Befriending Truth Anthology

In hopes of restarting this blog I'm posting the abstract of my contribution to Jeff Dudiak's anthology on Truth.


"Not Giving Up on Truth"

Philosophy from its beginnings has been a search for truth. It is motivated by a sense that what is taken by society at large to be the truth is not the real truth. And a belief that finding the real truth and announcing it is a radical act that liberates first the individual and finally the world. Lately, however, some have challenged the very notion of truth. In the paper I argue for a recovery of the idea of truth.

We live in a postmodern age and what this means is that there is a consensus that the intellectual synthesis that was the Enlightenment is no longer acceptable and must be replaced. But the consensus does not go much farther than that. The Enlightenment is a complex phenomenon and the debate does not become substantive and interesting until we have identified which elements of the complex we intend to reject and what we intend to offer in their place. The Enlightenment variously stood for many things: laissez faire capitalism, democracy, human rights, the scientific method, individualism, mass education, free speech, cosmopolitanism and progress. Central to all of these is perhaps the belief that truth is to be found by overthrowing tradition and relying on a combination of human reason and careful objective observation. In the 20th century faith that the application of the scientific method to society will yield nothing but progress and justice for all was shaken by war, colonialism and economic depression on a global scale. The vast majority of the world’s poor and powerless remained so and dreams of inevitable progress through reason began to seem at least somewhat hollow if not cynically manipulative. So the most radical postmodern response is to reject the most central notion of the Enlightenment: truth. Philosophically there is a parallel development that pointed to the same result. At the beginning of the modern age Descartes posed the problem of skepticism in a particularly acute form. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries philosophers struggled to exorcise Descartes’ evil demon without success. By the 20th century a weariness with skepticism was leading some to reject the elusive goal of coming to know the objective truth about the world.


But is truth really the problem or is the wholesale rejection of objective truth too radical? The question of truth needs to be divided into specific problems that should each be examined in turn. First there are technical issues. Truth in its ordinary common sense meaning is some sort of correspondence between the world and what we say about it. The sentence “the cat is on the mat” is true if and only if in the real world the mat is the place where the cat is at. This seems plain enough but there are many true sentences where it is hard to identify some fact out there in the world that makes them true. For example, it is true that there are no bananas on the Moon but what exactly does the fact look like that makes this true? Second, how facts make sentences true looks rather mysterious up close. John Locke held that our thoughts were like pictures in the head and that truth was a matching up of these pictures with the world outside our heads. But serious thinking about the nature of thinking makes it look less and less like pictures in the head. Third, the inability of philosophers to agree on any solution to the problem of skepticism seemed to put the world out of reach. If we do not really have access to the world, then how could we ever compare our sentences or our thoughts to see if they really correspond with the world? Fourth, people began to notice how the powerful used their power to project a very self-serving view of what was true and to impose it on the public as the official version of the truth. Looked at in this way, the “truth” begins to seem like a notion designed to protect the privileges of the powerful. Finally, there is quantum mechanics. The investigation of the physical world on the smallest scale began to reveal a deep strangeness about the world in which the objectivity of the physical world begins to look like an illusion.

Can and should the simple notion of truth as correspondence with reality be saved? It can and should. Since the problems with truth are multiple it makes sense that the solution should be complex. There are four main developments within philosophy which point the way. First, we should be fallibilists. Descartes started the modern period with his demand that beliefs be absolutely certain to count as knowledge. This has proven an unrealistic demand and his gambit should be rejected. We do not have to possess certainty in order to know the truth. Second, we should be contextualists. Justification for beliefs comes in varying strengths. How strongly a particular belief must be justified to count as knowledge ought to vary according to context. Third, accept a modest pragmatism. Radical pragmatists went along with the rejection of truth but more moderate pragmatism goes less far. It accepts that concepts are mostly human creations and notes that which concepts we use is up to us. It then recommends that conceptual choice cannot be guided by truth, for that makes no literal sense, but should instead be guided by human values. Finally, we should be metaphysical pluralists. One of the dominating visions of the Enlightenment has been the quest for a theory of everything. Underneath the blooming buzzing confusion of the world as we know it lies, they believed, a very simple world with only a few kinds of things operating according to a few fixed laws. This dream was an illusion. We should accept the fact that the world is so complex that there is in fact no one way the world really is. Instead we must accept that there are many ways the world is and that each way represents an independent truth not reducible to any of the other ways.