even by Rorty's standards, I think), seemingly at an exponential rate, I'd kinda like to say: “Well, from where we stand this line of inquiry seems fruitless, but we could easily have paradigm-shifting discoveries that make us see things very differently.” I think about the pre-Socratic debate about the nature of the universe. We might say that Democritus was, in some sense, right about something, or at least more right than his competitors. But, given the tools of that time, could the debate have been definitively resolved? (Though it seems like atomic theory is now seen as little more than a useful abstraction)

By: MichaelDrew

MichaelDrew — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 06:17:52 +0000

No one (serious) denies there are real things with all the important characteristics of the things we experience as cars. The question is of how much actual “truth” lies in the pigmentation arrangement and/or air compression sequence denoted “car” (or the attendant sounds). Rorty simply says that whatever truth exists in those patterns exists only by virtue of the fact that they are useful to us in communicating the idea of “car.” Note also that our idea(s) of “car” (momentarily imagining that it can be separated from the linguistic representation in our mind thereof) is not itself a “truthful” representation of actual cars — inasmuch as such things are brain sub-states, dependent on individually varying organs and processes of perception, located inside human skulls, not on asphalt.

By: MichaelDrew

MichaelDrew — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 06:07:14 +0000

Ask Nozick, via Invariances.

By: Fred

Fred — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:55:35 +0000

I would just like to say (and I guess I can't rule out the possibility that I'm just poorly educated) that I have always found Rorty to be an extremely useful guide through issues of “realism, truth, and knowledge.” I'm not very convinced by the embedded paper that I should think differently, and I would just like to know more specifically what you hold against his arguments. Surely there must be more than the vulgar claim that he doesn't believe in truth, and therefore no-one has any reason to believe anything.

By: Paul Zrimsek

Paul Zrimsek — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:38:17 +0000

Are TRUTH, “truth”, and Truth meant to be the same thing as truth, or something different?

By: NicoD

NicoD — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:24:45 +0000

I basically agree with MichaelDrew up to a point, but I'm nagged by the notion that, while we can't form some perfect representation , but surely the relationship with our language and objective reality isn't completely arbitrary. If I say “look out for that car!” doesn't it require, in order for that sentence to be true, that there, in some sense, exist something independent of us that somehow corresponds to the word “car”? But as I read Rorty, all he's really saying is that there is no point of view from which we'll be able to firmly establish such a connection, or which words correspond with the Truth.

By: MichaelDrew

MichaelDrew — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:50:36 +0000

One should keep in mind that Rortian pragmatism doesn't deny the existence of objective reality, it *merely* denies that humans can represent it, and perhaps that they have access to it.

We humans strive and strive to make what we want to be “true” representations of reality by making scratches on paper (or the electronic equivalent) and guttural noises, as if such things bear a real relationship to what we try to represent. They do not; any objective observer (i.e. not rooting ex ante for the possibility of human-expressed “truth”) can see that clearly. What does the cat yowl “about,” and moreover is the yowl “true”? What of the carryings-on of chimps?

We forget that we are apes.

By: Paul Zrimsek

Paul Zrimsek — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:20:41 +0000

The implication of your last paragraph seems to be that you would also still do economics the same way if you believed free will and objective truth existed. Perhaps epistemologists aren't the only ones wasting their time?