Category: Truth
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Is There a ‘No God’ Delusion?
A certain popular writer speaks of a God delusion. This prompts the query whether there might be a 'No God' delusion. Is it perhaps the case that atheism is a delusion? Bruce Charlton, M. D. , returns an affirmative answer in Is Atheism Literally a Delusion? In this post I will try to understand his basic argument and…
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No Beliefs? Then No Truths Either!
Peter Lupu e-mails: A comment to mull over regarding your premise (A) in your recent post about Eliminative Materialism. A. If a proposition is true, then it is possibly such that it is believed by someone. Premise (A) says that in order for a proposition to be true, it is a necessary condition that it…
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Adorno on the No Longer Believable
Theodor Adorno is exasperating but exciting. Although as sloppy as one expects Continental thinkers to be, he is nonetheless a force to be reckoned with, a serious man who is seriously grappling with ultimates at the outer limits of intelligibility. Derrida I dismiss as a bullshitter, indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, as…
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Rorty on Truth: An Argument Refuted
In an earlier Rorty installment I said, among other things, that "He wants to substitute rhetoric for argument but without quite giving up argument. So he ends up giving shoddy arguments . . . ." You think I'm being unfair, don't you? Well, let's see. Here is a passage from Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and…
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Does Deflationism Rule Out Relativism?
This post floats the suggestion that deflationism about truth is inconsistent with relativism about truth. Not that one should be a deflationist. But it would be interesting if deflationism entailed the nonrelativity of truth. There is a sense in which deflationary theories of truth deny the very existence of truth. For what these theories deny…
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Truth Is Absolute! Part Two
Part One is here. Michael Krausz, "Relativism and Beyond" in Relativism, Suffering and Beyond, eds. Bilimoria and Mohanty (Oxford, 1997), pp. 97-98: The classical 'self-refuting' argument against relativism runs roughly along the following lines. If relativism is true then the thesis of relativism itself must be relatively true. It would be contradictory to affirm that…
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Truth is Absolute! Part One
In an earlier piece I argued that one can be both an absolutist about the nature of truth while being a fallibilist about the knowledge of truth. But a reader demands to know why we should accept that truth by its very nature is absolute. One reason is that the doctrine that truth is non-absolute…
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To Oppose Relativism is not to Embrace Dogmatism
There is much popular confusion concerning the topic of relativism. One fallacy I exposed earlier, namely, the mistake of thinking that Einstein's Theory of Relativity implies either moral relativism or relativism about truth. Even more widespread, perhaps, is the notion that one who opposes relativism about truth must be a dogmatist. But there are two distinctions…
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Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism
A correspondent writes: British (Catholic) historian Paul Johnson in his wonderful Modern Times attributes relativism's rise to Einstein! So does Einstein's latest biographer. There are two questions that must be distinguished. The first is whether Einstein's Theory of Relativity entails either moral or cognitive (alethic) relativism. The second question is whether Einstein's revolutionary contributions to…
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Retortion and the Existence of Truth
Anthony Flood informs me that he has uploaded to his site an article I brought to his attention a couple of years ago: Retortion: The Method and Metaphysics of Gaston Isaye. Whether or not you agree with Tony's politics, and I don't, you should agree with me that his site is an ever-expanding repository of valuable…
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On ‘Male Chauvinist’ and ‘Relative Truth’
A reader comments: I'm confused about a claim you make. You say: "Take 'male chauvinist.' As standardly used nowadays, this refers to a male who places an excessively high valuation on his sex vis-a-vis the opposite sex. So a male chauvinist is not a chauvinist, and 'male' functions as as an alienans adjective: it does…
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Nietzsche, Truth, and Power
Nietzsche is culturally important, but philosophically dubious in the extreme. Some of our current cultural woes can be ascribed to the influence of his ideas. Suppose we take a look at Will to Power #534: Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls. The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the…
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A Cantorian Argument Why Possible Worlds Cannot be Maximally Consistent Sets of Propositions
In a recent comment, Peter Lupu bids us construe possible worlds as maximally consistent sets of propositions. If this is right, then the actual world, which is of course one of the possible worlds, is the maximally consistent set of true propositions. But Cantor's Theorem implies that there cannot be a set of all true propositions. Therefore,…