Inferring and Explaining

3 had been making out—smooching—during the half-hour absence. Connie’s no lawyer, no rocket scientist, nor even a college student yet, but she’s no fool either. She’s smart enough to read the signs, diagnose what’s going on, and lay out a persuasive case. Connie’s skills are precisely the skills that all intelligent human beings possess, and these are the skills we will be building on in this book. Truth and the Contemporary Academic Culture Te scholarly community sends us lots of sig- nals that we don’t value truth or at least that we should not value it. A lot of serious scholarship in philosophy, the history of science, sociology, literary criticism, and more tells academics like me that all truth and knowledge is relative to who we are—our race, sex, age, ethnicity, and historical circumstances—and that there’s no such thing as the “absolute” (real?) truth. Con- sider the thoughts of Richard Rorty: We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the efects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist indepen- dently of the humanmind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. Te world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. Te world in its own—unaided by the describing activities of human beings—cannot . . . Te world does not speak. Only we do. Te world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a lan- guage, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. 2 I believe that Rorty is on to something very important here but that his insight is seriously mischaracterized—that he is, if you will, saying something that is both true and false at the same time. Connie is a human being with a brain, cen- tral nervous system, and sense organs. She sees things—the lipstick stain, its color, and the color of her own lipstick. She hears things—her boy- friend’s lame excuse. And she forms a theory about what’s been going on. Her theory is, to use some loaded language, “in her head,” and the facts that make her theory true or false “are out there.” How do we link up the theory (what Rorty calls the “mental states,” “sentences,” or “descriptions of the world”) with the facts? Tings would be bad enough if all we had to do is propose an account of how brains and sense organs can allow us to see and hear things. Phi- losophers have beenworking on these problems for 2,500 years, and I have to report to you that there’s still a lot of work to do. But there are other serious problems as well. All Connie’s neural occurrences give rise to beliefs—“your stain is red, but my lipstick is baby pink.” Some of her beliefs are true, but others are false. Connie’s brain and sense organs seem to play a central role in helping her distin- guish the true beliefs from those that are false. Te story so far is one of nature. But Rorty’s ValuIng truth