I do care what the truth is, but the wish is father to the thought.
No, you don't care - if you did wishful thinking wouldn't be a good enough reason to believe something. If you cared you'd want evidence.
But then most of the things we care about are beyond any rational (and certainly beyond any empirical) criterium of truth.
What constitutes "most of the things we care about"?
Morality, aesthetics, our concern with the truth of what we say,...
I fail to see how any of these are beyond rationality or empirical analysis.
The consequences of systems of morality and actions can be observed and compared against eachother.
Even such a bland consequentionalism requires a standard by which one measures morality. You may put forward any criterion you want ('utility' being a favourite, but if you're hedonistically inclined 'pleasure' may be a nice alternative), but there's no way to establish the desirability of such a golden standard, beyond, perhaps, pointing to convention: 'I and most other reasonable men just happen to feel that we should organize our actions so as to bring about the maximum amount of X'. (And this is not what we say when we judge, for example, murder to be wrong. What we mean is: 'It's a fact that murder is wrong.')
Beauty is not reducible to certain physical properties and their relationship to one another. And even if it was that would not necessarily adequately explain what happens when we're moved by a painting, a poem,... More importantly there's the difference between explaining something and justifying it. There's no rational justification for the aesthetical experience.
a) 'Constantly lying' isn't what I was talking about, but even here the depressing limits of consequentionalist morality should be glaringly obvious.
b) More importantly, if you were able to discover as an absolute truth that every empirical statement you've ever thought to be the case and every impression you've ever had were not corresponding to a state of affairs in 'reality' and that none of the future ones you'll have ever would, that wouldn't have a single implication for your actual life. You would still be capable to realize all your ambitions, to do all the things you value* ,... without ever having to fear the perfect conceit dropping down around you. Yet you wouldn't want to sign up for that life, now would you?
*: And while I'm at it: how do I rationally determine what things I should attempt to bring about? What things are worthy of my attention?
Poll
