I guess we’re at a stopping point then- we both seem to agree that survival of the fittest has no means to guarantee, or even make likely that our brains are oriented towards discovering truth. If you don’t see that as problematic for the materialist, then I don’t really understand why not, but ok. As far as I can tell, it’s a defeater for everything the materialist believes, and especially sophisticated things like materialism that have no clear connection to survival.
Materialism is a pragmatic philosophy. Truth, from the human viewpoint, is (with respect to humanity) indistinguishable from the Truth.
That is to say, our perception of the world is a semiotic construct that filters that which is into a meaningful form. We can extrapolate certain things from that perspective, but we are ultimately limited by that.
What is ‘true’ and what is ‘perceived’ in a holistic sense (we have redundant systems to account for artifacts in other systems), aren’t separable.
Xunzian
Maybe I'm overlooking something simple, but the fact that I can understand the above sentence tells me the materialist is wrong- there is indeed a difference that you are relying on me to know of in order for the above to be intelligible, right?
Also, a pragmatic view of truth seems to stand on the coattails of the regular view of it. For example, I would assume you meant this claim:
To be true in the regular correspondence way, and not the pragmatic way. Isn’t the above supposed to be actually the case? Even if not, there is at least analytic truth. “Uccisore is not married, therefore Uccisore is a bachelor” seems to be true in the regular way, and not the pragmatic way as well. So the pragmatist has to admit the existence of these two flavors of what truth is. If the pragmatist admits that what I call truth exists, by what grounds are they calling their other thing truth, and by what grounds is a system acceptable that has to settle for it? Once we admit that direct correspondence truth exists, isn’t it a worthwhile (useful?) goal to try to get as much of it as possible? Isn’t it then a fair criticism that materialism can’t get much of this kind of truth, if another system can?
Both are constructions, the question is merely what they are constructed from.
We experience a stimulus of something real/material. Our brains process and make sense of this stimulus, which is in turn what we see. Over time, we layer additional perceptions onto this meta-narrative. “Ucci is not married, therefore Ucci is a bachelor” truths come along later as definitions used to make sense of this narrative. Now, we can argue about the hermeneutic cycle, but I addressed my views on that earlier.
Developmentally, I have no problem with what you’re saying- I’m sure the first thing we learn are purely pragmatic. We cry at certain times to get certain things. The connection has nothing to do, in our minds, with whether or not there are actually such things as mamas and babas.
But even if analytic truths come along later, they still represent a type of non-pragmatic truth that we can easily see. And it’s not as though I’m constructing a sort of truth that nobody has heard of before- I think I’m using the term in the usual way. So I think there’s more than enough room in philosophy the question of corrospondence truth important, and if the pragmatic materialist is saying they rely on pragmatism because the other sort of truth is unachievable under his world view- that’s fine with me, that’s all I was trying to show here.
As far as whether or not pragmatism is coherent, rational, and all that, those are all issues of analytic truth, so the pragmatist contradict himself to even examine them. Is pragmatism useful? No more or less than other sorts of truth, from what I can tell, though even acknowledging this as the ‘right’ question to ask has undercurrents of corrospondence.
The other thing, too, is that we can all think of lies that would be useful to believe, or useful to teach others. Does the pragmatist advocate doing such things? I worry that there’s kind of a back-handed understanding in pragmatism that says “We believe the truth is what’s useful, but we’re only considering those useful things that we sincerely think might be true in the sense of corrospondence as well”.
Of course, but we’ve created those non-pragmatic truths. The old line about punching a ‘reality is an illusion’ in the face demonstrates that some things, like my fist, would seem to exist outside of your mind.
But the other kind of truth, the kind you are discussing, is created. So, with the first kind of truth’s we have a “digging”. Here we are pragmatists, since the truth, as they say, is out there (granted, that is taken as an assumption, but I think it is a fair one and one that we share). In this digging we see elements of the object but our perception invariably colors it, as I said before, I can’t see the color an x-ray makes – indeed, I would go so far as to say such a color doesn’t exist (pragmatism). Now, this first order truth can really exist only on an individual level. As I’ve mentioned before, I am colorblind, so the world I see does, indeed, look different from the world you see. However, because humans are all more-or-less the same (our brains are all structured pretty much the same and we are all similar enough for it to be reasonable not to expect any huge deviation from the normal way of seeing things. Assuming, of course, that the individual doesn’t have some abnormality like schizophrenia.)
But the second order truths, the analytic, are transsubjective because they are essentially tautological in nature. We both have to agree on the definitions used for those truths to hold any value. So, these truths are wholly created by the people using them.
By combining the experiential first order truths as well as the analytic second order truths, our understanding of how the world is (third order truth – the one we actually see), is created. The first order truths are where pragmatism is applied, so lying can’t actually happen because it occurs on a purely individual level. I cannot lie to my eyes and make them see a bunny when there is no bunny in front of me. I can create an analytic explanation as to why there is a bunny in front of me, but as long as it fails to pass the muster of the pragmatic truth I think it ought be rejected.
Third order and second order truths can be deconstructed in a way that first order cannot, which is why we have to take first-order pragmatic truths as the foundation.
It’s funny, because in terms of how we dig (epistemology), I’m a pragmatist myself. That is, I think our processes should be devoted towards what’s most useful…in getting us to the corrospondence kind of truth.
Analytic truths are tautological in nature, but only the specific examples are created by us, it seems to me. It would be hard to believe that ‘if all A’s are B, and all B’s are C, then all A’s are C’ was something we created, which as close as I can get to the rule behind my bachelor example. We defined the terms, and so defined the relationship between them, but that principle seems to be an uncreated example of non-pragmatic truth.
As far as the color thing, my explanation of that would involve primary and secondary qualities, and I don’t suppose you’d let me get away with that, huh? 
I think I see what you mean about the first order truths, and how they are applied. The materialist isn’t choosing to uphold pragmatism, but is rather acknowledging that something like pragmatism is how our initial beliefs about the world come to us. I still have a problem, though, calling pragmatic deliverance ‘truth’. That seems too convenient. Without that trick of vocabulary, it still seems like we agree that the materialist has no claim to the world being anything like his senses describe to him. In the context of second order truths, where things like deduction, induction, and corrospondence apply, this still seems like a defeater for materialism to me, since materialism precisely is a claim about what’s behind first order truths. If I follow you correctly, the sort of pragmatist you describe should have nothing to say about metaphysics.
Well, yes and no. Metaphysics stem mostly from third-order truths. First order truths don’t care about what (if anything) is behind them. I can spend a lot of time demonstrating that atoms are mostly empty space (indeed, almost exclusively empty space), and I can mention that my fist is made of atoms and hence, empty space. Your face is likewise made of empty space. But in the first-order truth event of my fist meeting your face it sure doesn’t seem that way! Now, did this really happen? What did really happen?
I guess I don’t know what is really meant by that question. But I will say that metaphysics and the like extend beyond these truths rather than penetrate to the beginning. Metaphysics is, at the end of the day, an examination of those third-order truths. In metaphysics, we examine the relationship between first and second order truths and how they give rise to third order truths.
Materialism just takes first-order truths as being as deep as we can get as human beings. Even if zeroth-order truths exist, I cannot fathom what they might be.
Worldviews aren’t required to explain everything, although they should be consistent with the data. I just now noticed that you seem to conflate these two:
That’s a big or, Uccisore. All explanations are limited in scope. They are evaluated on what they get right and what they get wrong, not what they say nothing about. You’ve only argued here that evolution can’t, by itself with the present data, explain why brains apprehend truth. And your theistic account of knowledge can, which is a point in its favor and against materialism. All else being equal we should favor the theory with greater explanatory scope; but of course all else is not equal. There are several other areas where we need to compare the two worldviews.
There is no defeater for materialism here, just a favorable point for theism. And who said that materialism entails we only believe things which are necessary for survival? I believe I’ve pointed out to you in other threads that evolution does not necessarily produce only machines whose every function is geared directly to survival.
You win this round but not the match.