Just wanted to say that I do view 'truth' as a species of
meaning, and a rather minor one at that. I do not find myself
unable to profit from experience as a result of what is in many
respects not only a useful belief, but one that is an integral
part of a careful semantic analysis of the resources I use to
make meaning, particularly the English language. Truth does not
need to be 'reduced' to meaning; it's an aspect of meaning. [As
to whether it is _only_ an aspect of meaning, see follow-up
post.]
I sometimes think modern philosophers' obsession with 'truth'
amounts to a kind of cult. It was a strange turn in European
philosophy that led to elevating it into some sort of primary
status, perhaps a consequence of the rejection of metaphysics
(for which 'being' was primary), but still with the desire to
retain the structure of the philosphers' discourse which had to
have some replacement for its 'center' or 'first principle'. The
modernist cult of 'science' surely played a big part as well, and
I'm one of those who believes _that_ cult was the direct
functional successor to Christianity for most of the former's
members (these cults were not originally opposed to one another,
but complementary, allowing a painless transition).
I'll agree with Gary insofar as I think that no principle ought
to claim or usefully can claim a privileged role of 'first
principle', and that we ought not to try to reduce all useful
perspectives to any One. But I wouldn't even count 'truth' among
the candidates, or even as one among equals of such 'first
principles'. I would count Meaning among them, with truth
judgments just one of the many kinds of meanings we make.
I don't happen to be a 'realist', but I don't really see that
even realists need to be as concerned with 'truth' as many of
them have become. Phenomenology does quite well with core notions
like 'experiencing' and 'bodying', and can be quite practically
realistic without a correspondence theory, or even a notion of
'representation' to give 'truth' purchase on the real-by-
experience. Indeed most theories of correspondence or
representation have proven untenable (philosophers these days
like to say 'incoherent') in practice and detail, and since
'truth' is semantically, and in most philosophers' views also, an
attribute of propositions (i.e. of signs), then without such a
link to 'reality' that's all 'truth' is: something we can say
about propositions that it is sometimes useful to say about them.
(And there is no universal characterization of all the possible
circumstances in which it is useful to say a proposition is true;
it's a class with open extension and no exhaustive intension. As
is more or less the case for all sign use.)
I am currently systematically exploring all the things one can
say about propositions, as part of an analysis of the semantics
of evaluative meaning. Constructions of warrantability and
probability form one of about a half dozen basic general classes
of meanings of this kind, and truth 'sensu stricto' is one minor
variant within this large class.
It's perhaps also worth saying that meaning-centered theories do
not have to be conventionalist ones. Readers of several of my
recent posts will be aware that I'm quite skeptical that
communities share conventions in any but the most abstract sense.
It's surely also awfully 'optimistic' of truth-realists to hope
that what we each learn from hard experience about what it's not
useful to believe in this life will be the same in detail for
very many of us. And as to the appeal to power, conflicts of
every sort, not just over 'truth', are ultimately resolvable in
no other way where people's experience, and interests, are
genuinely different.
But we may choose not to resolve the conflict, to just live with
it, not to insist that if we are right others must therefore be
wrong (surely a pernicious view in history, and hardly a
necessary one in human experience), or that our truth must be
everyone else's as well. Or we may resolve it by appeal to forms
of power other than violence and pain. We can bribe people with
rewards. We can win games of rhetoric stacked in our favor. We
can try to limit other people's experience so that it agrees more
with our own. We can pretend that we are making an objective
appeal to experience -- but we cannot do that so long as
experience remains fundamentally interactive, and our differences
fundamentally important. JAY.
BTW, Hobbes and many people of his day believed that it was the
scientific regimen for establishing truth by observation and
experiment that must inevitably lead to perpetual conflict and
anarchy. Only divine revelation and pure axiomatic deduction
could save us from the scourge of schism. In a world of
difference, painless routes to agreement are always being sought
by those with the most to lose.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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