Thursday, December 13, 2012
Truth with a capital T
Does anyone ever defend this idea? I can't think of a time when I've heard someone refer to "truth with a capital T" except to reject the idea. And if that is always the case, if no one ever claims to believe in truth with a capital T, why does anyone bother to reject the idea? What is being rejected?
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i thought that was all those truth guys ever did.
ReplyDeleteyou know, to protect the honor of civilization, reason, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's not so explicit as that.It's the treating of truth as if it's a transcendental ahistorical abstract category i.e. as if it were a platonic form.
ReplyDeleteBut who are the truth guys? Who tries to protect the honor of civilization, etc.? Do I just not pay enough attention to a certain crowd? Or does the crowd not exist?
ReplyDeleteI don't believe in platonic forms, but isn't truth in fact (or in grammar) a transcendental ahistorical abstract category? That is, truth is a category in the sense that multiple truths can exist (i.e. be true) and thereby belong to that category. It is abstract in the sense that it is not concrete: you cannot paint it or saw it in half, etc. It is ahistorical in the sense that there is no danger that 2+2 might not have been 4 after all in the 17th century or the 22nd. And it's transcendental in the sense that it is abstract and ahistorical (I'm not sure what else could be meant by transcendental in this context, but I could just be missing the obvious). Is the problem with over-emphasizing these features of the concept of truth, as if they were metaphysically significant? That is my sense, but, as I say, I can't remember anyone ever making that mistake.
i don't know, i think i've got a recent anti-rorty book around here somewhere, i forget the author. maybe it is in defense of knowledge rather than truth.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the anti-Rorty book, may I ask?
Deletei may be misremembering, as i don't have it in front of me - i think it's boghossian, fear of knowledge?
DeleteA quick glance at Boghossian suggests that I would not agree with him 100%. He seems to be building up to the claim that religious beliefs about where people come from have been proved false by science. As if origin stories were playing the same game as scientific investigations. (And of course people on the other side can get things wrong too, refusing to accept scientific findings for muddled reasons.) But a) it doesn't look as though he's going to explicitly defend "truth with a capital T", and b) he's reacting against the anti-Truth camp. What I'm wondering is what this camp was reacting against or objecting to in the first place. Plato? Christianity? It's surely possible to disagree with those views without rejecting the ordinary idea of truth.
DeleteBoghossian is almost so odd on this as to be quaint. Some years back, one of my best friends published a nice paper which makes a critique of Boghossian that's a kind of mirror image of yours; i.e. Boghossian is charged with attacking the kind of "anti-Truth camp" that upon closer examination consists of unnameable and probably non-existent people.
DeleteProbably there are also several other beliefs that are commonly refuted without ever naming anyone (or at least anyone reputable from the history of philosophy) who has ever seriously defended them. Solipsism comes to mind.
(My friend, by the way, is the only person I've ever met who fully shared Wittgenstein's view of philosophy and philosophical problems before ever reading anything Wittgenstein wrote. As a result, she hardly ever refers to him by name, but her work is significantly more Wittgensteinian than that of many others who do.)
Yes, all the worst mistakes are made by unnameable and probably non-existent people.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to read your friend's paper. Thanks for the link.