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Truthmongering: An Exercise

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Lily Knezevich
Lily Knezevich*
Affiliation:
College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA23185, U.S.A.
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Extract

The Problem of the value of truth came before us – or was it we who came before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks.

– Nietzsche

Arthur Fine, in his defense of the Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA), has argued that any attempt to analyze truth will fail because any such analysis presupposes an untenable essentialism. In particular, he asserts that the anti-realist analysis of truth commits itself to there being an essential property which all true statements possess, qua true statements. It is this commitment which he castigates.

For the concept of truth is the fundamental semantical concept. Its uses, history, logic, and grammar are sufficiently definite to be partially catalogued, at least for a time. But it cannot be “explained” or given an “account of” without circularity. Nor does it require anything of the sort. The concept of truth is open-ended, growing with the growth of science …. Thus there is no projectible sketch now of what truth signifies, nor of what areas of science truth is exempt from - nor will there ever be.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 1989 , pp. 603 - 609
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1989

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Arthur Fine for provoking this research, and for being such a clear and insightful thinker as to make the challenge of disagreeing with him both enjoyable and illuminating. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities through their Summer Seminar program.

I would also like to thank William S. Throop and the audience of the annual meeting of the Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, read on April 1, 1988.

References

2 Fine, Arthur The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism and the Quantum Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986) 149Google Scholar

3 Simon Blackburn, of course, does appeal to a view of discourse as either thick with truth or thin without it. Cf. Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984).

4 Putnam, Hilary Reason, Truth and History (New York: Cambridge University Press 1981) 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Putnam, Hilary ‘Why Reason Can’t be Naturalized,’ Synthese 52 (1982) 3-23CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 This account of the epistemically ideal conditions referred to in the anti-realist characterization of truth is not what Putnam has in mind. He at least appears to suggest that all our current standards may be wrong. Cf. Reason, Truth and History, chapters 6 and 7.

7 Fine, 140

8 It is odd that Fine accepts this requirement on truth, since his own proffered NOA, with its eschewal of any analysis of truth, seems to fail this test. Is he hoisted on his own petard?

9 Fine, 141

10 Ibid.

11 Richard Rorty’s antipathy to anti-realist conceptions of truth stems in a similar way from his rejection of theory. Rorty, however, offers no dear arguments against anti-realism in particular, except to suggest that only natural kinds can be theorized about, and truth is not a natural kind. Cf. The Consequences of. Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982).

12 Carnap, Rudolf Meaning and Necessity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1976), 7-8Google Scholar