(this is a continuation of ideas from ‘Nietzsche’s Perpsectivism’)
As a historian isolates certain concepts of history in order to derive a description of events that serves some practical end without attributing to these concepts any kind of essential quality, so may we in the larger sense of human expression isolate certain concepts of truth in order to describe constraints that serve some practical end without attributing to them any kind of essential quality. One such interpretation of the concept of truth is that all propositions possess truth-value: the law of bivalence. Using this law as a rule of inference in a formal system one is able to parse the vastness of concepts man is able to conceive into a subset of relevant data (not unlike how a Marxist reading of history parses the documents of history to output a particular subset of Marxist-relevant information).
Supposing first that there are no credible arguments for the essential truth of the law of bivalence, and that it is insofar as we can know, one of many concepts we employ in order to make sense. As mentioned above in the analogy, I consider a knowable attribute of ‘concepts’ to be it’s ability to describe because that is quite simply what occurs, each concept describes something, and in this case the concept of truth is no more meaningful than the concept of horticulture, they all share this base attribute. As a historian tells a story through the selected concepts of history he focuses on, so do we in our employment of concepts tell stories, not least of all about who we are, where we come from, what our purposes are, and we communicate these descriptions for the most part in a language of concepts. Some descriptions may include concepts whose meanings are nestled within semantic formal constraints, constraints which limit the range of potential meanings to be had from a concept to some specific aspect, for example the concept of truth may be so worded that it is meant to be understood only in accordance with the law of bivalence. This is understood by tacit agreement in the act of communication between people, so that it is not always necessary to describe in detail the conditions for how the communicated words should be interpreted.
This above description of concepts as informal and formal manipulations is of course itself a concept, and I do not intend to hold that it is any more essentially true than anything else. It relies on the presupposition that there were no credible arguments for the essential truth of the law of bivalence, and was something I was able to conceive of and put into words to be understood. In this base respect it has a common attribute with any other conceptualization of truth. The key point I would like to emphasize is this concept does not rely on an additional semantic formal constraint such as the law of bivalence, it does not rely on being proven at all, it is description for description sake.
This differs greatly from concepts of truth which suppose essential truth-value in that these require proof by virtue of their semantic claims; in particular the essential claim of a law of bivalence sets the requirement for an either/or condition of truth-discerning which it should also be subject to. Without proof for its essential value, it can neither propose hierarchical authority upon it’s own concept or devalue those held by anyone else. Nonetheless, I would like to stress that if the law of bivalence is nothing more than a concept without knowable essential qualities, it can still have a privileged role in a hierarchy of concepts individually, and cross-perspectivally, according to how the concept is used. It’s utility is one of many ways to determine it’s value, and on the basis of utility alone many formal manipulations of concepts may be devised to maximize utility-relevant ends in human development, without there having to be a knowable essential quality underlying it all. Such is one philosophic view of the achievements of science, in opposition to scientific realism, the utiltarian view which disregards any metaphysical significance to predictive capabilities of applied sciences and focus only on the aspect of how to prosper on the same hunches.
I believe there is a conceptual difference between ‘describing’ and ‘proving’ which is at the heart of the dichotomy made between ‘relativism’ and ‘absolutism’: whereas a proof is both a proof and a description, a description does not necessarily have to be a proof. The multivalent logic narrative is one which can be described without need of proof, whereas the bivalent logic narrative requires description which proves consistency with its semantic constraints.
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[...] As I said, the predictive abilities of the hard sciences do not themselves serve to prove any tenets of conventional wisdom, the two belong to separate systems, and any analogies to the contrary serve only to bastardize the proofs into truisms. The soft sciences are the worst for this sort of transgression, because they strive to keep up the nominal appearance of sound integrity while virtually at every turn undermining it. The argument for a certain rigor is that it returns seemingly consistent and reliable results, much the way a calculus does. The analogy is apt, because it is just this insistent analogy that has bewitched us. Unlike the fixed properties of quantitative analysis done in the hard sciences, the soft sciences’ reliance on common language leads to inevitable ambiguities in the grammar of usage, for example, confusing essences with concepts and concepts with essences, the picture becomes the person and the person becomes the picture. The picture stands in for the essential thing. Now if we speak of essential people and things as pictures, and continue that analogy, do we lose anything integral the further we go on? The pictures that are supposed to be people do not reveal themselves to us in their full bundle of effects in our common parlance. The shorthand of terminology conceals the suitable grammatical uses of the terms while we unsuspectingly soldier on with our theories. This hypothetical person is not a person but a concept; we are not using the word ‘person’ as we expect it to be used. As Wittgenstein was prone to show, our use of language is chocked full of these errors in grammar, errors in the grammar of language-in-use. The truisms that are churned out in spite of these inconsistencies can maintain an aura of sophistication depending on the language game it is inserted within. One of the most ubiquitous trait of these games is the employment of bivalent logic (the proposition that all propositions possess truth-value; often paired with the law of non-contradiction), a logic that takes on an almost divine role in modern scholarship, so much so it is little wonder that our use of conventional wisdom comes without credentials and we are needing to have this debate (I am of the belief bivalent logic plays a far larger role in people’s minds than religion). [...]