A few short clarifications as I read responses to some of my recent postings:
The notion of truth as MANY has nothing to do with consensus notions about
truth. It is not a question of truth-for-one, or one-truth-for-all vs.
truth-for-many. It is a question of one-truth-for-any vs.
many-truths-for-any, where the many truths are all truths about, so far as
it matters for one's current purposes, the same phenomena or issues or
concerns. They are many different ways of seeing, talking about, making
sense of whatever the subject or object of discourse may be (whether we
imagine that subject to be wholly, partly, or not at all constituted by
these discourses). Even if there is one ontological reality (an issue on
which I am agnostic, I tend to think it a meaningless debate), it does not
follow that truth is what is placed in one-to-one correspondence with it;
rather there needs to be, it is better for our human survival and practical
activity, if truths are what are in a many-to-one correspondence with it.
To be dogmatic, there is no one truth about anything interesting.
Asking what is the concrete historical subject for which some discourse has
practical meaning, or which is itself the product of some state of affairs,
is often a useful question, but it can be too narrow if it assume a totally
anthropocentric view. It is not just individual human organisms which are
'subjects' in this sense. The systems-that-know, the systems that do
semiosis, include human organisms both in the category sense and in the
part-whole sense. Human organisms are not subjects if they are taken in
isolation from the larger systems of which we are a part; any labor-based
theory of knowledge implies as much. The system in which knowing and
meaning occur as processes is a system larger than the organism, and a
system organized on and across many scales of organization. It is an
impossible question in general, and usually a difficult one in any concrete
case, to say which levels of organization, in what relationships to one
another, are the subjects of history. From DNA and cells, to organisms and
tools, to families, villages, social ecosystems, online communities and the
technologies that enable them ... and for each of these, just as for the
different Umwelts of different species, there are different truths.
Bohr and Einstein warred, in a friendly way, over the interpretation of
quantum theory for decades. By and large Einstein lost, and while the
dominant view of succeeding generations of those who used their theories
was not as strongly 'multi-realist' (i.e. many-to-one) as Bohr's, it was
far closer to Bohr's than to Einstein's. Einstein greatly wished to
preserve determinism; he loved the aesthetic, and as he saw it also the
moral beauty, of knowing that the universe could only be as it is, that
there was only one possible logically consistent system of principles, and
that all in the universe was consistent with that one Unified Field Theory
(today it's called the Theory of Everything). Bohr felt that human
experience in general, and even our experience of physics and the cosmos,
would always require more than one analysis, no one of which determined the
possibilities of the universe (and as Heisenberg first showed, could not be
applied simultaneously to create a complete and sufficient set of
deterministic principles) ... and the later extensions of this viewpoint,
from quantum indeterminacy to macroscopic chaotic indeterminacy have tended
to suggest that it is not Logic, not what Must Be, but History, what Has
Been, that determines what is and what can be now. All of which makes it
much harder to say what could not be in some possible future.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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