Notes on Truth, Beauty, and Goodness -- Phil A231

William Jamison - Instructor

Intentions and expectations

The Nature of Normative Claims

I planned to quote from The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand: p. 353

"It does not follow that it is meaningless to talk of beliefs being true or untrue. It only means that there is no noncircular set of criteria for knowing whether a particular belief is true, no appeal to some standard outside the process of coming to the belief itself. For thinking just is a circular process, in which some end, some imagined outcome, is already present at the start of any train of thought. "Truth .. happens to an idea," James said in the lectures he published in 1907 as Pragmatism. "It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself."27 And, elsewhere in the same lectures: " 'the true' is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving."28 Thinking is a free-form and boundless activity that nevertheless leads us to outcomes we feel justified in calling true, or just, or moral."

If we take a historical approach does this define our findings? (I will argue that Sheppard takes this approach to interpretation.)

If we take a traditional approach -- it does also? We should discuss what we might call the traditional approach here. Here is an excellent description of what I treat as the tradition in this respect: http://www.cin.org/jp2/fides.html 

Are we finding what we have previously defined as the set of the possible....?

As we see with the various interpretations of the NT -- and fiction and history even our concept of what we are doing -- creating fiction or describing history -- is going to meet with expectations that indicate the intentions that set our discourse in motion.

Bibliography

leitmotif http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/g_leitmotif.html

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