Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Truth

  • A Question About Alethic Relativism

    Vlastimil V. inquires: When someone says that (R) truth is relative, a) … what's the most clear way to understand R? I suppose he means something else than that people disagree, also something else than that truth is seldom certain. b) … what's the most clear way to criticize R? BV:  (R) is a substantive…

  • The Movies Inside Our Heads

    Scott Adams: As I often tell you, we all live in our own movies inside our heads. Humans did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough. Adams is telling us either directly or…

  • Lies, Truth, Narratives, and Hillary

    Hillary Clinton we now know to be a liar beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt.  A liar is one who habitually makes false statements with the intention of deceiving her audience.  This definition, however, presupposes the distinction between true and false statements.  Aphoristically:  no truth, no lies.  Hillary cannot be a liar unless there…

  • Truthmaker Maximalism and The Misery of Philosophy

    According to one of my aphorisms,  Philosophy is magnificent in aspiration but miserable in execution. Part of what makes philosophy a miserable subject is that none of its conclusions is conclusive.  Herewith, a little example.  But first some background. A truthmaker maximalist is one who maintains that every truth has a truthmaker.  So it doesn't…

  • Correspondence and Truthmaking

    I posed the following problem: A. Some sentences are true in virtue of their correspondence with extralinguistic reality. B. If so, then reality must have a sentence-like structure. C. Reality does not have a sentence-like structure. London Ed solves it by rejecting (A).  But let me first say why I accept (A). Consider a true…

  • The Truthmakers of Truths About Truths

    Josh writes, I would be interested to see how you respond to the following dilemma (from Peter Geach, "Truth and God," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, [1982]: 84). Say proposition P1 is true because it corresponds to fact F. Does the proposition "Proposition P1 is true" (call it proposition P2) have a truthmaker? It seems…

  • Does Reality Have a Sentence-Like Structure?

     Our problem may be formulated as an antilogism, or aporetic triad: A. Some sentences are true in virtue of their correspondence with extralinguistic reality. B. If so, then reality must have a sentence-like structure. C. Reality does not have a sentence-like structure. This trio of propositions is inconsistent. And yet one can make a plausible…

  • Obama the Brazen Liar

    Here: “We do not pay ransom. We didn’t here, and we won’t in the future.” Barack Obama might like to have that one back this morning, to stick a pin in the moving finger that writes. But the finger done writ, and it won’t come back to cancel a single line of the president’s fatuous…

  • Working Draft: The Case Against Facts

    Comments appreciated if you are en rapport with the subject matter.   The Case Against Facts   Arianna Betti, Against Facts, The MIT Press, 2015, pp. 296 + xxvii   If Buridan's contribution to the bestiarum philosophorum was the ass, and David Armstrong's the ostrich, Arianna Betti's is the hedgehog bristling with spines. The hedgehog…

  • John D. Caputo’s Truth Problem

    As I said last Friday, the last time I read anything by John D. Caputo was at the end of the '70s.  His articles and books  struck me as worth reading at the time.  His recent work, however, appears to be incompetent rubbish.  One could say of the latter-day Caputo what Searle of Derrida: he…

  • Fallibilism and Objectivism

    It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason in us, with the question whether there is truth.  A fallibilist is not a truth-denier.  One can be — it is logically consistent to be — both a fallibilist and an upholder of (objective) truth.  What's more, one…

  • Objective Truth as a Condition of Intelligibility

    John D. Caputo has recently made the fashionably outlandish claim that "what modern philosophers call 'pure' reason . . . is a white male Euro-Christian construction."  Making this claim, Caputo purports to be saying  something that is true.  Moreover, his making of the claim in public is presumably for the purpose of convincing us that…

  • A Leftish Defense of the Objectivity of Truth

    Here in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  You know you are dealing with a lefty when he gets off the phrase, "climate-change denial."  Memo to Peter Lupu: I would like to hear your opinion of this article.  You might subject it to a Facebook fisking.  It should turn your crank, especially the benighted comments.  I…

  • 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…

  • The Decline of the Culture of Free Discussion and Debate

    Professor of Government Charles Kesler in the Spring 2015 Claremont Review of Books laments that "The culture of free discussion and debate is declining, and with it liberty, on and off the campus."  He is right to be offended by the new culture of 'trigger warnings' and 'microaggressions,' but I wonder if his analysis is…