“From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth,
From the laziness that is content with half-truths,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Oh, God of Truth, deliver us.” – author unknown
“The concept factual judgment or judgment with a truth-value and the concept of ethical judgment will be different concepts—such a distinction is there to be made, just as the concept mouse and the concept mammal are different concepts—but the distinctness does not preclude a judgment’s being both a factual and an ethical judgment. Compare the way in which the distinct concepts mouse and mammal will each collect any particular mouse you please, Timmy Willy or Johnny Town or whichever, within their extensions. Ethical judgments could be a subset of factual judgments even if they were an utterly special and essentially contestable subset. In this way, we can have a clear difference between the ethical-as-such and the factual-as-such without any dichotomy between their property provinces. The hope of making good a claim of this sort is the characteristic hope of ethical objectivism or moral cognitivism.” — David Wiggins
“Objectivity calls for putting one’s idiosyncratic predilections and parochial preferences aside in forming one’s beliefs, evaluations and choices. It is a matter of proceeding in line not with one’s inclinations but with the dictates of impartial reason. The universality of reason must be recognized: What is rational for one person to do, to believe, or to value will thereby also of necessity be equally rational for all the rest of us who might find ourselves in the same circumstances. For rationality is inherently “objective:” it does not reconfigure itself to meet the idiosyncratic predilections of particular individuals. To be sure, objectivity will have to take context into account, seeing that different individuals and groups confront very different objective situations. Rationality is universal, but it is circumstantially universal—and objectivity with it. It is a matter of what “any of us” would do in one’s place. [….] The contextuality of good reasons can be reconciled with the universality of rationality itself by taking a hierarchical view of the process through which the absolutistic (and uniform) conception of ideal rationality is thought to bear context differently, on the resolution of concrete cases and particular situations.” — Nicholas Rescher
“The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.” — Michael P. Lynch
“[T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.” — Michael P. Lynch
“[T]he conditions under which a proposition is true are partly determined by the conceptual scheme in which the proposition is expressed. But what makes a proposition true is not its relation to a scheme but whether or not the conditions in question obtain. For a claim to be true (or false), the conditions must be relative to a scheme. Yet the reason that the claim is true is not because it is relative to a scheme (as the truth relativist must hold); it is true because it is the case. [….] A fact, in the human sense, is simply what is the case.” — Michael P. Lynch
“[I]n taking concepts to be flexible and fluid-like, the pluralist is not saying that we are confused about our concepts. Rather, the point is that concepts are not absolutely determinate or closed; they do not have a fixed use in every possible situation. This does not imply, however, that no concepts have determinate uses in all actual situations. Some concepts may be perfectly determinate in actual situations, but not in all possible situations. [….] For the pluralist, concepts are … flexible; they are subject to possible extension in the fact of unforeseen circumstances. Hence, there can be irresolvable disagreements over how to apply any concept. In a sense, concepts are therefore always possibly vague in a nonpejorative sense; they have what Waismann called ‘open texture.’” — Michael P. Lynch
“Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.” — Michael P. Lynch
“Truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have. Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property that makes a proposition good to believe.” — Michael P. Lynch
“All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.” — Michael P. Lynch
“Truth is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs; our ordinary concept of truth is univocal.” — Michael P. Lynch
“Deflationists are right to be skeptical of the thought that any one traditional theory of truth can tell us what all and only true beliefs have in common. At a suitable level of abstraction, understanding what true beliefs are simply involves simply understanding what they do—their role in our cognitive economy. To play this role is to satisfy certain truisms, truisms that display truth’s connection to other concepts. It is this truth-role that gives truth its unity; the features that are constitutive of this role are what true propositions have in common, and simply having those features is what we ordinarily mean by saying that a proposition is true. But not all facts are exhausted by the truisms. One such fact is that there is more than one property that make beliefs true. Truth…is immanent in those other properties of beliefs. In some domains, what makes a belief true is that it corresponds to reality; in others, beliefs are made true by a form of coherence. [….] [Traditional theories of truth] are not best conceived of as theories of truth itself. They are better seen as theories of the properties that make beliefs true—or manifest truth.” — Michael P. Lynch
“A theory of truth should make sense of the following metaphysical principle: Truth is One: There is a single property named by ‘truth’ that all and only true propositions share.” The theory should also be “able to make sense of the intuition that drives pluralism about truth, namely, Truth is Many: there is more than one way to be true.” — Michael P. Lynch
“[T]ruth is a single higher-level property whose instantiations across kinds of propositions are determined by a class of other, numerically distinct properties. [….] Truth is many because different properties may manifest truth in distinct domains of inquiry. In those domains they have the truish features [we find in those folk-truisms enumerated above]. Truth is one because there is a single property so manifested, and ‘truth’ rigidly names that property.” — Michael P. Lynch
“Truth is an immanent functional property that is variably manifested.” — Michael P. Lynch
“We have to come to terms with epistemic realities, which include:
• the diversity in people’s experiences and cognitive situations
• the variation of ‘available data’
• the under-determination of facts by data (all too frequently insufficient)
• the variability of people’s cognitive values (evidential security, simplicity, etc.)
• the variation of cognitive methodology and the epistemic ‘state of the art’
Such factors—and others like them—make for an unavoidable difference in the beliefs, judgments, and evaluations even of otherwise ‘perfectly rational’ people.” — Nicholas Rescher
“[W]e can (quite appropriately) disagree about what it is that is true and what good reasons are at hand, while yet maintaining an (appropriately) absolutistic view of what truth and good reasons are. The ideal nature of actual truth and of actual good reasons that inhere in our (defining) conceptions of inquiry establishes a clear limit to the implications of cognitive relativism. To re-emphasize: a pluralistic contextualism of potential basis-diversity is altogether compatible with an absolutistic commitment to our own basis. One can accept the prospect of alternatives as available to the community at large without seeing more than one of them appropriate for oneself. One can combine a pluralism of possible alternatives with an absolutistic position regarding ideal rationality and a firm and reasoned commitment to the standards intrinsic to one’s own position. We ourselves are bound to see our own (rationally adopted) standards as superior to the available alternatives—and are, presumably, rationally entitled to do so in light of the cognitive values we in actual fact endorse. The crux of the pluralism issue lies in the question of just what it is that one is being pluralistic about.” — Nicholas Rescher
“There is no more evidence that science converges to one final worldview than there is that literature or morality converge to one final worldview.” — Hilary Putnam
“… [The] ‘scientific’ is not coextensive with ‘rational.’ There are many perfectly rational beliefs that cannot be tested ‘scientifically.’ But more than that, … there are whole domains of fact with respect to which present-day science tells us nothing at all, not even that the facts in question exist. These domains are not new or strange. Three of them are (1) the domain of objective values; (2) the domain of freedom; (3) the domain of rationality itself.” — Hilary Putnam
“Heeding the strictures of morality is part and parcel of a rational being’s cultivation of the good. For us rational creatures morality (the due care for the interests of rational beings) is an integral component of reason’s commitment to the enhancement of value. Reason’s commitment to the value of rationality accordingly carries in its wake a commitment to morality. The obligatoriness of morality ultimately roots in an ontological imperative to value realization with respect to self and world that is incumbent on free agents as such. On this ontological perspective, the ultimate basis of moral duty roots in the obligation we have as rational agents (toward ourselves and the world at large) to make the most and best of our opportunities for self-development. Moral obligation ultimately inheres in this ontological obligation to the realization of values in one’s own life.” — Nicholas Rescher
“We learn most of what we know about what makes life worth living, and how to live it well, from non-scientific sources–biography, narrative history, serious journalism, and religious texts [I would add ‘philosophy’], not to mention novels, poetry, drama and the visual arts. For Europeans at least, there is more insight to be got from a single volume by Jane Austen or Gustave Flaubert than a whole shelf of treatises on the social psychology of bourgeois love and marriage.” — John Ziman
“The question of truth and the question of life’s meaning are among the most fundamental questions of moral philosophy. [….] The question of life’s meaning does, as the untheoretical suppose, lead into the question of truth—and conversely.” — David Wiggins
“To affirm that there can be several different systems all giving us, at the same time, varying and yet legitimate ‘true’ metaphysical descriptions of the world does not…necessarily entail that there are many realities, that nothing is absolutely real, or, put less dramatically, that there is no such thing as a single, context neutral description or account of the world, that is, as the world really is. It only means that no metaphysical description of it can be outside every possible conceptual framework, but Reality itself is. Nor does it follow that any assertions about this ’real’ or ‘true’ world beyond all conceptual frameworks, are nonsense. [....] The conceptual frameworks we build in the realm of rational thought are not useless just because they cannot describe Ultimate Reality. Serious examination of, reflection on, these explanatory and interpretive schemes, their differences and overlaps, are crucial to expanding and deepening our understanding of reality, even if these conceptual frameworks (any or all possible combinations and collections of them) cannot bring us the Absolute Truth. If nothing else, they enable us to understand the relativity of conceptual truths and structures, and make us see what Pascal meant when he said that the highest function of reason is to show us the limitations of reason.” — Nandini Iyer
“I think that the idealist “picture” calls our attention to vitally important features of our practice—and what is the point of having “pictures” if we are not interested in seeing how well they represent what we actually think and do? That we do not, in practice, actually construct a unique vision of the world, but only a vast number of versions (not all of them equivalent…) is something that ‘realism’ hides from us.” — Hilary Putnam
Speaking of truth, and for what it’s worth, I’ve come to notice how I turn again and again to three philosophers in particular: Nicholas Rescher, Hilary Putnam, and Michael P. Lynch (especially the last), in an attempt to understand the meaning of (‘absolute’) Truth and (relative) truths. I perhaps should mention one more philosopher who wrote a book that is very much in the spirit of works by the aforementioned philosophers, Lenn E. Goodman’s In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach (Humanity Books/Prometheus, 2001). With regard to religious and philosophical worldviews, I often think of questions of truth from the vantage points provided by both orthodox and non-orthodox Indian philosophies (and, to a lesser extent, several Chinese worldviews, the most prominent being ‘Confucianism’ and Daoism), but three in particular stand apart, at least for me: Advaita Vedānta (in Hinduism), Jainism, and Buddhism. I have not been able to reconcile the different perspectives, arguments, and attitudes to truth among these philosophers and worldviews, but there appears to be significant overlap among them, at least here and there, and in varying degrees of family resemblance (the overlap can be metaphysical, epistemic, psychological, having to do with philosophy of language, ritual praxis, ethical orientation, therapeutic regimen or spiritual exercises, etc.).
The closest I may ever come to coherently connecting the dots scattered about above will be in a piece I’ve been writing over the years about how best to fairly and impartially compare and contrast religious and non-religious worldviews based on a belief that each, in principle, contains truths we can appreciate, even if we may not fully share them or in spite of the fact that they contradict truth-claims found in other worldviews. I am constitutionally averse to worldview claims that add up to a monopoly or open-ended patent on truth. Finally, I’m inclined to believe that there may be something like an elective affinity between types of character and associated dispositional temperament (connected, in turn to a larger social and cultural history and context) and one’s worldview or lifeworld (this being the individual's peculiar or idiosyncratic interpretation and understanding of an ‘official’ worldview), assuming it is freely chosen, as it were; in other words, there is a strong correlation between the kind of person one is, construed in largely moral psychological terms, and the sort of worldview one is drawn to, assuming a period in one’s youth that allowed for (if not encouraged) critical examination of the presuppositions, assumptions, values, and ethics of the religion, philosophy, or way of life (tradition) in which one was raised, in which one was socialized, to which one has grown accustomed to spontaneously relying upon as a moral compass and general guide to worthy living or personal fulfillment.
Thus a particular worldview or lifeworld may fit this person better than that person, it suits her, so to speak. Individuation and self-realization might lead to adopting a different worldview or lifeworld over the course of one’s lifetime, but the kinds of commitment, psychological benefits and values of community or fraternal association that are part and parcel of many worldviews should mean we consider the possible downsides of (perhaps premature or wrongly-motivated) abandonment and conversion (an immensely fraught topic I will not discuss here), including its possible deleterious effects on the values and commitments of others.
References & Further Reading
- Castañeda, Hector-Neri, “Philosophy as Science and as a Worldview,” in Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, eds. The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis? La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989.
- Cottingham, John. On the Meaning of Life. London: Routledge, 2003.
- Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001.
- Goodman, Lenn E. In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books/Prometheus Books, 2001.
- Iyer, Nandini. “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” in Knut A. Jacobsen, ed. Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerald James Larson. Leiden: Brill, 2005: 99-127.
- Kupperman, Joel. Value … And What Follows. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Lloyd, G.E.R. Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity & Diversity of the Human Mind. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2007.
- Lynch, Michael P. Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
- Lynch, Michael P. True to Life: Why Truth Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
- Lynch, Michael P. Truth as One and Many. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
- Matilal, Bimal Krishna. The Central Philosophy of Jainism: Anekāntavāda. Ahmedabad: L.D. Institute of Indology, 1981.
- Mou, Bo, ed. Two Roads to Wisdom? Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2001.
- Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1991.
- Norton, David. Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
- Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
- Putnam, Hilary (James Conant, ed.). Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
- Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
- Rescher, Nicholas. Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1993.
- Rescher, Nicholas. The Validity of Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
- Rescher, Nicholas. Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997.
- Rescher, Nicholas. Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000.
- Rescher, Nicholas. Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.
- Wiggins, David. Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
- Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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