Social Domains of Truth: Science, Politics, Art, and Religion 9781032378039, 9781032378084, 9781003342021

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations and Citations
1 Introduction: Truth Is Not a Minted Coin
1.1 On the Very Idea of Truth
1.2 Kinds and Domains of Truth
1.3 Holistic Alethic Pluralism
2 Propositional Truth: Facts and Propositions
2.1 Facts and States of Affairs
2.2 Beliefs and Propositions
2.3 Decontextualized Disclosure
3 Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity
3.1 Knowledge and Propositions
3.2 Truth of Propositions
3.3 Propositional Truth and Objective Knowledge
4 Alethic Pluralism
4.1 Functionalism: Michael Lynch
4.2 Practical Pluralism
4.3 Social Domains of Truth
5 Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification
5.1 Alston’s Minimal Alethic Realism
5.2 Putnam’s Internal Realism
5.3 Post-anti/realism
6 Truth as a Whole and Authentication
6.1 Isomorphism, Fidelity, and Disclosure
6.2 Kinds and Types of Truth
6.3 Bearing Witness to Truth
6.4 Modes of Authentication
7 Truth and Science
7.1 Science as a Social Domain
7.2 Scientific Realism and Theoretical Truth
7.3 Science in Society
8 Truth and Politics
8.1 Hannah Arendt: Speaking Truth to Power
8.2 Michel Foucault: Linking Power to Truth
8.3 Political Truth
9 Truth in Art and Religion
9.1 Artistic Truth
9.2 Art and Politics
9.3 Religious Truth
9.4 Religion and Science
10 Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom
10.1 Art, Religion, and Philosophy
10.2 Truth and Historicity
10.3 Social Critique and Practical Wisdom
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Social Domains of Truth

Truth is in trouble. In response, this book presents a new conception of truth. It recognizes that prominent philosophers have questioned whether the idea of truth is important. Some have asked why we even need it. Their questions reinforce broader trends in Western society, where many wonder whether or why we should pursue truth. Indeed, some pundits say we have become a “post-truth” society. Yet there are good reasons not to embrace the cultural Zeitgeist or go with the philosophical flow, but to regard truth as a substantive and socially significant idea. This book explains why. First it argues that propositional truth is only one kind of truth—an important kind, but not all-important. Then it shows how propositional truth belongs to the more comprehensive process of truth as a whole. This process is a dynamic correlation between human fidelity to societal principles and a life-giving disclosure of society. The correlation comes to expression in distinct social domains of truth, where either propositional or nonpropositional truth is primary. The final chapters lay out five such domains: science, politics, art, religion, and philosophy. Anyone who cares about the future of truth in society will want to read this pathbreaking book. Lambert Zuidervaart is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the Institute for Christian Studies and at the University of Toronto. He is the author of 11 books, including Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School (MIT Press, 2017), Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture (Cambridge UP, 2011), and Social Philosophy after Adorno (Cambridge UP, 2007).  He has contributed to The Routledge Handbook of the Frankfurt School (2018) and The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015) and to journals like the European Journal of Philosophy, Telos, and Philosophy and Social Criticism.

Social Domains of Truth Science, Politics, Art, and Religion Lambert Zuidervaart

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Lambert Zuidervaart The right of Lambert Zuidervaart to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-37803-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-37808-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34202-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In memory of Hendrik Hart (1935–2021)

Contents

Prefaceix Abbreviations and Citationsxiv   1 Introduction: Truth Is Not a Minted Coin 1.1  On the Very Idea of Truth  1 1.2  Kinds and Domains of Truth  9 1.3  Holistic Alethic Pluralism  17

1

  2 Propositional Truth: Facts and Propositions 2.1  Facts and States of Affairs  27 2.2  Beliefs and Propositions  30 2.3 Decontextualized Disclosure 40

26

  3 Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity 3.1  Knowledge and Propositions  57 3.2  Truth of Propositions  63 3.3  Propositional Truth and Objective Knowledge  67

57

  4 Alethic Pluralism 4.1  Functionalism: Michael Lynch  74 4.2 Practical Pluralism 78 4.3  Social Domains of Truth  89

74

  5 Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification 5.1  Alston’s Minimal Alethic Realism  98 5.2  Putnam’s Internal Realism  105 5.3 Post-anti/realism 114

97

  6 Truth as a Whole and Authentication 6.1  Isomorphism, Fidelity, and Disclosure  122 6.2  Kinds and Types of Truth  132

122

viii  Contents 6.3  Bearing Witness to Truth  138 6.4  Modes of Authentication  144   7 Truth and Science 7.1  Science as a Social Domain  158 7.2  Scientific Realism and Theoretical Truth  168 7.3  Science in Society  184

157

  8 Truth and Politics 8.1  Hannah Arendt: Speaking Truth to Power  205 8.2  Michel Foucault: Linking Power to Truth  210 8.3 Political Truth 220

205

  9 Truth in Art and Religion 9.1 Artistic Truth 232 9.2  Art and Politics  240 9.3 Religious Truth 246 9.4  Religion and Science  258

231

10 Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom 10.1  Art, Religion, and Philosophy  269 10.2  Truth and Historicity  275 10.3  Social Critique and Practical Wisdom  286

268

Bibliography302 Index317

Preface

This book arises from work on a previous volume titled Artistic Truth. There, to articulate an understanding of artistic truth as nonpropositional, I  pointed toward a general conception of truth that could help make sense of both propositional and nonpropositional truth. Not long after Artistic Truth appeared in 2004, I  began to sketch that conception’s contours in various lectures, papers, and publications, including the books Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation (2016) and Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School (2017). As those books demonstrate, the primary philosophical sources for my concerns about truth lie in two interdisciplinary traditions: reformational philosophy and Critical Theory. Reformational philosophy emerged in the early twentieth century among Dutch Calvinists inspired by the social vision of Abraham Kuyper. As a religious, political, and intellectual leader, Kuyper urged his colleagues and followers to articulate their social vision in all areas of life and across the entire range of academic disciplines. This led to the formation of a major political party (subsequently merged into the Christian Democratic Appeal [CDA]), the founding of a new university (the Vrije Universiteit, now called the VU Amsterdam), and the establishment of an independent Protestant school system. All of these have played significant roles in Dutch society. Teaching at the VU Amsterdam for nearly 40 years, philosopher Dirk Vollenhoven and legal theorist Herman Dooyeweerd translated Kuyper’s vision into a comprehensive philosophy commonly called “reformational.” Dutch immigrants brought this philosophy to North America after the Second World War. It has received institutional embodiment at Toronto’s Institute for Christian Studies (ICS)—a graduate school for interdisciplinary philosophy founded in 1967—and it has attracted practitioners and dialogue partners at many other schools around the world. As a graduate student at ICS in the early 1970s and later a faculty member there, I am deeply indebted to the philosophical contributions of Vollenhoven, Dooyeweerd, and their colleagues and students. Three insights from reformational philosophy have special resonance for my conception of truth: first, that theoretical thought has an important

x  Preface place in human life, but it is not decisive in our meeting the requirements of truth; second, that truth is multidimensional, such that propositional truth is both distinctive and interdependent with other sorts of truth; third, that how one stands with regard to truth is crucial both for one’s conception of truth and for one’s attempts to do what truth requires. Taken together, these insights point toward a holistic pluralism about truth that takes a radical stance on the social significance of thinking about truth. The comprehensive conception proposed in this book has a similar holistic, pluralist, and socially engaged character. At first glance, reformational philosophy and Critical Theory might seem like an odd pairing. Whereas reformational thought arose from a revival movement within Dutch Calvinism, the Critical Theory associated with the Frankfurt School has roots in German Marxism. One cannot ignore tensions and incompatibilities between these two traditions. Yet both undertake a thoroughgoing critique of Western society, and both turn this critique upon philosophy itself. Moreover, both traditions regard the idea of truth as central to such critique. Beyond these obvious points of contact, Critical Theorists have articulated three insights that strongly inform my conception of truth: first, that truth theory can and should contribute to human liberation (Max Horkheimer); second, that lending a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth (Theodor Adorno); and third, that propositional truth, being intimately connected with discursive justification, points toward a genuinely democratic society (Jürgen Habermas). Hence, the project of thinking about truth is not politically neutral. It can, and it should, contribute to the transformation of society. Such transformation is a central motivation for my own project. I do not discuss these sources at length in the current book. Rather, I draw on them as I respond to central issues in contemporary truth theories and lay out my own holistic alethic pluralism. Nor do I undertake the detailed interpretation of writings by other philosophers that characterizes the books already mentioned. Instead, I aim to spell out my own conception in sufficient detail to enable others, if they wish, to compare it with major contributions to truth theory since 1900. Accordingly, when this book discusses the positions of other philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Arendt, Alston, and Putnam, it does not pretend to do justice to their richly textured contributions. Yet I do hope to have avoided egregious errors when summarizing their positions and responding to them. Contributions to truth theory by professional philosophers can be rather technical and not readily accessible to nonspecialists. Truth theorists experience a constant pull toward increasingly refined analyses of ever more narrowly circumscribed problems. Consequently, if one does not take up such technical matters, one can appear to lack either interest or expertise. If one does address them, however, one risks ignoring the larger picture and losing a broader audience. Accordingly, I’ve

Preface  xi had to make strategic decisions about the level and focus of this book’s approach. Because I am most concerned to lay out a general conception within which both propositional and nonpropositional truth can make sense, and to do this in an accessible manner, I have decided not to take up technical debates in the truth-theoretical literature. Although I do not ignore these debates, this book only occasionally suggests how I would respond to them if I were writing a more technical work. Yet the book is hardly an exercise in “philosophy for dummies.” It employs its own technical terminology; it views familiar topics from unfamiliar angles; and it introduces themes other truth theorists might find puzzling or irrelevant. Such complications are unavoidable in a discipline whose history is tangled and whose primary practitioners today are professional academics. I make no apologies in this regard. Yet I do try to explain what my technical terms mean and show why they are needed. Also, when I translate the contributions of other thinkers into my own vocabulary, I aim to show respect for the integrity of their positions, even when I do not address the details of their arguments. I began writing this book during my years on the graduate faculties of ICS and the University of Toronto (2002–2016). This unusual opportunity to teach graduate students—and only graduate students—from two different schools allowed me to offer seminars every year that fed into my research, which, in turn, directly supported my teaching. I regularly led an annual ICS seminar on reformational philosophy, for example, that took up major figures in both analytic and continental philosophy. And, thanks to ICS faculty colleagues who supported my ongoing research, we co-taught two truth-relevant interdisciplinary seminars in 2009 and 2010, one on contemporary conceptions of truth and the other on Western alethic traditions from Parmenides to Hegel. All three of these ICS seminars proved enormously helpful for uncovering the truth-theoretical implications of reformational philosophy. My other seminars, cross-listed at the University of Toronto, were equally beneficial, including courses on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, and Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, and especially one titled “Theories of Truth.” Offered in 2007 and 2014, Theories of Truth studied representative thinkers and writings in both analytic and continental philosophy. It formed a lively laboratory where the students and I could explore and test my emerging conception of truth. I am most grateful to my colleagues and students in Toronto for the encouragement and insights they have given this admittedly ambitious project. Two participants in the Theories of Truth seminar have taken a special interest in this project. Joshua Harris has given me astute comments on nearly every chapter. And Dean Dettloff has organized an instructive blog symposium on my book Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation and subsequently conducted three interviews about my work, which

xii  Preface now appear in the book Shattering Silos: Reimagining Knowledge, Politics, and Social Critique (2022). Another former ICS student, Dr. Joe Kirby, has prepared the index for the current volume. I have also received helpful comments on various chapters from Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, Johannes Corrodi Katzenstein, Matthew Beaverson, Peter Enneson, Rebekah Smick, and Tricia Van Dyk. Peter, together with his coeditors Michael DeMoor, Matthew Klaassen, and Héctor Acero Ferrer, also produced a lovely Festschrift titled Seeking Stillness (2021) that contains a number of perceptive essays on holistic alethic pluralism by colleagues and former graduate students. I  am deeply thankful for all of these expressions of interest and support. I also have enjoyed numerous opportunities to share hunches and findings in other academic settings. Parts of chapter 1 previously appeared under the title “Holistic Alethic Pluralism” in the journal Philosophia Reformata, published by Brill, and received perceptive comments from René van Woudenberg. Many other individual scholars, more than I can name here, have offered fruitful responses on various occasions. The aforementioned books acknowledge event organizers and paper commentators through 2014. Let me simply add to those acknowledgments colleagues who have led such events since then: Ruth Groenhout, who arranged for me to become a Visiting Scholar at Calvin University and to present a draft of this book’s introduction to Calvin’s Philosophy Colloquium; Christopher Latiolais, Elizabeth Millán, and Andrew Spear, who invited me to speak about my research at Kalamazoo College, DePaul University, and Grand Valley State University, respectively; Johannes Corrodi Katzenstein, who sponsored my giving three lectures on truth at the University of Zurich in Switzerland; Iain Macdonald, Henry Pickford, and Peter Gordon and Max Pensky, who invited me to present papers on Adorno’s idea of truth at the University of Montreal, Duke University, and Harvard University, respectively; and Gerrit Glas, who asked me to speak about alethic holism and propositional truth at the VU Amsterdam. Such occasions have continually encouraged my work on the idea of truth. To all of you, let me simply say, Thank you! More than any other scholar, the late Hendrik Hart inspired this work and pointed it in fruitful directions. The first faculty member hired when ICS opened in 1967, and my predecessor there in systematic philosophy, Henk worked on a new understanding of knowledge and truth throughout his career. Henk’s exciting graduate seminars in the early 1970s inspired me to take up a similar project; his thorough and perceptive comments on my writings since then both guided and sharpened my reflections. Henk was more than an inspiring teacher and colleague, however. He was a dear friend who accompanied Joyce and me at every stage of our

Preface  xiii married lives. We celebrated together; we mourned together; we walked together through the valley of the shadow of death. All along the way, Henk showed us how to live in the hopeful spirit of truth. He was a true philosopher. A former student could ask for no better friend. Gratefully I offer this book in memory of Hendrik Hart, a spirited lover of truth, my teacher, colleague, and friend.

Abbreviations and Citations

Citations for works listed in both English and German give pagination first in the English translation and then in the German original, thus: AT 247/367. I cite existing English translations where possible and silently emend them when necessary. Dates in parentheses immediately after titles that first appeared in German or French or that are in English-language collections indicate when the originals were first published. Complete details appear in the bibliography. A G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols., 1974, 1975/Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vols. 13–15, 1970. AT Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, 1997/Ästhetische Theorie, 2nd ed., 1972. CT Wolfgang Künne, Conceptions of Truth, 2003. FR Michael Beaney, ed., The Frege Reader, 1997. LPR G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 2007. MT Douglas Edwards, The Metaphysics of Truth, 2018. ND Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966, 1967), trans. E. B. Ashton, 1973. NT Michael P. Lynch, ed., The Nature of Truth, 2001. OHPS Paul Humphreys, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science, 2016. P/K Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon, 1980. PLA Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (1918). RCT William P. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth, 1996. RTH Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, 1981. SI Bas C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image, 1980. SR Stathis Psillos, Scientific Realism, 1999. TC Michael P. Lynch, Truth in Context, 1998. TCT Richard Campbell, The Concept of Truth, 2011. TE José Medina and David Wood, eds., Truth: Engagements across Philosophical Traditions, 2005.

Abbreviations and Citations  xv TH TOM TP TWM

Richard Campbell, Truth and Historicity, 1992. Michael P. Lynch, Truth as One and Many, 2009. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” (1967). Stephen Schiffer, The Things We Mean, 2003.

1 Introduction Truth Is Not a Minted Coin

Truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed ready-made. —G. W. F. Hegel

Truth is in trouble. Prominent contemporary philosophers have questioned whether the idea of truth is important. They doubt that it deserves the emphasis Western philosophy has given it, and they wonder why it should play a central role in intellectual endeavors. Some have asked whether we even need it. Their questions both reflect and reinforce broader trends in Western society, where many people wonder whether it is either possible or necessary to pursue truth. “That’s just your opinion” waits as a ready response to anyone who claims to know or speak the truth. Or, when someone challenges a truth claim, a defensive “That’s my truth” quickly gets trotted out. Moreover, surprisingly many people think “truthiness”—the appearance of truth, not necessarily its substance—is all one can hope for, and truthiness, not truth, is all one needs to achieve. Indeed, according to some pundits, we have become a “post-truth” society, one where feelings trump facts in public affairs.1 So, if you consider truth to be a substantive and socially significant idea, as I do, you face formidable opposition in both the gilded halls of professional philosophy and the more ramshackle arena of public opinion.

1.1  On the Very Idea of Truth Yet there are many reasons why, when it comes to truth, one should not simply embrace the cultural Zeitgeist or go with the philosophical flow, reasons why, instead, one should continue to regard truth as a substantive and socially significant idea. These reasons are historical, societal, academic, and discipline-specific. First, historically, the idea of truth has been a primary orienting principle in Western culture since ancient times. The pursuit of truth has been among the highest aspirations for intellectual leaders; the exposure of falsehood, one of their chief tasks. Truth also is a central theme in DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021-1

2  Introduction Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three religious traditions that have so pervasively shaped Western societies and continue to influence cultures around the world. Simply to give up on a robust idea of truth would be to turn one’s philosophical back on this historical legacy, thereby ignoring philosophy’s own historically shaped self-understanding as a rigorous endeavor to make sense of the world in which we live. Second, regardless of what some philosophers say and what many nonphilosophers seem to think, it would not be easy to give up the idea of truth in the institutions of contemporary society. Despite a cultural climate of doubt concerning truth, and amid widespread despair about the effectiveness and legitimacy of social institutions, people still act inside these as if truth is a viable and important idea. We expect our friends and colleagues to be truthful, and we take offense when they are not. We continue to hold journalists to standards of correctness and accuracy, and we consider them accountable when they deliberately fabricate their reports and knowingly misrepresent what has happened. In our courts of law, we still ask witnesses to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and we penalize those who evidently commit perjury. We do not always just shrug and smile when politicians and government officials dish out what philosopher Harry Frankfurt has memorably labeled “bullshit.”2 In all of these settings—in friendships, the workplace, journalism, law, and politics—and in many others besides, the idea of truth provides a normative background for contemporary social institutions, and people continue to act accordingly, often in conflict with their overt opinions about truth. Third, in the academic world, the idea of truth sets the stage for fundamental debates about why scholars do their work and whether their work is worth doing. If finding truth is not the point of scholarly inquiry, then what is, and why would that be worth pursuing? Similarly, if truth is not a viable and important idea within the academy, why do conflicts over realism and antirealism have such staying power in mathematics and the natural sciences? Why do worries about relativism and anti-­relativism continue to pervade the humanities and social sciences? It would be very difficult to understand and address such issues and debates if an idea of truth were not at stake in them. In the fourth place, the idea of truth has been and continues to be central to the tradition and discipline of philosophy. From its earliest glimmerings among the pre-Socratics until today, Western philosophy has regarded itself as a search for truth. It also has tried repeatedly to say what truth comes to and why it deserves our attention. To dismiss this idea, or to treat it as merely a rhetorical device, would have wide ramifications for philosophy itself. The search for a satisfactory idea of truth is part and parcel of the search for an adequate philosophy. In all of these ways, then—historically, societally, academically, and philosophically—the idea of truth matters. Indeed, the stakes in

Introduction  3 theoretical debates about truth are high. Moreover, many philosophers today recognize this, as is evidenced by a growing stream of monographs and anthologies about truth during the past few decades. The trouble with the idea of truth is not that it is thin and insignificant. The trouble, instead, is that too many philosophical conceptions of truth are either insufficiently robust or robust in the wrong way. In fact, when properly understood—so I  shall argue—the idea of truth can create trouble for truth-troubling positions in recent philosophy. 1.1.1  Troubling Truth Three philosophical positions cause the most trouble for a substantive and socially significant idea of truth. The first is deflationism. The deflationist holds that when we say something is true, we do not employ a genuine predicate: either “is true” has no extension (i.e., there is nothing to which it applies) or it does not express a real property. According to the deflationist, our claiming that a sentence, assertion, or proposition is true does no significant work. Consequently, there is little need to provide a theory of what truth is or why truth is important. Disquotationalism, a prominent version of deflationism, even suggests that “truth talk” itself is largely unnecessary. In the words of Willard Quine, “To ascribe truth to the sentence [‘Snow is white’] is to ascribe whiteness to snow . . . Ascription of truth just cancels the quotation marks.” Hence, we do not need to say such a sentence is true. We could “just utter the sentence.”3 A second truth-troubling position is radical contextualism. Radical contextualism holds that the validity of truth claims is relative to the social and cultural contexts in which claims get made. Hence, there is no objective truth, in the modern sense of “objectivity,” nor is objective truth the goal of inquiry, whether scientific or otherwise. Richard Rorty is the most forceful recent proponent of radical contextualism. In an essay criticizing Crispin Wright’s book Truth and Objectivity, for example, Rorty argues there is no practical difference between assessing a claim’s truth and assessing its justification. When we say a claim is true, we are simply saying it is justified, and when we say a claim is justified, we are saying it is justified for the audience to which the claim is addressed. A  true claim, then, would simply be one that is justified or justifiable in a certain context. Hence, Rorty questions the universal validity that philosophers traditionally have assigned to claims made in the name of truth.4 These first two truth-troubling positions arise, for the most part, from issues and debates internal to the discipline of philosophy. The third, by contrast, arises from philosophically informed critiques of Western society. It has to do with the ideological roles fulfilled both by conceptions of truth and by claims to truth. This position has many versions, and one can find them throughout contemporary critical theory,

4  Introduction broadly construed.5 The most prominent version occurs in the literature surrounding the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault. Although Foucault’s own conception of truth shifted during his lifetime, and although his writings on truth often are ambivalent, a prominent position in the Foucaultian literature portrays truth as no more than an ideological tool within struggles for power.6 The result is to regard truth claims as power moves and as primarily rhetorical rather than logical, such that the question whether a truth claim is valid becomes the question whether it is effective in a struggle for power. I call this position the political instrumentalizing of truth—or politicization, for short. It instrumentalizes truth with respect to power, and it has the effect of undermining the significance of truth. Together, these three philosophical positions—deflationism, radical contextualism, and politicization—dramatically trouble the idea of truth. They cast doubt on the substantive character of truth as an idea, on the validity of claims made in the name of truth, and on the significance of truth in contemporary society. Moreover, whether inadvertently or not, these positions lend support to popular stances that many philosophers in the Western tradition rightly have criticized, namely, skepticism concerning whether truth can be known, relativism with respect to the validity of truth claims, and cynicism about whether truth is important. Such support is all the more reason, it seems to me, to challenge truth-­troubling positions in philosophy and to propose a conception that shows why and how truth is a substantive and socially significant idea. As first steps toward such a conception, let me comment on what matters philosophical truth theory addresses. Then I introduce three sets of issues to which my conception of truth responds (section  1.2), and I  conclude by previewing the book as a whole (section 1.3). 1.1.2  Truth Matters Two topics lie at the center of philosophical concerns about truth: what truth is, and why truth is important; or, what matters truth comprises, and why truth matters. In the language of traditional philosophy, the first topic pertains to the “nature” of truth. The second has to do with truth’s “value.” As soon as one identifies these topics in traditional language, however, one runs into objections from contemporary truth theorists. Some deny that truth has a nature. Others question truth’s value. Still others both deny that truth has a nature and question its value. I, too, doubt that truth has a nature, as philosophers traditionally have understood “having a nature”: I  doubt that truth possesses an essential property or an essential set of properties for which necessary and sufficient conditions can be stated. Yet my reasons for doubting this are nearly the opposite of the reasons given by others who raise questions along these lines. Contra primitivism (e.g., Donald Davidson7), the

Introduction  5 problem with defining truth’s nature is not that “truth” is so basic a concept that it defies further specification. Nor, contra deflationary accounts (e.g., Quine), is the problem that when we say something is true we fail to employ a genuine predicate. Rather, truth is such a protean idea that what it is about resists being reduced to an essential set of properties, and the uses of the truth predicate are so variegated that it can have differing extensions and can express various distinct properties. Instead of being too basic to be specified, the idea of truth is so dynamic and complex that it requires multiple specifications. In the words of Theodor Adorno, the idea of truth is a “constellation.” Like a Wittgensteinian open concept, it resists being reduced to a real definition, to a statement of necessary and sufficient conditions for anything to be true.8 The philosophical challenge this idea poses is to develop a sufficiently complex circumscription, one that carefully identifies areas of commonality among the various matters labeled as “true” but does not attempt to spell out a limited set of necessary and sufficient conditions for whatever can be true. I also question whether one should say truth has or is “a value.” My reservations here do not concern whether truth is important. As this book argues, truth is very important indeed, both in philosophy and in daily life. Rather, I find the language of valuation singularly inappropriate for expressing why truth matters. In contemporary usage, which reflects dominant tendencies in a consumer capitalist society, when people say something is a value or has a value, they often mean it is something they prefer to a certain degree or something they would prefer in the right circumstances. Such usage turns values into consumer preferences, such that the “value” in question is important to the extent that it is preferred. The upshot of such usage, when applied to truth, is that people portray the importance of truth as a matter of personal or communal preference. This, it seems to me, gets things precisely backward. It is not the case that truth is important because it is preferred. Instead, truth is preferred— or at least it should be preferred—because it is important. As I  intend to argue at greater length, truth is important because it guides human thought and action along fruitful paths and provides an ongoing horizon of orientation for cultural practices and social institutions. By doubting that truth has “a nature” and questioning whether it is “a value,” I join G. W. F. Hegel in claiming truth is not a minted coin to be pocketed or used ready-made.9 Truth is much more dynamic and complex than that. So, I do not say that the central concerns of philosophical truth theory pertain to the “nature” and “value” of truth, as these terms are commonly understood. Rather, they pertain to what truth is and why it matters—on the understanding that one can circumscribe what truth is but cannot neatly capture it in a real definition, and that one should say why truth is important but should not treat it as a mere value. Further, these two concerns overlap and intersect: one’s “definition” of truth holds implications for how one understands its importance, and one’s

6  Introduction “valuation” of truth helps shape one’s circumscription of what truth is. Hence, it is no accident that philosophers who do not think truth is a substantive idea also have serious doubts about the importance of truth. Nor is it surprising that philosophers who regard truth claims as merely rhetorical have little to say about what truth actually is. The two central concerns, and how one responds to them, overlap and intersect. For convenience, let me give each concern a label. Questions about what truth is can be said to express an ontological concern; questions about why truth matters, an axiological concern, where “axiological” pertains to the study of whether something is good, to what extent, and in which respects. One can group a large range of questions under each label, however, and truth theorists disagree about which of these questions is more important than others. Consequently, depending on a theorist’s own emphasis, one can classify the various types of truth theory in different ways. 1.1.3  Truth Theories Looking at some attempts to classify truth theories will shed light on the two main concerns and on how they intersect. In Theories of Truth, for example, Richard Kirkham is primarily concerned to identify exactly which problem various truth theorists try to solve.10 The main divisions, on Kirkham’s account, lie between theorists who try to spell out the necessary and sufficient conditions for a statement or proposition’s being true (what he calls the metaphysical project; for example, Bertrand Russell) and theorists who try to say either what feature(s) would justify a truth claim (the justification project; e.g., F. H. Bradley) or what it means to employ the truth predicate in ordinary language (the speech-act ­project; e.g., P. F. Strawson). Michael Lynch proposes a different way to map the same landscape. In The Nature of Truth, his comprehensive anthology of primarily AngloAmerican truth theories, Lynch divides the field between those who affirm and those who deny that truth has a nature (NT 4). He divides the affirmers into alethic pluralists, who say truth has more than one nature (e.g., the later Hilary Putnam), and theorists who say it has only one nature, which Lynch calls alethic monists.11 He further subdivides the alethic monists into those who affirm that truth is “at least partly epistemic” (pragmatist, verificationist, and coherence theorists) and those who deny this (correspondence, primitivist, and identity theorists). By “having a nature” Lynch means truth is a definable property or set of properties. His anthology ranges across a continuum from robust affirmative theories, which “assume that truth is an important property that requires a substantive and complex explanation,” to theories that reject this: specifically, a continuum from realist correspondence theories (e.g., Russell and J. L. Austin) to antirealist deflationary theories (e.g., Strawson and

Introduction  7 Quine). Lynch locates his own functionalist theory, a version of alethic pluralism, toward the middle of this continuum, in line with what he describes as “a growing consensus among some philosophers that neither traditional robust theories nor deflationary theories are right” (NT 5). Despite the different emphases Kirkham and Lynch bring to their classification schemes, and despite the different questions about truth these schemes highlight, both schemes are primarily motivated by an ontological concern about what truth is. Correlatively, they tell us little about why and how the various theories consider truth important. The latter axiological concern, by contrast, receives primary emphasis in Truth: Engagements across Philosophical Traditions, an anthology assembled by José Medina and David Wood that gives greater attention to European philosophy. Medina and Wood include none of the realist correspondence theories with which Lynch’s anthology begins. They begin instead with questions posed by Friedrich Nietzsche and William James concerning why we “value” truth. From there, the anthology goes into debates about the objectivity, universality, and potentially nonpropositional character of truth, and then it considers the relations of truth to disclosure, testimony, and power. Rather than treat truth as a property whose nature either can or cannot be explained, their anthology explores the “normative space” of truth—whether and why we “value” truth. Their central focus is “the normativity of truth” as “a space with its own ends, ends that are inseparable from other ends such as freedom and justice.” Theories of truth, on their account, do not so much address ontological questions about what truth is as they open up “ethical, political, and historical questions” (TE 3). Yet, if one reads the selections in this anthology—writings, for example, by Søren Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Hannah Arendt—one can see that their accounts of whether and why truth is important either assume or state positions about what truth is. Similarly, if one works through the selections in Lynch’s anthology, one can discover that their accounts of what truth is either assume or state positions about whether and why truth is important. Such duality of attention is unavoidable, it seems to me, given the inherent complexity of truth and the multiple roles of truth in human life. My own approach aims to take seriously both sides of the divide in contemporary philosophy between the analytic and the continental traditions.12 I resist any attempt to parcel out ontological and axiological concerns to one side or the other, as if the analytic tradition raises exclusively ontological questions or as if the contributions of the continental tradition are somehow restricted to axiological questions. Nevertheless, I do agree with Linda Martín Alcoff that, although the topic of truth provides a potential “bridge between analytic and continental philosophical traditions,” each tradition has had trouble seeing this potential. Continental

8  Introduction philosophers have had trouble because of the “normative concern” that motivates their critiques of knowledge and of epistemology, Alcoff says. Their concern makes them wary of attempts to define what truth is. Analytic philosophers have had trouble seeing truth as a bridge because, according to Alcoff, they take a nonnormative approach to truth. This approach leaves their epistemology “immature” concerning “the intersections of epistemology with social and political issues.”13 Yet I  would add that normative considerations (axiological ones, in my vocabulary) are in fact present in the analytic tradition, just as the continental tradition contains significant attempts to say what truth is. Hence, in addressing both ontological and axiological concerns, I aim to do so with a view to theories on both sides of the so-called continental divide. Further—and this is my main point—ontological and axiological concerns about truth intersect, such that an adequate account of what truth is has significant implications for why truth is important, and vice versa. Only by taking up both ontological and axiological concerns can one respond adequately to deflationism, radical contextualism, and the politicizing of truth. Moreover, two developments internal to analytic philosophy have prepared the way for such a tradition-crossing response to these truthtroubling positions. One is the rise of alethic pluralism as an alternative to both traditional correspondence theories of truth and their deflationist critics. The work of Crispin Wright, Michael Lynch, Douglas Edwards, and other truth pluralists shows that one can reject deflationary moves without landing in a thicket of logical contradictions concerning the “nature” of propositional truth.14 Thanks to their work, I do not intend to offer an explicit critique of deflationism. They have already done this, and they have done it well. Instead, my entire book-length account of what truth is and why it matters offers a robust anti-deflationary alternative that also goes beyond alethic pluralism with respect to propositional truth. The second development is renewed attention to the history of philosophical thought concerning truth. Here I think in particular of the work of Richard Campbell, whose Truth and Historicity shows in granular detail the trajectory of truth theory from Parmenides to Putnam. Then, based on this history, Campbell’s The Concept of Truth proposes an action-based conception of truth. This conception acknowledges the variegated uses of “true,” and it resituates the truth of propositions within the truth of human actions. For Campbell, the truth of propositions derives from the truth of assertions, and assertions are themselves human practices. When assertions are true, they are true in the manner of all actions, namely, they successfully achieve their aims. According to Campbell, then, the central meaning of truth is to act truly. Further, the keys to acting truly are openness toward the objects of our actions and integrity in the one who acts. Given this emphasis on

Introduction  9 openness and integrity, the idea that best summarizes an action-based conception of truth is not correctness or accuracy, concepts that go back to the Greek notion of aletheia. Rather, Campbell says, truth is fundamentally a matter of faithfulness—faithfulness to oneself and others and to the objects of our actions—an idea that goes back to the Hebrew notion of emeth (TH 434–39). And, Campbell suggests, this way of understanding truth provides a more effective response to both the politicization of truth and what he calls “skeptical relativism” than do approaches that consider only the truth of sentences, statements, propositions, and the like (TH 402–11, TCT 212–48).15 Even though Campbell’s action-based conception of truth has not received the attention among truth theorists that it deserves, I think his work is definitely on the right track, both in its understanding of the history of truth theory in the West and in its shifting of emphasis from sentences to actions. My own responses to radical contextualism in the philosophy of science and the politicization of truth in social critique rely on a similar shift of emphasis,16 from the truth of propositions to the truth of correlations between human fidelity in practice and societal disclosure. To get there, however, one needs to work through the issues that arise from what I call propositionally inflected conceptions of truth.

1.2  Kinds and Domains of Truth Three sets of issues need to be taken up by an attempt to address interlinked ontological and axiological concerns about truth in the proposed tradition-crossing way. One pertains to relations between propositional truth and the justification of truth claims. A  second concerns the distinctions and connections between propositional and nonpropositional truth. And the third set of issues pertains to the sorts of practices and institutions within which truth occurs. Let me introduce each set of issues before summarizing the book’s extended argument. 1.2.1  Truth and Justification A dominant debate in recent truth theory concerns the relation between propositional truth and the discursive justification of propositional truth claims. The debate divides truth theorists into two camps, according to whether they think the truth of a proposition depends on whether someone is or could be justified in believing or asserting the proposition. Theorists who affirm that propositional truth depends on discursive justification to some significant degree have what is called an epistemic conception of truth. Theorists who deny this have a nonepistemic conception. To a large extent, this debate over truth and justification maps directly onto a second debate over alethic realism and antirealism. Whereas alethic realists claim that the truth of a proposition depends on whether

10  Introduction things in the world are as the proposition says they are, alethic antirealists claim that it depends on other factors instead, such as how well the proposition coheres with other propositions (coherence theories) or how well the proposition works in theory or practice (pragmatic theories). Because demonstrating how well a proposition coheres or works requires discursive justification, alethic antirealists typically have epistemic conceptions of propositional truth, just as alethic realists typically have nonepistemic conceptions of propositional truth. The debate over whether truth is epistemic raises both ontological and axiological questions concerning truth, justification, and the relation between them. If the truth of a proposition simply depends on whether it is discursively justified or justifiable, why do people regularly treat propositions as true without regard for their (potential) justification? Is there something about the truth of propositions that exceeds their discursive justifiability? Conversely, if the truth of a proposition never depends on whether it is discursively justified or justifiable, why do people regularly challenge propositional truth claims and ask us to back them up with good arguments? Is there something about the process of discursive justification that affects the truth of a proposition? In both cases, the question “why” pertains to not only what truth and justification consist in but also why they are important. As was indicated earlier, an adequate theory of propositional truth needs to say what truth is and why it is important. But it also needs to say what discursive justification is and why it is important. Moreover, the theory should specify the relation between propositional truth and discursive justification and should say why this relation is important. A first step in this direction is to recognize, as I explain in chapters 2 and 3, that the notion of “propositional truth” is a catch-all for three distinct but closely interconnected concepts: the reliability of beliefs, the correctness of assertions, and the accuracy of propositions. It is because so many beliefs are reliable in practice—in ordinary experience and conduct—that people regularly treat the propositional content of these beliefs as “true”—that is, sufficiently accurate—without regard for their potential justification. Ordinarily, for example, we do not go around justifying or expecting others to justify the belief that the sun is shining or the grass is green. We find these beliefs to be reliable in practice, and we take their propositional content to be accurate enough for the purposes of daily life. Yet most people also recognize that not all of their beliefs are reliable, and ones that seemed reliable can turn out to be unreliable. Moreover, we often discover the unreliability of our beliefs when we make assertions and others question our assertions. When such questions arise, one can either give up one’s assertion, repeat or rephrase it, or give reasons for making the assertion. Once one begins to give reasons, one enters the process of discursively justifying the asserted proposition as being

Introduction  11 true—that is, as being accurate. Such discursive justification sheds light on the purported reliability of the belief in question and on the correctness claimed for the assertion. Hence, we can learn something about our beliefs and their reliability through the process of discursive justification. The potential for such learning is one important reason why people challenge our propositional truth claims and why we try to support these with good arguments. In this sense, the justification or justifiability of a proposition has an intimate connection with its accuracy and thereby with the correctness of an assertion and the reliability of a belief. In laying out this connection, one can also move beyond the debate between alethic realists and antirealists, as chapter 5 demonstrates. 1.2.2  Propositional and Nonpropositional Truth To this point, I have focused on propositional truth and have suggested that this concept needs to be internally differentiated. Even if they granted the need for internal differentiation, however, many philosophers would question the need to specify a certain kind of truth as “propositional.” They would question this because it seems to imply there could be other kinds of truth that are not propositional. These philosophers might disagree among themselves about whether beliefs, sentences, statements, assertions, or propositions are the primary “bearers” of truth. Nevertheless, they would agree in limiting truth, properly so called, to such linguistic and conceptual matters. For these philosophers, the idea, for example, of a nonpropositional artistic truth, which I have proposed elsewhere, would be a nonstarter. They have propositionally inflected conceptions of truth. Yet there are clear historical precedents for thinking nonpropositional matters can be true or false. Aristotle, for example, suggests that Greek tragedy (and, by extension, perhaps other “imitative” or representational arts) can be true, insofar as its function is to give insight into the sorts of things that could occur under certain circumstances.17 Anselm, whom Campbell gives special emphasis (TH 101–19, 418–29), regards the truths of statements, of thought, of action, of passion, and of sensing as all being varieties of “rectitude” (rectitudo), which he directly links with justice as “rectitude of [the] will preserved for its own sake.” He also tends to subsume sensing and language usage under “action,” such that truth pertains in the first instance to what people do and how they interrelate, not to what they believe and say.18 So too, as is well known, Hegel ranks the arts and religion alongside philosophy as the cultural pinnacle of knowledge and truth. They are forms of “absolute spirit,” he says, and what gives the arts and religion their truth capacity is not propositional (A 1: 99–105/13: 137–44). More recently, Ronald De Sousa has argued that emotions can be true or false, in keeping with a “generic”

12  Introduction conception of truth for which propositional truth is only a special case.19 All four of these philosophers, and many others besides, regard nonpropositional matters as true or false, even though they do not deny or reject propositional truth. Further, if one pays attention to ordinary language, one notices many uses of “true,” “truly,” and “truth” that are difficult or impossible to reduce to propositional truth. People speak of “true friends.” They admire companions who are “true to their word.” They say something “rings true” when it matches their experience. Also, in line with a modern ideal of ethical authenticity, they say they want to be “true to themselves.”20 What should we make of such usages? Are people simply sloppy in their use of language? Are they employing concepts that are so different from the concept of propositional truth that truth theorists do not need to include these other concepts in their accounts of truth? Or is there enough commonality among such usages and concepts that a theory of truth should encompass all of them and explain how they are interrelated? One’s response to such historical precedents and language usages proves decisive for the scope of one’s theory of truth. If one dismisses them, or if one has a prior commitment to the solely propositional character of truth proper, then one does not need to account for nonpropositional truth. Nor does one need to say how propositional truth, in its differentiated forms, relates to nonpropositional truth. Instead, one can take what I call a monothetic stance toward the topic of truth. Whatever one says about what truth is and why truth is important will presuppose the thesis that there is only one kind of truth, and that kind is propositional. Much of the literature on truth in the analytic tradition is monothetic in this sense, no matter how robust or deflationary the accounts given, and even when the accounts embrace a form of alethic pluralism. The obvious alternative to a monothetic stance is to take historical precedents and variegated usages seriously, to ask whether truth is more than propositional, and to consider whether some truth is nonpropositional. Conceptions that raise these considerations tend to take what I call a stereothetic stance toward the topic of truth. Unless these conceptions deny that any truth is propositional—an extreme position that would fly in the face of both historical precedents and ordinary l­anguage— they need both to account for propositional truth and to show how it is related to other forms of truth. Much of the literature on truth in the continental tradition takes a stereothetic stance, although the tradition has rarely succeeded in explaining the relation between propositional and nonpropositional truth. Because these two contrasting stances—monothetic and stereothetic— are so deeply entrenched in how different truth theorists delimit their field of investigation, it is very difficult to provide convincing arguments, across this divide, about the notion of nonpropositional truth. What

Introduction  13 looks like equivocation from one side can look hermeneutically astute from the other. Perhaps, however, there is room for agreement about some aspects of language usage. I suspect most philosophers would agree that when we call an acquaintance a “true friend,” we do not mean that she or he is true in exactly the same way a true proposition is true. A true friend is someone who really cares about you, someone you can count on “through thick and thin,” and someone you love to be with.21 It would be odd to say any of this about a true proposition. Yet one can wonder whether there is enough continuity between our assigning “true” to propositions and “true” to friends that the two usages share a common meaning. Further, is there an idea of truth that would encompass both the truth of propositions and the truth of friends—indeed, more broadly, both propositional truth and all truth that is not propositional? If so, what would that idea be? Without taking up the broader question here, let me comment on the usages of “true propositions” and “true friends.” The common meaning these two usages seem to share lies in notions of dependability and fidelity. Part of what we mean when we say either propositions or friends are true is that we can depend on them. We can depend on true propositions to provide the accurate insight we need, for example, and we can depend on true friends to stand by us when we need them. So too, we understand true propositions to be “faithful” in a certain sense, faithful “to the way things are,” just as we regard true friends as people who are faithful to who we really are. Moreover, when I call an acquaintance a true friend, I am not simply saying she or he is “true to type”—that is, that this person measures up to the standards for friendship. I also am saying that this person is true to me—she or he is true as my friend, not simply true to what friendship is, but dependable and faithful toward me. There is more to my calling an acquaintance a true friend than there is to my saying of our favorite feline, for example, “Measha is a true cat”—that is, that Measha is true to her feline type. Perhaps, then, the notions of dependability and fidelity point us toward a wider idea of truth encompassing not only the truth of propositions and the truth of friends but also additional sorts of apparently nonpropositional truth that ordinary language usage signals.22 By itself, such analysis of linguistic usage cannot provide a knockdown argument for why one should take a stereothetic stance toward truth in general. Someone committed to a monothetic stance could reply that propositional accuracy, for example, remains the core concept of truth, while notions such as dependability, fidelity, and the like are at best analogies of propositional truth. In any case, I think paying close attention to “truth talk,” if I may call it that, at least raises questions about how to account for existential truth, much of which appears to be nonpropositional, and how to understand the relation between apparently nonpropositional truth and truth that is clearly propositional in character.

14  Introduction In this context, I mean by existential truth all the ways in which people pursue and experience truth. Existential truth has to do with truth as it is lived and not simply believed, as it is practiced and not simply asserted, as it is carried out and not simply claimed. Taking a stereothetic stance, I  assume that people can and do pursue truth in art and religion, for example, and not only in science and philosophy, and that propositional truth is neither the quintessence nor the goal of such artistic and religious pursuits. I also assume that people experience truth in pre-linguistic and preconceptual ways—hence, in pre-propositional ways—and that one cannot adequately explain what they so ­experience by reducing it to propositional matters. Moreover, I believe that a sufficiently robust account of propositional truth needs to explore how propositional pursuits of truth link up with nonpropositional pursuits and how pre-propositional experiences of truth inform an awareness of propositional truth. Later, after I  have given a more detailed account of propositional truth, it will become clear that the preliminary distinction suggested here between propositional and existential truth is potentially misleading. For I  shall show that propositional truth is itself a mode of existential truth—an important and distinct mode, to be sure, but neither external to existential truth nor, in principle, opposed to existential truth. In other words, propositional truth is among the ways in which people live and practice the truth. What I have mentioned as nonpropositional pursuits and pre-propositional experiences of truth are intrinsic to differentiated and holistic engagements with truth, to which propositional truth itself belongs. The preliminary distinction between propositional and existential truth will need to be subsumed into a distinction among pre-­propositional, propositional, and post-propositional kinds of (existential) truth. 1.2.3  Social Domains of Truth One can be a pluralist about truth and yet take a monothetic stance toward what truth is. Most alethic pluralists, in fact, do just that: they distinguish within propositional truth among various ways in which propositions (or beliefs, sentences, etc.) are true, but they do not seriously consider whether propositional truth is itself only one kind of truth among other kinds. For most alethic pluralists, then, the plurality within truth has to do with distinct propositional domains, whether these are defined by differences in how propositions and the like do the job of being true (Lynch, TOM 76–82) or by correlated differences between the semantic component of domain-specific singular terms and predicates, on the one hand, and the metaphysical component of domain-specific objects and properties, on the other (Edwards, MT 76–81). Although Lynch focuses on propositions whereas Edwards emphasizes sentences, both seek to account for plurality within propositional truth.

Introduction  15 If, by contrast, one takes a stereothetic stance and regards propositional truth as only one kind of truth alongside various kinds of nonpropositional truth, then several issues arise that go beyond the purview of what, from here on, I label propositional alethic pluralism. One issue is both to distinguish these other kinds of truth and to show how they relate to propositional truth. A second is to explain how all the kinds of truth belong to truth as a whole. A third issue is to examine the connections, if any, between pluralism within propositional truth and pluralism within truth as a whole. In response to this third issue, several options present themselves. One is to deny that propositional truth is plural in the manner proposed by propositional alethic pluralists. Another is to grant such plurality internal to propositional truth but deny that this has much to do with differences among pre-propositional, propositional, and post-propositional truth. A  third option is to acknowledge both sorts of truth pluralism—both the plurality internal to propositional truth and the plurality internal to truth as a whole—and then to show how the two sorts of plurality are interrelated. The third option is by far the most ambitious, and it is the path this book pursues. In taking an especially expansive approach to truth pluralism, I shall introduce a greater variety among modes of propositional truth than propositional alethic pluralists typically acknowledge. I shall also show why, to explain such variety, one needs to provide a pluralistic social ontology of the ways within which truth occurs and thereby offer a robust account of why—historically, societally, academically, and ­philosophically—truth matters. Derived primarily from the reformational philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhoven, this social ontology distinguishes among interpersonal interactions, cultural practices, and social institutions. A conversation between two or more people, for example, would be an interpersonal interaction. If it occurred at a music concert or art exhibition, this interaction would take place in the context of the cultural practices of art making and art interpretation and within the frame of art as a social institution. Cultural practices and social institutions themselves belong to a larger societal formation whose structure and dynamic inflect their character and possibilities. All of these matters— cultural practices, social institutions, and a societal formation—have emerged historically, and they continue to change as history unfolds. Accordingly, unlike many truth theories that focus on sentences, speech acts, and propositional claims, and thereby limit their attention to certain actions and interactions, my conception of truth aims to acknowledge the larger social and historical fabric within which truth-relevant conduct and interpersonal relations occur. This approach assumes that human knowledge is both internally differentiated and socially embedded. Here, as explained in chapter 3, I depart

16  Introduction from standard epistemological accounts that try to capture what knowledge is in formulations such as “justified true belief.” I do not deny that justified true belief is an important component of knowledge. Yet I am not convinced that this formula, and others like it, can do justice to the diverse ways in which people come to know and in which they test and revise what they know. For example, I know Joyce, my life partner for more than forty-five years, and I know her very well. Yet I would be hard pressed to render this knowledge as a set of justified true beliefs, as would anyone else who has intimate knowledge of another person. Further, I do not think the appeal to this usage of “to know” involves an equivocation, as if one were using the same word to designate two logically unrelated concepts. It is not like trying to subsume the concept of a riverbank under the concept of a commercial bank simply because one can use “bank” to designate either concept. Here one faces a decision like the one posed with respect to variegated usages of “true” and its cognates. Either one can insist that knowledge proper reduces to what standard epistemologies describe, or one can seek a more expansive conception of knowledge that embraces ordinary, but philosophically non-standard, usages of “know” and its cognates. Not surprisingly, this book exemplifies the second, expansive approach. I take it that people acquire, test, and revise their knowledge in a vast variety of interpersonal interactions, and they do so within the contexts and frames provided by various cultural practices and social institutions. Sharing a meal, healing the sick, tending a garden, protesting an injustice, and watching a video, for example, all are ways in people acquire knowledge regarding themselves, others, and the world they inhabit. What they acquire in these ways cannot be reduced to justified true beliefs. It is especially important, I believe, to understand how cultural practices and social institutions help make the acquisition, testing, and revision of knowledge possible. Few philosophers would doubt that the practices of science or, more broadly, of professional teaching and research are practices of knowledge. Most probably also would recognize that the institution of schooling, from pre-school through university, significantly frames such practices via professional expectations and standards, procedures of evaluation and accreditation, and patterns of governance and funding. With notable exceptions such as feminists and social epistemologists, however, relatively few philosophers bring such institutional framing into their accounts of scientific knowledge. Even fewer would seriously entertain the suggestion that scholarship and schooling are only two among many decisive matrices of cultural practices and social institutions within which the process of knowledge occurs. My own working pluralist hypothesis, by contrast, is that most if not all of the main social institutions in a differentiated modern society, along with the cultural practices they frame, configure distinct social domains

Introduction  17 of knowledge and truth. By saying these institutions and practices configure social domains of truth, I intend to suggest two things. First, the main social institutions, along with their correlated cultural practices, are distinctive ways in which knowledge and truth occur. Second, the knowledge and truth that occur within them take on the distinctive character of the institutions and practices within which they occur. Hence, for example, the type of knowledge and truth one can find within artistic practices and the social institution of art is characteristically distinct from the type of knowledge and truth one can find within the practices and institution of religion. Both of these types, in turn, are characteristically distinct from scientific knowledge and truth. So too the knowledge and truth attainable in the political domain are characteristically distinct from those which one can attain in the domain of kinship, friendship, and intimate life partnerships. This is not to deny that different types of truth belong to a larger whole, nor is it to forget that overlaps, mixtures, and cross fertilizations occur among the various types. Yet I want to test the hypothesis that there are different social ways of knowing and different social domains of truth. If this hypothesis can be borne out, it will shed light both on distinctions among pre-, post-, and propositional truth and on the relations among them, for in each social domain, one or another of these three kinds of truth will prevail. The hypothesis also will help ensure that my general conception of truth is sufficiently comprehensive to account for truth as a whole in all its dynamic complexity.

1.3  Holistic Alethic Pluralism I do not begin with the social domains hypothesis in the chapters that follow, however. Instead, I  begin with propositional truth, the concept that dominates in contemporary truth theories and provides the target for deflationist, radical contextualist, and politicizing critiques. The next three chapters provide a general account of what propositional truth comes to, examine more carefully the truth of propositions and their role in objective knowledge, and introduce a social-ontological enrichment to propositional alethic pluralism. Chapter  2 begins by canvassing central debates concerning propositional truth bearers, truth makers, and the relations (if any) between them. After juxtaposing a strong affirmation (D. M. Armstrong) and a strong denial (Davidson) of truthmaking facts or states of affairs, I consider two contrasting accounts of propositional truth bearers: Bertrand Russell’s “atomic propositions” and Gottlob Frege’s “thought.” Then I  respond to the issues these debates raise by replacing the traditional notion of proposition/fact correspondence with a conception of decontextualized disclosure. At the heart of this conception lies a two-way interdependence between practical agents and the practical objects that

18  Introduction lend themselves to practical engagement, including the practices of language and logic. It is in this interrelation that the disclosure of the object occurs and propositional truth bearers emerge. In tandem with an emphasis on interdependence, I also propose more robust accounts of both propositions and facts. Propositions, I  argue, are the abstract results of assertoric speech acts that themselves serve to articulate pre-linguistic beliefs. So too, the “objects” with which beliefs, assertions, and propositions interrelate range, in a pattern of increasing decontextualization, from practical objects to (self-disclosing) facts to (abstract) states of affairs. Consequently, as already indicated, the concept of propositional truth needs to be internally differentiated to encompass the reliability of beliefs, the correctness of assertions, and the accuracy of propositions, and the connections among these need to be recognized. When propositions are true, they are true (i.e., accurate) in conjunction with assertions and beliefs and in relation to the matters that disclose themselves when we engage in the requisite linguistic and logical practices. Chapter 3 provides a more complete account of what the truth of propositions comes to. I do this in terms of a relationship between achieving a certain sort of insight and pursuing a specific sort of validity with respect to such insight. First, however, taking issue with accounts of knowledge as “justified true belief,” I propose a holistic and yet pluralist conception of knowledge within which, I claim, propositions play an important but limited role. Then I explain that the truth of propositions requires not only accuracy with respect to practical objects but also inferential validity with respect to the rules of logical thought. Moreover, validity and accuracy must occur together. Indeed, the truth of propositions hinges on our being faithful to the societal principle of logical validity, in dynamic correlation with the decontextualized disclosure of practical objects as states of affairs. It is because of this capacity for truth as correlated validity and accuracy that, I  argue, propositions play an important role in our doing justice to objects within their contexts—that is, in our objective knowledge. Their role within objective knowledge varies, however, depending on whether the knowledge is pre-propositional (e.g., artistic knowledge), in which case the truth of propositions helps extend it, or post-propositional (e.g., religious knowledge), in which case the truth of propositions helps enable it. Having characterized the truth of propositions (as distinct from the correctness of assertions and the reliability of beliefs), I next take up the question whether the truth of propositions is itself internally differentiated. Propositional alethic pluralists argue that it is, and they offer this argument as a way out of an impasse between robust correspondence and coherence theories of propositional truth, on the one hand, and deflationary and minimalist critiques, on the other. Chapter 4 first discusses Michael Lynch’s functionalist approach to alethic pluralism and raises

Introduction  19 questions about his ontology of distinct propositional domains. Then I propose an alternative account of plurality within the truth of propositions. This account emphasizes the distinct practices that, in conjunction with the linguistic and logical practices from which propositions arise, result in different sorts of propositions. I  call this approach practical pluralism, and I  show how it helps account for the truth of two contested sorts of cognitive results, namely, aesthetic judgments and moral propositions. The best way to explain how different sorts of propositions can be true in their own way, I argue, is to see how they function in distinct social domains of truth. Accordingly, chapter  4 lays out a social-­ontological model for understanding both domain-specific propositions and the distinct types of truth (artistic, scientific, political, etc.) with which different sorts of propositions interrelate. On this model, differences between propositional and nonpropositional truth link up with the different sorts of cultural practices and social institutions within which truth occurs. That allows me to embrace a greater plurality among modes of propositional truth than Lynch and other alethic pluralists acknowledge and yet retain a univocal concept of the truth of propositions—even as I  argue that there are more kinds of truth than that which is propositional. Hence, the chapter argues for a social-ontological pluralism with respect to truth, one that simultaneously insists on a holistic unity across legitimate differences. I call this position holistic alethic pluralism, and I explain it in chapter 6. First, however, chapter 5 takes up the topic of discursive justification and its relation to propositional truth. The chapter reviews in detail the debate between William Alston’s “minimal alethic realism” and Hilary Putnam’s “internal realism” about whether the truth of propositions is epistemically constrained. After sorting out their opposed positions, I  show that the conflict cannot be resolved within the terms of their debate. The reason for this is that both of them fail to provide a sufficiently robust account of objects and of their practical availability as facts and states of affairs. By offering such an account, my conception of propositional truth points past their debate to a position I  call post-anti/realism. According to this position, what I call discursive confirmation is an unfolding of the truth of propositions, and the truth of propositions calls for such discursive unfolding. Hence, as Alston insists, truth and justification are not the same and yet, as Putnam shows, they are intimately connected. Moreover, the justification of propositional truth claims is only one pole within discursive confirmation, the other pole being what I  call corroboration. Whereas discursive justification primarily tests for inferential validity, discursive corroboration primarily probes the quality of the insight offered. Together, and mutually indexed to each other within the process of discursive confirmation, justification and corroboration seek

20  Introduction to bear out the truth of the propositions we assert and of the beliefs our assertions articulate. Yet there is more to truth, I argue, than the truth of propositions, and there is more to bearing out truth than offering discursive confirmation. Chapter 6 lays out this argument by offering a holistic and pluralist conception of truth as a whole, to which propositional truth belongs, and the authentication of truth as a whole, to which discursive confirmation contributes. It argues that truth as a whole, and within each of its domains, consists in a dynamic correlation between human fidelity to societal principles, on the one hand, and a life-giving disclosure of society, on the other. By “life-giving disclosure” I mean an opening of society toward the interconnected flourishing of human beings and other creatures. Here I understand “dynamic correlation” as both a structure and a process that points in a certain direction. I argue that this directional structure and process shows up in the various social domains of truth, but in characteristically distinct ways. Whereas, for example, it shows up in the arts as a correlation between aesthetic validity and imaginative disclosure, it shows up in the sciences as a correlation between theoretical validity and evidence-based accuracy. Yet there is an isomorphism across different social domains of truth, such that all of them are domains of the same truth as a whole. This conception allows propositional truth to emerge as one important kind of truth, but not either the only kind or the most important. Building on this general conception of truth as dynamic correlation, I  then lay out a similarly general conception of the authentication of truth. The question here concerns how truth is borne out. After discussing accounts of testimony by Catherine Elgin and Emmanuel Levinas, I argue that truth is borne out by people bearing witness to it, and they bear witness to it by doing what truth requires. Authentication is the process of bearing witness to truth by doing what truth requires. And truth, I claim, requires authentication in order to unfold. I illustrate what this comes to in the domains of artistic authentication and religious testimony. I  also argue that the discursive justification and corroboration of propositional truth claims are not external to the process of authentication. Rather, they are intrinsic to it. If successful, this approach can socially recontextualize the discursive practices that truth theorists and epistemologists often discuss in isolation, without regard to their social relevance. A similar concern about social recontextualization motivates the discussion of science and truth in chapter  7. The chapter takes issue not only with those who deny that truth is an important goal for scientific pursuits but also with those who think science provides the highest or even the sole mode of truth. I argue instead for a conception of scientific truth that both retains its overriding importance for science and relativizes it to truth as a whole. Construing the term science broadly enough

Introduction  21 to encompass all the academic disciplines, I first characterize it as a social domain of knowledge and truth where what I call theoreticity, evidentiality, discursive reflexivity, and intersubjective fallibilism stand out (terms I explain in the chapter). Given these dominant characteristics, scientific truth amounts to a dynamic correlation between evidence-based accuracy and discursively arguable inferential validity (i.e., theoretical validity). Then I consider what light this conception of scientific truth sheds on debates about scientific realism in the philosophy of science. After working through two such debates, I propose an account of theoretical truth that points beyond them to a post-anti/realist conception of scientific truth. The chapter concludes by considering what the proposed conception of scientific truth implies for the place of science in society. First I argue that the social legitimacy to pursuing scientific truth rests upon how this pursuit arises from the ordinary correlation of inferential validity and propositional accuracy in daily life and takes it to a new level of precision and scope. To maintain legitimacy, however, science needs to have the requisite mixture of independence and interdependence vis-à-vis other social institutions, a mixture I call societal autonomy. The primary threats today to science’s societal autonomy stem from how political and economic systems impinge on science and how science feeds into these systems. So I examine contemporary systemic pressures, as internalized by universities. Then I propose ways to resist these pressures, carry out a social critique of current political and economic systems, and transform universities. I also show how my conception of science as a social domain can draw on the insights of sociohistorical contextualism concerning scientific knowledge, yet resist sociohistorical relativism with respect to scientific truth. Contra the radical contextualism of Rorty and others, I argue that sociohistorical relativism not only misconstrues scientific truth but also undermines genuine solidarity in both universities and civil society. Post-truth politics, with its rejection of scientific findings and celebration of “alternative facts,” takes direct aim at the legitimacy of scientific truth. To counter such attacks, philosophy needs to do more than defend the importance of scientific truth. It also needs to sort out how truth and politics are related. For this, I  argue, one needs a conception of truth that can both encompass and distinguish scientific and political truth. To that end, chapter 8 takes up essays on truth and politics by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Whereas Arendt fails to explain the relation between telling the truth and exercising political power, I suggest, Foucault fails to articulate the normative implications of truth, power, and their interrelation. Then I try to make up for their failures, focusing on what I call political truth. First I characterize politics as a struggle for justice and freedom on the basis of a struggle for power. All three concepts—justice, freedom,

22  Introduction and power—are normative concepts, I claim, such that politics itself is a social domain of truth. It is the domain where fidelity to the societal principle of justice on the basis of justifiable power can dynamically correlate with life-giving liberation from oppression. And such truth is, I  claim, post-propositional. The problem with post-truth politics is not simply that it undermines the propositional truth and scientific truth on which the pursuit of politics relies. The problem is that post-truth politics is politically false: it fundamentally opposes the empowered correlation between justice and freedom in which political truth consists. ­Moreover, both the politicizing of propositional truth and its depoliticizing are, I argue, as bad for politics as they are for truth as a whole. Both tendencies subvert what propositional truth contributes to the truth of politics and thereby to truth as a whole. In challenging both the rejection of political truth and the privileging of scientific truth, I open conceptual space for social domains where claims to truth arise but are neither readily reduced to relations of power nor straightforwardly scientific. Art and religion are two such domains, and they are the topic of chapter  9. Interacting primarily with Hegel and Adorno, I first present my conception of art as a social domain of primarily pre-propositional truth that consists in a dynamic correlation between fidelity to the societal principle of imaginative cogency and the pursuit of imaginative disclosure. Then I consider what this conception suggests concerning the relation between art and politics. On the one hand, I claim, cogent imaginative disclosure can support political truth by voicing social needs, challenging current arrangements of power, and inspiring commitments to justice. On the other hand, the justifiably empowered pursuit of justice and freedom can encourage artistic truth by calling for art that is attuned to social needs, resistant toward unjustifiable power, and revelatory of historical possibilities. Yet both artistic and political truth suffer, I  claim, when art is destructively politicized and when politics becomes inordinately aestheticized—tendencies that are just as damaging today as they were during the rise of European fascism a century ago. Next, chapter 9 considers religion as a social domain of primarily postpropositional truth. Religious truth arises, I  argue, from the collective practices whereby people place their hope and trust in what they worship as their ultimate sustainer, their “God.” This occurs via the stories of faith and the rituals of worship, both of which serve to reveal the ultimate meaning of life. Religious truth, then, consists in a dynamic correlation between fidelity to the societal principle of hopeful trust and the worshipful disclosure of “God.” And the authentication of religious truth occurs in how religious adherents conduct themselves in all of social life, including art, politics, and science. Responding to an ongoing conflict in contemporary society between religious fundamentalists and adamant secularists, the chapter concludes

Introduction  23 by considering how religion and science interrelate. This conflict makes one wonder whether religious truth and scientific truth are fundamentally incompatible. I argue that they are not, provided one has a sufficiently capacious conception of truth. To show this, I  examine three areas of potential conflict: between hopeful trust and theoretical validity; between worshipful and scientific disclosure; and between religious testimony and scientific confirmation. In each area, I  demonstrate how both domains can contribute to truth as a whole, such that religious and scientific truth need each order in order to thrive. Neither religious fundamentalism nor adamant secularism properly understands the alethic relation between religion and science. The final chapter offers explicit reflections on the connections between philosophy and truth already operative in preceding chapters. First, building on chapter 9, I ask how philosophy relates to art and religion. Like Hegel, I regard all three as social domains of truth in which truth as a whole is at issue. That is why philosophy needs to be especially attentive to the pre-propositional and post-propositional forms of truth in art and religion, respectively. Yet my emphasis on the plurality of social domains resists the Hegelian claim that truth as a whole culminates in the philosophical comprehension of truth. Next, still interacting with Hegel, I consider the historical character of both truth and philosophy. First I review the intrinsic historicity of truth itself: just as societal principles such as justice and solidarity emerge from historical struggles, and opportunities for life-giving disclosure are historical possibilities, so the social domains in which truth unfolds are the ongoing outcome of long-range historical developments. Then I consider the historical sources to my own conception in both the Hebraic emeth and Parmenidean aletheia strands of Western truth theory. My emphasis on a dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure tries to interweave these two seemingly incompatible strands in a creative and critical fashion. And this interweaving is just one example of the process of metacritique at work in both this book and the companion volume Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School. By metacritique I mean a process of inquiry that carries out an immanent criticism of dialectically interconnected positions in the history of philosophy in order to arrive at a better and timely understanding of the matters under dispute. My aim in both volumes is to critically retrieve crucial insights into truth from the history of alethic debates and to interweave them into the comprehensive alternative I call holistic alethic pluralism. This conception of truth gives philosophy two crucial roles in society, the concluding section to chapter 10 argues. One is to engage in a thorough critique of contemporary society as a whole. Another is both to learn from the social-ethical insights people gain in living the truth and to help them pursue such practical wisdom. To engage in social critique and to support practical wisdom, however, will require a drastic

24  Introduction reconstruction in philosophy, one that links up with both a fundamental transformation of contemporary society and a concomitant alteration in the very idea of truth. Holistic alethic pluralism points in the direction of these changes. It thereby aims to contribute to the unfolding of truth as a whole. Truth, as Hegel said, is not a minted coin. It is not a bitcoin either. What truth is, and why it matters, this book aims to show.

Notes 1 For a perceptive and succinct study of how post-truth politics arose and what it entails, see Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 2 Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 3 W. V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 80. Quine does grant, however, that the truth predicate is needed to talk about “sentences that are not given” and to generalize over a large number of sentences (80–81). 4 Richard Rorty, “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright,” in Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19–42. 5 Originally the term critical theory referred to a research program associated with the Frankfurt School of Western Marxism (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, etc.), and it continues to get used in this way. In its broader contemporary usage, it also refers to such projects of social critique as feminism, postcolonialism, queer theory, and critical race theory. I  distinguish these two usages by capitalizing “Critical Theory” when referring to the Frankfurt School tradition. 6 That is one way, but not the only way, to read the oft-cited conclusion to Foucault’s interview “Truth and Power”: “ ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A ‘regime’ of truth” (P/K 133). I take up Foucault’s work in chapter 8. 7 See Donald Davidson, “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth” (1999), in Lynch, ed., NT 623–40. 8 Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 72. See also Michael Lynch’s discussion of “fluid concepts” in TC 56–74 and 131–33, and True to Life: Why Truth Matters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 141–43. 9 “ ‘True’ and ‘false’ belong among those determinate notions which are held to be inert and wholly separate essences, one here and one there, each standing fixed and isolated from the other, with which it has nothing in common. Against this view it must be maintained that truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed ready-made.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 22. For an illuminating commentary that compares this passage with the conception of truth in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise (1779), from which the contrast between truth and money stems, see Angelica Nuzzo, “ ‘. . . As If Truth Were a Coin!’—Lessing and Hegel’s Developmental Theory of Truth,” Hegel-Studien 44 (2009): 131–56. 10 Richard Kirkham, Theories of Truth: A  Critical Introduction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

Introduction  25 11 Michael P. Lynch, “A Functionalist Theory of Truth,” in NT 725. See also Lynch, TOM 3–6. 12 Two representative anthologies that share this aim and contain instructive essays on the topic of truth are The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy: Contemporary Engagements Between Analytic and Continental Thought, eds. William Egginton and Mike Sandbothe (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), and Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide: Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M. Livingston (New York: Routledge, 2016). 13 Linda Martín Alcoff, “Reclaiming Truth,” in TE 336–37. 14 For a representative collection of essays in this field, see Truth and Pluralism: Current Debates, eds. Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen and Cory D. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 15 I take up the relation between aletheia and emeth in chapter 10. 16 See the concluding sections in chapters 7 and 8. 17 Aristotle, Poetics X.1–9, in S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics (New York: Dover, 1951), 34–37. See also Butcher’s chapter on “Poetic Truth,” 163–97. 18 Anselm, “On Truth,” in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 151–74. 19 Ronald De Sousa, Emotional Truth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45–67 and passim. In addition to emotional truth, De Souza identifies “fictional truth” and our being “true to” someone or something as domains of truth that are neither propositional nor “merely metaphorical” (52–55). 20 See in this connection Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). For other examples of ordinary usages of “true,” “truly,” and “truth” to talk about nonpropositional matters, see Campbell, TCT 59–60. 21 In a chapter titled “Acting Truly” (TCT 100–24), Richard Campbell provides an extended analysis of what it means to call someone a “true friend.” In that context, he also discusses the brief mention in Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic of friendships, alongside works of art and political States, as the sorts of nonpropositional matters that can be true or false. See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), §24n2, pp.  40–41; also §172 and n., pp.  236–37, and §213 and n., pp.  274–76. Wolfgang Künne, however, uses Hegel’s discussion and writings by Martin Heidegger as a way to dismiss the notion of nonpropositional truth (CT 104–7). 22 As already indicated, Campbell is one of the few recent truth theorists to emphasize dependability and fidelity as belonging to the broader meaning of truth. But he tends to offer “faithfulness” as an alternative to notions like correctness and accuracy and thereby leaves unclear how propositional truth is part of truth as a whole. Explaining this is a challenge I take up in this book.

2 Propositional Truth Facts and Propositions

Many recent theories of truth claim that for something to be true, there must be something else that makes it true. They also assume the matters that can be true are primarily or exclusively limited to propositions or their close cousins (beliefs, sentences, statements, and the like). Philosophers often call candidates for what can be true truth bearers, and they often label what makes them true truth makers. Accordingly, the primary ontological concern of many recent propositionally inflected theories of truth pertains to what truth bearers and truth makers are and how they interrelate. Although this concern seems most evident in correspondence theories, which posit a correlation or a congruence between (propositional) truth bearers and (nonpropositional) truth makers, one can detect a similar concern in coherence and pragmatic theories. These, too, wish to specify what makes propositional truth bearers true, whether that be other propositions with which the truth bearers are logically consistent (coherence theories) or the purposes of inquiry or action with respect to which the truth bearers are fruitful (pragmatic theories). Here, however, the commonality among propositionally inflected truth theories ends, and radical criticisms of the entire project of defining propositional truth begin. One finds significant disagreements in the literature about the nature of propositional truth bearers, the nature of truth makers, and the nature of the relation between them. Indeed, some philosophers strongly deny that propositional truth bearers have a nature, and others completely reject the notion of nonpropositional truth makers. The idea of propositional truth has come to resemble what W. B. Gallie called an “essentially contested concept.”1 If, nevertheless, one thinks the idea of propositional truth is important and regards the ontological concern of propositionally inflected theories as legitimate, one needs to sort out the concepts that figure prominently in such contestations. Four concepts in particular merit closer scrutiny: the concepts of facts and states of affairs, on the side of truth makers, and the concepts of beliefs and propositions, on the side of truth bearers. In this chapter, I first survey issues pertaining to these four concepts DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021-2

Propositional Truth  27 and how they interrelate (sections  2.1 and 2.2). Then I  lay out my own conception of truth makers, truth bearers, and their interrelation (section 2.3). I should mention at the outset, however, that I have strong reservations about the terms truth bearer and truth maker. My reservations have to do with the reasons I gave in the Introduction for not defining the “nature” of truth. Just as in general I do not think one can successfully define the nature of truth, so in particular I question whether it is fruitful to attempt a real definition of propositional truth. By contrast, common usages of the terms truth bearer and truth maker tend to assume that one can and should give such a real definition. They tend to assume that propositional truth is a definable property or set of properties such that truth bearers display this property and truth makers line up with this property. I do not share this assumption. When I use the language of “truth bearer” and “truth maker,” I do so for convenience and not out of a deeper ontological commitment to propositional truth’s being a definable property or set of properties.

2.1  Facts and States of Affairs Debates about facts and states of affairs in the truth-theoretical literature pertain primarily to whether there are facts and states of affairs, what facts and states of affairs are, and whether and to what extent they serve as truth makers for propositional truth bearers. Theorists who deny that there are either facts or states of affairs (or both) tend to see no need for nonpropositional truth makers.2 The same tendency shows up among theorists who see no significant differences between propositions and facts or states of affairs and regard true propositions as identical with facts.3 For such theorists, to say “It is a fact that Hannah is happy” is simply to say that the proposition expressed in the assertion “Hannah is happy” is true. In response, theorists who retain a fundamental distinction between propositional truth bearers and facts or states of affairs are inclined to ask, what makes a proposition such as “Hannah is happy” true? Moreover, they tend to assume that what makes it true is not another proposition but a fact or a state of affairs. For these theorists, the application of the term “fact” (“It is a fact”) to a nominalized sentence (“that Hannah is happy”) does not exhaust the usages of “fact” in ordinary language, nor does it provide decisive clues to either the nature of facts or their role as truth makers. If one grants that there are facts and states of affairs, and if one at least entertains the hypothesis that they are not only distinct from (true) propositions but also capable of making propositions true, then one faces questions about what they are and how they serve as truth makers. Here we find a wide range of views, between those who distinguish facts from

28  Propositional Truth states of affairs and those who equate them; those who regard both facts and states of affairs as truth makers and those who deny this about one or the other; those who treat both facts and states of affairs as “mindindependent” and those who deny this status to either facts or states of affairs or to both facts and states of affairs. Such disagreements overlap debates about the nature of facts and states of affairs and about their exact role as truth makers. One of the most fully articulated positions on such issues in the recent literature comes from David Armstrong. Modifying and developing the logical-atomist correspondence theory of Bertrand Russell (1918), Armstrong equates facts with states of affairs, and he says states of affairs are truth makers for particular truths, with such truths understood as true propositions. According to his realist metaphysics, a truth maker is an “independent reality” in virtue of which a proposition is true. Moreover, truth makers necessitate the truths they make true, and every truth has a truth maker. Armstrong calls his position “Truthmaker Necessitarianism and Truthmaker Maximalism.”4 Along with some necessary refinements, this position yields the following theory concerning the nature of truth: “p (a proposition) is true if and only if there exists a T (some entity in the world) such that T necessitates that p and p is true in virtue of T.”5 In the first instance, Armstrong regards truth-making states of affairs as consisting of particulars and their properties and external relations. On his ontology, both particulars and properties exist, and properties exist as universals that are immanent to the particulars of which they are properties. Moreover, the particulars and their properties are contingent (i.e., they might not have existed), but a particular’s instantiation of a property is necessary (i.e., if a has property F, then their “partial identity” must exist: “if a and F exist, then they must ‘intersect’ ”6). From this it follows that states of affairs, insofar as they consist of particulars and their properties, are “contingent beings” involving a necessary connection: It is important to observe that making a necessary truth does not make the state of affairs a’s being F a necessary existent . . . [T]he view that I should like . . . to champion is that a and F are necessarily connected but are themselves contingent beings. They might not have existed. If they might not have existed, then a’s being F might not have existed, and so this state of affairs is a contingent being.7 In other words, the state of affairs that necessitates the truth of the proposition “Hannah is happy” is the contingent existence of Hannah, the contingent existence of happiness, and the necessary instantiation of happiness by Hannah—her being happy at the moment when this proposition is asserted.8 Although Armstrong has much more to say about truth makers with respect to negative, general, and modal truths, the

Propositional Truth  29 necessitating of propositional truth by contingent truth makers lies at the heart of his truth theory. Despite the initial plausibility of Armstrong’s account, there is a strong tradition of skepticism in analytic philosophy concerning the notion of nonpropositional truth makers, extending from the work of Gottlob Frege and Alfred Tarski to more recent contributions by Donald Davidson and Hartry Field. If there is a common theme in this skeptical tradition, it is that the appeal to facts or states of affairs does not really explain how such purported truth makers make propositional truth bearers true. Either one lands in an infinite regress of facts that are required in order for it to be true that the initial fact makes the initial proposition true. Or, via the controversial “slingshot argument,” one ends up with one “Great Fact”—the world as such—as the truth maker for all true propositions.9 As formulated by Donald Davidson, the slingshot argument casts doubt on the notion of truth-making facts by showing how hard it is “to individuate facts if they are only defined as what makes propositions true.”10 Davidson’s 1969 essay “True to the Facts” aims to defend a version of the correspondence theory that dispenses with the notion of truthmaking facts. Standard correspondence theories have great difficulty, he says, “in finding a notion of fact that explains anything, that does not lapse, when spelled out, into the trivial or the empty.”11 Rather than seek a more robust explanation of “fact,” he turns to a semantic conception of truth derived from Tarski.12 Davidson’s slingshot argument goes like this.13 Suppose that a proposition is true if there is a fact to which it corresponds. Now consider the proposition “that Naples is farther north than Red Bluff.” To which fact does this proposition correspond? Presumably it corresponds “to the fact that Naples is farther north than Red Bluff.” On closer examination, however, this proposition also seems to correspond to many other facts, for example, “that Red Bluff is farther south than Naples” and “that Red Bluff is farther south than the largest Italian city within thirty miles of Ischia,” as well as any number of other facts identified by propositions that are logically equivalent to the original proposition. Unless one has a way to pick out the relevant truth-making fact without appealing to the notion that this fact is what the proposition in question corresponds to, one must allow an entire host of facts into any particular correspondence relation. Pushed to its logical conclusion, this argument suggests that every proposition corresponds to this host of facts. Indeed, every proposition corresponds to “The Great Fact.” In other words, talk about facts as truth makers “reduces to predication of truth.” And, if we want to explain the predication of truth, then we should follow Tarski’s lead and consider how sentences are satisfied by the functions of an object language.14 Unlike correspondence theories that use the strategy of facts, this semantic approach does not confuse

30  Propositional Truth “the objects the sentence is ‘about’ ” with “whatever it is the sentence says about them,” and it allows generality to have its own scope within truth-predicating language.15 As a reductio ad absurdum, the slingshot argument poses a significant challenge to truth-maker theories such as Armstrong’s. Yet Davidson’s appeal to the Tarskian notion of “satisfaction” also seems unable or unwilling to account for the feature of propositional truth that truthmaker theories highlight, namely, that for a proposition about nonpropositional matters to be true, there must be something nonpropositional that makes it true. On a Tarskian approach, the functions of an object language that satisfy a particular sentence are themselves linguistic assignments of predicates and the like to whatever the sentence is about. That leaves the following question unaddressed: What is it about the object that allows this linguistic assignment to take place? If the answer were “Nothing,” then Davidson’s purported intention to propose a truth theory that expresses “a relation between language and the world”16 would be oddly one-sided. The relation would be one of linguistic assignment but not of nonlinguistic availability for assignment. If, by contrast, the answer were “Something,” then Davidson would need to give an account of the nonlinguistic features of objects that allow objects to be so assigned. He does not give such an account in this essay, and, so far as I can tell, he never does provide one. Nevertheless, Davidson has put his finger on a sore point in truthmaker theories such as Armstrong’s. The most careful delineation of the nature of truth-making facts or states of affairs will come up short if it does not describe what gives them their truth-making capacity—that is, what, besides the supposition that they make propositional truth bearers true. One can say, as Armstrong does, that contingently existent particulars and properties and the necessary instantiation of properties are what makes propositions about them true. Yet this leaves open the question of what precisely gives them this truth-making capacity. It appears, then, that if one does not want to dismiss the notion of nonpropositional truth makers à la Davidson, one needs to offer a more robust ontology of their truth-making capacities than theorists like Armstrong seem ready to provide. More specifically, one needs to offer an ontology of their relation to the linguistic practices from which propositional truth claims arise. That is what I shall attempt.

2.2  Beliefs and Propositions First, however, I  need to lay out some issues pertaining to truth bearers, the other side of the truth-theoretical picture. Although truth theorists have identified various candidates for the role of propositional truth bearer, including sentences (Tarski), statements (J. L. Austin), and assertions (Bernard Williams), “beliefs” and “propositions” have been

Propositional Truth  31 especially prominent in truth-theoretical debates. So I focus on these two concepts. As Pascal Engel points out, a long history lies behind emphases on each concept.17 The emphasis on propositions—roughly, the abstract content expressed by linguistic utterances—goes back to the Stoics, and it attains contemporary prominence via the work of Frege and Rudolf Carnap.18 The emphasis on beliefs—roughly, mental ideas or representations—goes back to René Descartes and modern empiricism, and it comes to contemporary prominence via the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and Bertrand Russell. Simply noting this history already suggests a central point of contention with respect to truth bearers: To what extent are they tied to the use of language? Philosophers indebted to the nominalist tradition of, say, William of Ockham emphasize the tie to language usage. Like Davidson, and like Willard Quine before him, they tend to treat sentences or linguistic utterances as the primary bearers of truth, and they are wary about the concepts of proposition and belief.19 Setting such wariness aside, we can say that three issues pertaining to beliefs and propositions have special relevance for a theory of truth bearers. First, what are beliefs and propositions? Second, how are beliefs and propositions related, if they are? Third, what gives either beliefs or propositions their purported capacity to carry truth, to be “truth bearers”? 2.2.1  Beliefs: Russell’s Multi-term Theory (1912) In a well-known essay from 1912 titled “Truth and Falsehood,” Bertrand Russell proposes what Richard Kirkham describes as a “ ­ correspondenceas-congruence” theory of (propositional) truth.20 For Russell, truth requires that there be a congruence—indeed, an ­isomorphism—between a multiterm belief and a multi-term fact. A belief is a directional relation between a believing or judging mind and “several things other than itself.”21 The believing mind is one term in this relation—it is the “subject” or “subject term”—and the several other things to which it relates are the other terms— the “objects” or “object terms,” including the relation(s) between them. This relation of believing (or judging) has a definite direction that places the various terms in a certain order. For a belief to be true, the ordered relation between its object terms must be congruent with the ordered relation in which they in fact exist. Accordingly, to use Russell’s example, Othello’s belief that Desdemona loves Cassio involves a relation of believing between Othello, on the one hand, and the objects Desdemona, the relation of loving, and Cassio, on the other hand. If the complex unity [Desdemona’s loving Cassio] exists, having exactly the same objects in the same ordered relation as the belief’s object-terms (Desdemona, Cassio), object-relation (loving), and direction (Desdemona loving Cassio and not, for example, Cassio loving

32  Propositional Truth Desdemona), then Othello’s belief would be true. This complex unity is the fact that would correspond to Othello’s belief, if the belief were true. (Within the world of Shakespeare’s Othello, of course, the belief is in fact false.) The conception of truth as congruence in Russell’s essay has been both influential and controversial. One controversy arose because the conception led Russell to posit the existence of “negative facts” in order to explain how some multi-term beliefs are false, even though they seem congruent with multi-term facts. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus resolved this problem— and dismissed the purported existence of negative facts—by distinguishing between facts (Tatsachen) and states of affairs (Sachverhalte).22 Just as problematic, it seems to me, are Russell’s failure to distinguish adequately between an act of believing and either the belief that results or the content of this belief; his tendency to equate believing and judging; and his concomitant failure to do justice to the linguistic and conceptual mediation of truth claims. Moreover, these problems, which are especially pronounced in Russell’s 1912 “Truth and Falsehood,” seem endemic to any attempt to make beliefs the primary bearers of propositional truth. What matters for much of propositional truth is not simply whether someone believes something and not simply whether someone has a certain belief but whether the content of the belief is true in the relevant sense. As Marian David points out, the constituents of complex beliefs (e.g., either x or y; if x then y) need not be believed, and yet they remain truth-evaluable. A similar problem of “logically complex truthbearers” arises when judgments or assertions are considered the primary truth bearers: proposals along these lines “run afoul of the simple observation that there are unasserted and unbelieved truthbearers.”23 2.2.2  Propositions: Frege and Russell (1918) Such issues increase the attraction of the view that propositions, not beliefs (or judgments or assertions), are the primary bearers of propositional truth.24 Russell himself changed his mind about these matters, moving from an emphasis on propositions in The Principles of Mathematics (1903) to the multi-term theory of belief or judgment in the essay we have considered (1912) and then on to what Künne describes as the “parsimonious fact-based correspondence theory” of Russell’s logical atomist position (1918), in which propositions return to prominence (CT 5, 118–26). Moreover, there are widespread debates in the literature about how to view propositions, with “Fregean” and “Russellian” propositions being the primary alternatives. To understand and assess such debates, it will help to review their sources in the writings of Frege and Russell. To begin, we can say that, in general, both camps regard propositions as (1) the content expressed by declarative sentences (and, more broadly

Propositional Truth  33 but more controversially, by other linguistic utterances), (2) the sharable objects of propositional attitudes (i.e., what we believe, doubt, hope, etc. when we believe that x, doubt that x, hope that x, etc.), and (3) the primary bearers of truth-value. Moreover, both Fregeans and Russellians regard propositions as structured entities, as complexes whose parts or constituents “are bound together in a certain way.”25 They differ, however, about how to characterize the constituents and what binds these together in a structured proposition. 2.2.2.1  Frege: Thought as Sense of Sentence Frege usually employs the German term Satz to mean both “sentence” (as a linguistic expression) and “proposition” (as what a sentence expresses), but what he calls (the) thought (der Gedanke) is what Fregeans mean by “proposition.” Frege’s late article from 1918 on this topic, translated as “Thought” or “Thoughts” (FR 325–45), portrays a proposition (i.e., a thought) as the “sense” (Sinn) of the sentence that expresses it. The sense of a sentence arises from the sense of the parts that make up a sentence and from how these parts hang together. For a simple declarative sentence of the form “S is P,” the “saturated” sense of the subject term (“S”) completes the “unsaturated” sense of the predicate term (“is P”). In other words, the sense of such a sentence—that is, the thought or proposition such a sentence expresses—arises from how the sense of “S” links up with the sense of “is P.” To understand this portrayal of propositions as the senses of sentences, one needs to go back to Frege’s distinction between “sense” (Sinn) and “reference” (Bedeutung) in his famous essay from 1892. “On Sinn and Bedeutung” (FR 151–71) begins with simple signs, as in the equations a  =  a and a  =  b, and with words that designate definite objects, as in “Evening Star” and “Morning Star.” Frege quickly establishes that different signs and different “proper names”26 can designate the same object but have different meanings. “Evening Star” and “Morning Star,” for example, designate or refer to the same planet—namely, Venus—but they have different connotations and contextual implications. Their designation is what Frege calls Bedeutung (reference or referent),27 and their texture of connotations and implications is what he calls Sinn (sense). The sense of a sign or proper name is, he says, “the mode of presentation [Art des Gegebenseins] of the thing designated” (FR 152). Although not every word or phrase having a sense has a reference or referent—Frege gives as example “the celestial body most distant from the Earth”(FR 153)—words can refer (or be used to refer) only if they have a sense.28 Against the representationalist semantics stemming from Descartes and John Locke, Frege insists that one should not confuse either the sense or the Bedeutung of a word with the subjective representation (Vorstellung) that an individual might associate with it. For, unlike a mental

34  Propositional Truth representation, which differs from one individual to the next, the sense of a word can be “the common property of many people,” and the Bedeutung is “the object itself which we designate by using it,” and not simply an individual’s image or felt experience of the object (FR 154, 155). Accordingly, Frege recommends the following phraseology: “A  proper name (word, sign, combination of signs, expression) expresses its sense, stands for [bedeutet] or designates its Bedeutung. By employing a sign we express its sense and designate its Bedeutung” (FR 156). Using this phraseology, Frege then examines the sense and Bedeutung of what he calls “an entire assertoric sentence [eines ganzen Behauptungssatzes]” (FR 156)29—basically a declarative sentence or a sentence employed to make an assertion. For example, the sentence “The Morning Star is a body illuminated by the Sun” expresses a different thought from the sentence “The Evening Star is a body illuminated by the Sun,” even though both sentences raise correct claims about the same object. Along with other examples, this suggests that two sentences can have different senses but share the same Bedeutung. For Frege, the thought—the propositional content—is the sense of an assertoric sentence, and the sentence’s truth-value is its Bedeutung—with the truth-value understood as its being either true or false. This Bedeutung is presented via the sense of the sentence. As a consequence, any assertoric sentence can have only one of two Bedeutungen—“either the True or the False.” Moreover, “all true sentences have the same Bedeutung and so . . . do all false sentences.” With this move, Frege obliterates “all that is specific” in the Bedeutung of an assertoric sentence and, in effect, divorces the question of propositional truth from all questions about fact-based correspondence (FR 156–59). The 1918 essay “Der Gedanke” reinforces this account of propositions. There Frege dismisses attempts to explain “truth as correspondence” and “any other attempt to define truth” (FR 327). He restricts the question of truth to “the sense of sentences”—in particular, the sense of assertoric sentences—and describes thoughts as the “senses of sentences” (FR 328). He also argues that thoughts (i.e., propositions) belong neither to the external perceptible world nor to the inner world of consciousness but to a “third realm.” They exist independently of human consciousness, and they are available for anyone to grasp by thinking the thoughts that assertoric sentences can express (FR 334–42). When a thought or proposition is true, it is true “quite apart from my acknowledging its truth or even thinking it” (FR 342). It is also true quite apart from any purported correspondence to supposedly nonpropositional facts: “What is a fact? A fact is a thought that is true” (FR 342). Moreover, the truth of a thought or proposition is “timeless” and “eternally unchangeable” (FR 344).30 On Frege’s view, then, a proposition is the structured sense of an assertoric sentence, built from the way in which the sense of the grammatical

Propositional Truth  35 subject completes the sense of the grammatical predicate, and referring to either the True or the False. Propositions are independently existent and universally accessible; when true, they are timelessly true. 2.2.2.2  Russell: Propositions and Atomic Facts Just as Frege’s 1918 account of propositions (thoughts) and their truth relies on his earlier discussion of the sense and reference of words and assertoric sentences, so Bertrand Russell’s logical atomist account of propositional truth from around the same time31 builds on his earlier discussion of meaning and denotation. In “On Denoting,” a well-known essay from 1905, Russell takes issue not only with Frege but also with Russell’s own theory of denotation in The Principles of Mathematics (1903). “On Denoting” argues that “denoting phrases” (e.g., a man, all men, the present King of England) have various logical uses. Some do not denote anything, others denote one definite object, and others denote ambiguously. Moreover, denoting phrases do not have meaning in themselves but only by virtue of the meaning of the propositions “in whose verbal expression they occur.”32 Employing a predicate calculus similar to Frege’s, Russell shows how definite descriptions can have significance when used in a sentence and yet not denote anything. This allows him to avoid both Alexius Meinong’s postulation of existent objects that do not subsist (e.g., the round square) and Frege’s alleged commitment to every such phrase having both a meaning (Sinn) and a denotation (Bedeutung).33 In his later lectures on logical atomism, where Russell acknowledges his indebtedness to Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important insights he attributes to Wittgenstein is “that propositions are not names for facts” (PLA 187; italics in original). The reason he gives for this is not Frege’s claim that facts simply are true propositions, however, but rather the assertion that, unlike a name, which designates just one thing, every proposition can have two relations to the same fact—it can be either true or false to the fact—and every fact can have two propositions correspond to it—the proposition the fact makes true and the proposition the fact makes false. Indeed, facts cannot be named: they can only be asserted, denied, questioned, and so on, and “those are things involving the whole proposition,” not simply a name or definite description (PLA 187–88). Russell describes a fact as something belonging “to the objective world” that “makes a proposition true or false” (PLA 182–83). A proposition, as the “typical vehicle” for truth and falsehood, is an indicative or assertive sentence or a nominalized sentence of that sort. It is, Russell says, a complex symbol made up of other symbols (e.g., words) and meaning something (PLA 186). The facts that propositions stand for also are complex (PLA 193). Further, the complexity of propositions mirrors “an objective complexity in the world.” Indeed, there is a “certain fundamental

36  Propositional Truth identity of structure” between a fact and the proposition it makes true; the complexity of the proposition as a symbol “corresponds very closely with the complexity of the facts symbolized by it” (PLA 197). The most fundamental facts—what Russell calls atomic facts—are particular things and their qualities and relations. Labeling these particular things “terms,” and calling qualities “monadic relations,” Russell says atomic facts consist of terms and relations. Correlatively, he defines “particulars” as “terms of relations in atomic facts” (PLA 199). So too, the propositions that express atomic facts are what he calls atomic propositions. These consist of predicates, which express qualities or monadic relations; verbs or verb phrases, which express dyadic, triadic, and other relations; and subjects, which express the terms of the relation. In principle (i.e., in a strictly logical language), but not in practice (i.e., not in ordinary language), only proper names like “this” and “that” can stand for a particular (PLA 199–200). For each particular “stands entirely alone and is completely self-subsistent,” even though it usually is shortlived in our experience (PLA 201–2). Whereas, according to Russell, we can understand names for particulars simply through acquaintance with the particulars they name, to understand predicates (e.g., red, square) and relations (e.g., loving, being to the left of) we need to “bring in the form of a proposition”(PLA 205).34 Moreover, predicates and relations can never be the subjects of propositions; when our usage of words suggests that predicates and relations are subjects (e.g., to quote the Beatles, “Love is all you need”), then we have to ensure logically that they are kept “to the right use” (PLA 206). It is also important to realize that, contrary to what much of traditional philosophy says, not all propositions take a “subject-predicate form” (PLA 207). If this caveat about form applies to atomic propositions, then even more so to what Russell calls molecular propositions, which use logical connectives such as “or,” “if . . . then,” “and,” and so on to connect two or more propositions. When the propositions connected in this way are themselves atomic, the truth or falsehood of the molecular proposition depends on the discrete facts that make each atomic proposition true or false. For example, the truth of “p or q” depends on the truth of p and the truth of q. There is no “single disjunctive fact corresponding to ‘p or q’ ” on which the truth of this disjunctive molecular proposition depends. In general, “the truth or falsehood of the molecular proposition depends only on the truth or falsehood of the propositions that enter it” (PLA 209–10). In addition to atomic facts, Russell discusses “general facts” and “existence-facts.” Parallel to these facts, he also discusses “general propositions” and “propositional functions.” But it would take us too far afield to explicate all of these notions. At bottom, Russell’s logical atomism embraces a metaphysical picture in which the “ultimate simples” from

Propositional Truth  37 which the world is built—that is, particulars, qualities, and relations— “have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else” (PLA 270). These, along with the facts in which they are constituents, are what anchor the truth of propositions, by virtue of isomorphism between the structure of facts and the structure of the propositions that correspond to them. 2.2.3  Structured Propositions From the writings we have reviewed, one can derive two different accounts of structured propositions, usually labeled Fregean and Russellian. Although there is disagreement about the extent to which Frege and Russell subscribed to these accounts,35 they have framed much of the debate about propositions in the truth-theoretical literature. According to the Fregean account, a proposition is the structured sense of an (assertoric) sentence, formed from the sense of the words (i.e., concepts) whereby their referents are presented. Propositions are built from the senses of the words that make up the linguistic utterances we use to make assertions and articulate beliefs, and from how these senses are ordered. Propositions are ordered by virtue of how saturated senses complete unsaturated senses. If what the structured sense of a sentence designates (bedeutet) is true (the True), then the proposition is true. If it designates what is false (the False), then the proposition is false. The Russellian account, by contrast, regards propositions as structured expressions of particular things and their qualities or properties and relations. Before explaining what this account comes to, however, I  must note that here the formulation “expressions of” is deliberately ambiguous. In some of Russell’s writings, particulars, qualities/properties, and relations are themselves the constituents of propositions. In his 1903 The Principles of Mathematics, for example, he says the constituents of a proposition, which he labels “terms,” can be “a man, a moment, a number, a class, a relation, a chimaera, or anything else that can be mentioned.”36 This view of propositions as themselves consisting of particulars, qualities, and relations is the primary source for contemporary accounts of “Russellian propositions” as “structured entities whose basic components, or propositional building blocks, are the [actual] objects and properties our beliefs are about.”37 (This in contrast to a Fregean view, according to which propositions are “structured entities composed of the concepts of the objects and properties [that] beliefs are about.”38) Such incorporation of particulars and so on into propositions leads Künne to argue that “Russellian propositions” are states of affairs (Sachverhalten) rather than propositions (CT 261–63), and it prompts David to say “it is hard to see how a true Russellian proposition could be anything but a fact,” such that the purported correspondence theory of truth “reduces to an identity theory of truth, on which a proposition is true iff it is a fact, and false, iff it is not a fact.”39 In other writings, however,

38  Propositional Truth such as Russell’s 1918 “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” particulars, qualities/properties, and relations are the constituents of facts, not of propositions, and they receive expression in propositions, which are not facts but are complex symbols consisting of subjects, predicates, and verbs or verb phrases. Despite these differences among Russell’s own accounts of what propositions are and how they are constituted, the two of his accounts just summarized share the underlying position that propositions are structured entities whose constituents can be represented as ordered pairs consisting of terms and relations, with qualities or properties understood as one-place relations.40 As such structured entities, propositions are articulated in sentences, and they are what we believe when we believe that x. Unlike Frege, Russell does not regard a proposition as the sense of a sentence, nor does Russell think a proposition is built from the senses of words. Rather, a proposition is built from their references, such that sentences with different senses can articulate the same proposition. The key to a proposition’s being structured is the way in which a verb or verb phrase binds the other constituents of the proposition. What makes a proposition true is not that it (or the sentence that articulates it) designates “the True” but rather that the proposition’s structure mirrors the structure of the fact to which the proposition corresponds. Without going into the many debates between Fregeans and Russellians about how propositions are composed and how they operate, one can mention a central problem for each approach, a problem that goes back to its originator’s writings. Because Frege envisions only two referents for any proposition—either the True or the False—it is hard to see how a Fregean approach can account for the truth conditions of propositions whose linguistic articulations employ singular referring terms. This is especially so of propositions expressed by that-clauses in belief reports employing proper names. Stephen Schiffer gives the following example: Ralph believes that George Eliot was a man (TWM 24–26). If the use of “George Eliot” in this belief report does not refer to the actual historical author also known as Mary Anne Evans, but rather the “sense” of “George Eliot” helps govern the proposition’s reference (i.e., truthvalue), how can one specify the truth conditions for this proposition? This problem stems from unresolved issues in Frege’s own writings. As Michael Beaney indicates, there is a tension, perhaps irresolvable, between Frege’s semantic contextualism, according to which the meaning of a sign or word must be decided in the context of the proposition it helps express, and his increasingly Platonic-realist objectivism, according to which such meaning is governed by the object to which the proposition refers. In Beaney’s words, as far as our use of ordinary language is concerned, and given Frege’s conception of the Bedeutung of a proposition as a truth-value, it does

Propositional Truth  39 seem implausible to suppose that the Bedeutung of a name, i.e., the object it refers to, is somehow determined by the truth-value of a proposition in which it occurs. Here, it seems, whether a proposition has a truth-value is dependent on whether the names it contains have referents (FR 18).41 Whereas Fregean accounts of structured propositions have difficulty specifying the truth conditions of propositions employing singular referring terms, Russellians have trouble differentiating between the truthvalues of two or more sentences that seem to refer to the same fact but whose words have such different senses that they can hardly express the same proposition. Focusing again on that clauses in belief reports, Schiffer gives the example: “Ralph believes that George Eliot adored groundhogs but doesn’t believe that Mary Ann Evans adored woodchucks” (TWM 20). At first blush, it seems perfectly plausible for someone to believe and not believe as reported, provided one is not aware that “George Eliot” and “Mary Ann Evans” name the same historical person and that groundhogs are woodchucks. Accordingly, the displayed belief report might very well be true. Because the two names refer to the same “particular,” however, and to adore groundhogs and to adore woodchucks are the same relation, a Russellian can only regard the belief report as false, because it claims that Ralph both does and does not believe one and the same proposition of the form ⟨⟨p, a⟩, A⟩, where “p” indicates one person, “a” one kind of animal, and “A” the relation of adoring. On my reading of Russell, this problem stems from a deeper tension between his empiricism and his logicism. Here “empiricism” refers to his tendency to privilege knowledge by direct acquaintance, and “logicism” refers not simply to his project of reducing mathematics to formal logic (a project he shares with Frege) but more broadly to his tendency to regard symbolic logic as the ideal language for exhibiting the true nature of reality. “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” displays this tension in full force, combining a commitment to directly knowable atomic facts as the fundamental components of reality with a valorization of propositions as the vehicles of truth with regard to these facts. In postulating a structural isomorphism between facts and propositions as the key to propositional truth, Russell cannot countenance the sort of semantic flexibility regularly encountered in ordinary language, as is illustrated by the problem of differentiating the truth-values of sentences that differ in linguistic sense but not in factual reference. The deeper tension between empiricism and logicism also helps account for the different ways in which others have challenged Russell’s conception of propositional truth. Whereas Austin, in his 1950 essay on “Truth,” describes truth-making correspondence as a conventional correlation between a statement and a historical state of affairs, rather than a hardwired isomorphism between proposition and fact, Strawson, when

40  Propositional Truth he criticizes Austin’s correlational correspondence theory for misconstruing “fact-stating” language, completely rejects the underlying ontology of both Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s logical atomism: “The world is the totality of things, not of facts.”42 More recently, Künne has criticized Russell for the problems he generates by exceeding Wittgenstein’s Tractarian austerity and positing not only negative and general facts but also irreducibly general propositions and purely logical truths (CT 118–26). Russell probably would not need hardwired isomorphism, a world of atomic facts, and “non-atomic facts as truth-donors” (CT 125) if he were not equally committed to both empiricism and logicism.

2.3  Decontextualized Disclosure The issues we have canvassed with respect to facts and propositions, and many others like them, have strengthened the impetus among analytic philosophers to abandon anything like a correspondence theory and to embrace various forms of primitivism, minimalism, and deflationism with respect to propositional truth. Although I  recognize their appeal as alternatives to essentially contested concepts and theoretical frameworks, these positions tend to avoid rather than address the questions correspondence theories aimed to answer, whether by denying that the concept of the truth of propositions or sentences can be explained (e.g., Davidson’s primitivism), or by denying that we can finitely state what propositional truth is (e.g., Paul Horwich’s minimalism), or by denying that truth is a substantive property or a genuine predicate (e.g., Quine’s disquotationalism and other forms of deflationism).43 My own response to the issues canvassed is to replace the notion of correspondence with a more open-ended notion of disclosure, and to propose more differentiated accounts of both facts and propositions. I anchor these accounts in the practices and interrelations that give rise to facts and propositions. This anchoring follows clues suggested by John Searle’s analysis of reference and predication as well as by Stephen Schiffer’s theory of pleonastic propositions. Both Searle and Schiffer look for ways out of Russellian and Fregean impasses, but they do not dismiss entirely the underlying intuition of correspondence theories, namely, that the key to propositional truth lies in a relation between propositional truth bearers and nonpropositional truth makers. Unlike my own approach, however, neither Searle nor Schiffer theorizes this relation as being one of disclosure. 2.3.1  Reference, Predication, and Pleonasm Searle’s analysis of reference builds on a fundamental point in Strawson’s critique of Russell’s theory of proper names and definite descriptions. Strawson insists that it is not words or sentences that refer but rather

Propositional Truth  41 people as language users who refer by using linguistic expressions in line with the rules or conventions of the language used—a point that also challenges Frege’s account of reference (Bedeutung). Referring, Strawson says, “is not something an expression does; it is something that someone can use an expression to do.” Referring to something “is a characteristic of a use of an expression, just as ‘being about’ something, and truth-orfalsity, are characteristics of a use of a sentence.”44 Although Searle agrees with this fundamental Stawsonian point about reference, he is concerned to distinguish two “propositional acts”—­ reference and predication—and to identify the rules holding for each within every speech act of whatever sort where reference and predication occur (e.g., stating, promising, and commanding)—that is, every speech act within which language users employ linguistic expressions to refer and to predicate.45 This distinction allows Searle to reject the view, common to both Russell and Frege and continued, Searle suggests, by Strawson, that predicate expressions (are used to) refer to something nonlinguistic such as a property or a universal. Rather, predicate expressions are used to predicate, not to refer.46 I have explored elsewhere what Searle’s approach to reference and predication implies for a theory of propositions, and I  do not plan to rehearse the details here.47 Searle provides a way to understand propositions as the shared or shareable content that emerges via different types of speech acts when language users engage in, or have engaged in, the practices of referring and predicating. The occurrence and availability of such content are not restricted to the usage of sentences having a simple grammar of subject and predicate of the form S is P—a point both Russell and Frege rightly stress. Nevertheless, the usage of such grammatically simple sentences provides the clearest examples of what referring and predicating involve and of how propositions (or at least proto-propositional contents) emerge via various speech acts. Moreover, statements, reports, descriptions, explanations, and the like—which I classify as assertions or assertoric speech acts—are the speech acts in which referring and predicating most explicitly raise a claim to the truth of the propositions that emerge from them.48 To say that propositions emerge when a language user refers and predicates, and that their claim to truth surfaces most explicitly within assertoric speech acts, is to take issue with ontological assumptions in both Fregean and Russellian accounts of structured propositions. Whereas Frege regards propositions as the self-subsistent and eternal senses of (assertoric) sentences, Russell regards propositions as logical statements hardwired to the structure of atomic facts. A clue to thinking differently about the ontological status of propositions comes from Stephen Schiffer, who has demonstrated the logical problems that confront both Fregean and Russellian accounts. Schiffer proposes to think of “the propositions we believe, the actual referents of that clauses” as pleonastic (TWM 49).49 They are just

42  Propositional Truth as pleonastic as are fictional entities (such as the literary character Molly Bloom) and properties (such as being a dog) (TWM 50–71). The point Schiffer wishes to make about all such pleonastic entities, including propositions, is that they exist by virtue of “something-fromnothing transformations.” A  something-from-nothing transformation occurs “when from a statement involving no reference to an F we can deduce a statement that does refer to an F” (TWM 61). Schiffer gives as an example how we can validly infer from the statement “Lassie is a dog” the pleonastic equivalent “Lassie has the property of being a dog,” which entails the (pleonastic) existence of this property (TWM 61). Moreover, we can have knowledge about such an apparently “mind- and languageindependent abstract [entity]” by virtue of our engaging in “propertyhypostasizing” linguistic or conceptual practices. Hence, to connect this with Searle’s point about the difference between referring and predicating, in a simple act of asserting “Lassie is a dog” one does not refer to the property of being a dog but simply refers to Lassie and predicates about him. Nevertheless, according to Schiffer, once the assertion has been made, we can refer to that property and infer that it exists. Just as properties, being pleonastic, are mere “shadows of predicates,” so, according to Schiffer, propositions, as the pleonastic referents of that clauses, are the “shadows of sentences.” They exist by virtue of “something-from-nothing transformations” that allow us to deduce their existence from statements involving no reference to them. Further, we can know about them by virtue of engaging in proposition-hypostasizing practices. So, for example, we can validly infer from “Lassie is a dog” the pleonastic equivalent “That Lassie is a dog is true” and the proposition “that Lassie is a dog” (TWM 71). Propositions are pleonastic, then, in the sense that they come to exist by virtue of the logical inferences we can draw with respect to our language usage. They are neither Fregean self-subsistent entities nor Russellian hard-wired statements. Rather, in my own terms, propositions are the results of language-related logical practices. Unlike Searle, who restricts the notion of reference to the usage of linguistic referring expressions within speech acts, however, Schiffer continues the problematic Fregean and Russellian tendency to apply the concept of reference to entire (assertoric) sentences: he says that pleonastic propositions are the references of entire that-clauses. Yet his appeal to hypostasizing practices provides a way to regard propositions as resulting from the practices of referring and predicating, but without reducing propositions to mere linguistic constructions. 2.3.2  Decontextualization and Disclosure Taken together, Searle’s speech act theory of “propositional acts” and Schiffer’s account of “pleonastic propositions” suggest that propositions

Propositional Truth  43 emerge, via abstraction, from our engaging in the linguistic practices of reference and predication. Propositions are not simply linguistic constructions, however, because their emergence depends to a significant degree on how the objects they are about lend themselves to these practices. It is within the interrelation between the practices of reference and predication, on the one hand, and the objects of these practices, on the other, that the abstract emergence of propositions occurs. This interrelation is one of disclosure, such that the abstractly emergent proposition serves to discover aspects of the practical object(s) the proposition is about, and the practical object displays its identity and relations in light of that abstraction. Such interrelated discovery and display are what I mean by “decontextualized disclosure.” On this account, it would be a mistake to limit the notion of propositional truth bearers to propositions as such. Propositions are results of the linguistic practices of referring and predicating; these practices occur within speech acts of various sorts; and speech acts serve to articulate pre-linguistic beliefs. At a minimum, then, the notion of propositional truth bearers should include not only propositions but also the assertoric speech acts that most explicitly raise truth claims as well as the beliefs such assertions can articulate. Correlatively, the notion of nonpropositional truth makers should not be limited to either facts or states of affairs (or both). It should also include aspects of the practical objects that propositions are about. 2.3.2.1  Beliefs and Practical Objects Consider, for example, my belief on a certain occasion that Hannah, our Golden Retriever, is healthy. Her gait, her shiny coat, her eagerness to fetch, and much more may lie at the basis of this belief; if I  brought her to a veterinary clinic, scientifically based support for the belief could readily be produced. In the ordinary flow of daily life, however, I could easily have this belief without expressing it in language, and I could act upon it—by taking Hannah on an extended camping trip, for example— without asserting that she is healthy. Accordingly, the truth of this belief, if it is true, is not in the first instance the truth it would have if it were ­linguistically articulated or were asserted as a proposition. Rather, the truth of this belief resides primarily in its being reliable in practice. And one can have the belief and rely on it without ever expressing it in language. In that sense, this belief, like many beliefs, is pre-linguistic. A true belief is one that can be relied on in the course of daily life. This suggests quite a different account of true beliefs from Russell’s multiple relation theory, an account attuned to the pragmatic emphases of William James and John Dewey.50 The truth of beliefs does not hinge on a supposed isomorphism between multi-term beliefs and multiterm facts. It hinges instead on disclosive interrelations between practical

44  Propositional Truth agents and practical objects. By “practical agent” I  mean anyone who can take part in the practices of daily life. By “practical object” I mean anything toward which such practices can be directed. I  use the term “interrelation” rather than “relation” to signal that the connection between agent and object is a two-way path. Agents do not simply create or constitute objects, and objects do not simply determine or limit agents. Rather, in general, agents and objects are interdependent: agents engage with objects, and objects lend themselves to such engagement. To be a practical object is to be available for such engagement. Beliefs arise within disclosive interrelations. As practical agents engage with practical objects in the course of daily life, we arrive at insights into them, and we tend to rely on these insights. Such insights can be called beliefs. Although a belief need not be either articulated or asserted, usually it can be both articulated and asserted, and often it is, especially when problems arise or when others question us. A belief, then, is a practically acquired insight, usually articulable and assertible, that we rely on in practice. The “truth” of a belief is its reliability in practice, just as its “falsity” is its unreliability in practice. When a belief is articulated in language, it becomes assertible, and when it is asserted, it also acquires propositional form. That is why beliefs can be said to have “propositional content.” I prefer, however, to say that they can acquire propositional content, depending on whether they are linguistically articulated. Beliefs have content prior to being ­articulated—they are insights about something—but, strictly speaking, prior to articulation, this content is not propositional—it has not undergone the linguistic referring and predicating that propositions presuppose. Although the fact that beliefs usually are articulable and assertible helps explain why believing is said to be a “propositional attitude,” I also prefer to say that believing can involve a propositional stance when beliefs are linguistically articulated. I can believe Hannah is healthy without believing that Hannah is healthy. Yet once I say “Hannah is healthy” and act accordingly, my believing tends toward the propositional stance of believing that she is healthy. In either case—either simply believing (without linguistic articulation) or believing that (with linguistic articulation)—the insight [Hannah is healthy] remains the same. Something similar can be said about other so-called propositional attitudes such as hoping and doubting. What is hoped or doubted, in the first instance, is not a proposition or a propositional content. Yet once a hope or doubt receives linguistic articulation, the hoping or doubting tends toward a propositional stance. This suggests that, like belief, hope and doubt might involve a sort of truth that cannot be adequately explained in terms of the truth of propositions. Although this issue indirectly surfaces in ongoing debates about propositional attitude reports51 that Schiffer’s conception of pleonastic propositions aims to address, the typical response has been to squeeze the truth of beliefs and the like into the

Propositional Truth  45 truth of propositions rather than to expand the notion of “propositional truth” to include a sort of truth—reliability in practice, for ­example— that cannot be reduced to the truth of propositions. 2.3.2.2  Assertions and Facts To this point, I have focused on beliefs as practically acquired insights into practical objects. Clearly, however, there is more to the notion of propositional truth than the practical reliability of beliefs. At a minimum, we also need to consider the truth of assertions and propositions as well as the status of facts and states of affairs, which some truth theorists regard as truth makers. My main hypothesis in this connection, which I plan to explain, is that an increasingly decontextualized yet disclosive interdependence characterizes the relations, respectively, between beliefs and (aspects of) practical objects, between assertions and facts, and between propositions and states of affairs. To elaborate this hypothesis, I need to explain the notion of decontextualization. Beliefs, as I have described them, are deeply embedded in the practices and contexts of daily life. Usually we can articulate them in language, however, and such articulation partially disembeds beliefs from the practices and contexts within which they arise. Once I tell you “Hannah is healthy” or you ask me “Do you think Hannah is healthy?” my belief in this regard becomes communicable and discussable by others. In the course of our conversation, you could very well challenge what I have said and ask me to back it up with other claims. By making my (implicit) assertion about her health a topic for debate, we would have decontextualized the linguistic articulation that had already partially disembedded my belief. It is in the process of such disembedding and decontextualization that facts and propositions arise. We have seen that, in general, practical objects lend themselves to the practices of daily life. We can call this availability of practical objects for human practices their practical availability. The availability of practical objects undergirds any particular uses to which we put them in one context or another. One of the ways in which practical objects are available to us is that they let us talk and write about them. More specifically, they let us refer to them and to predicate about them whenever we engage in speech acts. When our linguistic practices of referring and predicating occur in assertoric speech acts—in our making assertions—we also unavoidably raise claims for the correctness of our assertions. I call the disposition of practical objects to let us refer and predicate their predicative availability. Their ability to sustain the correctness of our assertions I call predicative self-disclosure. Let me explain. At a minimum, every assertion employs both a referring expression and a predicate expression. Whether grammatically a proper name, a pronoun, or a definite description, the referring expression used when one

46  Propositional Truth makes an assertion serves to identify the practical object about which the assertion is made. So too, the predicate expression serves to specify the identified practical object in a certain respect. Both referring and predicating are circumscribed practices. The use of a referring expression to identify a practical object does not purport to capture the entire identity of the object, but only the side to it that we need to identify in order to talk about it in a certain context. Similarly, the use of a predicate expression does not specify everything that could be specified about a practical object, but only the feature or connection that is relevant for the context of the assertion. When I  assert “Hannah is healthy,” I  draw attention to my canine companion and say something about her. But calling her “Hannah” does not exhaust her identity, and saying she is healthy leaves a great deal about her unsaid. The predicative availability of this canine companion for reference and predication is not the only way in which she is available, nor does my assertion about her purport to say everything about her that could be said. Nevertheless, this assertion, like all other assertions, does raise a claim to be correct. Normally, in order for an assertion about a practical object to be correct, the way in which the object is predicatively available must line up with a nonpredicative and contextually relevant way in which it is available for human practices. Although such alignment is harder to see in connection with singular assertions that employ generic predicates (e.g., “Hannah is healthy”), it is readily apparent in connection with singular assertions whose predicates are not generic. Consider, for example, the assertion “My dog is a faithful companion.” If I say this in a conversation with you and thereby make an assertion that (implicitly) claims to be correct, the animal that allows me to refer to it as “my dog” and to specify it as “a faithful companion” must also allow us to relate this specifying predicate to how Hannah interacts with me—to her nonpredicative companionability. Her predicative availability must line up with a contextually relevant way of her nonpredicative availability in order for my assertion to be correct. The alignment between such predicative and nonpredicative aspects of a practical object’s availability is what I call the predicative self-disclosure of the object. It is how the object offers or displays itself in relationship to our assertoric practices, and it typically involves a relation of alignment whose terms are two sorts of practical availability, one of them predicative and the other nonpredicative. Predicative self-disclosure is what the object to which we refer allows us to specify in relation to at least one nonpredicative way in which that object is available to us. Such predicative self-disclosure is what I call a fact. A fact, in the first instance, is an alignment between an object’s predicative and nonpredicative ways of availability on the occasion of assertoric speech acts. From there one can extend the notion of a fact to such an alignment on the occasion of any relevant linguistic reference and predication, even when

Propositional Truth  47 no assertion is actually made. Facts, then, are not the same as practical objects. Rather, they are ways in which practical objects disclose themselves when we engage in the linguistic practices of reference and predication and, more specifically, when these practices occur in assertoric speech acts. When we make assertions, we raise a claim to their being correct. When we raise a claim to their being correct, we thereby claim that the practical object in question predicatively self-discloses in the manner asserted. When our assertions are correct, the practical object, in the specified respects, is as it is asserted to be—that is, we have correctly asserted the fact(s).52 Hence, it would be a mistake to think that facts must be either “real” or “linguistically constructed.” They are both, both real (e.g., they are ways in which practical objects disclose themselves) and linguistic (i.e., they are ways of disclosure for linguistic practices). Facts are how practical objects offer themselves to human practices, insofar as these practices involve referring and predicating, and especially insofar as the practices involve the making of correctness-claiming assertions. Accordingly, assertions can be said to be correct when they are “true to the facts.” But they could not be true in this sense if practical objects did not offer themselves in the right ways. The correctness of assertions is not simply a matter of agreement among language users or of suitability to the occasion when an assertion is made. For assertoric correctness depends on an interrelation between human practices and practical objects. This is not to deny, however, that a more robust account of facts would also need to consider relations among the agents who engage in practices as well as relations between their practices and the situations in which these occur. In that sense, Davidson was right to emphasize the intersubjective and situational aspects to propositional truth.53 Nevertheless, I do not think these aspects can replace the practical subject/object relations that give rise to assertions and facts. Just as beliefs are “true” (i.e., reliable) in interdependence with practical objects as such, so assertions are “true” (i.e., correct) in interdependence with the ­predicative self-disclosure of practical objects. The latter interdependence— between assertions and facts—is less contextually embedded than the former—between beliefs and practical objects—because it involves a higher degree of linguistic articulation and specification. Alternatively, one could say assertion/fact interdependence is more precise. 2.3.2.3  Propositions and States of Affairs Most disembedded—and also most precise—is the disclosive interdependence between propositions and states of affairs. Propositions and states of affairs emerge, via decontextualizing abstraction, from the interrelation between assertions and facts, an emergence that primarily occurs when assertoric claims to correctness are challenged and defended. When

48  Propositional Truth I make a correctness-claiming assertion and my interlocutor questions this assertion, our attention shifts to the discussable content of the assertion. This content, which typically takes the form “that x is y,” is the assertion’s propositional content. Indeed, it usually is a proposition. Moreover, because non-assertoric speech acts such as promising (e.g., “I won’t tell anyone”) or requesting (e.g., “Please help me”) can be transposed via nominalization into assertion look-alikes (e.g., “I promise that I won’t tell anyone,” “I ask that you help me”), we can say they also have or can acquire propositional content. Propositions are the abstract contents of assertions. They emerge when we take up assertions in discourse—when we question, oppose, reaffirm, and defend them. The abstract emergence of propositions from assertions goes hand in glove with the abstract emergence of states of affairs from facts. When assertions become topics of discourse, the facts with which they disclosively interrelate are further decontextualized. Because this further decontextualization involves abstraction, it is of a different sort from the disembedding of practical objects when they predicatively self-disclose. From predicative self-disclosures of practical objects in aspects of their availability, the facts turn into states of affairs. They shift from how practical objects display themselves for the linguistic practices of reference and predication to how they are displayed for the logical practices of identification and distinction. A state of affairs is how a practical object must present its availability if the relevant interdependent proposition is to provide abstractly decontextualized insight into “what is the case.” In other words, a fact must become a state of affairs that “obtains” if the interdependent proposition is to be “true” in the sense of “accurate.” Here “obtains” has a sense of necessity that predicative self-disclosure, which is not abstract, usually lacks. A state of affairs is how the pred­ icative self-disclosure of practical objects tries to meet the constraints of logical discourse. The truth of propositions, then, is a matter of accuracy with respect to interdependent states of affairs. Accordingly, the notion of propositional truth bearers includes but exceeds the truth of propositions. It also includes, at a minimum, the truth of assertions and the truth of beliefs. So too, the related notion of truth makers includes, at a minimum, states of affairs, facts, and practical objects. Indeed, because of differences among the disclosive interrelations between beliefs and object, between assertions and facts, and between propositions and states of affairs, respectively, we can differentiate the conception of propositional truth into at least three notions: the reliability of beliefs, the correctness of assertions, and the accuracy of propositions. Further, there appears to be an order of ontological priority among them, such that the accuracy of propositions presupposes both reliability and correctness, but neither the reliability of beliefs nor the correctness of assertions presupposes the accuracy of propositions. To the extent that contemporary truth theorists focus exclusively on

Propositional Truth  49 the truth of propositions—whether to affirm or to deny it—we miss its ­ontological underpinnings and fail to do justice to the full range of propositional truth. From here on, when I employ the term propositional truth, I ­usually have its full range in view, including reliability, correctness, and accuracy. I  reserve the term accuracy for the truth of propositions, as distinct from the reliability of beliefs and the correctness of assertions. 2.3.3  Truth Theories Revisited Reviewing the issues and debates discussed earlier in this chapter, we can see that, in general, my approach includes where others exclude, and it embraces pluralism where others attempt reduction. Such inclusion and pluralism are not indiscriminate, of course: within the field of propositional truth, not every conceivable practice or result can count as a “truth bearer,” and not every possible way in which objects are available for human practices can serve as a “truth maker.” Instead, I  have singled out beliefs, assertions, and propositions in disclosive interrelations with practical objects, facts, and states of affairs. This approach implies specific responses to other positions. In debates over so-called truth makers, for example, I endorse neither Armstrong’s “Truthmaker Necessitarianism” nor Davidson’s dismissal of the notion of truth-making facts. Whereas Armstrong, who does not differentiate facts from states of affairs, fails to explain how practical objects offer themselves for linguistic and logical practices, Davidson, who would see little point to such differentiation, fails to explain how linguistic and logical practices help disclose the availability of practical objects. Moreover, because I regard disclosive interrelations between practices and objects as the key to propositional truth, I cannot embrace an identity theory á la Hornsby or its precursor in Frege’s writings. To claim that true propositions are the same as facts would not only reduce the object’s predicative self-disclosure to the abstract way in which this shows up (as a state of affairs) in interrelation with a proposition but also ignore such “showing up,” by identifying states of affairs with the propositions they make true. Similarly, with respect to debates over so-called truth bearers, I do not regard either beliefs or propositions as the primary truth bearers. Rather I include both beliefs and propositions, along with assertoric speech acts, among the most important bearers of propositional truth.54 Moreover, when it comes to propositions as such, I have disagreements with both the widely shared view of propositions and the specifically Fregean and Russellian accounts. As was mentioned earlier, the widely shared view of propositions is that they are (1) the content expressed by declarative sentences, (2) the sharable objects of propositional attitudes, and (3) the primary bearers of truth-value. I have already explained my objections to (3), so I won’t belabor those. Concerning (1), because of an emphasis on human practices

50  Propositional Truth and speech acts, I  would not primarily link propositions to sentences, whether declarative or otherwise. What matters for the emergence of propositions is not sentences as such but how they are used. The primary sites for the abstract emergence of propositions are the assertoric speech acts in which sentences are formulated and used to describe, to explain, to state, and so forth. When propositions are the content expressed by declarative sentences, this is because such sentences are used to make assertions. Moreover, concerning (2), I  have already indicated that the attitudes called propositional—believing, hoping, doubting, and the like—are not primarily propositional. Whether they have propositions as their “sharable objects” depends on whether the attitudes in question have received linguistic articulation. So I would reformulate (2) by saying propositions have the potential to be the sharable objects—or, better, the sharable abstract content—of linguistically articulated attitudes that can acquire propositional content. My reformulation of the widely shared view, then, would be that propositions are (1) the abstract content of assertoric speech acts, (2) the potentially sharable abstract content of linguistically articulated “propositional attitudes,” and (3) important but not exclusive bearers of propositional truth-value. We have seen that both Frege and Russell regard propositions as structured entities. They disagree, however, about how to account for the constituents of propositions, what binds these constituents together, and how structured propositions carry truth-value. For Frege, a proposition, as the structured sense of an assertoric sentence, carries truth-value by referring to the True or the False. For Russell in his logical atomist writings, by contrast, a proposition carries truth-value by virtue of an isomorphism between the structure of a fact (consisting of a particular thing and its quality or qualities and relation[s]) and the structure of the corresponding proposition (consisting of subject, predicate, and verb). Whereas Frege has little room for facts in distinction from true propositions, Russell has little room for propositions in distinction from the grammar of sentences. Neither one shares my own emphasis on the centrality of assertoric speech acts to the abstract emergence of propositions, nor does either one embed the truth of both assertions and propositions within an in-principle pre-linguistic relationship between practices of belief and practical objects. Although I  do not deny that propositions are structured, I do not regard their structure as the key to their capacity for truth, whether through generic reference (Frege) or through atomic isomorphism (Russell). Pace Frege, although propositions abstractly emerge from the use of referring and predicating expressions to make correctness-claiming ­assertions, propositions themselves do not refer, nor do we use them to refer—no more than, according to Searle, predicate expressions refer or are used to refer. Once one gives up this Fregean understanding of propositions as referring to “the True or the False,” one can also question his

Propositional Truth  51 claims that they are independently existent and timelessly true.55 Russell’s insistence on the distinction between propositions and facts offers a valuable corrective in this regard. Yet Russell’s atomic isomorphism neglects the hermeneutic character of language usage that Frege’s distinction between sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung) notes. Words and sentences, like concepts and propositions (their logical counterparts), are not hardwired to practical objects. A texture of connotations and implications is part of their meaning, as is their suitability for various uses within different sorts of speech acts. Although the emergence of propositions from assertoric speech acts puts logical constraints on what the abstract content of an assertion can mean, such logically constrained meaning is not the full extent of what the words and sentences used to generate it can and do mean. Indeed, the very relation between facts and propositions, which Russell rightly retains, needs to be understood in a more hermeneutical fashion, as involving disclosive interrelations between human practices and practical objects. Facts, we could say, are always already interpreted via the practices of reference and predication, just as propositions are always already anchored in such practices. I also believe my approach can avoid some of the problems that plague contemporary Fregean and Russellian accounts of structured propositions. As was noted earlier, the contemporary Fregean has trouble accounting for the truth conditions of propositions whose linguistic articulations employ singular referring terms. Because my approach ties the truth-value of a proposition to a disclosive interrelation between certain practices and certain (aspects of) practical objects—and not to a generic reference—there is no obstacle in principle to one’s specifying the condition that would make a singular proposition true. The proposition would need to be accurate with respect to the self-disclosing object it is about. If, historically, we use both “George Eliot” and “Mary Anne Evans” to refer to the same woman author, then the accuracy of propositions that emerge from assertions (or from belief reports as assertion look-alikes) employing George Eliot as a referring term will be indexed to that historical usage. Accordingly, Ralph’s reported belief that George Eliot was a man will be propositionally untrue. The contemporary Russellian, by contrast, finds it difficult to distinguish the truth-values of two (or more) sentences apparently about the same fact but giving rise to different, even apparently contradictory propositions. My account does not hardwire propositions to facts. Instead, it posits an abstract and disclosive interrelation between propositions and states of affairs, while distinguishing propositions from the assertions (or belief reports) from which propositions emerge. Hence, there is no problem with two or more apparently incompatible sentences—better, two or more apparently incompatible assertions or belief reports—being about the same fact. Let’s suppose that, in an assertoric context, a practical

52  Propositional Truth object A predicatively self-discloses as “adoring x,” and practical object B predicatively self-discloses as “adoring y,” but someone does not recognize that referring expressions A and B are used historically to name the same person and also does not recognize that the predicative expressions adoring x and adoring y are used to make the same specification. In that case, the proposition “A adores x” and the proposition “B adores y,” which emerge from the relevant assertions, can both be accurate, even though someone misrecognizes that the two phenomenologically different self-disclosures are in fact the same and that the two distinct propositions are logically the same. My expansion of the field of propositional truth, drawn in part from Searle’s notion of propositional acts and Schiffer’s account of pleonastic propositions, aims to reconnect facts and propositions with the practical interrelations from which many truth theories tend to divorce them. Although the problems addressed by more narrowly circumscribed theories of propositional truth are not pseudo-problems, solving them will benefit from casting the truth-seeking net more broadly. That is what the present chapter has attempted. It thereby provides an expansive setting for more narrowly focused discussions of the truth of propositions (chapters 3 and 4) and the discursive justification of propositional truth claims (chapter 5).

Notes 1 W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956): 167–98. 2 See, for example, Hartry Field, Truth and the Absence of Fact (Oxford: ­Clarendon Press, 2001) and Wolfgang Künne’s discussion of Field’s “disquotationalism” in CT 242–28, 358–60. 3 See Kevin Mulligan and Fabrice Correia, “Facts,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/facts/. That true propositions are the same as facts is the central claim in Hornsby’s identity theory of truth— although she prefers to speak of “thinkables,” a term borrowed from John McDowell’s Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, 1996), rather than “propositions.” See Jennifer Hornsby, “Truth: The Identity Theory,” in NT 663–81; Marian David, “Truth as Identity and Truth as Correspondence,” in NT 683–704. 4 D. M. Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5. 5 Ibid., 17. 6 Ibid., 47. 7 Ibid., 49. 8 I am not sure, however, whether Armstrong would countenance happiness as a property. I also am not sure, given his discussion of internal and external relations (Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers, 50–52), whether he would give a similar explanation for truth makers involving external relations between particulars. If I say, “Hannah is five feet away from her friend Remy,” what makes the proposition I  express true? Is it the contingent

Propositional Truth  53 existences of Hannah and Remy together with the external relation of distance between them? And is Hannah’s having that relation to Remy contingent or necessary? 9 For a succinct and illuminating survey of such objections as criticisms directed at correspondence theories of truth, see Pascal Engel, Truth (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 14–26. For a more technical discussion of Davidson’s slingshot argument, see Künne, CT 133–41. Künne concludes that fact-based correspondence theories can survive Davidson’s slingshot argument. 10 Engel, Truth, 20. 11 Donald Davidson, “True to the Facts” (1969), in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 37. 12 Later, Davidson says it was a mistake to call “theories of the sort Tarski showed how to produce” correspondence theories (including his own 1969 proposal), and he reiterates his fundamental objection to correspondence theories, namely, “that there is nothing interesting or instructive to which true sentences might correspond.” Donald Davidson, “The Structure and Content of Truth,” The Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 6 (1990): 302–3. 13 What follows is a brief, nontechnical digest of Davidson, “True to the Facts,” 41–43. I have substituted “proposition” for Davidson’s “statement.” Davidson indicates that he actually prefers to speak neither of propositions nor of statements but of “sentences” and to regard truth not as “a property of sentences” but as “a relation between sentences, speakers, and dates,” where “dates” are occasions when sentences are uttered (43). 14 Davidson, “True to the Facts,” 43, 47. 15 Ibid., 49. 16 Ibid., 48. 17 Engel, Truth, 11. 18 Unlike the Stoics, however, whom Künne describes as “temporalizers” with respect to the truth of propositions, Frege and Carnap were “eternalists” (CT 249–316). 19 Künne, CT 1–20 and passim distinguishes two main lines of truth theory according to whether theorists regard truth as a “property of sentences” or as a “property of propositions.” The first, sententialist line includes what Künne labels “sentential primitivism” (e.g., Davidson), Tarski’s semantic conception of truth, and “disquotationalism” (e.g., Quine, Field). The second, propositionalist line includes both “eternalism” (e.g., Frege and Russell) and “temporalism” (e.g., Arthur Prior and David Kaplan) with respect to the truth of propositions as well as “propositional primitivism” (e.g., Frege), “minimalism” (e.g., Paul Horwich), and the “modest account” of propositional truth that Künne himself advocates. 20 Richard L. Kirkham, Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 118–24. Kirkham distinguishes correspondence-ascongruence theories from correspondence-as-correlation theories such as the one J. L. Austin proposed in an equally well-known essay from 1950 titled “Truth,” discussed in Kirkham, 124–30. The distinction goes back to Pitcher’s “Introduction,” in Truth, ed. George Pitcher (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 10–15. 21 Bertrand Russell, “Truth and Falsehood” (1912), in Lynch, ed., NT 21. Russell argues that we cannot regard belief as a relation of the mind to a single object because then beliefs could never be false. 22 For Wittgenstein, “negative fact” designates the non-existence or nonobtaining (Nichtbestehen) of states of affairs. A  fact is the existence or obtaining (Bestehen) of states of affairs. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus

54  Propositional Truth Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. D. F. Pears and B. R. McGuinness, intro. Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge  & Kegan Paul, 1961), propositions 1–2.225, pp.  6–19. For an instructive attempt to distinguish more clearly than Wittgenstein does between the ontology of truth makers and the logic of sentences and propositions, see Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith, “Truth-Makers,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44, no. 3 (March 1984): 287–321. 23 Section 2.1 in Marian David, “The Correspondence Theory of Truth,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/truth-correspondence/. 24 Although this formulation sounds redundant—Wouldn’t propositions obviously be the primary bearers of propositional truth?—recall that I  use the term propositional truth broadly enough to encompass more than propositions. For a succinct survey of the debates about whether there are propositions and, if so, what they are and how they operate, see Matthew McGrath and Devin Frank, “Propositions,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2018/entries/propositions/. 25 Jeffrey C. King, “Structured Propositions,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2017/entries/propositions-structured/. 26 Here, for convenience, Frege uses the term “proper name” (Eigenname) to indicate any sign, word, or phrase that designates “a single object” (FR 153). The term covers both genuine proper names (e.g., “Hannah”) and definite descriptions (e.g., “the author’s canine companion”). 27 As Michael Beaney demonstrates in his “Introduction” (see especially FR 36–46), it is difficult to settle on English equivalents for Frege’s usages of Bedeutung as a technical term. Frege uses it to indicate either an expression’s reference (its being used to refer to something) or an expression’s referent (what the expression refers to). Following the policy adopted by Beaney, I leave Bedeutung untranslated when I quote or summarize Frege’s writings, but I use reference and referent, as appropriate, when I say what I think his writings mean. 28 Here I leave aside the question whether a term lacking reference can be an Eigenname in Frege’s sense. 29 Cf. Gottlob Frege, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” in Kleine Schriften, ed. Ignacio Angelelli (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967), 148. 30 For discussion of the issues raised by what Künne describes as Frege’s “eternalism” with respect to propositions, see CT 269–95 and Beaney’s “Introduction” in FR 21–36. 31 Here I refer primarily to “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (1918) and “On Propositions: What They Are and How They Mean” (1919), in Russell, Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, ed. R. C. Marsh (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956), 175–281 and 283–320, respectively. 32 Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting” (1905), in Logic and Knowledge, 43. 33 Ibid., 45–47. I say “alleged commitment” because I do not think Frege claims that every such phrase has a Bedeutung. See in this connection John Searle, “Russell’s Objections to Frege’s Theory of Sense and Reference,” Analysis 18, no. 6 (1958): 137–43. Searle argues that Russell fails to refute Frege’s alleged commitment because Russell fails to understand Frege’s distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung. 34 In the background to this argument lies the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description broached already in the 1905

Propositional Truth  55 “Denoting” essay (see Logic and Knowledge, 41–42) and explained in Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 11 (1910–1911): 108–28. 35 In Russell’s case there is the additional complication that his views shifted significantly from one writing to the next. 36 Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (1903), 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 43. 37 Schiffer, TWM 18. 38 Lynch, TOM 133. 39 David, “The Correspondence Theory of Truth,” section 6. 40 Writing about contemporary understandings of what Russellian propositions are, Schiffer summarizes this underlying position as follows: “For the ­Russellian, every proposition may be taken to be an ordered pair of the form ⟨⟨x1, . . . , xn⟩, Rn⟩, where ⟨⟨x1, . . . , xn⟩ is an n-ary relation (properties are oneplace relations) . . . For any possible world w, ⟨⟨x1, . . . , xn⟩, Rn⟩ is true in w iff ⟨x1, . . . , xn⟩ instantiates Rn in w, false in w otherwise” (TWM 18–19). 41 Beaney goes on to suggest that, nevertheless, Frege firmly endorses contextualism precisely with respect to the Bedeutung of names within the logical system of his two-volume Grundgesetze der Arithmetik from 1893 and 1903. 42 J. L. Austin, “Truth” (1950), in NT 25–50; P. F. Strawson, “Truth” (1950), in NT 447–71, quotation from 470n6. 43 For the most part I follow Künne’s way of classifying and characterizing various conceptions of truth. I do not follow him, however, in his avoiding the term deflationism (CT 19) but stipulate instead that it refers to positions which deny that truth is a substantive property or a genuine predicate. One could also distinguish as Douglas Edwards does between “ultra deflationary” views, which deny altogether that truth is a property (e.g., early Strawson and Dorothy Glover) and more moderate “new wave deflationism” (e.g., Horwich and Field), which simply denies that the property to which the truth predicate refers is a substantive property (ME 6–40). 44 P. F. Strawson, “On Referring” (1950/1956), in Martinich, ed., The Philosophy of Language, 219–34, quotation from 223. 45 Although Searle calls reference and predication “propositional acts,” I think they are better regarded not as acts but as linguistic practices that occur by way of speech acts. See John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 24 and passim. 46 See the discussions of Frege and Strawson in Searle, Speech Acts, 97–102, 113–19. A little later, Searle writes: “the tendency to construe predication as a kind of, or analogous to, reference is one of the most persistent mistakes in the history of Western philosophy. No effort to eradicate it is too great” (122). 47 See Lambert Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 152–57. 48 I follow Jürgen Habermas in classifying the various speech acts under three categories: constative (e.g., stating), regulative (e.g., promising), and expressive (e.g., confessing). See his The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987), vol. 1, 1–42, 273–337. My category of assertions or assertoric speech acts is equivalent to his category of constative speech acts. 49 Although Schiffer focuses on believed propositions, I  think his proposal holds promise for understanding all propositions. Earlier in his discussion he gives the following general description of propositions: “abstract, mind- and

56  Propositional Truth language-independent entities that have truth conditions, and have their truth conditions both essentially and absolutely” (TWM 14). I have strong reservations about this description. Yet I think Schiffer’s understanding of pleonasm is on the right track. 50 See, for example, William James, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” in Pragmatism: A  New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, 1907), 197–236. This essay has been widely anthologized, including in Lynch, ed., NT 211–28; Medina and Wood, eds., TE 26–38. See also chapter 6 in John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), enlarged ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), 132–60, where Dewey writes: “That which guides us truly is true—demonstrated capacity for such guidance is precisely what is meant by truth. The adverb ‘truly’ is more fundamental than either the adjective, true, or the noun, truth. An adverb expresses a way, a mode of acting” (156). 51 For an instructive overview, see Thomas McKay and Michael Nelson, “Propositional Attitude Reports,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2014/entries/prop-attitude-reports/. 52 This is how I would parse Aristotle’s famous statement about (propositional) truth: “To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IV, 1011b 26–27. 53 Davidson, “True to the Facts,” 43–46. 54 By including these as truth bearers without discussing the role of sentences, I implicitly take distance from the sententialist line of truth theory (e.g., Tarski, Quine, and Davidson). Although I do not deny that, in relation to assertions and propositions, sentences can also carry truth-value, I  nonetheless reject the sententialist claim that sentences are either the sole or the primary bearers of propositional truth. 55 The universal accessibility of propositions is a different matter, and one can retain this emphasis without subscribing to Frege’s Platonic realism and eternalism concerning propositions.

3 Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity

In the previous chapter, I proposed an expansive conception of propositional truth, one that emphasizes the disclosive interrelations between beliefs, assertions, and propositions, on the one hand, and practical objects, facts, and states of affairs, on the other. Within this expansive conception, the truth of propositions is said to involve a double decontextualization of not only practical beliefs but also the ordinary availability of objects for human practices. The truth of propositions is achieved via decontextualized disclosure. At first glance, my emphasis on both decontextualization and disclosure might look internally incoherent. For taking something out of its context would seem to obscure rather than reveal its identity or meaning. Likewise, unveiling the identity or meaning of something would seem to require that we situate it properly in relevant contexts rather than engage in abstraction from them. So, I need to explain how both decontextualization and disclosure help generate the truth of propositions. The current chapter aims to show how decontextualization and disclosure together lead to a unique sort of insight, in conjunction with the pursuit of logical validity. I suggest that the truth of propositions hinges on human fidelity to the societal principle of logical validity, in dynamic correlation with the decontextualized disclosure of states of affairs. My discussion has three stages. First I propose a holistic yet pluralist conception of knowledge within which propositions play an important but limited role (section 3.1). Next I ask what it means to say a proposition is true (section  3.2). Then I  consider why the truth of propositions matters— specifically, why it is important within objective knowledge (section 3.3).

3.1  Knowledge and Propositions 3.1.1  The JTB Account On the standard, albeit contested, account of knowledge within analytic philosophy, my claim that propositions play an important but limited role within knowledge would make little sense. For on this account, DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021-3

58  Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity knowledge just is propositional, nothing more and nothing less, provided the propositions are justified and true. The standard account, often called the “JTB” analysis of knowledge, says that “justified, true belief is necessary and sufficient for knowledge.”1 Here belief is not understood as practical and often pre-predicative insight but rather as a propositional attitude whose object is a proposition, along the lines of “S believes that p.” Hence, knowledge, as justified true belief, is knowledge of a proposition, and knowledge of a proposition is what “propositional knowledge” comes to in the standard account. By contrast, according to the alternative account I  wish to propose, knowledge, like truth, is more than propositional. Further, propositional knowledge itself is more than the knowledge of propositions: it is also knowledge both within and by way of propositions. The standard JTB account assumes that knowledge is something one can possess: one can either have or not have a justified true belief about some matter or other. On the basis of this assumption, the usual analytic debates about knowledge concern the nature of propositional belief and what is required for a belief that one has to be both justified and true. Let me label this assumption the possession hypothesis. It is the assumption that knowledge is such that it can be had or owned or controlled. The possession hypothesis usually comes paired with a second assumption, namely, that knowledge is one discrete item among many that one can have. Other possessions in the immediate vicinity would be perceptions, memories, and concepts. On the basis of this second assumption, contemporary philosophical debates about knowledge often ask how these different mental building blocks, if I may call them that, need to be assembled in order to secure the most valuable one, namely, knowledge as justified true belief. This second assumption can be called the representation hypothesis. It regards knowledge as one mental item among many whose possession depends on how other mental representations come together. Despite sharp criticisms by Richard Rorty and others,2 the representation hypothesis remains alive and well in analytic epistemology.3 If, however, one does not begin with the possession and representation hypotheses; if one replaces an emphasis on mental representations with an emphasis on human practices; and if, in addition, one regards knowledge not as a thing to possess but rather as a relationship to inhabit, then the JTB account loses its initial plausibility, as do the debates surrounding it. To show why the possession and representation hypotheses are problematic, and to demonstrate the implausibility of the JTB account, would require a much longer discussion than this book can provide. Instead, let me sketch an alternative account of knowledge and show how it can incorporate the insights of the JTB account without reducing knowledge to a discrete mental possession. On this alternative account, knowledge is primarily a complex relationship within which different sorts of human practices lead to different sorts of insight.

Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity  59 3.1.2  Complex Relationship To begin with the obvious: for there to be knowledge, there must be those who can know. We can call them the knowers and, for purposes of the current discussion, we can restrict their class to human knowers.4 At a minimum, knowledge involves a relation between human knowers and that which they can know. But what knowers can know is not a univocal concept. It includes not only that which is knowable but also that which is known about what is knowable—in short, both the knowable and the known. If I claim to know one of your friends, you can ask me both whom do I know (the knowable) and what do I know about her (the known). Similarly, if I claim to know certain facts about your friend, you can ask which facts I know (the knowable) and what I know about these facts (the known). So knowledge involves at least the relations between knower and both knowable and known as well as any relation between the knowable and the known. Because already here several relations are involved, it makes sense to call knowledge a complex relationship. Yet the relationship is still more complicated. For knowers relate to the knowable and the known by engaging in ordinary human practices such as working, talking, and buying and selling. I call the objects of such practices practical objects. They make up a large portion of what human beings can know. Although there is more to the knowable than the entire class of practical objects, these are fundamental to human knowledge in all of its variety. Equally fundamental to human knowledge are both the principles that guide our practices of knowing and the methods or procedures whereby we confirm whether we have achieved the soughtafter results of engaging in these practices. For there are better and worse ways to engage in knowledge practices, and certain rules or guidelines or principles indicate which ways are better. And, because human knowers are finite and fallible, we need to confirm whether our practices line up with these principles and whether our practices have achieved the soughtafter results. Accordingly, we can describe knowledge as a complex relationship among the following six relata: human knowers, the practices of human knowing, the knowable, the known, guiding principles, and means of confirmation. Out of this complex relationship emerges insight of one sort of another. Knowledge, then, is the complex relationship within which human beings attain insight. It is important, however, not to confuse the insight attained—which emerges from the entire complex relationship— with the results achieved by our engaging in the practices of knowing. Whereas the results achieved are what is known about the knowable, the insight attained is the distillation of how, via the known, the practices of knowing uncover the knowable within the horizon of both guiding principles and confirmatory methods. In other words, insight is broader and more complex than a known result, and it encompasses but surpasses any known result.

60  Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity The importance of drawing this distinction between insight attained and result achieved (i.e., the known) becomes clear when one considers what light the JTB analysis might shed on knowledge as a complex relationship. With its emphasis on justification, truth of a certain sort, and propositional belief (i.e., belief that p), the JTB analysis claims that to know something is to believe a true proposition and to be justified in so believing. Moreover, once one has such a justified true belief, one possesses knowledge. Such an analysis highlights three sorts of relata within knowledge as a complex relationship: the known result (specifically, either a propositional belief or a believed proposition), the guiding principle (specifically, truth of a certain sort), and the means of confirmation (specifically, justification). According to the JTB analysis, when a belief, as the result of our knowledge practices, lines up with the principle of (propositional) truth and is confirmed by being justified, then we have attained insight (as propositional knowledge). In other words, the JCB analysis calls attention to three of six relata within knowledge as a complex relationship, namely, the known, the principle(s), and confirmation. It also rightly insists that all three are required. What the account either leaves out or under-emphasizes, however, is the importance of the other three relata, namely, the knower, the practices of knowing, and the knowable. The JTB analysis also precludes the possibility that propositional knowledge is only one sort of knowledge. Moreover, whereas I have characterized beliefs and propositions as results of (certain) practices of knowing, the JTB analysis tends to view them not as practical results but as inert mental possessions. It engages in a reification of knowledge. If knowledge cannot be reduced to (certain) results, no matter how well confirmed and how much in principial alignment, then, when we engage in practices of knowing toward knowable objects, guided by relevant principles, and seeking confirmation by relevant means, the insight that emerges cannot be equated with the known that results. It cannot be so equated even when these results are believed propositions or propositional beliefs. Although the known results point to the insight attained, and although the insight would not be attained in the absence of known results, the two are not the same. 3.1.3  Sorts of Knowledge Once one draws this distinction between results achieved and insight attained, one can also ask whether propositional knowledge is only one sort of knowledge and, if so, what the other sorts of knowledge might be like. My underlying hypothesis in this regard, in keeping with the pluralist and holistic account of truth this book provides, is that propositional knowledge is indeed only one sort of knowledge, alongside nonpropositional sorts of knowledge that are either pre-propositional

Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity  61 or post-propositional. These various sorts of knowledge—these various sorts of complex relationship among knowers, practices of knowing, the knowable, known results, guiding principles, and means of confirmation— are organized in distinct social domains. Yet these distinct social domains are indeed domains of knowledge. For the structure of knowledge in each domain echoes and participates in the structure of knowledge as a whole, such that a structural isomorphism occurs both among the various domains and from each domain to knowledge as a whole. Yet the relata within the complex relationship that is knowledge show up differently in each domain. I  call this hypothesis holistic epistemological pluralism. To illustrate what the hypothesis comes to and thereby also begin to indicate why propositions play an important but limited role in knowledge, let me briefly discuss the differences between artistic knowledge and scientific knowledge. (I plan to return to these differences in later chapters when I discuss different social domains of truth, including artistic truth and scientific truth.) In the current context, I use the terms art and artistic in their widest sense, to include all the various arts (e.g., dance, film, music, visual arts, etc.) across their sociological differences (e.g., popular art, mass art, and high art). I also use the terms science and scientific in the expansive nineteenth-century sense of Wissenschaft to encompass all the various academic disciplines, including mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. I wish to argue that we attain insight in both of these social domains, in both the arts and the sciences, but the sort of insight we attain and the manner in which we attain it differ from one domain to the other. Perhaps the most direct way to illustrate differences between artistic and scientific knowledge, while still viewing both as types of knowledge, is to contrast their primary practices and principles. Then one can also describe differences in how the knowable shows up in each as well as differences in the results whereby the knowable can be known. As I argue elsewhere at greater length,5 the primary practices at stake in art as a social domain of knowledge are practices of imagination. They include expression, presentation, and creative interpretation. The primary principle that guides human engagement in such imaginative practices within art is what I call imaginative cogency. Imaginative cogency is the societal principle of aesthetic validity. This account does not aim to deny that other practices and principles have important roles in the making and interpreting of art, but rather simply to claim that, within art as a social domain, those other practices need to follow the lead of imaginative practices that aim for imaginative cogency. It is within the correlation between imaginative practices and the societal principle of imaginative cogency that artistic insight emerges. Consider, by way of contrast, the primary practices and principles at stake in science as a social domain. Obviously, the sciences involve a

62  Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity large array of practices, some, like textual interpretation, that are more prominent in the humanities, and others, like statistical analysis or controlled experimentation, that are more prominent in the social or natural sciences. Common across the entire range of sciences in the broad sense, however, is the pursuit of theoretical inquiry and theoretical discourse. I shall have more to say about theoretical inquiry and discourse in the chapter on scientific truth. For now, suffice it to say that they establish the contours of what we can call theory. The practices of theory have primacy in science as a social domain, just as the practices of imagination have primacy in art as a social domain. This does not suggest, however, that the practices of imagination have no place in science or that the practices of theory have no place in art. Rather, the practices that have primacy in each social domain and help make it a distinctive domain of knowledge are theoretical in the case of science and imaginative in the case of art. Accordingly, as is well known, the practices of science typically do not aim first of all to be imaginatively cogent, even though aesthetic elegance, for example, might be prized in formulation of scientific findings. Rather, the practices of science primarily aim to be logically coherent, on the assumption that logical cohesiveness increases a theory’s adequacy, persuasiveness, or explanatory power. In other words, logical validity is the primary societal principle guiding theoretical inquiry and discourse, and it is definitely not the same as aesthetic validity. Nevertheless, both the correlation between imagination and aesthetic validity and that between theory and logical validity give rise to insight, imaginative insight in the first case, and theoretical insight in the second. Moreover, both kinds of insight arise within types of the complex relationship that I  call knowledge. This becomes more apparent when one considers how the knowable is known in each case. Artistic insight amounts to the imaginative disclosure of aesthetic signs via artworks and other art products and art events. Scientific insight, by contrast, amounts to the discursive disclosure of virtualized entities that present themselves in a process that I  describe in chapter  7 as predicative self-dis/closure, with the slash in “dis/closure” indicating both that the ordinary predicative self-disclosure (no slash) of practical objects is disrupted and a virtualized identity irrupts. A filmmaker who aims at imaginatively disclosing the turmoil of an approaching hurricane and a scientist who aims at discursively disclosing the conditions and consequences of such a “weather event” both try to know the same hurricane. Nevertheless, they seek two different types of knowledge, the one imaginative and the other discursive. Correlatively, the object to be known—the knowable hurricane— presents itself differently in each case, whether as aesthetic sign or as a virtualized entity. Crucial in all of this is the fact that art’s imaginative disclosure does not need to rely on either propositional beliefs or believed propositions,

Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity  63 whereas science’s discursive disclosure does. Whereas that difference might lead a JTB analyst to dismiss the purported knowledge character of artistic insight, it leads a holistic pluralist to distinguish between the primarily pre-propositional character of artistic knowledge and the primarily propositional character of scientific knowledge. It also leads a holistic pluralist to say that propositional knowledge is both important and limited: important, to begin with, because scientific insight is important, and scientific insight is unavoidably propositional; yet also limited, to begin with, because propositional knowledge can neither provide what art’s pre-propositional knowledge provides nor replace it. Furthermore, because what I  call art talk plays an important role in art as a social institution, and because such art-related conversation and discourse unavoidably rely on assertions and propositions, propositional knowledge is also important within art itself. Yet even there, propositional knowledge cannot replace pre-propositional knowledge: art talk is no substitute for the imaginative insight that arises by making art and by attending to art in pre-verbal ways (i.e., listening, viewing, etc.).

3.2  Truth of Propositions To this point, I  have written somewhat broadly about propositional knowledge, trying in this way both to acknowledge and to challenge the standard analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. I have suggested that propositional knowledge is only one sort of knowledge, alongside pre-propositional and post-propositional sorts, where knowledge means a complex relationship within which different sorts of insight can arise. Now, however, I need to give a more narrowly circumscribed account of the more specific notion of propositional truth that informs this holistic and pluralist alternative to the JTB account. Under the umbrella of propositional truth—which covers the reliability of beliefs, the correctness of assertions, and the accuracy of propositions—what I really need to explain is the truth of propositions: that is, their accuracy. 3.2.1  Accurate Insight According to the previous chapter, the truth of propositions both presupposes the reliability of beliefs and the correctness of assertions and emerges from them. Whereas the reliability of beliefs points to the availability of objects for human practices, and the correctness of assertions points to facts as predicative self-disclosures of practical objects, accuracy, as the truth of propositions, points to the abstract emergence of states of affairs from such practical availability and predicative self-­ disclosure. This abstract emergence involves a shift on both sides of the interrelation between the practices of knowing and their knowable objects. Whereas beliefs result from an interrelation in which the practices

64  Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity can be pre-linguistic (e.g., practices of perception and of know-how), and assertions stem from an interrelation in which linguistic reference and predication take the lead (primarily within speech acts), propositions arise from a post-linguistic interrelation in which logical practices predominate. States of affairs are how knowable practical objects offer themselves for logical practices of knowing—practices that I sometimes call logical thought for short. What are these logical practices? And how do they interrelate with states of affairs? In the current context, three logical practices stand out, namely, identifying, distinguishing, and relating. To identify in a logical way is to single out what things are and in which respects they are what they are.6 To distinguish is to establish that something is different from something else, and in which respects. To relate is to detect connections between discrete items in terms of both identity and difference: how something relates to something else that it is like or unlike or both like and unlike in certain respects. Concepts and propositions are the results of our engaging in these logical practices, the results of logically thinking about knowable objects in terms of their identity, differences, and relations. Although we can have an awareness of such matters without engaging in logical practices—we can have what some philosophers would call an “intuitive awareness”—it is by identifying knowable objects, establishing their differences from each other, and detecting their relations that we get clear about their logical status. Yet, in their full-bodied existence, and in our holistic experience of them, knowable objects are always more than what our logical practices take them to be.7 In other words, knowable objects offer themselves for logical practices not as the objects are in their entirety but as they are with respect to their logical identity, differences, and relations. And when logical practices yield concepts and propositions, such as the concepts indicated by “dog” and “health” and the proposition indicated by the assertion “My dog is healthy,” knowable objects offer themselves as states of affairs, such as my dog Hannah’s being healthy. When I assert such a proposition, I  usually know much more about the object than what I  assert. Nevertheless, what I assert, when the proposition is accurate, really does yield logically circumscribed insight into the knowable object as a state of affairs, insight that clearly differs from the insight that would emerge if I correctly asserted the opposite. Hence, the truth of propositions resides in their accurately disclosing logically attained insight into knowable objects as states of affairs. It can reside there both because the logical practices of identifying, distinguishing, and relating take distance from the linguistic and pre-linguistic practices that undergird them and because states of affairs emerge in abstraction from the practical and predicative availability that underlie the logical status of objects. Because of decontextualization and indeed abstraction on both the side of practices and the side of practical objects,

Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity  65 propositions are available in principle for any interlocutor, just as states of affairs necessarily impinge on any situation. The interrelation between an accurate proposition and the state of affairs that “makes it true” is one of doubly decontextualized disclosure. In order for a proposition about a practical object to be true (i.e., accurate), the predicative self-disclosure of the asserted object must present itself as being nothing other than how it was asserted to be (i.e., as a state of affairs). Propositions are decontextualized yet disclosive explications of decontextualized predicative selfdisclosures. When accurate, they convey logically attained insight. 3.2.2  Logical Fidelity Yet there is more to our achieving accuracy than simply engaging in logical practices that result in concepts and propositions conveying logically attained insight into logically knowable states of affairs. The ways in which we logically identify, distinguish, and relate must also be valid. The key to determining whether they are valid lies in inferential relations among the propositions that result from our logical practices. That is one reason why logic, as the study of the rules for valid inferences, figures so prominently in attempts like Russell’s and Frege’s to account for the truth of propositions. What these rules are, and which ones are most important, are, of course, topics for debate. Whereas classical syllogistic logic emphasizes “laws of thought” such as the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle, modern symbolic logic emphasizes “rules of inference” such as modus ponens, modus tollens, constructive dilemma, and so on. Other laws or rules or methods prevail in other Western systems of logic, and no doubt different ones surface in, say, traditional Chinese and Indian understandings of valid thought. Whichever rules are specified or highlighted, however, all of these approaches share the expectation that some ways of connecting the results of logical practices are valid and some are not. Moreover, all of these approaches valorize the ways that are valid. I call this shared expectation the societal principle of logical validity.8 It has emerged historically, within social struggles, as an overarching normative horizon for cultural practices and social institutions, especially for practices of logical thought and for institutions of organized study. The principle of logical validity is only one societal principle among several, among which I would include, for example, social solidarity, economic resourcefulness, and political justice. Yet it is the principle most directly at stake when we engage in logical practices that have logical results. In other words, the societal principle of logical validity provides a primary horizon for pursuing the truth of propositions. This implies in turn that the human knowers who engage in logical thought are called to be faithful to the principle of logical validity,

66  Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity whatever that means in their particular contexts and within their specific traditions of thought. Indeed, fidelity to the principle of logical validity, as demonstrated via inferential relations among propositions, provides a hallmark for the truth of propositions. It is not enough that our logical practices result in propositions that accurately articulate knowable objects as states of affairs. These practices and propositions must also exemplify human fidelity to the societal principle of logical validity. 3.2.3  Accuracy and Validity To this point I have argued that the truth of propositions involves both the accuracy of logically attained insight and the inferential validity of logical practices and results. Now I can add that the two sides to truth in this domain—accuracy and validity—reinforce each other. To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, validity without accuracy would be empty; accuracy without validity would be blind. To see why mutual reinforcement is required, consider what either propositional accuracy or inferential validity would be like in the absence of the other. In the absence of inferential validity, propositions could easily be accurate yet meaningless. Disconnected from other propositions and their inferential relations, an accurate proposition could help us pick out a state of affairs without yielding clues concerning its relation to any other state of affairs. The appropriate response to the isolated assertion of such a proposition might not be “Is that so?” but rather “So what?” Similarly, in the absence of propositional accuracy, the achievement of inferential validity could yield little if any insight into what the validly connected propositions are about. The inference could be “true” in the sense that it is formally valid—because, for example, it follows a rule of inference such as modus ponens or modus tollens—and yet give us no clue as to whether the inference is also sound—that is, whether the inferentially connected propositions are themselves “true” in the sense of being accurate. That is why, in my view, neither a correspondence theory nor a coherence theory can adequately account for the truth of propositions, even though each contains worthwhile insights in this regard. Whereas a correspondence theory typically insists on the importance of propositional accuracy and regards this as the key to truth, a coherence theory typically highlights the importance of inferential validity and considers this definitive for truth. In arguing that accuracy and validity mutually reinforce each other, I suggest that neither type of theory suffices, yet each can contribute to our understanding of what the truth of propositions involves. At the same time, of course, neither correspondence nor coherence theories suffice as accounts of truth as a whole, which includes but far exceeds the truth of propositions. For the truth of propositions, then, both accuracy and validity are required. Not only are both required but also they mutually reinforce

Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity  67 each other, in what I call a dynamic correlation. Accuracy and validity are correlated, in the sense that we cannot really have one without also striving for the other. And their correlation is dynamic in the sense that our attaining one usually feeds off our pursuing the other. We pursue inferential validity in order to attain more accurate insight into the matters at hand, and we strive for propositional accuracy in order to secure the soundness of our logical inferences about the matters at hand. Propositional truth, in the delimited sense that pertains to the truth of propositions, requires a dynamic correlation between fidelity to the societal principle of logical validity and the decontextualized disclosure of states of affairs. Moreover, it is through this dynamic correlation that we can offset the decontextualizing tendencies of logical practices and their results. When we pursue inferential validity with a view to accurate insight, and vice versa, we open up possible understandings of how one proposition connects with another as well as potential insights into how different states of affairs interrelate. These possible understandings and potential insights are, in a sense, always already there. For our propositional practices take place in tandem with nonpropositional practices toward fullbodied objects, practices whereby we achieve nonpropositional insights into what, logically, we experience as states of affairs. The achievement of accurate insight might decontextualize from these other practices and their objects. Thanks to the dynamic correlation between propositional accuracy and inferential validity, however, the truth of propositions can never separate entirely from knowledge and truth as a whole.

3.3  Propositional Truth and Objective Knowledge The claim that the truth of propositions can never separate entirely from the epistemic and alethic whole returns us to the topic of propositional truth’s role within knowledge. To address this topic, let me focus on what can be called objective knowledge, partly because many controversies about propositional truth have had that focus.9 I  shall concentrate on the truth of propositions, leaving mostly to the side questions about the reliability of beliefs and the correctness of assertions. By objective knowledge I mean insight into practical objects that does justice to what they are and mean within their sociohistorical contexts. First, however, I need to revisit the distinction, introduced earlier in this chapter, between propositional knowledge and nonpropositional knowledge of both prepropositional and post-propositional sorts. 3.3.1  Propositional and Nonpropositional Knowledge As we have seen, propositional knowledge involves interrelations among logical practices, logical results, and (practical objects as) states of affairs,

68  Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity all within the normative horizon of logical validity. Nonpropositional knowledge, by contrast, involves interrelations among practices and results that are not logical and practical objects in nonlogical dimensions of their availability for human practices, all within normative horizons of nonlogical validity. This does not mean that nonpropositional knowledge is illogical, however. The notion of illogicality makes sense only as a contrast within the dimension of logical knowledge, as another term for logical invalidity. The practices and results of knowledge in nonpropositional dimensions are not illogical. They are neither logical nor illogical. To be more precise, in some social domains, the characteristic practices and results of knowledge are pre-logical. They can occur in the absence of predicative language usage and in the absence of logical practices that presuppose predication. Knowledge in such domains is pre-­propositional. I take it that artistic insight achieved via imaginative practices and their results is of this sort. In other social domains, the characteristic practices and results of knowledge are postlogical. They usually cannot occur without our relying on predicative language usage and on logical practices of identifying, distinguishing, and relating, even though such linguistic and logical practices and their results are not the focal points of these domains. Knowledge in such domains is post-propositional. I  regard the insight attained via religious practices and their results as being of this sort. To say that a sort of knowledge is pre-propositional, then, is simply to say that the most salient practices and results of knowledge in a certain social domain are pre-logical and that practical objects present themselves for such practices and results in pre-logical dimensions of the objects’ existence (e.g., as aesthetic signs), all within the normative horizon of a societal principle other than that of logical validity (e.g., the principle of imaginative cogency). So too, to call a sort of knowledge post-propositional simply means that the most salient practices and results of knowledge in a certain social domain are postlogical and that practical objects present themselves for such practices and results in postlogical dimensions of the objects’ existence (e.g., as an object of worship), within a normative horizon other than that of logical validity. Moreover, propositional knowledge presupposes pre-propositional knowledge. At a minimum, the logical practices and objects that characterize propositional knowledge depend on the practices and objects of perception and feeling, of formation and usage, of imagination, and of linguistic communication, all of which are pre-logical. In other words, we could not think logically about practical objects if we were not also able to have feelings toward them or perceive them, give them shape or use them, aesthetically experience their multiple nuances of meaning, and communicate in language about them. Nor, for the most part, could the practical objects that we logically identify, distinguish, and relate present themselves as states of affairs if they were not already available as

Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity  69 perceived or felt objects, as usable objects, as imaginable objects, and as linguistically predicable objects. Although we can say that the logical practices that characterize propositional knowledge primarily rely on the linguistic practices of reference and predication, these linguistic practices in turn rely on what, borrowing a term from Edmund Husserl, we can call “pre-predicative experience.”10 Accordingly, propositional knowledge relies on pre-predicative experience as well—or, better, on the practices, results, and objects of pre-linguistic knowledge. Without this full range of pre-propositional knowledge, including practices of perception, know-how, imagination, and language, propositional knowledge would not be possible. In this sense, propositional knowledge presupposes prepropositional knowledge. Similarly, post-propositional knowledge presupposes propositional knowledge. In other words, the practices and objects that characterize knowledge in such social domains depend on the logical practices and objects that characterize propositional knowledge. Within sociologically complex spheres such as civil society, economy, polity, and religion, the characteristic interactions and institutions rely significantly on the ability of human agents to engage in logical practices and to pursue inferential validity. We see this, for example, from the roles of fiscal calculation and public deliberation in economic and political spheres. Accordingly, if there are types of knowledge specific to these domains—a hypothesis later chapters elaborate with respect to politics and religion—these types, being post-propositional, will presuppose propositional knowledge. 3.3.2  Propositional Truth and Pre-propositional Knowledge Given the distinctions I  have just laid out, the questions of why and how propositional truth is important within objective knowledge might receive different answers for domains of pre-propositional knowledge than they receive for domains of post-propositional knowledge.11 Let me first take up these questions for pre-propositional objective knowledge, recalling that objective knowledge refers to insight into practical objects that does justice to what they are and mean within their sociohistorical contexts. At first, it might seem paradoxical to suggest that propositional truth has any role to play in domains of pre-propositional knowledge. If the insight peculiar to such domains is pre-propositional, then what could logical practices and objects possibly contribute? Would it not make more sense to ask what pre-propositional insight might contribute to propositional knowledge? Without denying the legitimacy of this last question, I want to claim that logical practices and objects can contribute to the attainment of pre-propositional insight into practical objects, in two respects. First, the logical practices of identifying, distinguishing, and relating can make the results of pre-logical practices more widely

70  Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity shareable than they would otherwise be. Second, in making pre-logical results more widely shareable, the truth of propositions also gives us ways to examine and test the nonlogical validity of these results. I can illustrate both of these contributions in the domain of artistic knowledge. As was suggested earlier, imaginative practices, objects, and results—in correlation with the societal principle of imaginative cogency—are the primary ways in which we achieve insight in this social domain. If art products (e.g., a piece of music) and events (e.g., a concert) are the primary results when we artistically engage in the practices of imagination with respect to practical objects in their role as aesthetic signs, then our ability to think logically about art products and events can open up modes of understanding them that would otherwise remain closed. These modes of understanding are ones in which artworks are singled out, compared, and situated in larger contexts. Art education, commentary, and criticism all aim to provide such understanding. When they are successful, they make the artistic results of imaginative practices more widely accessible and intelligible than they would otherwise be. Propositional truth can also make explicit our initially intuitive evaluations of artistic merit. Consider specifically the three dimensions that I have identified elsewhere as belonging to artistic truth, namely, authenticity with respect to an art product’s originating experience or vision, significance with respect to an art public’s need for worthwhile cultural presentations, and integrity with respect to an artwork’s own internal demands.12 Attentively watching a film by a director whose work you have followed, you might find it rings true to that director’s filmic vision. Or you might experience it as significant in the current political climate. Or perhaps you admire its tightly constructed and challenging import. You could do any of these things without verbally articulating an evaluation of the film’s artistic truth. Once you put words to your preverbal evaluation, however, and make an assertion in this regard, your evaluation becomes explicit. In becoming explicit, the evaluation also becomes explicable: if accurate, the proposition you assert about the film’s authenticity, significance, or integrity allows you and anyone who hears or reads your assertion to consider what such artistic truth comes to in this instance. We can examine it, agree or disagree about it, and reach tentative conclusions in this regard.13 Far from betraying or distorting the primary experience of artist truth, as a Romantic myth might hold, propositional truth, when properly attained, makes such experience more widely sharable and renders explicit the normative validity at stake. This, I suggest, is what, in general, propositional truth can contribute to pre-propositional attempts to attain insight that does justice to what practical objects are and mean within their sociohistorical contexts: the truth of propositions can make such insight more widely shareable, and it can help explicate the prelogical validity at stake in such insight.

Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity  71 3.3.3  Propositional Truth and Post-propositional Knowledge Because domains of post-propositional knowledge presuppose propositional knowledge and rely significantly on our ability to think logically, the truth of propositions plays a different role in these domains than its role in pre-propositional domains. Whereas the truth of propositions helps make pre-propositional insight into practical objects more widely shareable, but does not make such insight possible, the truth of propositions helps make post-propositional insight possible in the first place. In the domains of post-propositional knowledge, it is not possible to carry out domain-specific knowledge practices without simultaneously engaging in the logical practices of identifying, distinguishing, and relating practical objects and pursuing logically valid results, in however rudimentary a fashion. If, in this simultaneous process of logical thought, we do not arrive at accurate and inferentially valid insight and the propositions we assert are not true, then that failure undermines our attempts to attain post-propositional insight. That is why, for example, lying, bullshitting, and falsifying public records, as appeared to be endemic to President Donald Trump’s administration, are so destructive in the political domain.14 Such attempts to obfuscate, belittle, or distort propositional insight—to render it either inaccurate or irrelevant—subvert any attempt to address questions of when and why political power is justifiable. They also torpedo any effort to sort out what would contribute to our achieving justice in the political arena. To the extent that pursuing justifiable power and achievable justice are definitive for what I  call political truth— a position I  elaborate in chapter  8—the failure or refusal to pursue accurate insight into these matters undermines truth in politics as a post-propositional domain of knowledge. Or, to make the same point more positively, the truth of propositions helps make objective political knowledge possible. So too, the failure or refusal to strive for logical validity weakens the pursuit of nonlogical validity in domains of post-propositional knowledge. For the pursuit of, say, social solidarity or economic resourcefulness or political justice presupposes not only that we can tell the difference between practices or institutions that do and do not line up with these expectations but also that we can think through the implications of both fidelity and infidelity to societal principles. By “think through” I mean we can make inferences that are themselves valid—that is, are properly aligned with the societal principle of logical validity. Of course, logical validity does not ensure postlogical validity: one can think poorly and nevertheless act justly, for example, and one can think well and still act unjustly. Yet the pursuit of postlogical validity could not get off the ground, so to speak, if we did not try to think validly about the matters at stake in post-propositional knowledge.

72  Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity Again, we can see the importance of this in the political arena, where oratory, rhetoric, and public relations play such a large role. I  do not mean to suggest that these tools of the political trade are illegitimate. Yet when they get employed without regard for logical validity or deliberately violate the rules of inference, the effect is to cast suspicion on all the lofty goals and ideals in the name of which grandiose claims get made. In the end, such suspicion also throws in doubt the justifiability of the power political agents deploy as well as the legitimacy of the ends they seek. That is to say, ongoing rhetorical illogic undermines the very truth—political truth—in whose name political struggles need to occur. Conversely, logically valid rhetoric can support the pursuit of justifiable power and achievable justice. Similar patterns hold, I  suggest, for civil societal, economic, and religious domains of post-propositional knowledge. Hence, the truth of propositions—involving, as it does, both accuracy and inferential validity—helps make possible and supports objective knowledge in post-propositional domains. The truth of propositions also extends and helps explicate objective knowledge in pre-propositional domains. In both roles, as both enabler and extender, the truth of propositions proves important to our attaining objective knowledge. Important, but not all-important. For the truth of propositions would have nothing to enable if there were no post-propositional domains of knowledge and truth. Nor would it have anything to extend if there were no pre-propositional domains of knowledge and truth. Indeed, the entire expanse of objective knowledge, of insight into practical objects that does justice to what they are and mean, includes considerably more than propositional knowledge. Although much of objective knowledge exceeds justified true belief, the reason for this is not that artistic knowledge or political knowledge or religious knowledge with regard to practical objects is not really knowledge. Instead, the reason is that knowledge as a whole, and knowledge in its distinct social domains, cannot be reduced to justified true belief. And, as subsequent chapters argue at greater length, truth as a whole and truth in its distinct social domains also cannot be reduced to either propositional truth or the truth of propositions.

Notes 1 Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and Matthias Steup, “The Analysis of Knowledge,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/ knowledge-analysis/. 2 Most famously, of course, in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 3 For illuminating discussions of how representationalism plays into debates about the nature of propositional truth, see Lynch, TOM 21–50, and Edwards, MT 83–104.

Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity  73 4 This is not to deny the possibility of nonhuman knowers, especially among nonhuman animals, but simply to focus on the issues regarding truth at stake in this book, including the more specific concerns raised by the JTB account of knowledge. 5 Lambert Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 55–73, 125–34. 6 The two forms of identification suggested here (i.e., to identify what and to identify in which respects) bring to mind the distinction between two different senses of “is”: the is of identity (x=y) and the is of predication (Px). Both of these, in turn, are distinct from the is of existence (∃x). 7 This is the crucial insight within the insistence on “the nonidentical” in Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). 8 Although logicians might restrict the notion of logical validity to deductive arguments, I use the term more broadly to indicate whatever makes for goodness in logical reasoning. In this broader sense, inductive and abductive arguments can also be logically valid, even though they are not deductively valid. 9 Here I think in particular of the debate between Richard Rorty and Crispin Wright. See especially Richard Rorty, “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson Versus Crispin Wright,” in Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19–42; Crispin Wright, “Truth: A Traditional Debate Reviewed,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (Suppl) (1998): 31–74. 10 See part 1 in Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic (1939, 1948), ed. and rev. Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 69–194. 11 The phrase “domains of pre-propositional knowledge” is shorthand for “social domains where, characteristically, knowledge is pre-propositional”— similarly for the phrase “domains of post-propositional knowledge.” I  use this shorthand to avoid cumbersome sentence structure. 12 See Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth, 127–34. 13 I return to questions about the truth of aesthetic judgments in the next chapter. 14 Here I rely on the distinction between lying and bullshitting introduced by Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Whereas liars know a factual truth and try to deceive someone about it, bullshitters do not care whether what they say is factually true or false: “It is just this lack of . . . concern with [factual] truth . . . that I regard as of the essence of bullshit” (33–34).

4 Alethic Pluralism

By distinguishing among reliability, correctness, and accuracy as well as between propositional and nonpropositional knowledge, the previous chapters embrace a pluralism about truth that other theorists would find problematic. If propositional truth takes different forms, and if knowledge cannot be reduced to justified true belief, does that mean the concepts of truth and knowledge are fundamentally vague or ambiguous? Does not this sort of pluralism concerning truth and knowledge inevitably lead to equivocation? These are legitimate questions, to which the current chapter responds. I am not the first to suggest that internal variety calls for pluralism concerning propositional truth. Well-known writings by Hilary Putnam, Crispin Wright, and Michael Lynch all point toward what I would label propositional alethic pluralism.1 Because Lynch has worked this out in considerable detail, I  begin with a discussion of his “functionalist” approach (section 4.1). Next I show how my own practice-oriented pluralism responds to questions Lynch does not address (section 4.2). The chapter concludes by expanding the horizons of alethic pluralism beyond propositional matters to the social domains of truth (section 4.3). To make sense of propositional alethic pluralism, I suggest, one needs to recognize the more encompassing pluralism of truth in diverse social domains.

4.1  Functionalism: Michael Lynch Michael Lynch rightly thinks that truth matters, both in one’s personal life and in society as a whole.2 Because truth matters, philosophers need to provide plausible accounts of what it is and how it works. Unfortunately, Lynch claims, many truth theories come up short in this regard. They suffer, we could say, from the choice of either all or nothing. 4.1.1  All or Nothing In Truth as One and Many, Lynch considers three approaches to propositional truth: correspondence theory, coherence theory, and deflationism.3 DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021-4

Alethic Pluralism  75 Correspondence and coherence theorists are alethic monists, Lynch says: “they assume that there is one and only one explanation of what makes something true” (TOM 3). Such monism lands them in what he calls a problem of scope. Although their preferred explanations seem plausible for a certain range of beliefs or propositions (e.g., beliefs about middlesized dry goods like cats on mats, in the case of correspondence theories, and beliefs about legal facts, in the case of coherence theories), there are other ranges for which their explanations are blatantly implausible. Moreover, this monist failure prompts the deflationary response that truth does not need an explanation. Rather, the concept of truth is “a mere logical device,” useful “for purposes of generalization and semantic assent,” and all beliefs or propositions “are equally apt for truth in an entirely thin sense” (TOM 108, 4, 49). As a result, deflationists have no way to explain the obvious differences among various sorts of beliefs and judgments, nor can they use an account of truth to explain meaning or belief or successful action. In short, deflationism “must remove truth from the philosopher’s toolbox” (TOM 113). That, for Lynch, is too high a price to pay for avoiding the failures of alethic monism. When it comes to truth theory, either all or nothing is a bad choice. Instead, Lynch proposes a functionalist version of pluralism concerning propositional truth. Relying on a distinction between the concept of truth and the property (or properties) of truth, a distinction derived from William Alston’s minimal alethic realism (RCT 37–51),4 Lynch argues that there is one univocal concept of truth, but truth as a property is realized in various distinct ways. In other words, different properties—such as correspondence to fact and logical coherence—can determine that different kinds of propositions are true. So truth is one, both as a concept and as single “higher-level” or “supervenient” property, but its instances are many: that is, the “instantiations” of this property across kinds of propositions “are determined by a class of other, numerically distinct properties” (TOM 70). 4.1.2  Immanent Functional Property What the concept of truth comes to, and what such properties are, Lynch derives from the truisms that make up the “historically prominent folk preconceptions we share about truth.” He emphasizes three such truisms: (1) Objectivity: The truth of a belief “depends on how things are.” (2) Norm of Belief: (Propositional) truth governs what it is correct to believe. (3) End of Inquiry: True beliefs “are a worthy goal of inquiry” (TOM 8, 12, 70).5 On the basis of these truisms, Lynch’s concept of truth identifies truth as “an immanent functional property that is variably manifested” (TOM 82). The functional property thus identified is that of playing the truth role: any belief or assertion or proposition that does the job of being true manifests this functional property.6 Yet how

76  Alethic Pluralism a proposition does the job and thereby manifests the truth property can vary from one propositional domain to the next. What, then, is the truth role that different kinds of propositions can fulfill in different ways? It is to do what the truisms about truth specify, that is, to portray things as they are, to make it correct to believe the proposition in question, and to make believing that proposition a worthy goal of inquiry. Lynch calls this functional property “immanent” because it can inhabit or show up in other distinct properties. It is immanent in the “ontologically distinct properties” that “manifest” it in turn (TOM 74). So, for example, in a certain propositional domain, a proposition’s “corresponding to reality” can manifest the functional property of truth. If it does, then the “truish features” already enumerated—objectivity, correctness, and inquiry-worthiness—will be a “subset” of the correspondence property (TOM 75). The proposition’s truth does not consist in its corresponding to reality. Rather, the proposition’s truth consists in how such corresponding manifests the functional truth property which, in a different domain, can be manifested by a different property. What are the different truth-manifesting properties, and what are the propositional domains for which they play the truth role? Restricting his attention in the first instance to atomic propositions, Lynch distinguishes two kinds of properties that manifest truth relative to two distinct domains. First, there are correspondence-like properties possessed by true propositions “about the antics of the ordinary objects and properties of our daily life” (cats on mats, and the like) (TOM 77). Second, there are coherence-like properties possessed by true propositions about morality and other social matters, properties like “superwarrant” and “supercoherence.”7 Different kinds of propositions and propositional domains are distinguished both by the truth-manifesting properties the propositions possess and by the subject matter they are about (i.e., by the concepts that comprise the propositions). Moreover, (atomic) propositions are domain-specific: they cannot be members of more than one propositional domain. Although Lynch does not attempt a complete ontology of such domains, thereby leaving open which truth-manifesting properties might be specific to, say, mathematical propositions or aesthetic judgments, he hopes to have shown how a functional approach to propositional alethic pluralism offers a worthy alternative to both deflationism and alethic monism. 4.1.3  Open Questions As Lynch recognizes, his functional pluralism raises a number of issues that need attention. How should one account for the truth of inferences or compound propositions that involve more than one kind of proposition (TOM 85–91)? Does pluralism concerning truth-manifesting properties entail that distinct logics govern distinct propositional domains

Alethic Pluralism  77 (a position Lynch labels domain-specific logical pluralism) (TOM 91–104)? Does the immanent property of truth do any real explanatory work with respect to the concept of truth and closely related concepts such as proposition and the content of beliefs? Or do the real explanations rest with the properties, such as correspondence and coherence, that manifest the immanent truth property (TOM 120–58)? Can functional alethic pluralism adequately explain the truth-aptness of moral judgments (TOM 159–84)? Lynch addresses all of these questions, and it is to the credit of his theory that he does. Yet two questions he does not consider are decisive for the project of propositional alethic pluralism, it seems to me. One is whether the primary deficiencies of traditional alethic monist approaches such as correspondence or coherence theory are not ones of scope but rather ones of ontology. Perhaps, for example, the main problem with representationalist correspondence theories is not that they fail to apply to legal, moral, and other social propositions but that they misconstrue the nature of “correspondence” in the first place. If this were the case, then functionalizing the theory of propositional truth to accommodate both correspondence and (super)coherence as properties manifesting the immanent truth property would simply import that ontological deficiency into an alethic pluralist account. There the misconstrual of “correspondence” would continue to block an understanding of what the truth of propositions comes to. Indirectly, the first question gives rise to a second, to a question concerning the ontology of distinct kinds of propositions and propositional domains. Assuming for now that it makes sense to distinguish different kinds of propositions, what criteria should one use to distinguish them? Lynch seems to be of two minds about this. On the one hand, his stated general ontology of propositions is fairly minimal. They are, he says, “the objects of our propositional attitudes”: they are what we believe or assert when we believe or assert something. As such, they also are “the primary bearers of truth and falsity.” Moreover, they are “languagetranscendent,” in the sense that sentences in different languages and different sentences in the same language can express the same proposition (TOM 130–32). Hence differences among kinds do not enter his general ontological description of what propositions are and whether they exist. On the other hand, the thesis that different properties variably manifest the immanent truth property leads Lynch to distinguish one kind of proposition and propositional domain from another. The differences in kind appear to be marked by how the propositions function alethically— that is, by how they manifest the truth property, whether via correspondence or via (super)coherence or, in the case of moral propositions, via concordance. Presumably these truth-manifesting properties are themselves connected somehow to the content of the propositions and the subject matter they are about.

78  Alethic Pluralism But what exactly is that connection, and why would it lead certain propositions to be truth-apt in the correspondence manner and others in the coherence or concordance manner? Is there anything intrinsic to the subject matter that would help delimit certain propositions as being truth-apt in one specific way rather than another? Why would one subject matter not be amenable to a variety of alethically distinct propositional domains? A particular work of art, for example, could be the topic of perceptual description, aesthetic judgment, sociological explanation, and moral evaluation. Would one of these discourses be alethically more appropriate than others? If so, why? If not, and if the different discourses were to generate competing or incompatible truth claims, how should they be adjudicated?8 Such questions go well beyond the parameters Lynch maps out. They illustrate the need for a more robust ontology of propositional truth and propositional domains than he offers. That is what the rest of this chapter tries to provide.

4.2  Practical Pluralism 4.2.1  Modes of Plurality Whereas Lynch tries to restrict the scope of correspondence and coherence theories to appropriate propositional domains, I do not believe they can be restricted in this manner, for two reasons. First, although mistaken in how they construe correspondence and coherence, both sorts of theories rightly try to use their construals to account for the truth of all propositions, not simply of some. If this creates scope problems, as Lynch shows, then that is due as much to their misconstruals as it is to their monism. Second, what such theories try to account for pertains to different sides of the dynamic correlation that, according to the previous chapter, constitutes the truth of all propositions. Whereas correspondence theories highlight but misconstrue propositional accuracy, coherence theories emphasize but misconstrue inferential validity. In my view, both accuracy and validity are required in order for propositions to be true. Hence, it would be a mistake to use either accuracy or validity as a clue to differences between kinds of propositions, as if some were true by virtue of their accuracy and others were true by virtue of inferential validity. Yet that, in effect, is what Lynch tries to do. He regards accuracy, construed as correspondence-to-fact, as the domainspecific truth-manifesting property peculiar to ordinary-life propositions (to use shorthand), and he considers inferential validity, construed as (super)coherence, to be the domain-specific truth-manifesting property peculiar to social-institutional propositions (to use shorthand again). Not only does this raise many issues concerning mixed propositions and inferences, which Lynch addresses, but also it creates pressure in

Alethic Pluralism  79 his domain-specific discussion of moral truth to accommodate both accuracy and validity via the notion of concordance. Lynch says supercoherence does not suffice as a truth-manifesting property in the moral domain. To be true (i.e., to manifest truth), moral judgments must also be “concordant”—a feature that combines “internal supercoherence and durable continual coherence with the facts” (TOM 175). Lynch’s concept of concordance is supposed to ensure that (supercoherent) moral truths are compatible with (fact-corresponding) nonmoral truths (TOM 171–80). But it occludes the importance of both accuracy and validity for the truth of all propositions, whether “moral” or “factual.” At the same time, the range of discourses giving rise to assertions and propositions is much richer and more diverse than Lynch’s implicitly neoKantian fact/value distinction suggests.9 That raises the question whether there are multiple ways in which propositions can be accurate and valid, such that what counts as accuracy and validity differs from one domain to the next. It also raises the question whether the concept of propositional truth, and more specifically the concept of the truth of propositions, can be univocal, or whether in this arena we face an inescapable ambiguity such that no unifying explanation is possible. As Lynch points out when discussing “simple alethic pluralism,” the result of affirming such ambiguity would be “a disguised form of truth nihilism” (TOM 59). I hope to show that, by emphasizing practices rather than properties, one can allow for multiple modes of accuracy and validity without surrendering a univocal concept of the truth of propositions. Yet this univocal concept does not exhaust the larger idea of truth to which it belongs, the idea of truth as a whole. According to the previous chapter, propositions result from the logical practices of identifying, distinguishing, and relating whatever propositions are about. What they are about, in the first instance, is practical objects in their logical dimension—that is, practical objects presenting themselves as states of affairs. Concepts, as the primary components of propositions, also are about these states of affairs. Hence, one can envision at least four ways to distinguish among different kinds of propositions: in terms of the sorts of concepts they involve, the sorts of states of affairs they are about, the primary logical practices that give rise to respective propositions (whether identification, distinction, or relation), and the patterns of inference that seem best suited to the concepts and propositions at issue. So, for example, one could try to differentiate aesthetic propositions from legal propositions by distinguishing aesthetic concepts from legal concepts, or aesthetic phenomena from legal matters, or existential judgments from relational judgments, or the “intuitive” character of aesthetic reasoning from the precedency of legal thought. For convenience, we can label these four potential sources of plurality among propositions conceptual, objectual, analytic, and inferential.

80  Alethic Pluralism Historically, here have been many attempts to sort propositional plurality in these ways, most notably in Immanuel Kant’s detailed distinctions among aesthetic, teleological, moral, instrumental, perceptual, and other types of judgments. The question, however, is whether such differences generate actual plurality in the truth of propositions. If they do, then exactly how do the conceptual, objectual, analytic, and inferential differences among propositions explain such alethic plurality? If they do not, and if, contra Lynch, differences between correspondence and coherence do not explain differences in the truth aptness of different kinds of propositions and propositional domains, then what if anything does? The key to an answer, it seems to me, lies in recognizing that, although the dynamic correlation between propositional accuracy and inferential validity can occur in various ways, such propositional alethic variety does not simply stem from differences among kinds of propositions. Differences among concepts, states of affairs, logical practices, and types of inference, whether in separation or in combination, do not by themselves explain plurality in how the truth of propositions occurs. What explains such variety, instead, is how logical practices and their results link up with other practices and their results. 4.2.2  Can Aesthetic Judgments Be True? Consider, for example, the domain that created special complications for Kant’s epistemology: what he called judgments of taste, and what many subsequent philosophers have called aesthetic judgments. To distinguish taste judgments concerning beauty from closely related judgments concerning pleasure and goodness, Kant points to their unique quality (disinterestedness), quantity (subjective universality), relation (purposiveness without purpose), and modality (exemplary necessity).10 Strictly speaking, aesthetic judgments on Kant’s construal are neither conceptual nor propositional even though, in our disputes about them, we act as if they are. Hence, the question of their propositional truth or falsity cannot really arise. This is a direct consequence of Kant’s narrow construal of what counts as knowledge and his attempt to sort out kinds of propositional truth—more accurately, kinds of judgmental validity, in Kant’s case—in terms of differences among kinds of propositions—that is, differences among kinds of judgments, in Kant’s case. And he concludes that aesthetic judgments—and, by implication, aesthetic propositions, if there were such—are inherently truth inapt. They cannot be either true or untrue. Is that so? Are aesthetic judgments and propositions inherently truth inapt? If that is not so, then why would aesthetic judgments strike Kant, and many philosophers after Kant, as inherently truth inapt? In response to the first question, I would answer that Kant is wrong. Aesthetic judgments, and the aesthetic propositions he did not countenance, are no less

Alethic Pluralism  81 truth apt than perceptual, instrumental, or moral judgments and propositions are. The reason why aesthetic judgments and propositions appear not to be truth apt, apart from Kant’s truncated conception of knowledge, is because of how logical practices and their results (i.e., concepts, propositions, and inferences) link up with aesthetic practices and their results. Let me explain. To be available in their aesthetic dimension, objects need to offer themselves for our aesthetic practices, which the previous chapter describes as the practices of imagination. The objects need to offer themselves as aesthetic signs to be explored, presented, and creatively interpreted. When, by virtue of engaging in imaginative practices toward objects in their aesthetic dimension, we call things beautiful or ugly or trite or elegant, we thereby give linguistic articulation to the results of our aesthetic practices. If, in addition, we make assertions in this regard, claiming, for example, “This landscape is gorgeous,” we thereby put ourselves in a position to identify what we have aesthetically experienced as a beautiful landscape, to distinguish it from whatever is either not beautiful or not a landscape, and to relate it to the same landscape under potentially different conditions or to other landscapes we have experienced. Implicit in our assertion, and usually made explicit if someone else questions it, is the aesthetic proposition “That this landscape is gorgeous.” I see no reason why such a proposition would not be truth apt. It would be either accurate or inaccurate and, in context, either valid or invalid, and there are ways to tell which it is. So why would Kant and other philosophers exclude aesthetic propositions from the domain of truth aptness? I can think of three reasons. One is that aesthetic practices—exploring, presenting, and creatively interpreting nuances of meaning—might seem incompatible with the logical practices—identifying, distinguishing, and relating matters—from which concepts and propositions arise. If imagination and logical thought do not mix, then how can there be aesthetic propositions? In Kant’s case, however, that can’t be right. Although his notions of imagination (Einbildungskraft) and conceptual understanding (Verstand) do not map seamlessly onto my account of aesthetic practices and logical practices, respectively, there is significant overlap. And, as is well known, Kant regarded harmony between imagination and understanding as a precondition for aesthetic judgments and indeed for all perception-based judgments. A second possible reason for considering aesthetic propositions truth inapt could be that aesthetic signs seem inherently inaccessible for treatment as states of affairs. This reason would reflect the tendency among Kant and other philosophers to regard beauty, sublimity, and the like not as properties of the object but as qualities of felt experience. Yet even Kant, when he describes aesthetic ideas as imaginative representations that exceed the grasp of ordinary language and conceptual thought,

82  Alethic Pluralism allows that objects have “aesthetic attributes,” alongside their “logical attributes,” that help expand our conceptual understanding.11 Why, then, would it be impossible to logically grasp aesthetic attributes— which essentially is what it means to treat aesthetic signs as states of affairs? When I assert that this landscape is gorgeous, and my proposition is a­ccurate, the landscape’s predicative self-disclosure—the ­ alignment between its linguistic availability and its availability as an aesthetic sign—presents itself as a state of affairs. There is no inherent barrier to treating this aesthetic sign as a state of affairs. A third obstacle to regarding aesthetic propositions as truth apt might stem from questions about validity rather than from issues concerning accuracy. Clearly validity is a leading concern in Kant’s aesthetics. He concludes that aesthetic judgments have a peculiar validity, such that it makes sense to argue about them, but it does not make sense to try to prove them.12 This conclusion suggests that aesthetic judgments do not claim logical validity. If people do not raise a claim to logical validity when they make assertions about aesthetic matters, then such assertions would likely not give rise to truth-apt propositions. Without going into the intricacies of Kant’s account, let me suggest that the issue he raises, but fails to resolve, concerns the relation between the validity of aesthetic (i.e., imaginative) practices and results, on the one hand, and the validity of logical practices and results, on the other. Kant is right to insist that aesthetic practices cannot be logically valid. The reason for this, however, is not that they cannot be valid but rather that they cannot be logical. When the practices of imagination are valid, they are aesthetically valid. Yet it would be wrong to conclude from this that therefore the results of what could be called aesthetic thought— that is, recommendations, evaluations, and explanations about aesthetic matters—cannot be logically valid. The results of aesthetic thought can indeed be logically valid. Central to such results, in my view, are truth-apt aesthetic propositions. The validity of aesthetic practices and results is, to be sure, fundamentally different from the validity of logical thought. Aesthetic matters unfold within the horizon of imaginative cogency as indicated, for example, by such aesthetic standards as complexity, intensity, and depth. Logical matters, by contrast, unfold within the horizon of inferential validity as indicated, for example, by the rules of modus ponens, modus tollens, and the like. Just as it would not make sense to fault a lively story for violating the rules of first-order logic, so it would be mistaken to reject an inferentially valid argument because it lacks metaphorical richness. Sitting at the intersection between these two horizons of validity, aesthetic propositions and aesthetic thought must do justice to the imaginative character of the aesthetic practices supporting them and the aesthetic signs the propositions concern. Yet aesthetic propositions are, in the first instance, the products of logical practices. Like all other propositions,

Alethic Pluralism  83 they primarily lie within the horizon of inferential validity, and they are truth apt in a propositional way. I am unconvinced, then, by the three possible reasons why Kant and others might deny the truth aptness of aesthetic propositions—indeed, why they might deny that there are aesthetic propositions. Neither an alleged incompatibility between aesthetic and logical practices nor the supposed inaccessibility of aesthetic signs for treatment as states of affairs nor the peculiar validity of aesthetic matters renders aesthetic propositions truth inapt. Yet the manifest tensions between aisthēsis and logos do inflect the accuracy/validity correlation that constitutes the truth of propositions. Not only is imagination intrinsically pre-logical but also it resists the sorts of univocality, clarity, and precision that logical practices aim to achieve. Although no less truth apt than other propositions, then, aesthetic propositions, when true, are propositionally accurate and inferentially valid in their own imaginatively inflected way. Hence, to nod toward Lynch’s three truisms about the truth of propositions (i.e., objectivity, correctness, and inquiry-worthiness), if aesthetic propositions are to do justice to the aesthetic matters they are about and be both correct to assert and worthwhile to discover, they must embody insight that comes via both imaginative and logical practices. The insight must be attuned to the imaginative character of aesthetic interactions and experiences, yet honed toward the clarity and precision of logical thought. Further, to do justice to such imaginative attunement, a logical inference about aesthetic propositions must, as it were, cut them some slack. In trying to draw out the logical connections among aesthetic propositions as well as between aesthetic and nonaesthetic propositions, our inferences must keep in mind the imaginative underpinnings of aesthetic propositions. An aesthetic debate has a different character from, say, a legal proceeding, even though the same rules of logical inference apply to both. From both the side of accuracy, then, and the side of validity, aesthetic propositions can be true. They can do justice to aesthetic matters, and they can be inferentially valid. What such accuracy and validity come to is imaginatively inflected. Yet one does not need to posit a unique kind of truth for aesthetic propositions. Like all other propositions, they are true by virtue of a dynamic correlation between propositional accuracy and inferential validity. Propositional alethic pluralism points to a pluralism in practical modes of propositional truth. 4.2.3  Truth of Moral Propositions Perhaps, however, I have drawn too hasty a conclusion from one admittedly distinctive domain. Even if I have shown that aesthetic propositions are truth apt, albeit in an imaginatively inflected way, it need not follow that other kinds of propositions are also truth apt and in other ways. So,

84  Alethic Pluralism let me take up another test case, namely, the domain of what Lynch and other philosophers call moral propositions.13 Would my approach help account for the truth-aptness of so-called moral propositions without falling into the complications that beset Lynch’s account of concordance? First let me comment on his account. After showing why neither representationalist correspondence theories nor deflationism can account for the truth of moral propositions, Lynch suggests that coherence rather than correspondence is the property that manifests truth in the domain of moral propositions. To use an example to which he alludes, the reason why the moral proposition “Gender discrimination is wrong” is true, if it is true, would not be that it supposedly corresponds to some mind-independent reality. Rather, this proposition, if true, would be true because of how it fits within a larger framework of moral judgments, beliefs, and commitments. Specifically, the property that makes a moral proposition true is what Lynch calls supercoherence. A moral proposition is supercoherent if it belongs to a moral framework that has achieved internal coherence and if it would continue to belong to it throughout all of the framework’s successive improvements (TOM 171–72). Yet supercoherence does not suffice as a manifestation of moral propositional truth, Lynch says. For moral propositions could be coherently held on the basis of “fixed but false non-moral beliefs about the world,” such that “even the craziest moral views might turn out to be supercoherent” and thus true. Lynch gives the example of a misogynistic culture that deprives women of rights because of mistaken non-moral beliefs about intelligence and the like. To rule out moral craziness (or even simply moral ignorance, I  suppose), Lynch introduces concordance as an additional constraint. Concordance is primarily a feature of moral frameworks and secondarily a feature of individual moral judgments, propositions, and beliefs. A concordant moral framework would be both internally supercoherent and “durably coherent” with external “coherence-independent facts.” No matter how internally coherent a moral framework is, for example, it should not “convince us that gender affects intelligence” (TOM 175). Accordingly, a concordant moral proposition would be one that durably belongs to a concordant moral framework. Or, to state this more formally: “P is concordant if, and only if, (a) P supercoheres with a moral framework; and (b) that framework’s morally relevant non-moral judgments are true” (TOM 176). A  true moral proposition is true not simply by virtue of supercoherence, then, but by virtue of concordance, which presupposes supercoherence. As Lynch acknowledges, his appeal to concordance and supercoherence to account for the truth of moral propositions faces two opposing sorts of objections (TOM 180–84). One is that it implies a pernicious moral relativism. The other objection is that Lynch sets the bar for moral truth so high that moral skepticism ensues. He responds to the first objection

Alethic Pluralism  85 by arguing that whatever moral relativism his account implies is modest and not pernicious. And, in reply to the worry about moral skepticism, Lynch claims that, because (propositional) truth is at stake, the bar needs to be set high: “truth, like most things worth having, is hard to come by. It is all the more precious for being so” (TOM 184). Although I am not completely convinced by either response, my own concern is different. It has to do with a conceptual slippage alluded to earlier when I  mentioned the pressure to accommodate both accuracy and validity via the notion of concordance. The slippage occurs because accuracy gets assigned to (fact-corresponding) nonmoral truths (e.g., that gender as such does not affect intelligence) and validity gets assigned to (supercoherent) moral truths (e.g., that gender discrimination is wrong). Not only do I  find it problematic to parcel out accuracy and validity to distinct propositional domains, for reasons already explained, but also I wonder about the truth status of claims concerning concordance between the two domains. If such concordance claims raise a claim to propositional truth, as they surely must, would the propositions they involve be true by virtue of accuracy (understood as correspondence-tofact) or validity (understood as supercoherence) or neither or both? The slippage in Lynch’s implicit response to this question shows up in his description of a concordant moral framework: it is one that, being internally supercoherent, also durably coheres with external facts. Here’s the question: Can a moral framework cohere with nonmoral facts in the same sense that beliefs or propositions internal to the framework cohere with the framework and with each other? Or is the first usage of “cohere” simply a different way to say that the moral framework must correspond to nonmoral facts, in which case Lynch’s account lies closer to moral realism than he suggests? Or do we need a different concept altogether to indicate the required fit between framework and facts? Presumably concord would point to such an alternative. Yet Lynch has provided no account of concordance that would give it independent status comparable to correspondence and (super)coherence as properties manifesting the truth of propositions. This is not simply a philosopher’s worry. On Lynch’s account, anyone who asserts a moral proposition will do so in conjunction with what Lynch regards as nonmoral beliefs and, presumably, will make claims conjoining the two domains. For example, if you assert that gender discrimination is wrong and, when challenged, you back up your assertion by asserting that women are neither less nor more intelligent than men, someone could always ask what facts about intelligence have to do with questions of legal standing and social recognition. Your reply, if you make one, would involve propositions about the relevance of certain (nonmoral) facts for certain (moral) claims. In what sense would such propositions about relevance, if true, be true? They could not simply supercohere within a moral framework, nor could they simply correspond

86  Alethic Pluralism to nonmoral facts, for they inescapably involve the conceptual interpretation of such facts in light of a moral framework. Neither correspondence nor coherence seems adequate as a concept for whatever “property” manifests the truth of hermeneutical propositions, and the notion of concordance seems discordant with their interpretative character. It is precisely the inescapability of conceptual interpretation that opens a different way to think about the truth of moral propositions. For one hallmark of moral propositions, as acknowledged by Lynch’s emphasis on (super)coherence, is that they always presuppose interpretations of relevant choices, decisions, or deeds as being of a moral kind. Such interpretations, in turn, presuppose the logical practices of identifying, distinguishing, and relating matters as moral matters. In the domain of moral propositions, the relation between logical and nonlogical differs from what we observed in the domain of aesthetic propositions. Whereas logical practices that result in aesthetic propositions depend on the exercise of imagination with respect to aesthetic signs, logical practices that result in moral propositions are themselves depended upon by the moral practices that give content to moral propositions. That is why moral propositions presuppose a more or less coherent framework of concepts, but aesthetic propositions, for the most part, do not. As in the aesthetic domain, however, questions concerning the distinctive character of moral propositional truth do not simply revolve around distinct kinds of propositions. Rather they revolve around the relation between logical practices and their results, on the one hand, and moral practices and their results, on the other. For it is in this relation that the dynamic correlation between propositional accuracy and inferential validity receives its specifically moral inflection. For the purposes of this discussion, I designate as moral matters any choices, decisions, deeds, and patterns of conduct that can be regarded as either right or wrong. The agents of such matters can be either individual or collective, and in vast stretches of human life, the moral domain supervenes on what I regard as matters of social ethics.14 Social-ethical matters pertain to normative interrelations, practices, and institutions in different social domains, such as polity, economy, and civil society, within the horizons of various societal principles, such as justice, resourcefulness, and solidarity. Hence, for example, insofar as any somewhat competent adult is a moral agent, blatant lies by a political leader in a constitutional democracy could well be both morally wrong and socially unethical. Moreover, part of their immorality would supervene on the leader’s violation of social (specifically, political) ethicality. The complex relationships between moral and social-ethical matters, which I barely hint at here, are a significant reason why conceptual interpretation is inescapable in the domain of moral propositions. When I write of moral practices and their results, I have in mind both the making of choices and decisions and the choices and decisions made

Alethic Pluralism  87 as well as both the doing of deeds and the patterns of conduct that inform such actions. Moreover, as I have just suggested, in vast stretches of human life, we do not simply choose, decide, and do things per se. Rather, we make our choices and engage in actions within specific social domains, for example, as parents and children, as workers and consumers, or as citizens and bearers of rights. But I shall simplify by setting such social texture aside. The question we face, then, is how the truth of moral propositions is inflected via the relation between logical practices/results and moral practices/results. As indicated, I do not think moral agents can make moral choices and decisions, act morally, or participate in patterns of moral conduct without always already engaging in logical thought. I  do not mean they must be highly reflective or even theoretically astute. I  simply mean that, to be a moral agent in these ways, one must identify, distinguish, and relate matters as moral matters. To do the right thing as a right thing, and not simply as one’s thing, the moral agent must be able to think about it in moral terms. Consequently, an inability or a failure to think of matters as moral matters, or an inability or a failure to make valid inferences when engaged in such thought, would significantly undermine moral practices. This implies, in turn, that the production and evaluation of moral propositions are constitutive for morality in ways that the production and evaluation of aesthetic propositions are not constitutive for aesthetic practices. The constitutive role of moral propositions for morality complicates the question of how the correlation of propositional accuracy and inferential validity shows up in the domain of moral propositions— that is, the question of what the truth of moral propositions is like. To be accurate with respect to a moral matter, a moral proposition must, in a sense, already play a role in the state of affairs it aims to disclose. Although this complication does not preclude propositional accuracy, it does render it considerably less direct than the accuracy of straightforward propositions concerning cats on mats. So too, to be inferentially valid in its connection with other moral propositions, a moral proposition must, in a sense, already be presupposed in these inferentially connected moral propositions. Circular patterns, rather than deduction, induction, or abduction, might well be more appropriate in moral reasoning, lending some credence to Lynch’s insistence on supercoherence. Consider, for example, the assertion that it was morally wrong for police in Minneapolis to use lethal violence when arresting George Floyd on May 25, 2020. To assert this, I must already have identified, in however inchoate a fashion, prolonged kneeling on a prone man’s neck as lethally violent. I  must also already appeal, however implicitly, to the moral proposition that exerting lethal violence in such an arrest is morally wrong. If, in addition, I criticize the police action for being racist or

88  Alethic Pluralism for reflecting racist patterns of conduct, I then appeal to the stance that racism is morally wrong. Hence, in the moral domain, so simple and candid an assertion as “The police were wrong” or “That was just wrong” will involve a moral proposition whose accuracy is mediated through a network of interrelated concepts concerning law enforcement, police responsibility, lethality, violence, and human rights. The moral proposition that the use of lethal violence was morally wrong will also be wrapped up in a chain of moral reasoning that appeals to various empirical facts, sociological claims, and legal precepts, such that to give an argument why this was morally wrong will already presuppose what it tries to establish. Further, when people assert such a moral proposition, they often invoke rather than articulate their circular patterns of moral reasoning. The conceptual mediation of moral states of affairs and the circularity of moral inferences can create the appearance that moral propositions are inherently truth inapt. It can seem as if moral propositions cannot be either accurate or inferentially valid, and hence that, in this domain, no dynamic correlation between accuracy and validity can occur. As a result, it is tempting to treat moral propositions as either mere expressions of emotive states or simply social constructs. Or, when such positions threaten to devolve into moral solipsism or relativism, one might be tempted to revert to a fact-correspondent version of moral realism. These appearances and temptations arise because the prevailing notions of propositional accuracy and inferential validity—indeed the prevailing theories of propositional truth, including Lynch’s significant alternative—are too narrow and exclusive to do justice to the pluralism of propositional alethic modes. If, by contrast, one allows for a more complex variety to how propositions can be true, based on the variety of nonlogical practices and results with which the logical practices that yield propositions must interrelate, then one can regard conceptual mediation and inferential circularity as clues to how, in the moral domain, the truth of propositions is morally inflected. True moral propositions are indeed true: they result from a dynamic correlation between propositional accuracy and inferential validity. Yet, being morally inflected, they are true in their own way, as their mediation and circularity indicate. To this point, I  have argued for a pluralism of practices rather than simply a pluralism of propositions, as illustrated in the aesthetic and moral domains. If, as Lynch says, deflationism suggests that all propositions are equally truth apt “in an entirely thin sense” (TOM 49), then my anti-deflationary position holds that they are all truth apt in entirely robust and plural ways. Rather than continue to document their plurality at the level of the practices that inflect them, however, let me sketch the social ontology this propositional alethic pluralism presupposes. For

Alethic Pluralism  89 propositional alethic pluralism is made possible by plurality in the social domains of truth.

4.3  Social Domains of Truth Theories of propositional truth are not ontologically neutral. At a minimum, as we have seen, they employ or assume accounts of the nature of facts or states of affairs, of beliefs or propositions, and of the relation or lack of relation between these. Beyond this minimum, many other ontological claims play a role. Lynch’s alethic functionalism, for example, employs a robust concept of functional properties as well as a less sharply delineated notion of plural propositional domains. In contrast to the metaphysical pluralism that lies behind Lynch’s propositional alethic pluralism, most deflationist approaches to truth are motivated by scientism and reductionist materialism, as his earlier book points out: Thus we often find truth disparaged as a “non-natural” or “metaphysical” notion by the contemporary deflationist. For consider: If the one true story of the world refers only to physical objects and their properties and a “reduction” of truth to these low-level properties is untenable, then there must be no property of truth. Similarly, if, broadly speaking, the “scientific method” is the one and only right way to gain knowledge about the world and scientific research can tell us nothing about the nature of truth and skepticism is untenable, then it would seem that there cannot be a property of truth. The point is this: deflationism, as a view about the nature of truth, makes good sense from the standpoint of an absolutist interpretation of the twin views of empiricism in epistemology and materialism in metaphysics (TC 118). If, by contrast, a truth theorist regards science as only one avenue to truth, albeit an important one, and also rejects ontological materialism, then deflationism loses its appeal, and a path can open toward a more robust and pluralist conception of truth.15 4.3.1  Social-Ontological Model The path taken in this book lies across the field of social ontology. A social ontology posits that social matters exist and are real. They are not simply “fictions,” nor can they be reduced to so-called natural phenomena. Moreover, the matters studied by mathematics and the natural sciences, including biology, themselves occur within social frameworks. Although one cannot reduce numbers, physical processes, and ecological

90  Alethic Pluralism systems to social phenomena, neither can one reduce social matters to natural phenomena. In fact, a full philosophical consideration of any matter would need to take into account both the social frameworks of natural phenomena and the natural underpinnings of social phenomena. Not only is materialist scientism unwarranted but also science itself displays much more internal diversity and complexity than the notion of a single “scientific method” can allow. Because social ontology regards social matters as real, it needs to suit the complexity of these matters. But it also needs to achieve sufficient categorical precision to bring out both the unity and the diversity of the matters under consideration. To account for contemporary societies, where advanced institutional differentiation combines with increasing global integration, social ontology must achieve a similar combination of differentiation and integration. Without going into the details, let me sketch a social-ontological model that aims to do exactly that. The model maps three intersecting axes of how life is organized in society, each of which has three vectors. I  call this a triaxial model. It begins with a premise of interpersonal identity: individual persons exist in relation to others, and interpersonal relations are constitutive of who they are.16 Based on this premise, the model gives priority to intersubjective interactions rather than to the actions or behavior of individual agents. This is not to deny that individuals and their actions exist and are important, but rather to emphasize that, even in their individuality, they are socially constituted. Moreover, the autonomy of individual agents is a relational autonomy.17 Accordingly, the first of the three axes indicates three levels at which interaction is configured in contemporary society. These levels of interaction are interpersonal relations, cultural practices, and social institutions. The second axis maps the three primary macrostructures within which social life occurs, namely, civil society, the proprietary economy, and the administrative state, as well as the interfaces among them. The third axis consists of the societal principles that obtain for social life within its configuration and structuration. The societal principles the model most strongly emphasizes, because of their special relevance for the three macrostructures, are solidarity, resourcefulness, and justice. But there are other societal principles as well, including, for example, imaginative cogency and logical validity. Because the three axes intersect, a comprehensive attempt to understand matters along one axis will unavoidably raise issues along the other two. Thus, for example, to account for what I call “art in public,” I needed not only to discuss art as a social institution but also to examine the role of arts organizations in civil society and ask how contemporary art can contribute to a “differential transformation” of society in the direction of greater solidarity and justice. This is just one example of

Alethic Pluralism  91 how a triaxial model can support what I call an “architectonic critique” of contemporary society.18 Using this triaxial model, we can locate social domains of knowledge and truth along the first axis and discuss them in terms of interpersonal relations, cultural practices, and social institutions. We can also consider the role of societal principles in these social domains. Although this does not preclude questions about how societal macrostructures frame the social domains of knowledge—questions addressed, for example, in the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault—these will not be my focus here.19 Instead, as already indicated in chapters 1 and 3, I think the primary social domains of truth lie in specific constellations of relations, practices, and societal principles, as configured by social institutions. So, for example, whatever artistic truth comes to, it will involve certain relations among artists and art audiences as well as specific sorts of practices and their objects and results, and it will require responses to a delimited societal principle—all within the configuration of art as a social institution. In my own account of artistic truth as cogent imaginative disclosure (which I have mentioned before and to which I return in later chapters), I zero in on authenticity, integrity, and significance within artist/audience relations, and I emphasize the practices, objects, and results of imagination as well as the societal principle of imaginative cogency. 4.3.2  Domain-Specific Propositions By appealing to a triaxial model of how social life is organized, and by postulating social domains of knowledge and truth, I  aim to provide social-ontological underpinnings for two claims central to the holistic pluralism of this book: first, that propositional truth is important, but it is not all-important and, second, that there is much more to knowledge and truth than that which is propositional. The postulate of social domains helps explain not only the differences among pre-propositional and post-propositional knowledge, which the previous chapter explored, but also the differences among various practical modes of propositional truth, which the previous section in the current chapter has indicated. For each social domain is characterized by its own specific complex relationship among cultural practices of knowing, the knowable, known results, guiding principles, and means of confirmation, and these guiding principles and means of confirmation are themselves tied to a specific societal principle. It is the specificity of these components in a social domain that configures the type of truth specific to that domain. Such specificity also explains why propositions generated in conjunction with these components have their own domain-specific inflection of propositional truth. Moreover, for almost every social domain, we can distinguish the nonpropositional truth that is indigenous to it from the inflected

92  Alethic Pluralism propositional truth that adheres to domain-specific propositions. We can also explain specific inflections of propositional truth by relating them to the different social domains to which they pertain. I shall have more to say about several social domains when subsequent chapters discuss scientific, political, artistic, and religious types of truth. An even more expansive account, which exceeds the limits of this book, would also need to consider whether work and technology, language, civil society, the economy, and what Honneth calls personal relationships20 demarcate their own social domains of truth. But let me conclude this chapter by indicating in more detail how postulating social domains of truth not only helps explain specifically propositional alethic pluralism but also expands the scope of alethic pluralism well beyond propositional truth. The underlying intuition is this: The practices, objects, and results that yield propositional insight are different from those that yield various forms of nonpropositional insight, and the dynamic correlation that constitutes the truth of propositions is different from the dynamic correlations that constitute other sorts of truth. Yet the complex relationships that yield various forms of insight constitute knowledge just as much as the complex relationship among logical practices, states of affairs, and propositions does. Moreover, all of these sorts of insight, whether propositional or not, contribute to knowledge as a whole. So too, the dynamic correlations involving other societal principles and other modes of disclosure constitute truth just as much as that between inferential validity and propositional accuracy does. And all of these types of truth contribute to truth as a whole. Just as the truth of propositions is practically inflected in a plurality of ways and yet a dynamic correlation between inferential validity and accurate insight characterizes all such truth, so too the various social domains of truth give their own specific inflections to truth as a whole and yet, as I explain in chapter 6, they all manifest a dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure. Pluralism presupposes holism, and vice versa, both with regard to the truth of propositions and with regard to truth as a whole. Nevertheless, propositional knowledge and truth have a specific and important role to play, a role inflected by connections between the propositional and the nonpropositional. For propositional knowledge, when accurate and valid, offers the sort of univocal, clear, and precise insight that other forms of knowledge often lack and sometimes need. That is why propositional knowledge can extend and help explicate pre-propositional knowledge, such as one can achieve in the arts, and can also enable and support post-propositional knowledge, such as one can achieve in the moral domain. So too, the truth of propositions helps inflect the nonpropositional types of truth that are indigenous to various social domains.

Alethic Pluralism  93 4.3.3  Beyond Propositional Alethic Pluralism Perhaps, however, one could object that plurality in the practical modes of propositional truth renders superfluous the supposed plurality in social domains of truth. If we can differentiate the truth of aesthetic, moral, and other propositions according to how logical practices and results link up with other practices and results, what more needs to be said about social domains of truth? Can’t we simply grant the thesis of propositional alethic pluralism, although considerably expanded beyond Lynch’s functionalism, without having to entertain and defend an even more expansive alethic pluralism, according to which propositional truth, while important, is only one sort of truth? Although a full response must wait until chapter  6, which lays out my conception of truth as a whole, let me give two reasons why this objection does not work. First, there are sorts of truth that clearly either precede or exceed the truth of propositions. Artistic truth is one of these and, as I intend to argue later, religious truth is another. The many controversies surrounding artistic and religious truth, especially in relation to scientific truth, are reason enough to think that at least in these two social domains the primary truth is not propositional. If this is so there, why not possibly elsewhere? A second reason not to reduce truth as a whole to propositional truth is the diversity of societal principles that provide guidance for various social practices. Because of this diversity, cultural practices and their results can be valid without being inferentially valid. That means the validity of nonlogical practices cannot be equated with the truth of propositions, even when propositions are inflected by their relation to nonlogical practices. Although conceivably one could treat nonlogical validity as completely nonalethic, it seems more plausible that nonlogical validity is indeed alethic, and that the nonpropositional truth to which nonlogical practices contribute is what helps make the truth of propositions important. The truth of propositions is important, not because supposedly it is the only sort of truth, but because it is the only sort of truth that does what propositional truth does: it makes our insight precise, and it either extends or helps enable other sorts of truth. Like Michael Lynch, then, I subscribe to a form of propositional alethic pluralism but retain a univocal concept of the truth of propositions. Yet my concept differs from his, even as I both embrace a greater plurality among modes of propositional truth and regard the truth of propositions, in all its plurality, as itself only one sort of truth. Whereas Lynch conceives of the truth of propositions as a functional property variably manifested via such properties as fact-correspondence, supercoherence, and concordance, I regard such truth as a dynamic correlation between the inferential validity of propositions and their accuracy toward states

94  Alethic Pluralism of affairs. Plurality in the truth of propositions stems not from their truth-manifesting properties but from the relations they bear to various nonlogical matters. Or, better, this plurality stems from how the relation to various nonlogical practices and their objects and results inflects the logical practices that generate propositions. In other words, such plurality, which is internal to the truth of propositions, can be explained by how the truth of propositions relates to various social domains of nonpropositional truth. Before I examine the larger idea of truth as a whole that such an explanation requires, however, we need to take up one more issue concerning propositional truth, namely, the question whether propositional truth comes to anything more than the justification or justifiability of our beliefs, assertions, and propositions. That is the topic of the next chapter.

Notes 1 See, for example, the third of Hilary Putnam’s 1994 Dewey Lectures, published as “The Face of Cognition,” The Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9 (1994): 488–517, and excerpted under the same title in Lynch, ed., NT 705–22. Prominent writings by Crispin Wright include Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); “Truth: A Traditional Debate Reviewed,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Suppl) 24 (1998): 31–74; and “Minimalism, Deflationism, Pragmatism, Pluralism,” in NT 751–87. Writings by Lynch are cited and discussed below. See also the strong case against deflationism and primitivism and in favor of “truth pluralism” in Edwards, MT. 2 Michael P. Lynch, True to Life: Why Truth Matters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 3 Here I  simplify, for Lynch actually concentrates on what he calls “representationalism” and “antirepresentationalism.” Because the notions of correspondence and coherence play large roles in his critique of these theories, however, I do not think my simplification is misleading. 4 See also Alston’s “A Realist Conception of Truth,” in NT 41–66, and “Truth: Concept and Property,” in What Is Truth? ed. Richard Schantz (Berlin: ­Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 11–26. Lynch discusses Alston’s distinction between concept and property in TC 129–35. 5 This is an informal summary. Lynch states the first two truisms as biconditionals, and he adds a ceteris paribus clause to the third. 6 Strictly speaking, Lynch limits the truth role to propositions (as distinct from beliefs and assertions, for example), for reasons he explains—see TOM 9, 14–15, 78–82, 129–33. The rest of my summary reflects this restriction. 7 Lynch’s notions of superwarrant and supercoherence are closely related to what Crispin Wright calls “superassertibility.” A  superwarranted belief or proposition is one that is and will be “continually warranted without defeat” (TOM 38). A supercoherent one belongs to a system of beliefs or propositions that is “coherent at some state of inquiry and remains so without defeat in every successive stage of inquiry” (TOM 148). 8 Although not formulated in quite this way, similar concerns about the relation between the truth property and the properties that manifest it have been

Alethic Pluralism  95 raised by Douglas Edwards, “Simplifying Alethic Pluralism,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2011): 28–48; Marian David, “Lynch’s Functionalist Theory of Truth,” in Truth and Pluralism: Current Debates, eds. Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen and Cory D. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 42–68; Crispin Wright, “A Plurality of Pluralisms,” in Truth and Pluralism, 123–54, especially 141–45. Edwards summarizes his concern and his own alternative as follows: “The problem for Lynch’s view, then, is that the claim that truth is manifested in the domain-specific properties ends up in tension with the claim that truth is a property independent of any domain-specific annexing. Because determination pluralism does not hold that truth is part of the truth-determining properties, it does not have this problem” (MT 131). 9 Although Truth as One and Many gives a much more detailed account, Lynch’s functionalist alethic pluralism stems from an attempt to combine (minimal) alethic realism and metaphysical pluralism (i.e., pluralism about the world) that he originally called relativistic Kantianism. See Lynch, TC 4–5 and passim. 10 See “Analytic of the Beautiful,” in Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89–127; AK 5: 203–44. 11 See section 49 in Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 191–95; AK 5: 313–17. 12 See section 56 on “the antinomy of taste” in Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 214–15; AK 5: 338–39. 13 The notion of moral propositions often strikes me as irremediably vague because the background conceptions of morality are unduly undifferentiated. Nevertheless, I use this terminology here in order to tie directly into Lynch’s discussion. 14 The distinction here between the moral and the ethical derives from, but is not synonymous with, Hegel’s distinction between morality (Moralität) and ethicality (Sittlichkeit). See especially G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 15 The signal contribution of The Metaphysics of Truth by Douglas Edwards is that it identifies the ontological underpinnings to truth theory and forthrightly mounts ontological arguments against deflationism and for truth pluralism. Unlike Edwards, however, I do not differentiate domains of truth in terms of “different ways of being” and what he calls “sparse and abundant properties.” Although I agree that one needs to anchor propositional truth pluralism in an ontology that accounts for distinct domains of truth, I propose a social ontology of institutions and practices rather than Edwards’ metaphysics of existence and properties. 16 Although Honneth does not state this premise as such, I believe my premise of interpersonal identity is compatible with his Hegel-inspired diagnosis of social freedom in terms of the “We” of personal relationships, of the market economy, and of democratic will-formation. See Axel Honneth, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, trans. Joseph Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity, 2014). 17 See chapter 7 (“Relational Autonomy”) in Lambert Zuidervaart, Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 207–40. 18 See especially chapters 4–6 and 9–10 in Zuidervaart, Art in Public.

96  Alethic Pluralism 19 These questions arise in chapters 7 and 10 below, and I also take them up in a book titled Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming). 20 Personal relationships include friendships, intimate relationships such as marriage, and families. See Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 132–76.

5 Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification

Perhaps no other debate has so roiled philosophy’s truthscape as that between alethic realists and alethic antirealists in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Although less intense now than when its leading protagonists were in their prime, this debate unsettles all contemporary attempts to say what propositional truth is and why it matters. Yet the debate has had many iterations and has generated little consensus about what issues are really at stake. To address the debate and not remain permanently at sea, one needs to single out certain issues and settle on a few protagonists. The current chapter takes up a version of the alethic realism debate in the writings of William Alston and Hilary Putnam. Specifically, I try to sort out central ideas and arguments in Alston’s “minimal alethic realism” and Putnam’s “internal realism” or “pragmatic realism.” Already here one faces terminological complications, however. For Alston’s defense of alethic realism is anything but minimal, and Putnam’s purportedly realist position concerning propositional truth, whether internal or pragmatic, is, according to Alston, not alethic realism. Further, Putnam came to his position by rejecting his own previous “metaphysical realism.” And later, in the early 1990s, he replaced internal or pragmatic realism with a position he called “common-sense realism.”1 Moreover, Alston, in articulating his own alethic realism, distinguishes it from various types of metaphysical realism, positing “only the thinnest sort of significant connection between alethic realism and metaphysical realisms” (RCT 84). Such terminological complications might indicate, on the one hand, that the distance between Alston and Putnam is not as great as the intensity of their disagreements suggests, and, on the other hand, that their disagreements point to a shared problem in attempts to theorize the truth of propositions. That, at least, is the double hypothesis guiding my interpretation of their debate.2 After considering first Alston’s minimal alethic realism (section  5.1) and then Putnam’s internal realism (section  5.2), I  propose to incorporate their insights within what I  call a post-anti/ realist conception of propositional truth and discursive justification (section 5.3).3 DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021-5

98  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification

5.1  Alston’s Minimal Alethic Realism The central issue at stake in the Alston/Putnam debate is whether, in the words of Wolfgang Künne, the truth of propositions is “epistemically constrained” (CT 20–22). Alston argues that it is not epistemically constrained. Putnam, in the writings Alston addresses, argues that it is.4 To say of propositional truth that it is epistemically constrained is simply to say that some feature of human knowledge—such as evidence or warrant or rational acceptability—sets limits to what can be true. In Putnam’s view, that constraint is ideal justifiability. Accordingly, Alston considers Putnam’s position an epistemic conception of truth, which he juxtaposes to his own nonepistemic and minimally realist conception. I shall follow Alston’s usage of “epistemic” and “nonepistemic.” 5.1.1  Generalized T-Schema According to Alston, a realist conception of the truth of propositions— and, by extension, the truth of beliefs and statements or assertions— regards truth as a property propositions either do or do not possess. A  proposition has this property if and only if what it claims to be the case is the case. This means, contra epistemic accounts, that the truth of a proposition does not consist in the proposition’s epistemic status such as its being justified or justifiable, or its “being adequately supported by evidence, or being ‘warrantably assertable’, or cohering with some system of beliefs” (RCT 7). For a proposition to have the property of being true, then—for it to be a truth bearer—the truth maker that it is about must indeed be as the proposition claims it is: “If what is stated is that grass is green then it is grass’s being green that is both necessary and sufficient for the truth of the statement” (RCT 7). After considering how the truth of propositions figures in illocutionary acts (such as assertions or statements) and in propositional attitudes (such as beliefs), Alston draws on Alfred Tarski to propose the following general statement of “what it is for a proposition to be true”: (p) The proposition that p is true iff p (RCT 27–28).5 Or, to render this informally: For anything claimed by a proposition, the proposition claiming it is true if and only if what is claimed is as it is claimed to be.6 This generalization of the T-schema, says Alston, is the central formulation of a minimal and stripped down version of alethic realism, minimal by comparison with “more full-blooded” correspondence theories such as Bertrand Russell’s, and stripped down “relative to coherence and pragmatist theories, and to epistemic theories of truth generally” (RCT 32).

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  99 The generalized T-schema allows Alston to avoid either explaining the supposed correspondence of propositions to facts or saying anything of substance about the nature of facts or states of affairs. It also allows him to avoid providing a definition of truth, along with all the issues that attempts to give a real definition have raised. Alston avoids explaining correspondence and the nature of facts by employing a distinction between concept and property previously worked out by Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. The concept of propositional truth is not the same as the property of propositional truth, Alston claims, and the property may have features that the concept does not reflect. All his minimalist theory purports to explain is our ordinary concept of propositional truth. It does not need to explain the features of the truth property that correspondence theories try to explain—presumably, correspondence itself. Yet, against deflationary accounts, Alston does insist there is indeed a property of truth that we attribute to propositions when we call them true (RCT 41–51). Moreover, Alston does not deny the existence of facts, even though he does not try to explain their existence. Rather, he points out that, with suitable modifications, the generalized T-schema displays the relationship between true proposition and truth-making fact by an “identity of content,” in the sense that “the same sentence is used to specify the content of both the proposition and the fact.” Whatever the right kind of proposition/fact correspondence comes to, it will obtain “if and only if the same declarative sentence can be used to specify the contents of proposition and fact” (RCT 39).7 Yet Alston says he does not subscribe to an identity theory, according to which facts are the same as true propositions. Nor are facts “mere shadows of propositions,” he says. Although, as Peter Strawson has pointed out,8 there is “an intimate conceptual dependence of fact talk on statement talk,” this does not entail that facts themselves are “mere shadows of our practice of making statements.” No, they are “genuine denizens of the extralinguistic, extraintentional world,” Alston claims (RCT 39–40). Next Alston considers six common objections to his proposed minimal alethic realism. Of these, the last three strike me as especially relevant to his deliberately not explaining correspondence and the nature of facts, namely, the objections that his approach “is not a substantial theory of truth,” that it might be unable account for propositional falsity, and that it cannot accommodate “propositions formulated by the use of vague terms” (RCT 59–64). Alston responds to the first objection by rejecting the assumption that a theory of truth needs to help explain other phenomena. It simply needs “to explain what we are saying when we attribute truth to [a] truth bearer” (RCT 60). Alston replies to the question about falsity by saying his account can accommodate “propositions that lack truth value,” but to show this exceeds the scope of his book (RCT 62). Similarly, he meets

100  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification the worry about linguistically vague propositions by saying that, because the vagueness of language is unavoidable, it is not a problem unique to a realist conception of truth; it challenges any truth theory. What Alston does not consider, however, is whether these objections arise not because he has failed to say everything there is to say about the implications, scope, and applicability of his theory concerning the concept of truth but because he has refused to say anything of substance about the property of truth. If truth as a property consists in a correspondence between proposition and fact, as Alston seems repeatedly to suggest, then what is the nature of that correspondence, and what is the nature of the facts to which true propositions purportedly correspond? What makes Alston’s alethic realism minimal is his deliberately avoiding such ontological questions. Moreover, it is hard to see how, within the parameters of his own theory, he could explain either propositional falsity or linguistic vagueness without saying something more substantial about both correspondence and facts. Yet that would require him to embrace a more robust metaphysical realism than his minimal alethic realism can accommodate. 5.1.2  Realism and Facts Alston’s wariness toward robust metaphysical realism is obvious from chapter 2, where he discusses the relation between alethic and metaphysical realism; that is, between realism concerning what truth is and realism concerning what exists. On the one hand, he says, a particular version of metaphysical realism will have implications for what propositions are true or false, but it will have “no implications for what it is for a proposition to be true or false” (RCT 78, italics in original). Metaphysical realism about the existence of theoretical entities such as quarks, for example, will expect propositions about quarks to be true or false, but it will not say what it is for such propositions to be true or false. On the other hand, although alethic realism about what truth is need not carry implications for what propositions are true or false and whether metaphysical realism or antirealism is preferable, it can. Surprisingly, Alston does not think the alethic realist’s commitment to there being a property of truth carries such implications. Instead, Alston thinks implications for metaphysical realism can arise from the commitment alethic realism requires to there being mind-independent facts as truth makers that are “ ‘out there’, enjoying a mode of existence independent of our thought, experience, or discourse” (RCT 81). These implications occur in precisely the domain where Alston’s dispute with Putnam occurs, namely, where questions arise whether and in what sense truth makers exist independently of human cognition. Yet even here Alston sees no real reason why Putnam’s “updated, relativized Kantianism,” according to which truth makers exist only within or

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  101 relative to some humanly devised “conceptual scheme,” cannot be compatible with alethic realism, despite Putnam’s denying such compatibility (RCT 82–83). For one can hold that facts are humanly mind-dependent without denying that propositional truth consists in a certain relation between propositions and facts. Accordingly, Alston narrows the scope of whatever metaphysical realism is implied by alethic realism. He narrows it to the specific independence of a truth-making fact from the truth-claiming proposition this fact makes true: “Alethic realism . . . does imply that what makes a particular assertion (belief) of mine true or false is (almost always) constitutively independent of that assertion (belief) itself and its features” (RCT 83). Although this formulation does not preclude that the truth maker could, in specific cases, be another proposition or assertion or belief, usually, says Alston, this is not the case. Rather, what determines the truth of almost any true statement, that is, the fact that makes it true, is constitutively independent of that statement. Hence alethic realism . . . implies that (almost always) what confers a truth value on a statement is something independent of the cognitive-linguistic goings on that issued in that statement, including any epistemic status of those goings on (RCT 84). To the extent that alethic realism implies that truth makers are “independent of our thought and talk,” it “carries with it a metaphysical realism concerning the status of truth makers.” There is, then, a significant connection between alethic and metaphysical realism, but only one of “the thinnest sort” (RCT 84). 5.1.3  Relativized Kantianism After responding to arguments against alethic realism from the side of coherentism (primarily Brand Blanshard) and verificationism (Michael Dummett), Alston devotes three chapters to Hilary Putnam’s internal realist writings. Chapter 5 considers Putnam’s arguments against alethic realism; chapter 6, his emphasis on conceptual relativity; and chapter 7, his epistemic conception of truth. The gist of chapter 5, which I take up later, is that Putnam’s arguments against alethic realism hinge on a claim about indeterminacy of reference that would not tell against alethic realism unless the alethic realist were committed to certain metaphysically realist positions about how language hooks up with reality. Alston both partially disavows those metaphysically realist positions and argues that they do not have “the consequences for reference that Putnam supposes” (RCT 158). The key to sorting out such metaphysical issues lies in chapter 6, where Alston argues that Putnam’s emphasis on conceptual relativity is in fact

102  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification compatible with alethic realism. Putnam’s emphasis opposes two of the three tenets that he regularly ascribes to “metaphysical realism”: (1) that “the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects,” and (2) that “there is exactly one true and complete description of ‘the way the world is’ ” (RTH 49).9 Against these metaphysically realist tenets, Putnam argues (1) that there are plural and incompatible ways of “dividing the world into objects,” and (2) that there is more than one “right” way to describe how the world is (RCT 162–63). In other words, there are alternative conceptual schemes, no one of which can legitimately claim absolute truth. Moreover, any claims about what specific objects exist, what they are like, and what the facts of the matter are will be relative to some ontology or conceptual scheme. This does not mean that objects and facts are simply linguistic or conceptual constructs. But it does mean that they can impinge on us only via our conceptual schemes. As Alston summarizes, Putnam’s view features a particular sort of “mind-dependence”— dependence on the very cognitive-conceptual activity that takes the objects (and their properties and relations) as its objects. It is relativity to a way of conceptualizing the world that is the gist of the position (RCT 168). After considering several possible responses ranging from “hard-nosed” to “more moderate” absolutist rejoinders, Alston argues that Putnam’s conceptual relativity is compatible with minimal alethic realism concerning truth. As I read it, Alston’s argument turns on his separating the ontological status of facts from that of the truth of propositions. On the one hand, Alston readily concedes to Putnam that facts are “scheme relative; they don’t hold independently of one way, among many ways, we have of conceptualizing and theorizing about them” (RCT 179). Yet within a given ontological scheme, the truth of a proposition can “amount simply to things being, in or relative to that scheme, as the proposition would have them to be” (RCT 180). And that would be completely in line with the generalized T-schema embraced by minimal alethic realism. Although such scheme relativity of facts rules out the position that what makes a proposition true is “a reality that is wholly independent of our conceptual cognitive activity,” that would be not great loss, since Alston has already given up the metaphysically realist position that truth makers must be “totally independent of our conceptual-cognitive activity” (RCT 180, italics in original). On the other hand, Alston insists that the truth value of a proposition cannot be relative to a conceptual scheme. For if it were scheme relative, the same proposition could be true in one conceptual scheme and false in another. This would conflict with the T-schema, which says that necessarily a proposition that p is true iff p. Although Alston proposes a way

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  103 to make conceptual relativity compatible with the T-schema—namely, by indexing the content of every proposition to a specific conceptual scheme—he says Putnam himself has never taken the truth of propositions to be scheme relative. Moreover, even a more robust proposition/ fact correspondence conception of truth can be compatible with conceptual relativity, Alston suggests. For on his construal, to claim such correspondence is simply to say “that if the proposition is the proposition that p, then it is a fact that p” (RCT 182, italics in original). Hence, nothing about conceptual relativity makes it incompatible with alethic realism, minimally understood.10 The only reason Putnam considers them incompatible, according to Alston, is because he conjoins conceptual relativity with an epistemic conception of truth. Moreover, the only reason Alston can see for Putnam’s conjoining these is that Putnam thinks alethic realism must be committed to there being a mindindependent and theory-independent reality to which true propositions correspond. Alston denies this commitment, just as Putnam’s “relativized Kantianism without noumena” does. But Alston thinks a properly relativized Kantianism should also reject an epistemic conception of truth. So, on Alston’s reading, a tension pervades Putnam’s internal realism. The tension can be summarized in the following dilemma: “if internal realism requires an epistemic conception of truth it can’t be relativized Kantianism, whereas if it is relativized Kantianism, it is hospitable to a realist conception of truth” (RCT 186). This dilemma sets up Alston’s critique of Putnam’s epistemic conception in chapter 7. Before turning to this critique in the next section, let me suggest that a different dilemma confronts Alston’s minimal alethic realism: to be sufficiently minimal to accommodate conceptual relativity, it needs to surrender a central tenet of alethic realism. Although Alston wishes to accommodate facts to conceptual relativity, he can do so only at the expense of reducing facts to the contents of propositions. Let me explain. In my view, it is one thing to say that facts never hold independently of our schemes for conceptualizing them and theorizing about them. For facts, as I argue in chapter 2, are how practical objects display themselves in the presence of correct assertions, and our assertions always occur within conceptual schemes. It is something else, however, to suggest that facts are simply things’ being as propositions claim them to be. For this suggestion in effect means the content of facts is nothing other than the content of propositions, such that the decisive otherness, objectivity, and nonidentity of facts goes missing. Moreover, despite Alston’s claims about the independence of truth-making facts from the “cognitive-­linguistic goings on” behind the statements they make true (RCT 84), he does not succeed in distinguishing facts from propositions. A collapsing of facts into propositions is evident from Alston’s description of what proposition/fact correspondence comes to: “Thus to say that the statement that water is wet corresponds with a fact (viz., the fact that

104  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification water is wet, naturally!) is just to say that there is an actual fact with the same content as that proposition, namely, water is wet” (RCT 182, italics in original). But I would argue water’s being wet, as it is asserted to be, is not the same as the content of the proposition that water is wet. Nor would merely saying that there is a fact (water’s being wet, as asserted) with the same content as the proposition water is wet suffice to establish a correspondence between the one and the other, if that’s what one’s theory envisions. For the point of a correspondence theory is not simply to say that both fact and proposition exist or have the same content but that in some fashion—presumably via correspondence—the fact makes the proposition true. Moreover, even if the truth of propositions were not scheme relative (a position I here neither defend nor deny), it is hard to see how, given Alston’s concessions to relativized Kantianism, propositions themselves would not be scheme relative. For if the purported truth-conferring correspondence between proposition and fact were, as alleged, simply the identity in content between fact and proposition, and if the fact is scheme relative, then would not a proposition having fact-identical content also have to be scheme relative? And, in any case, Alston regards propositions as the contents of assertions and belief. Insofar as assertions and beliefs are scheme relative, would not propositions have to be scheme relative too? Without denying the scheme relativity of propositions, Alston tries very hard to lessen its import by suggesting that every proposition could contain “as part of its content an ‘index’ something like ‘in conceptual scheme C1’ ” (RCT 180). But he does not pursue the implications of this suggestion very far. That is understandable. For if both proposition and fact where scheme relative, it would be hard to see how the truth of the proposition—a truth it is supposed to have by virtue of the relation between a scheme-relative proposition and a scheme-relative fact—would not also be scheme relative. The result of this line of thought would be truth relativism, which is precisely what Alston and most alethic realists both fear and oppose. For what would count as true within one conceptual scheme would not necessarily count as true in a different conceptual scheme. Propositional truth itself would be conceptually relative. Although Alston does not reach this conclusion, his student Michael Lynch does. Lynch says that, together, the scheme relativity of facts and the scheme relativity of propositions entail that every propositional truth is relative to an ontological or conceptual scheme. Yet Lynch claims this conclusion does not result in truth relativism, which he describes as “any view that takes truth to be truth-for-a-scheme” (TC 136). Although the truths of propositions are scheme relative, he argues, the concept of truth is a not a scheme-relative concept: “Just because every truth is relative to a scheme, this does not imply that our concept of truth is ‘truth-for-C’ [i.e., truth-for-conceptual-scheme-C]. All truths are relative, yes, but our

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  105 concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept” (TC 137–38, italics in original). He makes a similar move with respect to unavoidably schemerelative facts and the nonrelative concept of a fact as “what is the case” (TC 139). Because the concepts of truth and fact are nonrelative and minimal, Lynch claims they “float free of metaphysical debates, including debates between relativism and absolutism” (TC 139–40). Even if this were so—which I  seriously doubt—I fail to see how the supposed nonrelativity of the truth concept helps one avoid the problem of truth relativism. The problem is not that our concept of truth would be relative to an ontological scheme but that truth itself—what the concept is about—would be scheme relative. The only way for Alston himself to resist this conclusion would be to insist more vigorously on the nonidentity between facts and propositions. This could be done without reverting to metaphysical realism’s insistence on the mind-independence of facts. But it would require a more robust account of what facts are and how they function than Alston seems prepared to give. To keep his alethic realism sufficiently minimal to accommodate Putnam’s relativized Kantianism, Alston has given up a central tenet of alethic realism, namely, the distinctive identity of facts.11

5.2  Putnam’s Internal Realism Alston regards epistemic conceptions of truth as the only “serious alternative” to alethic realism as a theory of the concept of truth, and he considers Hilary Putnam’s approach to be “the strongest version of an epistemic conception available” (RCT 188, 195). Hence Alston’s critique of epistemic conceptions focuses on Putnam’s approach. Alston labels this the Ideal Justifiability Conception (IJC) of truth, which he summarizes as follows: To say of a belief that it is true is to say that it would be justifiable in a situation in which all relevant evidence (reasons, considerations) is readily available (RCT 194). Such a situation would be an epistemically ideal situation. In Putnam’s own words, “truth is an idealization of rational acceptability. We speak as if there were such things as epistemically ideal conditions, and we call a statement ‘true’ if it would be justified under such conditions” (RTH 55). Alston recognizes that different epistemic conceptions identify truth with different epistemic statuses, such as justification, warrant, rational acceptability, or being well-grounded in the evidence. But he proposes to use term justified “to range over any positive epistemic status that is taken by some thinker to constitute truth” (RCT 190). Accordingly, he discusses Putnam’s emphasis on idealized rational acceptability in terms of ideal justifiability. I follow Alston in this usage.

106  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification 5.2.1  Ideal Justifiability Alston thinks a number of problems confront any attempt to work out a satisfactory concept of an epistemically ideal situation. His main objections, however, pertain to three other difficulties, namely, (1) that not all true propositions are ideally justifiable, (2) that the concept of ideal justifiability presupposes the concept of truth, and (3) that the conception of truth as ideal justifiability conflicts with the T-schema. He labels these objections the extensional, the circularity, and the intensional arguments, respectively, and he primarily directs them toward questions concerning the concept of truth. Alston’s extensional argument offers two sorts of propositions that could be true yet not ideally justifiable. One sort would be about matters that are “totally inaccessible to human cognition” (RCT 200). Because human cognition is finite and fallible, Alston says, in principle there are many matters we cannot know, such that even under ideal epistemic conditions we could not justify claims about them. Yet propositions about these unknown matters could very well be true. The second sort offered for consideration are propositions of theoretical science that are “underdetermined by empirical evidence” (RCT 203). It is not hard to imagine, Alston suggests, that such theoretical propositions are true yet cannot be decisively adjudicated, no matter how ideal the epistemic situation. There is something odd, however, about this extensional argument. For in offering the first sort of proposition, Alston seems to assume either that true propositions can exist without any human believing or asserting them or that we can believe and assert true propositions without even knowing what we are talking about. On the first scenario, propositional truth would be purchased at the expense of reifying propositions. On the second scenario, propositional truth would be secured at the cost of valorizing human ignorance. Either way, this seems too high a price to pay for rejecting ideal justifiability as at least a relevant condition for the truth of propositions, even if not a definition of propositional truth. Fortunately, even though Alston does not seem to sense the oddity here, he does concede that he cannot prove there are true propositions that are not ideally justifiable. So he puts less weight on the extensional argument and more on the circularity and intensional arguments (RCT 203–4). The circularity argument claims that, to explain the notion of an epistemically ideal situation, one must appeal to a prior notion of truth. If, on the prior notion, truth were ideal justifiability, then the explanation would presuppose what it sets out to explain. If, by contrast, the prior notion did not equate truth and ideal justifiability, then ideal justifiability could not serve as a definition of truth. Alston identifies three places where such an explanation of the epistemically ideal situation must presuppose the concept of truth, namely, to explain justifiability, the availability of all relevant evidence, and the relevance of evidence. Of course,

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  107 the circularity argument would not hit Putnam’s position if he does not actually try to define truth in terms of ideal justifiability. Alston acknowledges as much when he cites Putnam’s later reflection in 1988 on what his 1981 formulation of truth as idealized rational acceptability meant. Putnam says he did not intend to reduce truth to epistemic notions but simply to suggest “that truth and rational acceptability are interdependent notions.”12 Alston comments: if Putnam now means that one cannot possess the concept of epistemic justification without possessing the concept of truth and vice versa, then “the current Putnam drops out as a target for my argument . . . For here I am only opposing the view that some kind of epistemic status is a conceptually necessary and sufficient condition for truth” (RCT 208). Precisely that view, whether or not the later Putnam holds it, is the target for Alston’s intensional argument against the IJC. The argument concludes that ideal justifiability does not make up “any part of the meaning of ‘true’ (the concept of truth)” (RCT 208). Hence, there is no way for ideal justifiability (or any other epistemic status, for that matter) to be a conceptually necessary and sufficient condition for truth. The intensional argument hinges on Alston’s employing the generalized T-schema—(p) The proposition that p is true iff p—to specify the meaning of the concept of propositional truth. According to Alston, any biconditional that fits this schema is “necessarily, conceptually true; it is rendered true by the concept of truth.” And that “leaves no room for an epistemic necessary or sufficient condition for truth. Nothing more is required for its being true that p than just the fact that p; and nothing less will suffice” (RCT 209). Thus, any attempt to impose such an epistemic condition, whether ideal justifiability or something else, conflicts with the T-schema and thereby with the concept of truth and with what it means for a proposition, assertion, or belief to be true. Alston regards this argument as decisive because hardly any contemporary analytic truth theory, whether realist or antirealist, denies the importance of the T-schema for understanding the concept of propositional truth. Unlike many of his fellow truth theorists, however, Alston does not think the T-schema is in fact “neutral as between various theories of truth” (RCT 209).13 Rather, it strongly supports (minimal) alethic realism and significantly conflicts with an epistemic conception of truth. Because, according to Alston, “the T-schema makes explicit something . . . fundamental to our concept of propositional truth,” accounts of truth that contradict it, as he argues epistemic conceptions do, are “thereby unacceptable” (RCT 211). After considering and rejecting possible replies by epistemic theorists, Alston asks whether Putnam’s IJC or Alston’s own minimal alethic realism has a better shot at determining truth values. And he concludes that it is unlikely for Putnam’s IJC to surpass or even approximate the capacity of minimal alethic realism to determine truth values. Rather than

108  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification bringing truth back home to the realm of human experience, as Putnam’s book title Realism with a Human Face suggests, his attempt to develop a plausible epistemic conception of truth is forced “to introduce a conception of epistemically ideal circumstances that are so far removed from our actual epistemic situation as to make it impossible for us to make informed judgments as to what would or would not be justifiable in such circumstances” (RCT 228). So not only is Putnam’s IJC unable to explain the concept of propositional truth but also it is implausible with respect to what we experience as propositional truth claims. 5.2.2  Objects and Reference Alston’s comment about the impossible ideality of the epistemically ideal situation points to a fundamental ontological dispute within his debate with Putnam. Earlier I  said the central issue at stake in this debate is whether the truth of propositions is or is not epistemically constrained. The ontological dispute surfaces when one asks why this issue of epistemic (non)constraint matters to Alston and Putnam as much as it plainly does. It matters, I surmise, because it both conveys and presupposes fundamental commitments concerning the limits and possibilities of human existence in relation to that which is not human. Alston’s underlying ontological intuition, signaled in his book’s Epilogue, is that human existence is inescapably conditioned by that which is not human and is ultimately dependent on the divine. The “fundamental root of opposition to realism about truth,” he suggests, is “intolerance of vulnerability” (RCT 264). Putnam, by contrast, views human existence as intrinsically open to possibilities for human flourishing and always responsible for what it makes of these possibilities. This view is suggested, for example, by how he connects truth with rational acceptability and with wider values toward the end of Reason, Truth and History. A theory of truth, he says, presupposes a theory of rationality, and that, in turn, presupposes a theory of the good, with all its built-in assumptions “about human nature, about society, about the universe (including theological and metaphysical assumptions).” Moreover, a theory of the good can only always be programmatic, to be revised “again and again” as our knowledge increases and our worldview changes (RTH 215). Although these contrasting ontological stances need not be irremediably opposed, to reconcile them would require revisions on both sides. Perhaps something similar holds for the debate over epistemic (non)constraint. Perhaps Alston’s minimal alethic realism and Putnam’s internal or pragmatic realism are not irremediably opposed; perhaps, through revision, they can be reconciled. To find out, we need to turn more directly to Putnam’s writings. The Preface to Reason, Truth and History introduces Putnam’s internal realism about truth as a way to move beyond an unproductive

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  109 dichotomy between what he calls “objective and subjective views of truth and reason.” This dichotomy leads some philosophers to insist that true propositions and the like correspond to mind-independent facts, lest the objectivity of truth be denied and truth relativism embraced, while others just as forcefully reject “a naïve copy conception of truth” and vigorously embrace both subjectivism and relativism. Putnam intends to propose a conception of truth that “unites objective and subjective components” by positing a close connection between truth and rationality, even as he recognizes the historical—but not arbitrary—character of the standards of rationality (RTH ix-x). Rather than dichotomies between object and subject, between truth and history, and between fact and value, Putnam wants to highlight their interconnection: If one must use metaphorical language, let the metaphor be this: the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world. (Or, to make the metaphor even more Hegelian, the Universe makes up the Universe—with minds—collectively—playing a special role in the making up.) (RTH xi) Accordingly, when Putnam says that “the only criterion for what is a fact is what it is rational to accept” (RTH x) and that “truth is an idealization of rational acceptability” (RTH 55), one can read these as anti-dichotomous attempts to emphasize interconnection rather than as reductive efforts to establish synonymy. In that sense, when Putnam later says he did not intend to reduce truth to epistemic notions but simply to call attention to the interdependence between truth and rational acceptability, one could say he merely clarifies his position and does not revise it. This interpretation would mean that it is not only “the current Putnam” (i.e., 1988 and later) but also the internal realist Putnam of Reason, Truth and History (1981) who “drops out as a target” for Alston’s arguments against epistemic positions of truth (RCT 208). Moreover, since Alston considers Putnam’s internal realism to be the strongest version of an epistemic conception, we would then have to wonder who actually holds the positions Alston rejects. Yet the fact that Alston devotes three chapters to Putnam suggests something decisive is indeed at stake in this debate. It has to do with the ontological status of the objects to which language users refer when they make propositional claims as well as how such objects are practically available for language usage. Let me take up questions about objects and reference first, before I turn to questions of practical availability in the next subsection. As we noted earlier, Putnam directs his arguments for internal realism against what he calls “metaphysical realism” or “the externalist perspective.” These arguments rely heavily on his rejecting “magical theories of reference.” Such theories hold that “certain mental representations

110  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification necessarily refer to certain external things and kinds of things,” that there is a fixed link between words and things, as if the world were populated with “Self-Identifying Objects” to which signs “intrinsically correspond” (RTH 15, 52–53). Against such theories of reference, Putnam insists that signs, including concepts—which are “signs used in a certain way” (RTH 18)—refer only because of how a community uses them with respect to objects that are always already classified and described within the users’ conceptual scheme. In that sense, as Putnam says, “ ‘Objects’ do not exist independently of conceptual schemes” (RTH 52). The claim that objects do not exist independently does not mean they exist only within conceptual schemes. Nor does it mean that objects exist only because of conceptual schemes. Their not being mind independent does not make them wholly mind dependent. Putnam’s internal alethic realism does not entail metaphysical antirealism. For Putnam, as we saw, mind and world are co-constitutive. Nevertheless, because he opposes a kind of realism that seems to posit wholly mind-independent Self-­ Identifying Objects, Putnam tends to emphasize one constitutive relation more than the other, namely, the constitution of objects within conceptual schemes, rather than the dependence of sign-users on the availability of objects for human practices. As we shall see, this tendency fatally infects his approach to practical availability. Moreover, as if riding the other end of a teeter-totter, Alston’s critique of Putnam leans heavily toward such dependence on objects, but without employing the notion of their practical availability. This is clear from how Alston responds to Putnam’s arguments against metaphysical realism with respect to truth. In chapter 5 of A Realist Conception of Truth, which I  briefly touched on earlier, Alston aims to undermine Putnam’s arguments against those who, like Alston, say truth is not epistemically constrained. Putnam fails to show, Alston claims, that “where a theory is epistemically ideal . . . it is impossible that it should not be true” (RCT 134–35). Alston considers three of Putnam’s arguments, labeled the model-theoretic, the “Models and Reality,” and the Reason, Truth and History arguments. Whereas in the first Putnam specifically argues that an epistemically ideal theory cannot be false, in the other two he argues that metaphysical realism faces, and internal realism avoids, “a crippling referential indeterminacy” (RCT 150). All three of Putnam’s arguments turn on conceptions of reference. So do Alston’s responses. Rather than lay out the complete arguments and responses, let me zero in on questions concerning reference. In response to Putnam’s model-theoretic argument that metaphysical realists cannot specify an interpretation that would make an ideal theory false, for example, Alston challenges Putnam’s account of what theory interpretation comes to. Putnam writes as if language users interpret sentences, discourses, and whole languages extensionally, Alston claims, “by assigning designata to singular terms and extensions to general terms” (RCT 142).

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  111 But that is not how language interpretation goes, Alston says, and Putnam is wrong to saddle the metaphysical realist with providing an extensional interpretation of the terms in an ideal theory. What Alston calls “a sensible realist” (like himself!) does think is that the meaning of a general term “lays down necessary and sufficient conditions for something’s falling in the extension of the term.” But there is more to interpretation, Alston says, than simply assigning extensions to general terms (and designata to singular terms). For both the meaning of a general term and mostly nonlinguistic “facts of the world” jointly determine its extension (RCT 144–45). Accordingly, there is more to interpreting a theory than simply specifying the extensions of general terms. Contra Putnam, the metaphysical realist does not need to hook up “each term of a theory with things and sets of things in the world” (RCT 147). Just as Putnam’s model-theoretic argument mistakenly saddles metaphysical realists with a purely extensional account of language interpretation, so, Alston claims, Putnam’s other two arguments wrongly allege that metaphysical realists face “a crippling referential indeterminacy” that the internal realist supposedly escapes (RCT 150). Alston advances his rebuttal in two stages. First, he suggests that Putnam’s arguments wrongly conflate actual referring with explaining what referring comes to. According to Alston, both the metaphysical realist and the internal realist can recognize that statements like “ ‘Cat’ refers to cats” are guaranteed to be true by virtue of what the sentence means, even if neither has a satisfactory explanation of the nature of reference. Then Alston suggests that Putnam’s arguments presuppose a fundamental contrast between two metaphysical pictures that Alston himself disputes: whereas the metaphysical realist must, per impossible, somehow connect words with constituents of a wholly language-transcendent reality, the internal realist thinks both the objects we refer to and the language we use to refer are internal to our conceptual schemes (RCT 158). Yet not even this contrast between metaphysical realism and internal realism establishes the point Putnam wants to make, Alston claims. Internality to a conceptual scheme does not eliminate the indeterminacy of reference, and insisting on the language-independence of the objects referred to does not preclude the determinacy of reference. 5.2.3  Availability and Relativity At this point, one has to wonder whether there is any real difference between what Alston calls minimal alethic realism and what Putnam calls internal realism. I think there is, and it goes back to the issues I raised concerning Alston’s conceding the conceptual-scheme-relativity of facts. Whereas, in making this concession to Putnam, Alston reduces facts to the contents of propositions, Putnam, in arguing for an intimate connection

112  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification between ideal justifiability and propositional truth, reduces the practical availability of objects to their relativity to conceptual schemes. This reduction can be seen from Putnam’s attempt to recast the problematic notion of a “Self-Identifying Object.” He writes: If, as I maintain, “objects” themselves are as much made as discovered, as much products of our conceptual invention as of the “objective” factor in experience, the factor independent of our will, then of course objects intrinsically belong under certain [conceptual] labels. .  .  . But this kind of ‘Self-Identifying Object’ is not mind-independent (RTH 54). Yet, Putnam argues, the object’s lack of mind-independence does not result in a “facile relativism,” according to which any conceptual scheme is as good as another. For, he says, there are “experiential inputs” that constrain our knowledge beyond the requirement of coherence that governs the rational acceptability of our beliefs and assertions. They constrain our knowledge, however, within rather than beyond our conceptual schemes: such experiential inputs (i.e., sensations and the like) are “to some extent shaped by our concepts, by the vocabulary we use to report and describe them” (RTH 54). Accordingly, even though the propositional truth of a belief or assertion is not the same as its rational acceptability—its justifiability, in Alston’s terms—such truth is “not independent of all justification. To claim a statement is true is to claim it could be justified” (RTH 56). I shall return to this concluding statement about propositional truth and ideal justifiability. For now, however, let me show how it depends on a problematic view concerning the practical availability of objects. The term practical availability refers to how objects lend themselves to the practices of daily life. Just as human life is multidimensional, so too are the objects with which we interrelate in practice. That means practical availability is also multidimensional—there are many distinct ways in which an object is practically available to us. In accounting for assertoric correctness and propositional accuracy, I have highlighted two such dimensions, namely, the availability of practical objects for linguistic and logical practices. Nevertheless, my account of what makes it possible for assertions and propositions to be “true” (i.e., correct and accurate) presupposes that objects have many other dimensions of practical availability. For, as the predicative self-disclosure of practical objects, “truthmaking” facts simply are how the objects’ predicative availability aligns with other, nonpredicative ways of availability. Moreover, if some of these nonpredicative dimensions of practical availability were absent— for example, the perceptibility, usability, and interpretability of practical objects—many objects would not even be available for linguistic reference and predication, and no pertinent facts would occur.

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  113 Such insistence on practical availability and predicative self-disclosure does not turn practical objects into “self-identifying objects,” however. To say that they are practically available is not to say that they determine how we approach them in practice, and to claim that predicative and nonpredicative dimensions of their availability can align on the occasion of language usage is not to claim that the objects themselves do the predicating. On the one hand, there is more to what objects are than what our linguistic and logical practices can capture. What they disclose of themselves for correct assertions and accurate propositions is not their “full identity” or “inner nature” but rather an alignment between certain aspects of their availability. On the other hand, precisely in being practical objects, what objects are includes their being multidimensionally available for human practices. Practical objects are not either dependent or independent vis-à-vis human perception, language, and thought. They are both. More precisely, practical objects and human practices are interdependent. Putnam misconstrues such practical availability in two respects. First, he does not recognize just how multidimensional it is. The practical availability of objects cannot be reduced to what Putnam calls “experiential inputs,” as if all that matters about an object is the signal it triggers in our sensory apparatus. Not even Kant, whom Putnam credits with first proposing an internal-realist view of truth (RTH 60–64), thought this. For Kant, sensations cannot become constituents of experience and knowledge outside the forms of intuition and the schematism of the imagination. In this sense, “experiential inputs” could not constrain our knowledge if the objects were not available in other ways that, strictly speaking, are not conceptual, unless one expands the notion of “conceptual scheme” to include all the intuitive and imaginative elements that Kant distinguished from concepts as such. Although, in my view, Kant’s transcendental construal of these nonconceptual elements does not sufficiently accord relative independence to practical objects, he nevertheless recognized the multidimensional character of their availability. In the second place, to use Kantian language, Putnam confuses the empirical and the transcendental senses in which concepts “shape” the nonconceptual elements of experience and knowledge. It is one thing to say we could never feel or perceive or use or interpret an object in complete isolation or abstraction from our conceptual schemes. For, to use my own vocabulary, the referability, predicability, and “thinkability” of objects are intrinsic dimensions of their practical availability, and we rarely experience them in the pre-predicative manners mentioned without also engaging in linguistic and logical practices. Empirically, then, concepts, as results of our logical practices, unavoidably help give shape to our pre-predicative experience of objects in pre-predicative dimensions of their availability, when, for example, to use Putnam’s terms, we “report and describe” the objects as experienced.

114  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification It is another matter, however, to suggest that our conceptual schemes transcendentally constitute such pre-predicative experience and pre-­ predicative availability, that is, that our conceptuality makes them possible. For such a suggestion would completely eliminate the relative independence of the object—its being practically available rather than simply conceptually shaped or even created. It would also ignore the multidimensional character of the object’s availability—its being much more than the object of our talk and thought. Yet that is precisely what Putnam suggests when he says objects “are as much made as discovered,” made as “products of our conceptual invention” (RTH 54). It is hard not to read this as a claim that human conceptual schemes make the objects of knowledge possible not only in linguistic and logical dimensions of their availability (which would be problematic enough) but also in their pre-predicative dimensions. Even if Putnam does not actually make this claim, it is clear that, by confusing the empirical and transcendental senses of object-constitution, he tends to eliminate the relative independence of practical objects. As a result of both misconstruals—both the misrecognition of multidimensionality and the elimination of relative independence—Putnam reduces the practical availability of objects to their being relative to conceptual schemes. But practical availability presupposes that the object has its own identity, an identity that we cannot equate with the identity or identities we assign it. The object is, in Adorno’s words, the nonidentical, and, in this sense, it has priority over our conceptual schemes (ND 183–86). Practical availability also presupposes that the object has its own identity in relation to the human practices for which it is available. Hence, in being independent, the object is simultaneously interdependent, and the entire debate about the alleged “mind-independence” of objects collapses. I believe both Putnam and Alston should welcome this collapse. Yet neither one could, because neither broke free from a (relativized) Kantian problematic, with Alston reducing facts to propositional contents and Putnam reducing the practical availability of objects to conceptual relativity.14

5.3 Post-anti/realism Acknowledging these reductions is important for sorting out the Alston/ Putnam debate about whether propositional truth is epistemically constrained. To argue that truth is not epistemically constrained, Alston must employ a concept of mind-independent facts. Yet, when he tries to give content to that concept, he cannot really distinguish facts from minddependent propositions, which the facts are supposed to make true without regard to the proposition’s justifiability. By contrast, when Putnam insists that there is an intimate connection, without synonymy, between propositional truth and the ideal justifiability of propositional claims, he

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  115 appeals to how nonepistemic constraints (“experiential inputs”) impinge on our making propositional claims. Yet, when he describes such nonepistemic constraints, he cannot really treat them as (relatively) independent from the conceptual nexus within which the justification of propositional claims takes place. What Alston recognizes, but misdescribes, is the importance of the object’s predicative self-disclosure for the accuracy of propositions. What Putnam recognizes, but also misdescribes, is the role of inferential validity in our attaining such accuracy. Indeed, as I shall argue, discursive justification should be understood as the inferential unfolding of propositional truth. And, being a dynamic correlation between accurate insight and inferential validity, propositional truth calls for discursive justification. As Alston claims, albeit for different reasons, truth and justification are not the same. Yet, as Putnam shows, they are intimately connected. As I hope to demonstrate, these insights, when properly redescribed, point us beyond their debate toward a post-anti/realist conception of propositional truth. 5.3.1  Truth Claims and Discursive Confirmation The previous chapter, when arguing for a plurality in the ways that propositions can be true, claimed that all these ways involve a correlation between the accuracy of a proposition with respect to a state of affairs, on the one hand, and the validity of the inferences whereby, in asserting the proposition, we can connect it with other relevant propositions. I also suggested that, in practice, we cannot really have one without the other: in isolation, accurate propositions would likely be meaningless and valid inferences could very well be unsound. From this perspective, it makes little sense to debate whether or not propositional truth, in the sense of accurate insight, is epistemically constrained. It both is and is not constrained. Accurate insight is not epistemically constrained insofar as, in the abstract, one can assert, without justification, a proposition for which the predicative self-disclosure of a practical object is itself decontextually disclosed—that is, the proposition, without any argumentation, can be accurate with respect to the state of affairs it is about. This is what minimal alethic realism à la Alston recognizes. Yet in practice (and it is in practice that assertions get made and propositions emerge), that is not how propositions are true. Rather, they are accurate in relation to other propositions about other related states of affairs, and the inferential validity of that relation is intrinsic to their being true. In that sense—that is, in practice—the accuracy of propositional insight is epistemically constrained. Further, if there were no way to establish the inferential validity of that relation, then the accuracy of the insight would become questionable. This, I  take it, is the worthwhile insight within Putnam’s insistence on ideal justifiability, even

116  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification though he sometimes seems to equate ideal justifiability with accuracy as such. The way past the Alston/Putnam debate is to recognize that the truth of propositions is not a matter of either accuracy or validity but rather both, in dynamic correlation. Here I  need to introduce another technical term, one I  have used already but have not explained. It is the concept of a propositional truth claim. A  propositional truth claim is the implicit claim of a belief or assertion to be true (i.e., reliable or correct). This claim gets raised whenever we state a belief or make an assertion. In effect, it is the claim that the propositional content of the belief or assertion is accurate: that if this content were rendered as a proposition, the proposition would be accurate. Yet there is more to propositional truth claims than the claim to accuracy. They are also implicit claims to inferential validity. When we state our beliefs and make assertions, we imply that what we believe and what we assert would, if properly considered, be acceptable to those with whom we interact: that they too should accept our beliefs and assertions as being valid. Such implicit truth claims, such implicit claims to accuracy and validity, become explicit when people question, reject, or ignore stated beliefs and assertions. If people express doubt about your stated belief or disagree with your assertion, they in effect, even if not in intent, invite you to give reasons why someone should find the propositional content accurate and accept it as valid. If you respond by giving reasons, you invite them, in turn, to acknowledge the truth of your articulated insight. I call this process of reason-giving in support of propositional truth claims discursive confirmation. Discourse is the constellation of intrinsically linguistic and logical practices whereby we attest to the accuracy and validity of our propositional claims. Central to this discursive constellation are the practices of justification and corroboration; the discursive confirmation of propositional truth claims involves both. Justification and corroboration are not the same. When I want to justify a propositional claim, I try to show that it is internally consistent and coheres logically with other relevant claims. When I want to corroborate a propositional claim, by contrast, I try to show that the propositional insight being claimed is indeed a worthy insight, one that can be depended upon in practice, including theoretical practice. Because propositional truth consists in the correlation between inferential validity, on the one hand, and accurate insight, on the other, the discursive confirmation of propositional truth claims requires both justification with respect to inferential validity and corroboration with respect to accuracy. Together, the concepts of propositional truth claims and discursive confirmation help make sense of two positions in the dispute between Alston and Putnam. On the one hand, Putnam says that although propositional truth is independent of whether a claim is currently justified, it is not

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  117 independent of the claim’s potential justifiability: “To claim a statement is true is to claim it could be justified” (RTH 56). What Putnam sees, in my own terminology, is that propositional truth claims, when challenged, intrinsically call for discursive justification. Moreover, we cannot avoid making an implicit truth claim, one that in principle calls for justification, whenever we state our beliefs or make assertions. The claim that a statement could be justified is implicit in every propositional truth claim. Although, as Alston rightly insists, justifiability is not a necessary and sufficient condition for the truth of propositions, it nonetheless is an unavoidable expectation raised by every propositional truth claim. On the other hand, though Alston says, contra Putnam, that the truth of a proposition is independent of its justifiability, he also claims that the notion of discursive justification (“epistemic justification,” in Alston’s vocabulary) must presuppose the concept of propositional truth. To eliminate the concept of propositional truth in an account of discursive justification would, he writes, strip us of any sufficiently contentful conception of epistemic justification, leave mysterious the reason we should find it valuable in the pursuit of knowledge, prevent us from giving an adequate account of what distinguishes epistemic from other species of justification of belief, and leave us without any effective means for making rational choices between competing claims as to what justifies what (RCT 258). What Alston recognizes, to use my own vocabulary, is that discursive confirmation presupposes propositional truth in a way that propositional truth does not presuppose confirmation. For the entire point of justifying and corroborating propositional truth claims is to bear out the purported reliability and correctness of our beliefs and assertions, and there would be nothing to bear out if our beliefs and assertions were not such that they raise a claim to propositional truth. Although the truth of propositions is not independent from their confirmability, as Putnam correctly argues, it both precedes and motivates confirmation. I signaled both positions—both that propositional truth claims raise the unavoidable expectation of justifiability and that the truth of propositions calls for confirmation—when this book’s introductory chapter said the justification or justifiability of a proposition has an intimate connection with its accuracy. Now I can explain this, incorporating “justification” into the notion of discursive confirmation. On the one hand, whether propositions and the like are true does not depend on whether they are confirmable or confirmed. On the other hand, whether our implicit claims to propositional truth are satisfied does indeed depend on whether they can be confirmed. Nor can we state our beliefs or make assertions in communication with others without implicitly raising the expectation of discursive confirmability. The necessary and sufficient

118  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification conditions for propositional truth are not the same as the necessary and sufficient conditions for discursive confirmation. Yet, in practice, we cannot meet the conditions for propositional truth without simultaneously trying, or being ready to try, to satisfy the conditions of discursive confirmation. 5.3.2  Justification and Corroboration My response to the debate about epistemic constraints relies upon our supplementing the notion of justification with that of corroboration within the concept of discursive confirmation. If one does not incorporate the notion of corroboration, then one can easily regard discursive justification as no more than a process of establishing the “rational acceptability” of propositional truth claims; that is, establishing whether the propositional content of our stated beliefs and assertions coheres logically with other propositions. As Putnam puts it, what makes a statement, or a whole system of statements . . . rationally acceptable is, in large part, its coherence and fit; coherence of “theoretical” or less experiential beliefs with one another and with more experiential beliefs, and also coherence of experiential beliefs with theoretical beliefs (RTH 54–55). But if the only point of discursive argumentation about a proposition were to establish its rational acceptability, then the quality of the insight the proposition conveys would not really matter. By “quality of the insight” I mean the degree to which a proposition does justice to the practical object(s) it is about. Accuracy is not a fixed quantity. It comes in degrees. Any given proposition, when compared with potential alternatives, will be more or less precise, more or less relevant, more or less helpful. “The cat is on the mat” is, for example, less precise than “The Manx kitten is on the Persian carpet.” If we were looking for one lost kitten in a house full of cats and floor coverings, “The cat is on the mat” also would be less relevant and helpful. Much of discourse in daily life aims not simply to justify our beliefs and assertions but to bear out the quality of the insights their propositional content conveys. That is why establishing a proposition’s rational acceptability cannot be the sole point of discursive argumentation. Not even an appeal to “ideal justifiability” (Putnam) or “superassertibility” (Wright) or “supercoherence” (Lynch) would suffice.15 For one would continue to privilege inferential validity at the expense of propositional accuracy, even though stating a belief and making an assertion raise an implicit and explicable claim to both accuracy and validity. Because propositional truth consists in neither inferential validity alone nor accuracy alone but rather in their correlation, discursive confirmation

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  119 requires that the justification and corroboration be mutually indexed to each other. No matter how logical, the discursive justification of a demonstrably vacuous claim fails to attest to its truth. Conversely, no matter how insightful, a poorly argued corroboration fails to confirm the truth of a propositional claim. When a propositional truth claim is challenged and we give reasons for it in response, we aim to establish not only its acceptability but also the accuracy of the proposition at stake. Indeed, there would be little point to confirming a proposition’s inferential validity if we could not also show that the content of the proposition is worthwhile, that the insight it conveys is genuine, in short, that the proposition is accurate. Such discursive confirmation of accuracy is what I call corroboration, and it goes hand-in-hand with discursive justification. Both justification and corroboration, indexed to each other, are required for the discursive confirmation of propositional truth claims.16 To see why discursive confirmation requires both corroboration and justification, consider what happens when a proposition is asserted, challenged, and defended. In asserting a proposition, I implicitly claim it is accurate and valid. In other words, I raise a propositional truth claim: I  implicitly claim the proposition accurately decontextualizes and discloses a fact as a state of affairs and does so in a way that is at least potentially valid in relation to other propositions. Why do I  raise this claim? I  raise it not only to ask for your agreement but also to affirm a propositionally articulated insight. In effect, I  implicitly say not only “This proposition is true, don’t you agree?” but also “This proposition carries a genuine insight worth anyone’s while.” Hence, a good argument in response to a challenged propositional truth claim must do more than simply link the asserted proposition within an inferentially valid chain of reasoning. It must also connect the propositionally proposed insight with other propositionally articulable insights pertaining to whatever the original assertion was about. The aim of discursive confirmation is not simply to vindicate our truth claims, then, but also to attest to the worth of the propositions we assert. Both justification and corroboration call attention to links between a disputed proposition and other propositions, the one primarily with a view to validity, and the other primarily with a view to accuracy, but always in mutual correlation. Together within the process of discursive confirmation, corroboration and justification, when done well, will either uncover a propositionally articulated insight as genuine or show why and how it is not genuine. In that sense, discursive confirmation, when done well, allows the truth of propositions to unfold. Although discursive confirmation is not the same as propositional truth, propositional truth calls for discursive confirmation. All of this suggests that discursive confirmation is a way in which we bear witness to truth. The truth to which discursive witness is borne is, in the first instance, propositional truth. Yet, just as there is more to truth

120  Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification than that which is propositional, so there is more to bearing witness than discursive corroboration and justification. What this “more” comes to, and how propositions and discourse contribute to it, the next chapter explores.

Notes 1 Hilary Putnam, “The Face of Cognition,” The Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9 (1994): 488–517. For an illuminating study of Putnam’s transition from internal realism to common-sense realism, see Crispin Wright, “Truth as Sort of Epistemic: Putnam’s Peregrinations,” The Journal of Philosophy 97, no. 6 (2000): 335–64. Wright argues that the best way for Putnam to respond to critics of internal realism would be to combine a “direct-realist epistemology” with a “moderate-internalist conception of truth” (364). 2 Here I  use the term debate somewhat loosely. Although Alston’s A Realist Conception of Truth devotes several chapters to challenging Putnam’s “internal realism,” Putnam never replied at length—partly, I suspect, because he had turned to “common sense realism” by the time Alston’s book appeared in 1996. Putnam, of course, was notorious for changing his mind about central claims—Alston describes Putnam’s thought as “in more or less continuous flux” (RCT 132). This feature prompted the following humorous entry in The Philosophical Lexicon published by the American Philosophical Association in 1987: “hilary, n. (from hilary term) A  very brief but significant period in the intellectual career of a distinguished philosopher. ‘Oh, that’s what I thought three or four hilaries ago.’ ” As quoted in Künne, CT 404, emphasis in original. 3 I introduce the notion of a post-anti/realist conception in Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School: Critical Retrieval (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 103–21. 4 Of Putnam’s writings from 1978 through 1992 that Alston discusses, I shall focus on Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 5 But see RCT 30–32 and 208–10, where Alston takes distance from Tarski’s semantic conception of truth. 6 My informal translation of Alston’s universal generalization of what he calls the T-schema (i.e., “The proposition that p is true iff p.”) is intended to skirt the issues of substitutional quantification this generalization raises—see RCT 28–30. 7 The modified generalized T-schema goes like this: “(p) The proposition that p is true iff it is a fact that p” (RCT 38). 8 P. F. Strawson, “Truth” (1950), in Lynch, ed., NT 447–71. 9 The other tenet is (3) that “truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things.” Together these three tenets make up what Putnam calls the externalist perspective, which prefers “a God’s Eye point of view” (RTH 49). In “A Defense of Internal Realism” (1982), Putnam distinguishes the three tenets as “metaphysical realism1,” “metaphysical realism2,” and “metaphysical realism3,” but he says it makes sense to see them as tenets within one “metaphysical realism” whose content derives from “a rich filigree of ideas, doctrines, and detailed arguments” within the history of philosophy. Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 30.

Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification  121 10 In Truth in Context, Lynch, following Alston, argues in much greater detail for conjoining minimal alethic realism with metaphysical pluralism. Lynch claims both that fact relativism leads to relativism concerning the content of propositions and that such content relativism leads to fact relativism (TC 20–27). Moreover, he embraces both types of scheme relativity. What he does not notice, however, is that his Alstonian reliance on the T-schema might generate some of the problems signaled by objections to relativism concerning propositional content—a point I simply raise without arguing here. 11 Here I do not simply repeat Alcoff’s charge that an attempt like Alston’s to retain proposition/fact correspondence while granting the scheme relativity of facts would drain the metaphysical content from a correspondence theory of truth and, because of “the historical associations of correspondence with classical realism, . . . would also be misleading.” Linda Martín Alcoff, Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 175. Yet I also do not think that Lynch’s emphasizing the metaphysical thinness of minimal alethic realism constitutes an adequate response to Alcoff’s charge—see Lynch, TC 124–25. 12 Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 115. 13 Alston recognizes, of course, that his T-schema is not exactly the same as Tarski’s more familiar Convention T, as stated by “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages,” in Alfred Tarski, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938, trans. J. H. Woodger (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 187–88. There Tarski says a formally correct and materially adequate definition of “true” for a given object language L must imply all sentences that can be obtained from the following schema: s is true in L if and only if p (where s designates a declarative sentence in the object language and p indicates a translation of that sentence into the metalanguage). Tarski regards sentences (rather than propositions) as the truth bearers, and he regards the biconditionals as extensional (rather than intensional and hence necessarily true). But Alston does not think these differences tell one way or another for the general acceptance that any biconditional along these lines will comport with a serious account of the concept of truth (RCT 210–11). 14 My argument here concerning the practical availability of objects is very similar to Haugeland’s account of propositional truth as involving normative “beholdenness” to the object—what at one point he labels “a beholdenness theory of truth.” See the long chapter titled “Truth and Rule-Following,” in John Haugeland, Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 305–61; quotation from 348. 15 See Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 44–61, and Lynch, TOM 36–49. 16 Although I have made similar points in response to Jürgen Habermas’s Truth and Justification, ed. and trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), I failed in that discussion to distinguish corroboration from justification. See Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School, 117–19.

6 Truth as a Whole and Authentication

In previous chapters I have argued that propositional truth is an important kind of truth; that it has more internal diversity than many truth theories recognize; and that, because the truth of propositions consists in a dynamic correlation between accurate insight and inferential validity, there is an intimate connection between propositional truth and the discursive confirmation of propositional truth claims. This argument assumes that there are also nonpropositional sorts of truth and that these too are important. I have also suggested that the various sorts of truth manifest one truth as a whole. Now it is time to articulate a conception that is sufficiently comprehensive and complex to account for both the various sorts of truth and truth as a whole. I call this conception holistic alethic pluralism. The current chapter spells out what holistic alethic pluralism comes to, with respect first to truth as such and then to the authentication of truth. The subsequent four chapters explore the potential fruitfulness of this conception for understanding science, politics, art, religion, and philosophy as social domains of knowledge in which different sorts of truth play prominent roles. As I show in sections 6.1 and 6.2, correlational isomorphism is the key to connecting propositional truth with nonpropositional sorts of truth as all manifesting truth as a whole: each sort of truth displays a specific correlation that both echoes the correlation in truth as a whole and participates in it. Then I portray truth as a whole as a dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure and begin to indicate how this holistic correlation comes to expression not only in propositional truth but also in nonpropositional sorts of truth. Similarly, as I argue in sections 6.3 and 6.4, the authentication of truth has a holistic structure that different modes of authentication, including the discursive confirmation of propositional truth claims, both echo and enact.

6.1  Isomorphism, Fidelity, and Disclosure Although better known in sociology and mathematics, the term isomorphism also occurs in correspondence theories of truth. There it refers to DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021-6

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  123 a purported similarity in the constituent structures of the two items—the truth bearer and the truth maker—that supposedly must correspond in order for a proposition to be true. As we saw in chapter  2, Bertrand Russell’s multi-term theory of belief and his logical atomist account of propositions both insist on correspondence as isomorphism: that is, that truthbearers and facts are both complex structured entities: truthbearers are composed of (other truthbearers and ultimately of) words, or concepts; facts are composed of (other facts or states of affairs and ultimately of) things, properties, and relations. The aim is to show how the correspondence relation is generated from underlying relations between the ultimate constituents of truthbearers, on the one hand, and the ultimate constituents of their corresponding facts, on the other.1 6.1.1  Correlational Isomorphism In contrast with this understanding, I propose that the decisive isomorphism within truth as a whole does not lie in a purported correspondence between propositional truth bearer and nonpropositional truth maker— a conception of propositional truth that previous chapters have challenged. Rather, the decisive isomorphism occurs among different ways in which human responses to societal principles can correlate with the role such responses play in social life. Consider, for example, the primary relations at stake in what I  have characterized as propositional truth, beginning with the relation between the “truth bearer” and the “truth maker.” Clearly there would be no propositional truth with respect to practical objects if there were no interrelation between the linguistic and logical practices from which assertions and propositions arise, on the one hand, and the manners in which these objects offer themselves for such human practices. Yet this interrelation does not require that there be a strong similarity in structure, an isomorphism, between the practices or their results and the ways in which objects are available for predication. Rather, what the interrelation does require, if it is to yield propositional truth, is that those who predicate try both to follow the rules of first-order logic and to do justice to that about which they predicate. There must be a correlation between their fidelity to the societal principle of logical validity and their doing justice to the object’s predicative self-disclosure. Moreover, this correlation is dynamic, in the sense that each side inflects the other, the fidelity serving to promote propositional disclosure of the object, and our doing justice to the object’s predicative self-disclosure depending in part on how faithful we are to the principle of logical validity. Yet there need not be an isomorphism between the belief or assertion or proposition and the practical object it is about.

124  Truth as a Whole and Authentication Instead, the crucial isomorphism lies between the fidelity/disclosure correlation within propositional truth and the fidelity/disclosure correlation that resides at the heart of truth as a whole. My hypothesis, then, is that just as propositional truth revolves around a dynamic correlation between fidelity to logical validity and a propositional disclosure of the object, so in general truth consists in a dynamic correlation between human fidelity to societal principles, on the one hand, and a life-giving disclosure of society, on the other. Moreover, a version of this general correlation shows up in every nonpropositional sort of truth, as it does in propositional truth. I do not mean to suggest, however, that these other sorts of nonpropositional truth derive their truth character from the correlation between logical fidelity and propositional disclosure. Rather, like propositional truth, they derive their truth character from how their specific, internal correlations both echo and participate in the dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure in truth as a whole. Although propositional truth is important, it is not all-important, and, among the various sorts of truth, propositional truth is not the primary sort either. Indeed, there is no primary sort of truth. What is primary, when it comes to truth, is truth as a whole, not one of its types or kinds. Here we must observe a well-known distinction between epistemological and ontological order or, perhaps more precisely, between the order of explication and the order of that which is explicated. Although the discussion of truth in this book begins with issues pertaining to propositional truth, this order of explication does not mean I think propositional truth has ontological primacy over other sorts of truth. Rather, the order of explication indicates that, because many other philosophers do accord primacy or exclusivity to propositional truth, I must address such issues first if my own alternative conception of truth is to take up the leading concerns of other truth theorists. That is so even though, as already suggested, I do not regard propositional truth as the primary or even the sole sort of truth. Yet propositional truth is important, important in its own right, and important for the role it plays within truth as a whole. To show this, let me say more about the correlation between propositional disclosure and logical fidelity. On my view, linguistic and logical practices are central to the process whereby we achieve propositional insight into ourselves, others, and the world around us. Propositional insight arises from our referring to matters, making predications about them, identifying what they are in specific respects, distinguishing one matter from another, and understanding how different matters are connected. Often we encapsulate such insight in the assertions we make and the propositions we assert. Optimally, we count on these assertions and propositions, these results of our linguistic and logical practices, to be correct or accurate and inferentially valid—that is, to be propositionally true.

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  125 Accordingly, we can distinguish two axes in propositional truth. One is the axis between those who engage in predication, identification, and the like, on the one hand, and the “objects” that offer themselves for such practices, on the other—in more traditional terms, between languageusing thinkers and whatever can be talked and thought about. The other axis lies between the results of such practices and the principle of logical validity that holds for these results and, in holding for the results, also holds for the practices that yield these results. For us to attain propositional truth, both axes need to be in play, and they need to be in a dynamic correlation. Along the first axis, our linguistic and logical practices need to be “on the mark” with respect to their objects, and their objects need to offer themselves in the right way for these practices, a feature of objects that I call “predicative self-disclosure.” Otherwise we will not achieve the right identifications, distinctions, and relations. Along the second axis, the assertions and propositions at which we arrive need to be both internally consistent and more or less coherent with one another if the identifications, distinctions, and relations achieved are to stand up to further scrutiny (i.e., be corroborated and justified). In other words, along the second axis, the results of our predicating and thinking need to measure up to the principle of logical validity, such that all who predicate and think carry responsibility for the inferences they make. That is why a dynamic correlation between the two axes of propositional truth is required: one’s propositional practices must lead to logically valid results, and one’s inferences must sustain the insightfulness of these practices. Moreover, there can be logically valid results only if, in their thinking—in their propositional practices—people try to be true— faithful—to the societal principle of logical validity. Deliberate lying, obfuscation, and misinformation undermine such fidelity and insight and thereby damage not only the path of propositional truth but also the pursuit of truth as a whole. For infidelity to one societal principle—the principle of logical validity, in this case—both encourages and reinforces infidelity to other societal principles—such as solidarity and justice— even as the refusal to pursue propositionally true insight both fosters and strengthens other refusals to pursue what is societally good. Conversely, fidelity to the principle of logical validity in the pursuit of correct and accurate insight promotes and helps secure fidelity to other societal principles within other modes of disclosure. Hence, as I  said before, propositional truth is important both in its own right—human beings need accurate and inferentially valid insight— and for its role within truth as a whole—it helps foster a dynamic correlation between fidelity to societal principles and a life-giving disclosure of society. Yet propositional truth is not alone in having such double importance, and it is limited in ways that nonpropositional sorts of truth, which have other limits, are not. That is why propositional truth, although important, is not all-important, and why it is not the primary

126  Truth as a Whole and Authentication sort of truth. Primacy goes not to one sort of truth but rather to truth as a whole, to which we now turn. 6.1.2  Fidelity to Societal Principles As a whole, I have suggested, truth comes down to a dynamic correlation between two axes: between (1) human fidelity to societal principles and (2) a life-giving disclosure of society. Although first proposed in response to such continental philosophers as Martin Heidegger2 and Herman Dooyeweerd,3 this conception of truth in its most comprehensive sense has two goals of direct relevance for analytic truth theories as well. First, it aims to support an account of propositional truth that moves beyond impasses in the debates between alethic realists and antirealists. Second, in response to deflationism and minimalism, it aims to recover a robust sense of what propositional truth is and why it matters. Keeping those goals in view, let me explain what the axes of fidelity and disclosure involve and how their correlation makes up the inner dynamic of truth as a whole. Then we will consider what such an account implies for a pluralist conception of truth. I begin with fidelity to societal principles. In speaking of societal principles, I  refer to how, throughout history and within diverse cultural practices and social institutions, human beings have developed and responded to a limited plurality of central expectations about what makes for goodness in human life and society. Among the prominent societal principles in a contemporary setting I would include, for example, those of solidarity and justice. I do not call these principles “concepts.” They have much richer textures than mere concepts do, and they are not simply the objects or results of thought. Rather, societal principles such as solidarity and justice are central expectations within the very fabric of our practices and institutions. At the same time, they provide overarching horizons of orientation for our lives as social beings. Societal principles also are not Platonic forms or Kantian ideas occupying some merely intelligible world. They arise within society as people struggle with one another over the direction and shape of their social institutions (e.g., schooling, family, government) and of society as a whole. Different individuals, groups, and cultures might have different understandings of, say, solidarity and justice, and they might have different ways to pursue them. Yet they cannot avoid having these expectations and living them, nor can they avoid having and living them in common with others. In this sense, societal principles are what people hold in common and what holds them in common; they are the commonly holding/held. Societal principles are not like natural laws either. They do not hold for human life in the same way that the second law of thermodynamics holds for explanations of the physical universe. For societal principles take at

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  127 least some of their content from how human beings respond to them, and that leaves societal principles open to receiving new content in the future. What, at the level of social institutions, the principle of justice looks like and calls for today, in an age of economic globalization and nationalpolitical disintegration, might be quite different from what it required in premodern societies; what it requires in 100 years might be quite different again. At the same time, however, what this principle requires in 100 years will be shaped, in part, by how people and societies respond to it today. Unlike natural laws, societal principles are both historically rooted and open to the future. This discussion of justice does not mean to suggest, however, that societal principles hold only for political and economic practices and institutions, where struggles over justice might seem most obvious. Societal principles also hold for aesthetic and logical matters, for example. Such matters, too, are intrinsically cultural and social. The practices of art making and art interpretation are cultural practices, and they occur within art as a social institution. Similarly, the practices of predication and inference, so central to the pursuit of propositional truth, are cultural practices, and the social institution that especially frames them in a differentiated society is that of science (in the nineteenth-century sense of Wissenschaft) or, more broadly, the academy. So too, the central expectations that have a special role to play in art and the academy—imaginative cogency in the case of art, and logical validity in the case of science—are societal principles. Like solidarity and justice, they have arisen historically to become central, and centrally contested, expectations about what makes for goodness in life and society. The complex character of societal principles—both historical and futural, both holding and held, both shared and contested, both calling for human responses and arising from them—makes it hard to say what fidelity to societal principles comes to. Let me begin by saying what fidelity does not mean. It does not mean either blind obedience or a mechanical reflex. Fidelity implies being persistently faithful to something or someone. Such faithfulness gives one some responsibility for that to which one is faithful. Accordingly, fidelity to a societal principle such as justice means that we try to do what justice requires even as we take responsibility for giving shape to this requirement in how we respond to it. But there is more. Fidelity also implies a certain attachment, even an attraction, to what receives our faithfulness. One mark of fidelity to societal principles is that we care about justice, about solidarity, about logical validity, and the like, and hence we find it hard to dismiss, ignore, or blatantly subvert them. That does not imply we readily agree about what these principles mean or easily do what they require. It does suggest, however, that what motivates such fidelity is more than a sense of obligation; it is a kind of love. Indeed, fidelity to societal principles is not an

128  Truth as a Whole and Authentication intellectual attitude but a practical stance. It involves trying, out of love, to do what the principles require, both trying to act accordingly within our cultural practices and social institutions and trying to align these with what the principles require. Given these features to fidelity—the call to responsibility, the motivation of care, and the practical stance—it is all the more important to distinguish societal principles from mere concepts, ideas, or natural laws. Societal principles are such that to follow them, we must be faithful to them, and to be faithful to them, we need to take responsibility for them, care about them, and try to enact them. Notice, however, that I say “try.” Societal principles are not easily followed, and we have no guarantees that our responses to them will suffice. Perfection and certainty, hallmarks in many traditional conceptions of truth, do not characterize fidelity to societal principles. Nevertheless, I submit that such fidelity is one axis of truth as a whole. It is an axis along which we try to be true to what truth requires—that is, we try to be faithful to what justice and solidarity and other societal principles ask of us. Perhaps we can say such responses belong to the trueing of human life and society—to their aligning with what makes for goodness in human life and society.4 Unlike the trueing of a bicycle wheel, however, which one person can do in a limited amount of time, fidelity to societal principles is an unending task, for which everyone is responsible. 6.1.3  Life-Giving Disclosure Like the axis of fidelity to societal principles, the second axis within truth as a whole points to two concepts that I need to explicate: “life-giving” and “disclosure.” Let me begin with disclosure. In the current context, disclosure refers to an ongoing historical process. As a historical process, it unfolds in one direction or another. And that means truth as a whole also is not simply a structure or a state of being. Instead, it is a directional process. Perhaps we can say truth as a whole has a certain structure—it has two axes, for example—yet it is more than a structure. Truth as a whole is a directional and structured process. The disclosure in question pertains to society as a whole. It pertains to whether and how society opens up rather than closes down. Here “opening up” means in part that society develops in a direction that minimally allows and maximally encourages human fidelity to societal principles. In a contemporary setting, for example, a disclosure of society would occur when social conditions become more conducive to the pursuit of justice and do not obstruct this pursuit. Let me pause here to reflect on the various ways in which I have connected “disclosure” with “truth.” In addition to the current discussion of societal disclosure, I have proposed “cogent imaginative disclosure” as a way to summarize what artistic truth comes to. I have also discussed

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  129 propositional insight as a kind of disclosure made possible in part by the “predicative self-disclosure” of the object. Does a common thread connect these various usages? Or do they end up having such different meanings that it would be confusing or even a sign of equivocation to keep using the same term disclosure in these various ways? Initially, it might appear that there is no common thread. Imaginative disclosure and propositional disclosure are both processes of attaining insight, the first, unlike the second, in a primarily pre-propositional way. “Predicative self-disclosure” does not mean that the object attains insight, however. Rather it means that the object offers itself for the propositional insight attained by human knowers. Moreover, the disclosure of society does not in the first instance refer to insight, either attained or offered, but to social change in the direction of (greater) fidelity to societal principles. So what do these various usages have in common? The thread running through all of them is the idea of opening up rather than closing down. Imaginative disclosure and propositional insight both open up what they are about—personal, social, and ­artwork-specific worlds, in the case of art, and practical objects and other matters, in the case of predication and inference. The predicative self-disclosure of such practical objects is how they open themselves up in relation to predicative practices. And societal disclosure is a process whereby society opens up in a certain direction. Related terms such as discovering, uncovering, unveiling, and revealing have similar ranges of meanings and a similar core, and they all link back to the ancient Greek sense of ἀλήθεια as being or becoming unhidden or, to use Heidegger’s terms, “disclosedness” (Erschlossenheit) and “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit).5 I prefer to use “disclosure” because it serves to designate a process in which human agents can participate rather than either simply an activity that they initiate or a condition that they passively inhabit. In all of the usages mentioned already, “disclosure” refers to a process of opening up that human beings participate in but that goes beyond their own initiative. Moreover, the sorts of disclosure previously discussed—cogent imaginative disclosure, propositional insight, and a practical object’s predicative self-disclosure—all belong to the general process of societal disclosure. Both the artistic opening up of worlds and the propositional opening up of objects are ways in which society can move toward (greater) fidelity to societal principles—specifically, the principles of imaginative cogency and logical validity. And predicative self-disclosure, as the alignment between predicative and nonpredicative aspects of a practical object’s availability in response to linguistic and logical practices, also belongs to this general process. Predicative self-disclosure is one of the ways in which practical objects support human fidelity. When they let us do justice in language and thought to what they are in certain respects, they sustain our faithfulness to societal principles.

130  Truth as a Whole and Authentication Yet this process in society as a whole is not simply an opening up in the direction of (greater) fidelity. It is also a life-giving process. The disclosure of society is life-giving when it lets human beings and other creatures flourish in their interconnections. The process of societal disclosure goes beyond one that simply supports or promotes human flourishing, although it does include that. It includes the flourishing of other creatures as well, especially in the relationships they sustain with one another and with human beings. A society whose trajectory, for the most part, allows human beings simply to dominate “nature” and exploit it for their own purposes would lack life-giving disclosure, as would a society in which, over the generations, the rich and powerful regularly oppress the poor and marginalized. “Life-giving” indicates both a call to human beings to care for the Earth and one another and the potential they have to heed this call and foster the interconnected flourishing of all creatures. Because of this call to care, the disclosure of society, like fidelity to societal principles, is not only rooted in history but also oriented toward an open-ended future. Often we struggle to envision which changes in society today would contribute to life-giving disclosure and which would not. Nevertheless, human beings experience the pull of a possibly better future, and they can ask whether society is headed in that direction. This question can serve to orient attempts to bring about social change. At the same time, of course, real social change requires that the historical development of society to date actually supports such attempts. The process of life-giving disclosure is both historically rooted and future oriented. 6.1.4  Dynamic Correlation Having considered the two axes within truth as a whole, we can ask how they intersect. I describe their intersection as a dynamic correlation. By “correlation” I mean they are mutually interdependent: we cannot have one axis without the other. Fidelity to societal principles would lose its point if society could not move in the direction of interconnected flourishing, and society could not undergo life-giving disclosure if no one pursued fidelity to societal principles. To describe this correlation in positive terms, we can say that the telos of human fidelity to societal principles is to promote a process in which human beings and other creatures come to flourish in their interconnections. In truth, we try to be faithful to societal principles such as solidarity and justice not only because we care about these central, shared, and contested expectations but also because we care about the wellbeing of humans and other creatures, to which the pursuit of solidarity and justice contributes. Conversely, a life-giving disclosure of society depends in part on the degree to which cultural practices, social institutions, and societal formations come to align with societal principles such as solidarity and justice. To come to flourish in their interconnections with other creatures,

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  131 human beings must contribute to that process via their fidelity to societal principles. The correlation between fidelity and disclosure within truth as a whole is such that societal disclosure directs and helps motivate human fidelity to societal principles, and this fidelity both contributes to interconnected flourishing and helps to specify what such flourishing involves. Both axes in this correlation are historical, and both are open to a future that is still to come. That makes the correlation dynamic in more ways than one. In the first place, the meaning of fidelity and disclosure is always being worked out as history unfolds. Hence, we cannot say once and for all what either fidelity or disclosure comes to. Yet this does not preclude our saying something definite about what they mean. If we had no notion of what solidarity and justice mean, we would be hardpressed to say what the pursuit of these societal principles can contribute to interconnected flourishing. Similarly, if we had no notion of what such flourishing involves, we would have a hard time saying what solidarity and justice require. Further, we have sufficient clues from human history to be able to say something definite—albeit not definitive—about both societal principles and societal disclosure. In the second place, the correlation is dynamic because there is more to each axis than how it correlates with the other. I have said that a life-­ giving disclosure of society depends in part on the degree to which practices, institutions, and societal formations align with societal principles. I  said “in part” because human fidelity to societal principles does not suffice to bring about interconnected flourishing. There is more to the historical process of disclosure than what human beings contribute, and we do not always foresee or control the consequences of our attempts at fidelity. Indeed, sometimes societal disclosure can and does happen despite our principles and alignments, and beyond them too. Similarly, there is more to fidelity to societal principles than what it contributes to interconnected flourishing. When it is genuine, such fidelity is motivated by care for the principles themselves, not only by care for interconnected flourishing, and we hear in them a call to responsibility that comes from beyond ourselves. Such motivation and calling help explain why some people can seek social justice no matter how bleak the prospects for achieving it in society as it is currently constituted. This dynamism is worrisome to philosophers who connect truth with either perfection or certainty. For, as a dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure, truth as a whole is an ever-unfolding historical process that is open to a future still to come. This generates both a kind of circularity to the circumscription of truth that defies deductive logic and an open-endedness that resists real definitions of what truth is. The descriptions I  have given of each axis and of their correlation are not circular definitions. Nevertheless, the two axes are indissoluble correlates within a dynamic process, such that to consider one we must consider the other, and to regard them in correlation we also need to regard what

132  Truth as a Whole and Authentication goes beyond the correlation. The key for a philosophical circumscription of truth as a whole, then, is not to avoid the circularity of a dynamic correlation but, as Heidegger suggests in a related context, to try to enter the circle in the right way.6 My conception of truth as a whole is worrisome, too, for philosophers who regard truth as either only propositional or at least value-neutral. For the notions of human fidelity and societal disclosure obviously exceed the notions of reliability, correctness, and accuracy, and the correlation of human fidelity and societal disclosure clearly points to judgments about what is better and worse for human life and society. Moreover, the notion of a dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure is speculative in a way that disturbs most postmetaphysical philosophies. Truth in its most comprehensive sense is not the same as either fidelity or disclosure, as either humans being true to societal principles or society truly opening up. Rather it is the historically rooted and future-oriented correlation between human fidelity and societal disclosure. My conception is close in this regard to the negative dialectics of Theodor W. Adorno, who thinks truth involves a convergence between a thorough critique of society as a whole and hope for a better future. As Adorno recognized, truth is the idea in which social critique and social hope interlink. Far from being value-neutral or non-speculative, the proposed conception of truth involves what I have described as a “complex interplay between normativity and eschatology.”7 The challenge for such a comprehensive, normative, and future-oriented conception is to show how it helps us make sense of different sorts of truth, including propositional truth.

6.2  Kinds and Types of Truth According to the hypothesis stated earlier in this chapter, the various sorts of truth display specific correlations between fidelity and disclosure. Moreover, each specific correlation both echoes the dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure in truth as a whole and participates in that holistic dynamic correlation. In other words, there is an isomorphism both among the various sorts of truth and between each sort and truth as a whole. This isomorphism lets truth as a whole come to expression within each sort of truth. Each sort differs from the other sorts, however, in how the whole comes to expression, specifically in the societal principle that has primacy for a certain range of practices and in the sort of disclosure that correlates with fidelity to this societal principle. Each sort of truth specifies in its own way what truth as a whole involves, what the dynamic fidelity/disclosure correlation comes to. Here the term sort covers both kinds of truth and social-domainspecific types of truth. The primary kinds of truth, at least as they are canvassed in this book, are the pre-propositional, propositional, and

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  133 post-propositional kinds. This distinction goes back to the discussion of knowledge in chapter  3. Whereas propositional truth consists in a dynamic correlation between accurate insight and inferential validity, the two kinds of nonpropositional truth (i.e., pre-propositional and postpropositional) do not. To say more about what these two nonpropositional kinds are like, however, one needs to discuss the social domains of truth in which they come to the fore. And it is in the different social domains, as discussed in chapter 4, that one discovers distinct types of truth—artistic, scientific, political, religious, and the like. Some of these types will be primarily pre-propositional (e.g., artistic truth), others will be primarily post-propositional (e.g., political and religious truth), and at least one of them will be primarily propositional (i.e., scientific truth). My underlying hypothesis, then, is that both the distinct kinds of truth and the specific types of truth display their own versions of the dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure that characterizes truth as a whole. To test this hypothesis, one needs to specify different types of truth in different social domains. 6.2.1  Guidelines for Specification I have already alluded to such specification of types when I mentioned a distinction between artistic truth, a type of pre-propositional truth that amounts to cogent imaginative disclosure, and propositional truth, which amounts to inferentially valid propositional disclosure. Whereas artistic truth consists in a correlation between imaginative disclosure and fidelity to the principle of imaginative cogency, propositional truth consists in a correlation between propositional disclosure and fidelity to the principle of logical validity. Both pre-propositional truth that is artistic and propositional truth proper involve the attainment of insight, but the sort of insight differs from one to the other, and each is attained and tested in line with a different societal principle—aesthetic validity (i.e., imaginative cogency) and logical validity, respectively. I have more to say about artistic truth in chapter  9. Already here, however, the preliminary distinction between pre-propositional artistic truth and propositional truth points up the challenges that accompany an attempt to combine holism concerning truth in general with pluralism concerning the kinds and types of truth. On the one hand, there might seem to be no limit to the sorts of truth one can propose, so long as one can distinguish different societal principles that correlate with distinctive sorts of disclosure. On the other hand, it might seem that none of these distinctions actually makes a difference, that all the various sorts of truth are simply minor variations on the same “fidelity and disclosure” theme, such that we are left, in Hegel’s memorable phrase concerning Schelling’s Absolute, with a “night in which . . . all cows are black.”8 Is there a rule or method to follow when specifying sorts of truth?

134  Truth as a Whole and Authentication In response to this question, I wish to identify and follow two guidelines for specification. First, any proposed type of nonpropositional truth must be obviously distinct from propositional truth and yet be neither separate from it nor unrelated to it. Second, it must be possible to locate a distinct social institutional framework for each type of truth—that is, each type should be associated with a distinct social domain, just as artistic truth is linked to art as a social institution. For, as was explained in chapter 4, the primary social domains of truth are specific constellations of interpersonal relations, cultural practices, and societal principles, as these are configured by social institutions. Although the two guidelines specified might not suffice to rule out either an indiscriminate proliferation of types or a problematic holism-bolism with respect to truth, they should at least help generate a plausible range of types whose mutual isomorphism marks them as belonging to truth as a whole. In keeping with the first guideline, and as already indicated, I distinguish not only between propositional and nonpropositional truth but also, within the category of nonpropositional truth, between pre-propositional and post-propositional truth. In other words, I distinguish three kinds of truth across the various types: pre-propositional, propositional, and postpropositional truth. By using the prefixes “pre-” and “post-,” one already acknowledges that nonpropositional types of truth are neither separate from propositional truth nor unrelated to it. Pre-propositional truth provides a basis for propositional truth, and post-propositional truth is itself based on propositional truth. Before I  explain what this distinction among three kinds of truth involves, I  should first say why drawing the distinction in this way is important. From the perspective of someone who has an anti-­ propositional conception of truth, it might seem both arbitrary and coercive to treat all truth as either pre-, post-, or propositional. Why not distinguish instead, for example, among pre-artistic, artistic, and postartistic truth? Doesn’t it privilege propositional truth, even if only inadvertently, to divide all truth into pre-propositional, propositional, and post-propositional kinds? There is something to this objection. As soon as one distinguishes among several types of truth within truth as a whole, one can view each type in relation to all the other types. If one type is based on some of the others and provides a basis for others, then one can draw a similar “pre-” and “post-” distinction with respect to that type. So, for example, if political truth is a recognizable type of truth, one could plausibly distinguish among pre-political, political, and post-political sorts of truth. Nevertheless, I have both historical and systematic reasons to pay particular attention to this distinction with respect to propositional truth. Historically, the reason is obvious. For the most part, the Western tradition of philosophy has emphasized propositional truth above all other kinds, often to the exclusion of any other kind. To address this tradition

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  135 while proposing a holistic pluralism with respect to truth, one must figure out how the various sorts of truth relate to propositional truth. Distinguishing pre-, post-, and propositional truth serves that historically motivated purpose. I also have three systematic reasons for focusing on how propositional and nonpropositional truth are distinct and interrelate. First, propositional truth provides an indispensable basis for correlations between fidelity and disclosure in many social domains of truth, including civil societal, economic, political, and religious domains. So how one understands the relation of propositional truth to “post-propositional” truth matters a great deal for an account of such social domains. Second, as I argue in chapter 7, propositional truth is a leading concern in science and the academy, itself one of the most formative domains of truth in modern society. If one wants to get clear about the proper roles of scientific research and university education in contemporary society, one needs to understand not only what propositional truth comes to and why it matters but also how it relates to other kinds of truth. Third, even in those social domains of truth where propositional truth is neither the leading concern nor the basis for domain-specific correlations between fidelity and disclosure, the domain-specific truth attained often calls for predicative and propositional articulation. That is one reason why, for example, what I call art talk has an important and unavoidable role in the social institution of art: conversations and debates about the import and significance of art serve to explicate the cogent imaginative disclosure art provides, and they allow artistic truth to be taken up more readily in other social domains. To identify and promote the contributions of the arts to social life, one needs to understand the relation between pre-propositional artistic truth and propositional truth. In other words, it is because propositional truth plays a pivotal role across the various social domains of truth that I  give particular attention to distinctions and relations among pre-propositional, propositional, and post-propositional truth. 6.2.2  Pre-propositional Truth To call truth within a specific social domain “pre-propositional” is to indicate that the primary practices in this domain can proceed even if and when the primary agents do not engage in predication and inference. It does not mean the primary agents (e.g., artists and art interpreters in the social domain of artistic truth) never do or never can engage in predication and inference when they undertake the domain’s primary practices (e.g., art making and art interpretation). It is just that what they are primarily doing does not depend on their making predications and drawing logical inferences. “Pre-propositional” also means that, insofar as the primary practices aim to disclose practical objects, the objects offer

136  Truth as a Whole and Authentication themselves to these practices in pre-predicative ways—as aesthetic signs, for example, or as usable materials. Along the axis of disclosure, then, “pre-propositional” means that predication and predicative availability are neither required nor presupposed. “Pre-propositional” also says something important about the sort of societal principle that has primacy for the practices and results that stand out in a specific social domain. It says the principle is such that we can be faithful to it without trying to meet logical requirements. This does not mean, however, that the domain’s primary practices and results are by definition “illogical.” They are neither logical nor illogical, for they are pre-logical. Although, following Susanne K. Langer, we might say they might have their own “logic”—that is, their own way of cohering or making sense—they can have this without needing to follow the rules of logical inference.9 Hence, along the axis of fidelity in a domain where truth is pre-propositional, faithfulness to the principle of logical validity is neither required nor presupposed. Among the various social domains, at least two give rise to prepropositional forms of truth: the domain of work and technology (technê) and the domain of art (poiēsis). In the first, we find the truth of knowing-how; in the second, the truth of knowing-as-if. The truth of knowing-how involves a correlation between fidelity to the principle of serviceability and what could be called the worked disclosure of usable materials as they are turned into products.10 The truth of knowing-as-if involves a correlation between fidelity to the principle of imaginative cogency and the imaginative disclosure of aesthetic signs. Just as anyone capable of making, repairing, or using a product can experience the truth of technical know-how, so anyone able to create, perform, or interpret an artwork can experience the truth of imaginative knowingas-if. To dismiss these types of truth because they seem naïve or vague or illogical is to misunderstand their specific, pre-propositional truth character. 6.2.3  Post-propositional Truth In contrast, to call truth within a specific social domain “post-­ propositional” is to say that the primary practices in this domain need to have a basis in predication and inference. Predication and inference are not the primary practices in such a domain, but what the agents there are primarily doing depends on their also making predications and drawing logical inferences, which support the primary practices. “Postpropositional” also suggests that the “objects” disclosed in this social domain offer themselves to the primary practices in post-predicative ways, as matters that intrinsically also function as objects of language and thought, even though they present themselves as much more than mere objects of language and thought. In other words, along the axis of

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  137 disclosure, “post-propositional” means that predication and predicative availability are necessary supports, and they are presupposed. Controversially, religion can be regarded as a social domain of postpropositional truth. I  say “controversially” because both severe critics and ardent defenders of religion often regard it as anti-propositional. Accordingly, they suppose religion to be either incapable of truth because its purported truth is not propositional (according to the critics) or capable of a higher, supra-propositional truth (according to the defenders). To say religion is capable of post-propositional truth will please neither the critics nor the defenders. I discuss this matter at greater length in chapter 9. For now, let me simply suggest that the primary practices within this social domain, such as telling stories of faith and enacting rituals of worship, necessarily rely on linguistic articulation and propositional claims, even as such religious practices steer language and thought in the direction of faith and worship. So too, the primary “object” of such practices, which many religionists call “God,” can only be worshipped if it also discloses itself for predicative language and thought. A “God” who cannot be talked and thought about, because he or she purportedly refuses to reveal Godself for predication, would also not be disclosed for faith and worship. Unlike social domains of pre-propositional truth, the axis of fidelity in a social domain where truth is post-propositional both relies on faithfulness to the principle of logical validity and presupposes such faithfulness. That is another reason why, in my view, it is a mistake to regard religious truth as anti-propositional (and therefore either logically indefensible or intrinsically superior to the demand for discursive justification). In social domains of post-propositional truth, we cannot be faithful to the leading societal principles there, such as solidarity and justice, without simultaneously trying to meet logical requirements. This does not mean that fidelity to such societal principles simply follows the rules of inference— being just, for example, definitely is not the same as being logical. But it does mean that fidelity in these domains relies on our making propositional claims and being ready to justify them discursively when the claims are challenged. Again, controversially, I hold this to be so for the fidelity axis in religious truth. It is also so of faithfulness to the leading societal principles in civil societal, political, and economic domains. Chapter  8 pursues this matter at greater length in the political domain. To summarize: Three kinds of truth show up in the social domains of truth. Pre-propositional truth appears most forcefully in the domains of work/technology and art, and possibly also in the domains of language and communication, insofar as these decisively involve pre-predicative practices. Propositional truth is most prominent in the social domain of science and the academy. Post-propositional truth shows up most markedly in civil societal, economic, political, and religious domains, and perhaps also in the domain of personal relationships such as family,

138  Truth as a Whole and Authentication friendship, and intimate partnerships. These three kinds of truth are not restricted to the domains mentioned. We probably can find all three in every domain. When we try to circumscribe the type of truth most characteristic of each social domain, however, we find it is either pre-­ propositional, propositional, or post-propositional. By linking the types of truth to distinct social institutional frameworks, I have limited the number of types to be distinguished. To consider additional types, I would need to be convinced either that there are additional social domains to frame them or that there are types of truth that do not primarily occur within social domains. All the types I wish to distinguish, like truth as a whole, display a correlation between fidelity and disclosure. Within each type this correlation occurs between fidelity to a specific societal principle, on the one hand, and a certain sort of disclosure, on the other. Yet truth as a whole is not merely the composite of these types. Rather, it is the dynamic that pervades them all. Every type of truth manifests and echoes the entire process whereby human fidelity to societal principles correlates with a life-giving disclosure of society. In other words, the pluralism of truth is holistic, just as the holism of truth is pluralistic. And, as the next section argues, this holistic pluralism also characterizes how truth unfolds. That truth unfolds will, of course, not be immediately obvious to someone who thinks truth is primarily or solely propositional. On a propositionally inflected conception of truth, it could suffice to establish what the property of being true comes to, and to say truth unfolds might seem absurd. If, however, one thinks of truth as a directional and structured process—as a dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure—then one needs to consider how this process unfolds. In my view, truth unfolds by being borne out, and truth is borne out in what I  call authentication. Although authentication is not the same as truth, it is an extension of truth, and truth requires authentication in order to unfold. Authentication encompasses all the ways in which people bear witness to the truth, in both word and deed. It occurs within the cultural practices and social institutions that make up the fabric of social life. The next section explores the relationship between truth and authentication. Then I discuss the role of discursive confirmation in the authentication of propositional truth, before considering how two types of nonpropositional truth are authenticated.

6.3  Bearing Witness to Truth Anyone familiar with both analytic and continental philosophy over the past 100 years might wonder why a conception of truth as fidelity and disclosure would emphasize the process of bearing witness to truth. This emphasis appears to have few precedents in either tradition. Despite

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  139 recent discussions of the epistemology of testimony, analytic truth theorists have had little to say about bearing witness to truth. On the other side of the continental divide, by contrast, where this topic does receive attention, testimony is presented primarily as an alternative to conceptions of truth as disclosure rather than a supplement. 6.3.1 Testimony To take one example from analytic epistemology: Catherine Elgin construes testimony as giving your word that what you assert is true, in the expectation that your conversation partner will take you at your word and thereby accept your invitation to rely on the truth of what you assert. In this interchange, the speaker takes on a responsibility toward the hearer, and the hearer receives an invitation to accept the speaker’s discharge of that responsibility. Hence, the hearer has moral and epistemic claims toward the speaker. Crucial from both sides is that the speaker, in testifying—in saying “[You can] Take my word for it”—(implicitly) claims that the speaker’s testimony is warranted: When I testify to you that p, then, I do not merely impart the information that p is the case. I also give you reason to believe that p is warranted and that I am warranted in testifying that p. In addition, my testimony gives you moral and epistemic claims against me. If p is false . . . , then in testifying that p, I both impart false beliefs and do you a moral wrong. . . . In the realm of rights, epistemology and ethics overlap.11 Elgin has reasons not to characterize what one asserts (“that p”) as a proposition: like Nelson Goodman and Willard Quine, she doubts that propositions exist. Nevertheless, she clearly characterizes testimony as an interchange tied to raising and receiving what I have called propositional truth claims. And, within the domain of propositional truth, much of what she says is right—especially the point, in my own terms, that asking someone to take one’s word for an informative or descriptive assertion unavoidably suggests that one has been faithful to the principle of logical validity and has done propositional justice to the matter under discussion. Moreover, as Elgin indicates, this suggestion occurs as an invitation to be received but not necessarily accepted: Testimony is abortive, I suggest, unless the invitation is received. But the invitation need not be accepted.  .  .  . [T]estimony occurs when a statement of purportedly established fact is offered as someone’s word and the offer is understood, recognized, and acknowledged, whether or not it is believed.12

140  Truth as a Whole and Authentication In other words, she rightly observes that testimony involves an openended invitation. Yet Elgin does not consider the role of such testimony in various social domains, nor does she entertain the hypothesis that there might be much more to our bearing witness to truth than the raising and receiving of propositional claims. Emmanuel Levinas, by contrast, argues that the predominant alethic tradition in Western philosophy, from Parmenides through Husserl and Heidegger, has regarded truth as the self-disclosure of being to consciousness, for which human subjectivity provides a self-effacing conduit, optimally in pure theoretical consciousness: The truth correlative to being—in which the subject, a pure welcome reserved for the nudity of disclosed being, effaces itself before that which manifests itself . . .—remains, within the thought that issued from Greece, the foundation of every notion of truth.13 Accordingly, the dominant Western tradition treats testimony as an inferior and suspect pathway to the truth of disclosed being. Critiquing that tradition in general and Heidegger in particular, Levinas juxtaposes a “truth of testimony” to the “truth of disclosure.” He locates the truth of testimony in a call to infinite “responsibility for the other human.”14 This call summons each person from beyond being; in taking up an infinite responsibility, one gives testimony to the truth. The truth to which one gives testimony, however, is not the truth of disclosed being. It is the truth of an ethical summons. Without going into the details of Levinas’s critique, I  would suggest that his juxtaposing testimony to disclosure is problematic. Whereas an alethic emphasis on disclosure can help explain propositional truth, it is hard to see how substituting an alethic emphasis on testimony can generate a viable account of propositional truth. I find this worrisome because, in a society such as ours, we can scarcely bear “infinite responsibility” for the other if we do not engage in propositional truth-finding and truthtelling. Moreover, a philosophy of testimony cannot discharge its own responsibility if it fails to provide an account of propositional truth. Yet Levinas correctly understands, it seems to me, that truth is not primarily and certainly not exclusively a matter of assertoric correctness and propositional accuracy. Rather, truth is fundamentally a direction in which people are called to live. He also rightly insists that this call comes to us from beyond, but in coming from beyond, it simultaneously comes from others and from within. Moreover, we receive this call to live the truth, and to bear witness to truth, across the many dimensions of our corporeal lives, including dimensions that are preconscious and pre-­ predicative. Levinas also sees that to answer the call to live ­truthfully— to do what truth requires—is also to bear witness to truth—to offer testimony. Indeed, truth unfolds through the authentication of truth.

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  141 Hence, without my giving up the truth of disclosure—although recast as a life-giving disclosure of society rather than a self-effacing disclosure of being—I submit that the dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure needs testimony in order to unfold. Testimony, however, does not have its own truth such that, à la Levinas, we could juxtapose the truth of testimony to the truth of disclosure. Instead, testimony is a matter of bearing witness to the truth. Testimony is true when it carries out the truth, when it carries out the correlation between fidelity and disclosure. Hence, true testimony requires more than verbal attestation. It requires not simply saying what truth is but doing what truth requires. And we can only do what truth requires within the practices and institutions that make up the fabric of social life. Because there is a differentiated array of such practices and institutions, testimony, like truth itself, takes on the contours of the various social domains where it occurs. Consequently, we usually give testimony to the truth in social-domain-specific ways, bearing witness to domain-specific correlations between fidelity to societal principles and a life-giving disclosure of society. We do this within our very engaging in cultural practices and participating in social institutions. Although we do this, what we bear witness to is not simply of our doing. Both fidelity and disclosure call upon human agency, yet neither axis in truth as a whole can be reduced to what human beings do. Although we are responsible for and to societal principles, they are not simply our constructions. Similarly, although we contribute to the process of opening up society, life-giving disclosure also exceeds our contributions. Bearing witness to truth, by contrast, does seem to boil down to what we do. To bear witness to truth is to do what truth requires, even though the truth that requires us to act includes factors beyond our control. Such testimony to a correlation between societal disclosure and fidelity to societal principles is quite textured, being tied to specific situations and circumstances. If, for example, the correlation between human flourishing and social solidarity requires us to welcome “the stranger,” we bear witness to this correlation by creating spaces for hospitality in the organizations and neighborhoods we inhabit. Yet, rarely will our testimony be a single gesture or event. More likely it will include sustained efforts by many people over many years. Still, it is something we can do. Moreover, if we did not do something in response to truth’s requirements, truth itself would suffer—we would fail, for example, to be faithful to the societal principle of solidarity, and a path toward interconnected flourishing would be blocked. 6.3.2  Public Invitation This account of authentication assumes that the practices and institutions within which we interact support our doing what truth requires.

142  Truth as a Whole and Authentication That cannot always be assumed. Established cultural practices and social institutions can be so distorted, compared with what, say, solidarity and human flourishing require, that bearing witness can only occur through resistance and deep social change. In this sense, bearing witness to truth is as caught up in social struggle as fidelity and disclosure are. Even so, bearing witness must be invitational and public. Authentication must be invitational because truth encompasses all: no person and no group has an exclusive claim to either being faithful to societal principles or contributing in a life-giving way to the opening of society. Because truth encompasses all, we cannot bear witness to it by taking a privileged position, as if only we have access to what truth requires and no one else. Nor can we bear witness to truth if we either force others to accept our testimony or exempt ourselves from the scope of this testimony, as if somehow only others and not we ourselves are responsible for doing the truth to which we attest. Exclusion, coercion, and hypocrisy are inimical to authentication. To bear witness to truth is to invite others to do what truth requires while simultaneously asking ourselves to do the same. Moreover, this invitation must be an open one—open to being accepted or rejected or ignored—and not a subtle twisting of others’ arms. Because of such openness, authentication must also be a public matter. To bear witness cannot be an act of private protest or an esoteric group activity, for the truth to which testimony is being brought addresses all the inhabitants of a societal formation. It is not her truth or his truth, not my truth or their truth, but it is truth for all. No one lives outside the correlation between fidelity and disclosure, and no one who bears witness to this correlation can stand outside it. Rather, to bear witness, is to take a stand in public within a specific correlation, showing in one’s own life what truth requires by trying to do what truth requires. To give an example I have used before, if the correlation between being faithful to the societal principle of justice and contributing to interconnected flourishing requires that we eliminate systemic racism, then one bears witness to this correlation by doing what one can, with others, to transform the racist practices and institutions to which one belongs, whether through gestures, policies, or public protests. To bear witness to the truth means to do what truth requires in a social context and with respect to others who co-inhabit that context.15 We invite others to do the truth by trying to do it ourselves in a public way. 6.3.3  Unfolding of Truth The public and invitational character of authentication helps explain why truth requires authentication in order to unfold. If truth were no

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  143 more than a dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure, manifested in specific correlations within specific social domains, it would point us in certain directions but might not actually make a difference in how people live. In their all-encompassing character, fidelity to societal principles and life-giving disclosure have a bearing on all that human beings are and do. But it is intrinsic to truth’s having this bearing that it also be borne out, that the directions in which truth points also be pursued and, in being pursued, be confirmed as indeed what truth requires. In a sense, to be addressed by the call to truth, one must already be caught up in attempts to answer it and, in answering it, to bear witness to that call. It is crucial, however, to keep truth and authentication distinct and not to reduce one to the other. If we try to reduce truth to authentication, which implicitly happens in some epistemic conceptions of (propositional) truth, then the call to truth becomes nothing more than our response to this call, and we lose sight of all those elements in fidelity and disclosure that exceed what we are and do. By contrast, if we try to reduce authentication to truth, which implicitly happens in some nonepistemic conceptions of (propositional) truth, then we lose sight of just how responsible we are for the directions in which truth points. Truth cannot unfold unless we bear witness to it. Yet we would have little to testify to if that which unfolds did not precede and exceed our bearing witness to it. When truth is authenticated, it is borne out, and when truth is borne out, it moves in the direction toward which it points. That is how truth unfolds. When, for example, we transform racist institutions in response to a call to foster interconnected flourishing by pursuing justice, the correlation between fidelity to justice and societal disclosure takes on new meaning and significance. Now it becomes compellingly obvious that racism has no place in the domains of truth, that truth not only calls for social justice but also, in so calling, requires an end to institutionalized racism. Clearly, the close linkage I have proposed between truth and authentication, within their distinctness, poses a challenge. It would be tempting, when one tries to live as truth requires, to regard one’s own witnessbearing as intrinsically and unavoidably true and thereby to restrict what truth requires to how one does what is required. It would be tempting to narrow the scope of a specific correlation down to the concrete ways in which we participate in this correlation such that, for example, combatting racism would become the full extent of what the call to life-giving justice requires, even though there is more to social justice than that. At the same time, however, if we did not pursue the truth in concrete ways, and if we did not regard our own witness-bearing as true, then truth itself would not unfold. We are easily torn between inflating and deflating our own efforts.

144  Truth as a Whole and Authentication The key to answering this challenge, it seems to me, is to ask ever anew whether the testimony we give does in fact align with what truth requires, and to listen for the answers others give. Asking this can keep us open to the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that some of our testimony is false, that some of the ways in which we try to do what truth requires are in fact contrary to truth. It can also remind us that truth usually requires more than we can do. In authentication, as in truth itself, neither certainty nor perfection holds sway.

6.4  Modes of Authentication Like truth, authentication is multidimensional. Authentication occurs in a variety of practices and institutions, and it takes on the contours of the social domains where it occurs. Just as we can distinguish among prepropositional, propositional, and post-propositional kinds of truth, so we can distinguish among pre-discursive, discursive, and post-discursive modes of authentication. Within the diverse array of authenticating practices, the justification and corroboration of propositional truth claims are central to the discursive mode of authentication. Let me explore how they contribute to the authentication of propositional truth. Then we shall consider some nondiscursive (i.e., pre-discursive and post-­ discursive) modes of authentication. 6.4.1  Discursive Confirmation As I explained in chapter 5, justification and corroboration are discursive practices aimed at confirming the truth of propositional claims. They are intrinsically linguistic: we cannot demonstrate either the accuracy or the inferential validity of what we believe and assert without employing language to do so. Justification and corroboration are also intrinsically logical practices: to confirm such accuracy and validity, we need to make inferences and draw conclusions. Together, justification and corroboration are central to the constellation of intrinsically linguistic and logical practices whereby we attest to propositional accuracy and validity. The discursive authentication of propositional truth claims requires both justification and corroboration. By locating justification and corroboration at the center of confirmation as the discursive mode of authentication, I suggest that they are practices through which we bear witness to truth—specifically, to the truth of propositions. This suggestion distinguishes my approach from other attempts to connect truth and testimony. Whereas Levinas juxtaposes the “truth of testimony” to the sort of disclosure that Western philosophers have hard-wired to propositional truth, I claim there is a specific sort of testimony—namely, discursive confirmation—for the sort of disclosure that is specific to propositional truth, and propositional truth needs such

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  145 testimony in order to unfold. And whereas Elgin treats testimony as primarily a warranted, fact-stating invitation for which appropriate uptake is required, I propose to construe testimony in a much broader way, such that the warranting (i.e., justifying and corroborating) within fact-­stating “testimony” would itself belong to just one sort of testimony (i.e., it would belong to the discursive mode of authentication), thereby implying that there are other, nondiscursive, modes of testimony or authentication. Discursive confirmation, then, like all other modes of authentication, is a public and invitational enactment of a specific correlation between fidelity and disclosure. In justifying and corroborating our propositional truth claims, we try to attest to the truth of the claims and the truth of what they claim. Like authentication in general, such discursive attestation is neither infallible nor unquestionable. Sometimes, perhaps often, it is wrong, and always it is subject to dispute. Yet we would not bother to justify and corroborate our propositional claims if we did not regard them and our attestation to them as true. 6.4.1.1  Universality and Necessity Compared with other modes of authentication, however, justification and corroboration have a unique structure. As the doubly decontextualized disclosure of doubly decontextualized practical objects, propositions present what they are about as abiding topics for further consideration that cannot be any different from how these topics are presented to be. Accordingly, when one asserts a proposition, one unavoidably claims, at least implicitly, that the insight being asserted is so for everyone, within the constraints, of course, of the occasion and circumstances under which the assertion is made. One also unavoidably (and implicitly) claims that anyone who rightly considers the matter under discussion must find it to be as asserted. In other words, one raises a claim to the universality and necessity of one’s propositional insight. This claim to universality and necessity, which inheres in any propositional truth claim, gives discursive authentication its peculiar structure. Unlike other modes of authentication, justification and corroboration, mutually indexed to each other, aim to bear out the purported universality and purported necessity of propositional claims. In this, the central practices of discursive authentication themselves simultaneously appeal to the principle of logical validity and to the soundness of the corroboration offered. As discursive authentication, when the confirmation of propositional truth claims succeeds, it establishes the degree to which a propositional claim is universally and necessarily valid. The peculiar structure of discursive authentication, with its focus on universality and necessity, gives the practices of justification and corroboration an important role within authentication as a whole, as we shall see. Yet it also encourages an exaggerated regard for “reason” that,

146  Truth as a Whole and Authentication together with propositionally inflected conceptions of truth, has set the direction for much of philosophy in the West. In contrast, rather than regard rational discourse as the key to authentication (and thereby to human flourishing) or accurate and inferentially valid insight as the key to truth, I consider authentication and truth, holistically conceived, to be the key to rational discourse and propositional truth. 6.4.1.2  Discourse and Action More precisely, the role discourse plays within authentication as a whole helps explain why discursive authentication is important. Discursive authentication lies at the basis of all post-discursive modes of authentication. Minimally, the latter include authentication in civil societal, economic, political, and religious domains. Although discourse is not the only basis for post-discursive authentication, it is definitely and unavoidably part of the basis. Any attempt to bear witness to specific correlations between fidelity and disclosure in these domains will rely in part on discursive practices with respect to propositional truth. In post-discursive modes of authentication, we rely on the justification and corroboration of propositional claims to help us establish the scope of the societal principles at issue and to confirm possibilities for interconnected flourishing. For example, it makes a difference in political authentication whether the justice sought is only for us or also for others and whether some flourish at the expense of others. It also matters that there are discursive practices and discursively attuned institutions within which we can deliberate about such differences. Part of bearing witness to the correlation between fidelity to justice and life-giving disclosure is to argue for propositional claims in this regard and to provide evidence for the propositional insights we claim to have about these matters. Discourse is not the key to authenticating such political truth, but it is also not optional if we would be true to what justice and human flourishing require. In other words, although there is more to doing the truth than making and defending propositional truth claims, discursive authentication is itself a way to do the truth. And in many social domains, we cannot do the truth in nondiscursive ways without also making, justifying, and corroborating propositional truth claims. This does not mean, however, that discourse either trumps nondiscursive practices or somehow stands outside or beyond the process of authentication as a whole. For the most part, justification and corroboration occur in connection with nondiscursive modes of authentication, which both provide a context for discourse and rely on discursive support. At the same time, discursive practices, in their supportive role, can be at odds with nondiscursive practices, generating conflicts that we cannot always discursively resolve. My inferentially valid argument might not support a politically truthful course of action, for example, or I  might

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  147 use logically invalid arguments to support a political protest that justice calls for. In practice—that is, in our multidimensional responses to what truth requires—discourse and (other) actions do not always line up, even though an alignment would be preferred. Yet, as countries around the world become ever more complexly interconnected, the importance of discourse for authentication as a whole cannot be ignored. It is crucial to have ways to sort out the universality of societal principles and the necessity of correlations between fidelity and disclosure in specific social domains. It makes an immense difference in international relations, for example, how we articulate and debate what the societal principle of justice and interconnected flourishing require. One especially sees this in international environmental agreements, where approaches within one country can affect lives and habitats across the globe. Even though there is much more to our addressing the challenges of climate change than propositionally articulating sound insights and backing them with valid arguments, we can hardly begin to address these challenges if we fail to take them up discursively. To this point, I have described authentication as a holistic yet multidimensional process of bearing witness, invitationally and publicly, to a dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure, a process through which truth itself unfolds. And I  have suggested that, as the confirmation of propositional truth claims, discursive authentication both supports and receives context from nondiscursive modes of authentication. To complete this initial description of authentication, let me discuss two nondiscursive modes and their relationships to discursive authentication. First I consider the pre-discursive authentication of artistic truth. Then I explore post-discursive authentication in the social domain of religion. (Both art and religion receive additional attention in chapter 9.) 6.4.2  Authenticating Artistic Truth A mode of authentication is a distinct set of practices in social life through which we bear witness to a specific correlation between fidelity and disclosure. In art, this correlation occurs between the societal principle of imaginative cogency and what I call imaginative disclosure. If there is a mode of authentication unique to artistic truth, it will be a distinct set of practices through which we can bear witness to cogent imaginative disclosure. As is explained in chapter  9, I  regard artistic truth as internally differentiated via three relations: relations between artist and art product, between audience and art product, and within the art product itself when it is an artwork. Artistic truth amounts to authenticity with respect to the experience or vision from which an art product arises, significance with respect to an audience’s need for worthwhile cultural presentations, and integrity with respect to an artwork’s own import and internal demands.

148  Truth as a Whole and Authentication Moreover, each of these relations inflects the expectation of imaginative cogency. If this is right, then we can anticipate that the authentication of artistic truth would show a similar internal differentiation: the practices whereby we bear out imaginatively cogent authenticity might differ from those whereby we give witness to either imaginatively cogent significance or imaginatively cogent integrity. Moreover, because artistic truth is prepropositional, the manner in which it is borne out will in the first instance be pre-discursive. So we should be able to identify distinct pre-discursive practices through which people attest to imaginatively cogent disclosure. To authenticate artistic truth is to bear out in pre-discursive practices the authenticity, significance, and integrity of a work of art.16 Traditionally, many philosophers have located such practices in the realm of feelings and emotions. I think this is a mistake, for the simple reason that art making and art interpretation center on human artifacts— art products and art events—and bring with them normative expectations concerning competency and merit. Art making, which is more than a simple expression of feelings, presupposes a certain level of technical ability, and art interpretation, which is more than a merely emotive reaction, presupposes a certain level of experienced or even trained listening, viewing, or reading. Accordingly, the primary practices of authentication in the social domain of art must be more complex than felt expression and emotive reaction, yet pre-discursive. What are these practices? Although their precise details differ from one art form to another, I think we can describe them in general ways. These descriptions recall the practices that imagination, as an intersubjective aesthetic process, involves, namely, the exploring, presenting, and creative interpreting of nuances of meaning. What we want to confirm, in a case of purported artistic truth, is whether the exploration, interpretation, and presentation carried out in and via the work of art are both cogent and disclosive, imaginatively cogent and imaginatively disclosive. Does this artwork imaginatively disclose the originating experience or vision in an original way? Does it deserve and provoke imaginative attention from the audience or public it addresses? Does it imaginatively disclose its own world in a challenging way? If the answer to each question were yes, then we would have confirmed the artwork’s truth in relation to the artist, in relation to its audience or public, and in relation to itself. Typically, however, we do not formulate these questions during our primary experience with an artwork. They are, instead, unformulated expectations that we go about “answering” in pre-linguistic ways. The expectations arise and are met within the primary practices of art making, art exhibition or performance, and art interpretation—the practices of shaping media and materials into imaginative artifacts, of bringing a script or score to life in the theater or concert hall, of viewing, listening, or reading attentively for the nuances of meaning in a performed, exhibited,

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  149 or otherwise presented artwork. We could say these expectations arise in the crafting and perceiving of an artwork, provided we understand that such crafting and perceiving are not mere matters of production and perception: they are caught up in an imaginative process that aims to disclose, as cogently as possible, not only the originating experience and interpretative needs that give rise to the artist’s crafting and the audience’s perceiving, respectively, but also the world of the artwork itself. For convenience, let me propose labels for the pre-linguistic practices in which such expectations can be “answered” or met. The authentication of the artwork’s authenticity can be said to occur via discovery; the authentication of its significance, via appreciation; and the authentication of its integrity, via illumination. An artwork’s authenticity, when the work is authentic, stems from the work’s mediated expression of the experience or vision from which, through competent art making, the artwork arises. Artists, when busy as composers or painters or writers, continually seek to craft artworks that ring true to their own experience or vision. This process is one of discovery and rediscovery, of finding the right materials and methods and structures to give compelling new voice to what artists envision. When they discover what they seek, they confirm the emerging artwork’s authenticity. So too, from the side of someone performing or interpreting an artwork, confirming its authenticity is a matter of discovering, often through repeated exposures, whether and how the artwork carries an original imprint of its creator’s experience or vision—whether and how, indeed, it is cogently and imaginatively disclosive in this regard. To confirm an artwork’s authenticity is not nearly so straightforward as determining whether the signature on a legal document is genuine. For discovery in art is itself an imaginative process, pre-linguistic in character, and hence not subject to standard rules of evidence and argument. Yet this does not mean that discovery does not occur, or that, when it occurs, it cannot be discussed—a topic I return to when I consider “art talk.” In addition to authenticity, artistic truth includes the significance of an artwork. Significance pertains to the relation between an artwork and the need an audience or public has for worthwhile cultural presentations. A  significant artwork is one that is true—cogently and imaginatively disclosive—with respect to such a need. I  use the term appreciation to refer to the interpretive practice in which an artwork’s significance is confirmed. Appreciation is the practice of finding an artwork significant (or insignificant, as the case may be). Again, this is not primarily a matter of verbal judgment, although it can receive linguistic articulation, but a preverbal assessment. The first time I experienced the Broadway production of Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2, in 1994, I “just knew” it was a significant theatrical event, among the most significant in an entire decade. Even though this preverbal assessment was informed by what I had read in advance and what I had heard others say, the actual rendering

150  Truth as a Whole and Authentication of the assessment happened while I experienced the performance, fully immersed in the unfolding drama, and it did not wait until I had a chance to report on the experience or verbalize a judgment about the production’s quality and importance. Such preverbal, immersive assessment is what the practice of appreciation comes to. It is how we learn whether an artwork does indeed provoke and deserve our attention, how we authenticate the significance of a work of art. As a confirmation of significance, appreciation requires an interaction between how we interpret an artwork and how we interpret our own need for what the artwork may offer. Often, in fact, an artwork will direct our attention to interpretive needs that we did not already recognize as our own. Moreover, interpretive needs change over time, such that works highly significant in one sociocultural setting will be less so in another. Yet it is inherent to the primary interpretation of art that we expect it to be significant and that we confirm or disconfirm an artwork’s significance via the preverbal practice of appreciation. The integrity of an artwork pertains to its import and how that import works. When an artwork has integrity, it imaginatively discloses itself in imaginatively disclosing something else, and it does so in a manner that is unique and challenging. For convenience, we can call this “something else” the world of an artwork. In imaginatively disclosing their worlds, artworks elicit interpretations of their import. To confirm the truth of this import, when it is cogently and imaginatively disclosive of the artwork itself and of its world, we need to engage in two-way illumination. Just as appreciation requires an interaction between how we interpret an artwork and how we interpret our own need, so the confirmation of integrity requires a mutual illumination between two worlds. On the one hand, we need to let the artwork’s import cast light on our own world. On the other hand, we need to let our world uncover the artwork’s import. When we find an artwork’s import and our own world mutually illuminating, we confirm the integrity of the artwork, also when such import disturbs our personal or social world. Again, such mutual illumination is primarily a pre-linguistic and prediscursive practice. It occurs within attentive listening or viewing, and it presupposes a certain level of experience or training in art perception. Yet its pre-discursive character does not make it illogical, no more than the experience or training required makes attentive listening or viewing an elite activity. Mutual illumination is neither logical nor illogical: it is a different sort of practice from the practices of predication and argumentation. It also is not elitist: anyone can gain the requisite experience by learning to pay attention to art as art. To this point, I have stressed the pre-linguistic and pre-discursive character of the primary practices whereby we authenticate artistic truth, that is, the practices of discovery, appreciation, and illumination. I  do not deny, however, that there are important lingual and logical dimensions

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  151 to our experience of art, and that primary authentication often occurs in connection with art talk. I use the term art talk to encompass all the many ways in which we use language in our experience of art. Within art talk, we can distinguish art conversation—usages of language to reach an understanding—from art discourse—usages of language to adjudicate propositional claims raised in art conversation. Earlier in this chapter, I suggested that conversations and debates about artistic truth can explicate art’s cogent imaginative disclosure and make it more accessible in other social domains. Something similar can be said about the relation between art talk and the authentication of artistic truth. When we tell others about the authenticity we have discovered or the significance we have pre-verbally appreciated or the integrity we have illuminated, we encourage them to reflect on their own experience of an artwork, or to acquire such experience, in light of these expectations. Moreover, when our conversation includes verbalized judgments about these matters, as it often does, we put forward propositional truth claims about an artwork’s truth that can be affirmed, questioned, disputed, and justified. In other words, the artistic authenticity, significance, and integrity that we experience and report can become topics for discursive authentication, with all this implies, including the purported universality and necessity of our propositional claims about an artwork’s truth. Perhaps this sheds new light on puzzles about “aesthetic judgments” that perplexed Immanuel Kant and subsequent philosophers of art, as discussed in chapter 4. Kant wondered how a singular and purportedly feeling-based judgment such as “This rose is beautiful” could nonetheless claim to be universal and necessary. Transposed to art, and formulated in terms of truth rather than beauty, one could ask how a judgment such as “This painting is authentic [or significant or integral]” can claim to be universally valid and necessary. My response, too briefly stated, would be that raising such a claim to universality and necessity is intrinsic to the making of propositional truth claims, but the pre-propositional, pre-discursive, and imaginative character of the primary (artistic) truth predicated in such a judgment makes the truth of the propositional claim resistant to discursive authentication. Moreover, in the absence of prediscursive authentication via imaginative discovery and the like, discourse on such matters loses its point. 6.4.3  Religious Testimony Having considered a mode of pre-discursive authentication, we turn now to a mode of post-discursive authentication. I  mentioned earlier that post-discursive authentication occurs in civil societal, economic, political, and religious domains. In these domains, discourse is unavoidably part of the basis for authentication. To illustrate what this means, let me discuss religion, the domain where heated contentions occur about

152  Truth as a Whole and Authentication appropriate discursivity. The harshest critics of religion often regard it as incapable of both propositional truth and discursive justification, and its most vociferous advocates often consider it capable of a higher truth that needs no discursive justification. By suggesting religious truth calls for post-discursive authentication that itself partly rests on discursive confirmation, I  stake out a position either midway between both sides or somewhere beyond them. As chapter 9 explains at greater length, truth in the social domain of religion is primarily a dynamic correlation between fidelity to the societal principle of hopeful trust,17 on the one hand, and a worshipful disclosure of what ultimately sustains those who trust and worship, on the other. The primary religious practices whereby this correlation occurs are narrative and liturgical: they involve telling and retelling the stories of faith as well as enacting and reenacting the rituals of worship. Adherents of a religion undertake these practices with respect to what ultimately sustains them in face of both good and evil, which many religionists label “God.” Through stories of faith and rituals of worship, those who trust and worship “God” seek and find ultimate meaning for their lives and for the world they inhabit.18 Unlike artistic truth, however, religious truth is not primarily borne out in practices of the same sort as the practices through which this truth takes shape. Whereas the authentication of cogent imaginative disclosure primarily occurs in imaginative practices of discovery and the like, the authentication of hopeful trust and worshipful disclosure does not primarily occur in narrative and liturgical practices. Rather, religious truth receives authentication when it is lived out, when those who trust and worship let the ultimate meaning they have discovered guide their interactions with others as well as their participation in the diverse practices and institutions that make up their society. In other words, the authentication of religious truth is not merely religious. It is also political, economic, social, and so forth. To bear witness to religious truth is to live as religious truth requires. Although religious communities do bear witness to religious truth when they retell the stories of their faith and reenact the rituals of their worship, they also give testimony to this truth, for example, in how they steward their economic resources or publicly justify their religious beliefs. Accordingly, the authentication of religious truth is both complex and fraught with implications for other social domains. When adherents of a particular religion try to live out the ultimate meaning they have discovered, they easily come into conflict with dominant patterns in civil society, the economy, the state, and personal relationships, not to mention social domains such as technology, art, and the academy where the direction of a culture is often set. Adherents of a religion also frequently desire these patterns to be different. That is why, for example, I have described religion as performing “both a critical and a utopian role with respect to

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  153 the state” and as being “both an incubator of civil-societal organizations and a disturber of civil-societal patterns.”19 Yet, as was claimed earlier, it is intrinsic to authentication as a whole that it be invitational and public: it invites others to respond, without coercion, to what truth requires. Hence, the authentication of religious truth, if it is genuine, cannot involve either imposing religious teachings and their social implications on others or relegating such teachings and implications to a “private sphere.” To see why this is so, we need to consider more carefully the post-discursive character of religious authentication. Religious authentication is post-discursive because of the propositional claims raised in religious teachings, doctrines, and creeds. The teachings of a religion are attempts by a religious community to summarize in language, whether spoken or written, how they understand the ultimate meaning they have found and continue to find. Often these teachings are informal and fluid, and the meaning they convey is somewhat implicit. When a religious community formalizes and authorizes its teachings as doctrines and creeds, however, the latter make the community’s understanding explicit. Yet teachings, doctrines, and creeds do not by themselves unlock the truth of a religion. Given my view of religious truth, which emphasizes trust and worship, I cannot regard teachings and their explications as the key to religious truth. Instead, they are themselves indexed to the ultimate meaning a religious community has discovered and continues to discover via the practices of story-telling and worship. Nevertheless, teachings, which have propositional content, and their doctrinal and creedal elaborations, which explicate such content, are intrinsic, not extrinsic, to religions as such. That is why I have described religious truth as post-propositional: one cannot pursue it without at the same time embracing some of the propositional claims put forward in religious teachings and the like. Moreover, because propositional claims call for discursive authentication, religionists cannot avoid the obligation to offer discursive justification and corroboration for their religious beliefs.20 In other words, it is intrinsic to the authentication of religious truth that religious adherents should make and defend propositional claims about their trusting worship of “God” and what this implies for life and society. In a differentiated modern society, where religion is just one social institution among many, religious adherents cannot effectively bear witness to religious truth if they refuse to enter public discussions and debates about their religion. At the same time, however, they will fail to bear witness if they reduce the practices of religious authentication to the discursive justification of religious beliefs. Justifying religious beliefs needs to belong to a larger effort to show in practice what it means to place one’s trust in the source of ultimate sustenance worshipped in a particular religion. Religiously, justifications in the absence of full-fledged authentication are

154  Truth as a Whole and Authentication empty; attempts at authentication without justification are blind. Neither hypocrisy nor dogmatism serves to authenticate religious truth. This account of religious authentication as post-discursive will not satisfy critics of religion who deny its truth capacity and resist its alleged incursions into the public sphere. Nor will it satisfy defenders of religion who regard its truth as absolute. On the one hand, adamantly secularist defenders of the public sphere will object that my account of religious truth and authentication allows supposed religious truth to trump propositional truth and does not sufficiently hold religionists to standards of public accountability. How can one argue with someone who claims to be doing “God’s” will as revealed in religious practices? Fundamentalist defenders of religious truth, on the other hand, will object that my account wrongly relativizes religious truth to other types of truth and has an unduly democratic understanding of the justification of religious beliefs. How can one affirm the truth of religion if other social domains are equally capable of truth and any claim to the truth of one’s own religion must invite public dissent? By contrast, I  believe my account suggests why ongoing conflicts between adamant secularists and dogmatic fundamentalists cannot be resolved within the terms of the standard debates. It also indicates how a different understanding of religious truth and authentication could create philosophical room for resolution of such conflicts—always recognizing, however, that these are societal conflicts whose resolution must be more than philosophical. So long as adamant secularists cannot acknowledge the possible legitimacy of religious truth and its post-discursive authentication, and so long as dogmatic fundamentalists cannot consider the possible falsehood of their own religion or the possible failure of their own attempts at authentication, the “debate” between them—more like a shouting match—cannot be fruitful. If, however, we see religious truth as one type of truth among several, and if we regard religious authentication as discourse-including practical testimony, then both sides in this debate will need to appeal to something wider than the type of truth and mode of authentication that each side privileges. They will need to appeal to a broader conception of truth and a more expansive understanding of authentication. In that process they might discover shared principles, such as solidarity and justice, and common concerns, such as interconnected flourishing, that neither side in its isolation can adequately pursue. As John Dewey was fond of quoting in favor of his own pragmatic conception of truth, “by their fruits you will know them” (Matthew 7:16).21 Hence, like propositional truth, discursive authentication is important, but not all-important, not even in those social domains such as religion where the authentication of truth rests in part on discursive practices. At the same time, discursive practices are not irrelevant for social domains such as art where the primary practices of authentication

Truth as a Whole and Authentication  155 are pre-discursive. Yet there is at least one social domain—that of ­science and the academy—where discourse is indeed the primary way to authenticate truth. This does not mean, however, that truth or its authentication must be scientific to be legitimate. To think that would deny the legitimacy of all other social domains of truth, whether prepropositional or post-propositional, whether pre-discursive or postdiscursive. It would also result in too narrow an understanding of the character and importance of scientific truth, to which the next chapter turns.

Notes 1 Marian David, “The Correspondence Theory of Truth,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/truth-correspondence/. 2 See especially chapter 3 in Lambert Zuidervaart, Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School: Critical Retrieval (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 47–73. 3 See especially chapters  3 and 14 in Lambert Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation: Essays in Reformational Philosophy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 54–76 and 277–97. 4 I adapt this notion of “trueing” from an instructive essay by Pamela J. Reeve, “Truth as ‘Being Trued’: Intersections Between Ontological Truth in Aquinas and the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion,” in Truth Matters: Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion, eds. Lambert Zuidervaart et  al. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 263–82. 5 See Zuidervaart, Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School, 175–78. For more on Heidegger’s conception of truth, see Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Mark A. Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Denis McManus, Heidegger and the Measure of Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 6 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 15th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979), 152–53, 314–16. 7 Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 286. 8 G. W. F. Hegel, “Preface,” §16, in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 9. 9 See the discussion of artworks as nondiscursive yet articulate symbols in Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 24–68. In a richly illuminating study, Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin summarizes Langer’s discussion as follows: “Music, for instance, can be seen as the logical expression of feeling in terms of its internal structural analogy with sentient life, visual art . . . as logical expression of feeling in terms of its overall spatial analogy with a perceived object.” The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 202. 10 I discuss technical know-how at greater length in Lambert Zuidervaart, Shattering Silos: Reimagining Knowledge, Politics, and Social Critique (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), 74–76.

156  Truth as a Whole and Authentication 11 Catherine Z. Elgin, “Word Giving, Word Taking” (2001), in Medina and Wood, eds., TE 285. 12 Ibid., 279. 13 Emmanuel Levinas, “Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony” (1972), in TE 262 (italics in original). 14 Ibid., 264. 15 Zuidervaart, Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School, 98. 16 For the sake of brevity, here I leave aside the truth of art products and art events that are not artworks. On the distinction between artworks and other art products and events, see Lambert Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7–8, 127–34. 17 I use the phrase “hopeful trust” to gloss what others might label “faith.” I often avoid using “faith” in this context, for two reasons. First, there is a strong tendency in Western thought to equate (and thereby reduce) the meaning of “faith” to (propositional) “belief.” Second, because I  use “fidelity” as a general term in my account of truth, employing the term “faith” in the description of religious truth would create awkward constructions such as “fidelity to [the societal principle of] faith” or “faithfulness to faith.” 18 I put “God” in quotation marks to indicate that my characterization is functional rather than prescriptive. Some religions are not monotheistic, and some have divinity concepts that standard “God-talk” does not render well. 19 Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 243, 246. 20 Here and in what follows I  use “religious beliefs” as shorthand for all the ways in which religionists assert the propositional content of their religion’s teachings, doctrines, and creeds. 21 John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), enlarged ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), 156.

7 Truth and Science

The previous chapter has proposed a holistic conception of truth and authentication according to which isomorphism connects various distinct social domains of truth. That there are distinct social domains of truth has not been argued in detail. Rather, it has served as an underlying hypothesis to which layers of significance have gradually accrued. Now, however, it is time to substantiate this hypothesis and examine several social domains of truth. I begin in this chapter with science. Subsequent chapters take up politics, art, religion, and philosophy. There are several reasons to begin with science. First, for the past two centuries, many in Western society have regarded science as either the primary or the sole domain of truth. Although more controversial in recent decades, not only in philosophy but also in the general culture, this view remains the default position for many contemporary truth theorists. I label this position scientism: the view that science is either the primary or sole domain of truth.1 In suggesting there are multiple social domains of truth, of which science is just one, my conception takes direct aim at scientism. Consequently, a discussion of truth in science should not be deferred. A second reason stems from the close connection between propositional and scientific truth. The account one gives of propositional truth has a direct bearing on how one conceives of scientific truth, just as one’s account of truth in science has significant implications for one’s conception of propositional truth. Unlike mainstream truth theories, which mostly assume (monothetically) that truth is propositional, I have argued (stereothetically) that there is much more to truth than that which is propositional. Now I  need to uncover what bearing this alternative approach to propositional truth has for a theory of scientific truth. I also want to explore the significance of my account of scientific truth for the conception of propositional truth offered in chapters 2–5, before considering several social domains where, unlike science, the primary sorts of truth are not propositional. Third, the alethic character and importance of science have come under attack in recent decades. Often such attacks occur within a larger DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021-7

158  Truth and Science battle over the character and importance of truth as a whole. If, as this book argues, truth as a whole is crucial for human life and society; if, within truth as a whole, propositional truth is important, although not all-important; and if science, with its strong linkage to propositional truth, is an important social domain of truth, then it makes sense to begin with science. For, in the face of current controversies, one needs to show what scientific truth comes to and why it is important, even as one challenges any scientism that would belittle or dismiss other types of truth. For these three reasons then—traditional scientism, the connections between propositional and scientific truth, and current attacks on scientific truth—I begin my discussion of specific social domains with an account of scientific truth. Within mainstream philosophy of science, the topic of truth in science usually arises in three contexts: (1) questions about the aim(s) of science, (2) controversies about the relation between scientific theories and the “objects” they are about, and (3) concerns about the role(s) of science in society. Accordingly, I divide this chapter into three sections and discuss first the character of science as a social domain of knowledge and truth (section 7.1), then the notion of theoretical truth (section 7.2), and finally the place of science in contemporary society (section  7.3). In adopting such a high-altitude approach, I cannot take up the detailed debates that structure philosophy of science as a complex subdiscipline. Yet I do plan to indicate some of the implications these debates have for understanding science as a social domain of knowledge and truth.

7.1  Science as a Social Domain 7.1.1  Aims and Task During the heyday of logical empiricism in the first half of the twentieth century, when scientism reached a zenith in what has come to be known as analytic philosophy, the aims of science seemed fairly straightforward. Science, it was thought, properly pursues and provides empirically verifiable knowledge of the fields it studies. Moreover, claims to knowledge that are not empirically verifiable, and also are not simply tautologous, are cognitively meaningless. By mid-century, however, answering questions about the aims of science had become more complex. First, the so-called verifiability criterion of meaning was challenged from within the logical empiricist camp as being itself neither tautologous nor empirically verifiable, and hence as being cognitively meaningless.2 Then, in a highly influential essay by an insider to the camp, Willard Quine undermined the entire distinction between analytic (tautologous) and synthetic (empirically based) statements on which the verifiability criterion rested.3 Such criticisms opened the door to a plurality of possible aims for science, such as causal or

Truth and Science  159 probabilistic explanation, prediction and control, intellectual problemsolving, and even interpretation or understanding. Within a decade, Thomas Kuhn had introduced his own revolution into philosophy of science, one that turned away from an emphasis on the logic or structure of science to its history or process.4 Kuhn’s work raised the possibility that the aims of science might, like science itself, vary historically, and that there may be a plurality of aims for a historically emergent plurality of scientific disciplines. Once one adds to this historical emphasis the growing impact of Critical Theory,5 poststructuralism,6 feminism,7 neo-pragmatism,8 and social epistemology,9 answering the question of science’s aims becomes much more complicated. Further, thanks especially to the last-mentioned schools of thought, one can no longer take up the question of aims without also considering both what Heather Douglas calls “values in science” and what Martin Carrier calls the “social organization of science.”10 In other words, to use my own vocabulary, to address the question of science’s aim(s), we do well to regard science as a social domain of knowledge to which many practices contribute, each of which might well have its own internal aims. Nevertheless, if science is indeed a social domain, then one can ask which practices and principles are most characteristic of this domain and what general purpose or task they fulfill—that is, what type of knowledge ­science seeks to provide. Hence, I would distinguish the question of specific aims from the question of overall task. Given that distinction, one can ask what the characteristic task of science in contemporary society is, the one that helps distinguish science from other social domains of knowledge and that helps explain its roles in contemporary society. Before taking up the topic of distinctive task, however, I need to establish the scope of this inquiry. In contemporary parlance, the term science primarily refers to the natural sciences, with physics being the exemplar many philosophers of science prefer and biology being an outlier for some. Secondarily, “science” also refers to the social sciences, including psychology, sociology, political science, and economics. The ­humanities, however—philosophy, religious studies, intellectual history, and the like—seem to lie outside the scope of what many mean by “science,” and the place of mathematics is unclear. Despite such contemporary usage, when I speak of science as a social domain, I  intend to include all academic disciplines: mathematical disciplines, natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. In other words, I  wish to pursue what Stathis Psillos calls a “general philosophy of science” about “science-in-general.” Like Psillos, I think that “the common core of science . . . is a form of knowledge.”11 Unlike Psillos, however, I do not restrict the subject matter of science to “nature,” nor do I equate “science-in-general” with natural science. Instead, science as a social domain has the scope of Wissenschaft in its nineteenth-century sense. The concept of science in this broad sense

160  Truth and Science allows for a distinction between Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (cultural sciences—an umbrella term for what we now distinguish as the social sciences and the humanities)—but it regards all of them as sciences. In this I agree with Sven Ove Hansson, who prefers the broader concept designated by Wissenschaft “because the sciences and the humanities—the Wissenschaften—form a community of knowledge disciplines that is unified by epistemic criteria.”12 To draw attention to this broad scope, I occasionally use Wissenschaft, academic disciplines, and terms derived from them to indicate science-in-general in the widest sense, what Hansson calls “science(s) in a broad sense.”13 7.1.2  Scientific Knowledge The question, then, is what form of knowledge characterizes science-ingeneral and what the pursuit of such knowledge tries to achieve. In other words, what is the characteristic task of science as a social domain of knowledge? Hansson identifies four epistemic criteria unifying the sciences in a broad sense: they (1) aim to provide the intersubjectively most reliable knowledge currently available, (2) strive to improve such knowledge “through critical appraisals and new investigations,” (3) rely on a “division of intellectual labor” and show “mutual respect for each other’s competences,” and (4) display “a strong and rapidly growing interdependence.”14 Alternatively, following sociologist Robert Merton, whom Hansson mentions, one could also say that all of the academic disciplines pursue four “institutional imperatives”: universalism, communality, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.15 Although obviously debatable, both Hansson’s epistemic criteria and Merton’s institutional imperatives point to features that mark the distinctive character of scientific knowledge in the broad sense of science. Let me suggest four such features: theoreticity, evidentiality, discursive reflexivity, and intersubjective fallibilism. In describing them, I shall relate them to Merton’s imperatives. As used here, theoreticity is not limited either to the prominence of theoretical terms (as distinct from observational terms) in the natural sciences or to the semantic dependence of such terms upon a naturalscientific theory. Rather, it calls attention to the fact that in all academic disciplines, including the humanities, developing, proposing, testing, and revising or rejecting theories are how knowledge is pursued and attained. One cannot do science in the broad sense without engaging in theoretical practices. More than any other feature, the theoreticity of science-in-general gives rise to the institutional imperative Merton calls universalism. By universalism Merton means that in science “truth-claims . . . are to be subjected to preestablished impersonal criteria” and not accepted or rejected on the basis of the “race, nationality, religion, class and personal qualities”

Truth and Science  161 of those who make these claims.16 Although, after the rise of feminism, social epistemology, and critical theory broadly construed, Merton’s formulation is obviously outdated, I think he is right to single out universalism as an institutional imperative. I  want to suggest, however, that this imperative flows from the theoreticity of science-in-general. When one strives for theoretical knowledge within a specific field, the pursuit itself compels one not so much to ignore the particular circumstances and social contexts from which truth claims arise as to relativize these circumstances and contexts to the claims’ (potential) theoretical validity. For if the claims are theoretically valid, then they should be valid for anyone who takes the theory seriously, whatever his or her circumstances and contexts. Theoreticity and the universalism it generates are closely linked to what I call evidentiality. Here I do not limit the meaning of evidentiality to its usage in linguistics, where it primarily refers to how a language grammatically specifies the types of evidence on which statements within the language rest (e.g., whether perceived, inferred, or learned).17 Instead, evidentiality indicates how all sciences in the broad sense require that theoretical truth claims be adequately grounded in appropriate interactions with the objects of investigation. This requirement holds regardless of whether the claims are explanatory or interpretative and regardless of whether the interactions are computational, experimental, statistical, or hermeneutic. Evidentiality permits many different methods for making and confirming findings—whether, for example, one conducts a well-­constructed sociological survey or undertakes a close reading of historical documents—provided they are appropriate to what is being investigated. The crux of the matter is that, given appropriate interactions, the theoretical claims must be adequately grounded. For this, there is no single algorithm or test. The evidentiality of science-in-general helps explain what Merton describes as the communal character of scientific findings. There is an institutional imperative, he says, that “the substantive findings of science are a product of social collaboration and are assigned to the ­community.”18 The hypercommercialization of so-called STEM disciplines [i.e., (natural) science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] and a state-driven bureaucratization of all scientific research since Merton wrote this can make his description sound hopelessly naïve. Yet there is something to it. It’s not so much that scientific findings are communal property—although, in principle, I  agree that they should be— but rather that the methods whereby findings are made, confirmed, and disseminated are collectively shared. In that sense, scientific findings are available to anyone who has the requisite aptitude and training. A scientific finding, whether an experimental result or a statistical pattern or a textual interpretation, presupposes the employment of collectively shared methods.

162  Truth and Science To make theoretical truth claims on the basis of adequate evidence unavoidably requires focused dialogue and debate. It also relies on a heightened awareness of how intrinsically debatable are the claims made and evidence presented within a scientific field. I  call this heightened awareness discursive reflexivity. As previous chapters explained, I use the terms discourse and discursive to indicate the process of probing, challenging, and defending validity claims within our linguistic interactions with one another. In ordinary propositional knowledge, we regularly pursue the discursive confirmation of our propositional truth claims. But in science, broadly construed, discourse has a more decisive role than it has in everyday life. Scientists must regularly and repeatedly ask whether their arguments are inferentially valid, whether their explanations or interpretations illuminate the subject matter, and whether their findings are accurate. Moreover, such discursive concerns continually guide how scholars set up experiments, construct surveys, or scrutinize texts. Indeed, there is a continual feedback loop among making theoretical claims, presenting suitable evidence, and testing both the claims and the evidence. Compared with ordinary discourse, then, the scientific modus operandi is deliberately reflexive: it involves a heightened awareness that, within the sciences, assertions are made to be tested and contested. Along with theoreticity and evidentiality, such discursive reflexivity characterizes science as a distinctive social domain of knowledge. The prominence of discursive reflexivity in scientific knowledge, broadly construed, helps explain what Merton calls disinterestedness, which he attributes not to personal motivations but to such professional patterns as expert confirmation of findings and peer review. These patterns make up a “structure of control exercised by qualified compeers.”19 I  would argue, however, that the social-ontological source of so-called disinterestness in science is neither individual nor professional. Rather, it stems from the character of scientific knowledge as such, specifically, from the prominence of discursive reflexivity. The intrinsically and unavoidably debatable character of theoretical claims, purported evidence, and reported findings requires that scholars individually and collectively strive to suspend whatever obstructs requisite scrutiny by qualified peers. Professional practices such as peer review are designed to help secure such suspension and thereby to help foster the discursive reflexivity intrinsic to scientific knowledge, along with the universalism already mentioned. These practices, insofar as they are well-designed and well-­implemented and are not either subverted by careerism and competition or irreparably distorted by political and economic pressures, also help foster intersubjective fallibilism, the fourth characteristic feature of science as a social domain of knowledge. Merton describes this feature as an ethos of organized skepticism, and he says it often brings science into conflict with social domains such as politics, the economy, and religion where certain “dogmas” are held sacrosanct.20

Truth and Science  163 Skepticism, however, is not the right term for what I have in mind. It is not so much that the pursuit of scientific knowledge requires either perennial doubt concerning the validity of claims and the solidity of evidence or sustained suspension of judgment about them. Rather, the pursuit of scientific knowledge requires insatiable curiosity about what is the case, combined with unreserved readiness to revise previous claims and revisit purported evidence when others pose competent questions and offer pertinent critique. In other words, scientific knowledge is pursued and secured with a strong awareness that it is perpetually revisable via interaction among professional peers. My term for this feature of scientific knowledge is intersubjective fallibilism: the individual and organizational predisposition to acknowledge and learn from collectively recognized mistakes. No one of the four features I have described suffices to capture the distinctive character of science as a social domain of knowledge. Together, however, and taken as a constellation, they do serve both to distinguish science from other social domains of knowledge and to specify the primary task of science in society. This task, as it emerges from the described features, is to pursue and provide theoretically valid and evidentially grounded knowledge via discursively reflexive and intersubjectively fallibilistic processes of inquiry and debate. That is my way to spell out what Hansson says is the first of four criteria uniting all the various sciences in the broad sense: the sciences all take as their primary task “to provide the most reliable information currently obtainable in their respective subject areas,” he says, with both the reliability and the information being understood as “intersubjective.”21 But Hansson does not specify the type of “information” that science seeks, other than to say it must be intersubjectively reliable. By contrast, I would say the information or, more broadly, the knowledge that science seeks must, at a minimum, be theoretically guided, evidentially grounded, discursively contestable, and fallibilistically obtained. Whatever reliability such knowledge displays will be indexed to these four features. 7.1.3  Scientific Truth Because science pursues and provides a specific type of knowledge, it is also a distinct social domain of truth. To characterize the type of truth specific to science in the broad sense, let me first review my accounts of propositional knowledge and truth. Then I shall explore what these accounts, when combined with my characterization of scientific knowledge, imply for the character of scientific truth. In previous chapters I have described knowledge in general as a complex relationship among six relata: human knowers, the practices whereby they know, that which is knowable, what is known about the knowable, the principles that guide our practices of knowing, and the methods or

164  Truth and Science procedures whereby we confirm what is known. It is within this complex relationship that we attain insight. I have also distinguished among three kinds of knowledge—propositional, pre-propositional, and postpropositional—as well as among several types of knowledge—scientific, artistic, political, religious, and so on—each of which is mainly either propositional, pre-propositional, or post-propositional. In propositional knowledge, the knower primarily engages in identifying, distinguishing, and relating practical objects (the knowable). I call these activities of thought logical practices. The knower engages in logical practices in order to arrive at concepts and propositions (the known) about these objects as states of affairs, in response to the principle of logical validity, and with reference to arguments and experiences that can confirm or disconfirm the insight one tries in this way to attain. Propositions, then, are achieved results of logical attempts to know practical objects as states of affairs. These results can be either true or false in a very specific sense. They are true when they accurately convey logically attained insights into knowable objects as states of affairs. Such truth of propositions involves a dynamic correlation between the accuracy of a proposition—it really does disclose the distinct identity-inrelationship of the object—and the proposition’s inferential validity—it does indeed cohere logically with other relevant propositions. In other words, the truth of propositions requires mutual reinforcement between the decontextualized disclosure of practical objects as states of affairs and our being faithful to the principle of logical validity. Science, I  submit, is the social domain where we pursue heightened propositional knowledge and seek heightened propositional truth. The heightening of propositional truth occurs via the theoreticity, evidentiality, discursive reflexivity, and intersubjective fallibilism already described. And this heightening involves not only an increase in intensity but also a change in quality, similar to how new and distinctive system-wide qualities can emerge from the interactions of entities that do not display these qualities. In the terminology of contemporary emergentism, theoreticity and the like can be called emergent properties of propositional knowledge when it becomes scientific. Accordingly, let’s consider how each feature to scientific knowledge helps inform the type of truth that science in the broad sense seeks. In the first place, the theoreticity of science heightens the decontextualization that the truth of propositions already involves. Earlier, I argued that propositions, as the decontextualized and abstract contents of assertions, emerge when assertions are taken up in discourse. This occurs in correlation with the abstract emergence of states of affairs from facts (i.e., from how practical objects predicatively self-disclose for assertoric practices). Hence, the truth of propositions presupposes decontextualization and abstraction both in the relevant practices of knowing and in the knowable object.

Truth and Science  165 The pursuit of theoretical knowledge heightens such abstraction. On the side of knowledge practices, theoretical inquiry requires that the logical practices of identifying, distinguishing, and relating take place within the framework of an inherently abstract theory. Accordingly, theoretical inquiry unavoidably turns away from the ordinary embeddedness of logical practices in lived experience and instead undertakes such practices “for their own sake.” So too, on the side of knowable objects, theoretical inquiry necessarily stages the object so that it can present itself as a pure state of affairs. Removed, via experimentation and other methods of deliberate abstraction, from many connections with other objects and from ordinary practical interrelations, the objects of theoretical inquiry are staged to self-disclose under a single aspect of their existence or within a specific type of existence. Such theoretically informed staging of knowable objects allows them to function as virtualized entities. By “virtualized entities” I mean that they present those characteristics and relationships for which they have been deliberately staged but not necessarily other ones they would or could display when not so staged, whether in ordinary life or within the purview of a different academic discipline. The features that show up when dogs are studied by geneticists are not necessarily those which show up for either ecologists or ethologists, and usually they are not the features most prominent for pet owners either. By presenting themselves in a deliberately staged way, the objects studied by science engage in what I  call predicative self-dis/closure, where the slash in “disclosure” indicates both a disruption to ordinary predicative self-disclosure and the irruption of a theoretically virtualized identity, a specifically staged set of characteristics and relationships. Scientific truth is a heightened type of propositional truth, heightened in its abstraction from the ordinary practices and objects of propositional knowledge. Just as theoreticity heightens the decontextualization built into propositional truth, so the evidentiality of science-in-general takes the availability of the object to a different level. Recall that, when distinguishing the reliability of beliefs from the correctness of assertions, I  described beliefs as (in-principle) pre-linguistic insights generated via ordinary engagements with practical objects. What beliefs highlight, in my view, is the practical availability of practical objects—that is, their availability for human practices. The specific availability of practical objects for the linguistic practices of reference and predication is the objects’ predicative availability. I  have also claimed that the truth of assertions—that is, their correctness—is sustained by the alignment between an object’s predicative availability and relevant nonpredicative aspects of an object’s practical availability. I call such alignment the predicative self-disclosure of a practical object. When correctly asserted on a particular occasion, such alignment is a fact.

166  Truth and Science This interwoven practical underlayment to the carpet of propositions and their truth receives new delineation and firmness in the practices of scientific inquiry. For in science, ordinary practical availability and, within that, ordinary predicative availability are insufficient to support and confirm the claims being made about objects. These are not ordinary assertions, and the objects to which they pertain are not ordinary practical objects. Instead, these are theoretically framed assertions about theoretically staged objects. Hence the interactions that support scientific assertions and serve to confirm or disconfirm them must themselves be scientifically framed, and the objects of investigation must be appropriately staged for that framework. In other words, the type of objective availability pertinent to the making and confirming of scientific assertions is methodically controlled, in accordance with procedures designed and shared within a community of inquiry. Moreover, given the focus within specific sciences on objects under single aspects of their existence (e.g., mathematical or physical or organic) or within specific types of existence (e.g., botanical and zoological), the methods appropriate to the requisite interactions with objects can be as varied as the entire range of academic disciplines. In this sense, there is no single scientific method, and the old logical-empiricist dream of a “unified science” was just that: a dream, and a bad one at that. In this respect, too, scientific truth takes propositional truth to a different level. Instead of an ordinary alignment between predicative and nonpredicative aspects of a practical object’s practical availability, the truth of scientific assertions points to an extraordinary alignment between theoretically framed and methodically controlled features of a virtualized object or range of objects. That scientific assertions depend on such framing and control does not make them any less true. Rather, scientific truth offers a heightened version of propositional truth, providing both precision and scope that nonscientific assertions often lack. I have argued in previous chapters that the truth of propositions involves a dynamic correlation between propositional accuracy and inferential validity: accuracy with respect to the knowable object’s predicative self-disclosure as a state of affairs, and validity with respect to other relevant products of logical thought (i.e., other propositions). This dynamic correlation is how propositional truth echoes and participates in the dynamic correlation within truth as a whole between life-giving disclosure of society and fidelity to societal principles. The discursive reflexivity of scientific knowledge gives much more prominence to the calls for inferential validity and propositional accuracy than they have in nonscientific thought. For in science, it is not simply a matter of being ready to discursively justify and corroborate propositional truth claims when these are challenged. Rather, the very formulation and presentation of such truth claims occur with a view to possible objections and refutations. That, it seems to me, is what the

Truth and Science  167 logical empiricist verifiability criterion of meaning and the Popperian demarcation criterion of falsifiability22 rightly emphasize, even though neither has held up as an account of either scientific knowledge or scientific truth. The scientific enterprise highlights the need for validity and accuracy in ways that ordinary thought does not. Because of discursive reflexivity, scientific inquiry also calls greater attention than one finds in ordinary thought to the distinction and the relation between the justification and the corroboration of propositional truth claims. As was explained in chapter  5, to justify a propositional truth claim is to show that it is internally consistent and coheres logically with other relevant claims. Discursive justification aims to establish inferential validity. To corroborate a propositional truth claim, by contrast, is to show that the purported insight is indeed sound. Discursive corroboration tries to bear out propositional accuracy. Because the truth of propositions requires a correlation between validity and accuracy, both justification and corroboration are required in order discursively to confirm propositional truth claims. In science, these two mutually imbricated practices acquire a prominence they lack in other social domains. Characteristically, scientists argue for their assertions, and they are expected not to present as scientific claims assertions they cannot argue for. So too, they provide evidence when they make their assertions, and they are expected not to present as scientific claims assertions for which they have no evidence. Science then, as a social domain of knowledge, sets the discursive bar high—much higher than in daily life—and this informs the character of scientific truth. For to seek truth in science is not merely a matter of trying to achieve propositional accuracy and inferential validity. Rather, it requires the pursuit of evidence-based accuracy and discursively arguable validity. And what count as such accuracy and validity are themselves informed by the theoretical framework and investigatory staging that a specific science provides. As the correlation of evidence-based accuracy and discursively arguable validity, scientific truth is a heightened version of propositional truth. Because the accuracy and validity of scientific truth claims must be based on evidence and be discursively arguable, intersubjective fallibilism also characterizes scientific knowledge. There is a continual push within scientific inquiry to find better evidence and to abandon assertions when evidence fails, along with a constant pull toward better arguments and away from inadequate ones. Both the push and the pull happen via interaction with other qualified inquirers. This readiness for peer-tested revision heightens the tentative quality of ordinary propositional truth claims. In ordinary speech and conduct, although we properly recognize that the propositions we assert might be inaccurate or unjustified, we do not usually seek to be refuted. Scientists, by contrast, properly do present their assertions for possible refutation.

168  Truth and Science In a paradoxical way, the heightening of propositional truth in scientific truth also increases the tentative manner in which propositional truth claims are properly made in the sciences. Questions of scientific truth are never permanently settled. Scientific truth claims are intrinsically refutable. Given the theoreticity, evidentiality, discursive reflexivity, and intersubjective fallibilism of scientific knowledge, then, we can characterize scientific truth as follows. Scientific truth is the dynamic correlation between evidence-based accuracy and discursively arguable validity that scientists collaboratively achieve via theoretically framed assertions about the predicative self-dis/closure of theoretically staged objects. In these ways, scientific truth, when it is achieved, heightens the decontextualization, objective availability, discursivity, and fallibility that characterize the ordinary truth of propositions, intensifying these features to the point that they become different qualities. Achieving such heightened propositional truth is, I submit, the task of science, in the broad sense, as a social domain of knowledge. To see what all of this implies for the character of scientific work, we turn next to debates over realism concerning theoretical truth.

7.2  Scientific Realism and Theoretical Truth Debates over scientific realism have pervaded Anglo-American philosophy of science since the demise of logical empiricism in the 1950s. Insofar as these debates concern the character and extent of scientific knowledge and truth, they go to the heart of what science is and what it contributes. In fact, nearly all leading philosophers of science since the 1960s have taken positions in these debates and have offered their own versions of either support for a realist stance or opposition to it. Although a single chapter cannot do justice to the complexity and scope of such debates, I do want to indicate my own response. To achieve sufficient focus, let me restrict my attention to questions concerning theoretical truth, setting aside questions about what some philosophers call empirical truth as well as related concerns about observational and methodological accuracy. With that restriction in place, I first lay out areas of conflict between scientific realists and their opponents concerning the truth of theories (section 7.2.1). Then I give closer scrutiny to (1) the relation between theoretical truth and ordinary propositional truth and (2) the relation between theoretical truth and what van Fraassen and others call empirical adequacy (section 7.2.2). I shall argue that the pursuit of theoretical truth is fundamental for all of the sciences in a broad sense, including mathematics and the humanities. But the terms of debates over scientific realism obscure why and how this is so.

Truth and Science  169 7.2.1  Scientific Realism and Its Discontents As a general position concerning theoretical truth, scientific realism is the threefold stance that scientific theories, and the theoretical terms and assertions they involve, can be interpreted in a “literal” way; that the matters scientists theoretically describe really exist independently of such descriptions; and that scientific theories can provide true knowledge of the world or aspects and entities within it. Hence, as both Psillos and Anjan Chakravartty indicate, scientific realism involves three sorts of stances: semantic (about the “literal” interpretation of theoretical claims); ontological or metaphysical (about the mind-independent existence of what are often called “theoretical entities”—that is, the objects, events, processes, structures, and relations about which theoretical claims are made—for example, electrons, gravitational forces, molecules, and genes); and epistemological (about the sort of knowledge that theoretical claims provide) (SR xix-xxi).23 For present purposes, we can group all opponents to one or another of scientific realism’s three stances under the label scientific antirealism. Some scientific antirealists are empiricist instrumentalists. Because they think only knowledge derived from direct perception can be true, empiricist instrumentalists regard scientific theories as no more than relatively successful instruments for organizing such empirical knowledge; theories cannot provide true knowledge of what cannot be perceived, of what is not observable, they say.24 Other scientific antirealists are historicists who, in the manner of Thomas Kuhn, claim that scientific theories from two different periods of “normal science” (e.g., physics before and after Einstein’s revolutionary theory of general relativity) are mutually “incommensurable.” This claim renders either suspect or unanswerable the question which theory is more truthlike or true.25 Still other scientific antirealists are social constructivists. Informed by work in social epistemology and the sociology of scientific knowledge, social constructivists argue that various social factors so thoroughly shape the production of scientific knowledge that it makes little sense to regard scientific theories as being true, in a context-transcending way, about a mind-independent world.26 Moreover, intersecting at various points with empiricism, historicism, and social constructivism, feminist philosophy of science also often rejects scientific realism, whether because the latter presupposes a disembodied or androcentric conception of objectivity, or fails to acknowledge qualitative differences in insight due to social positioning and gendered experience, or problematically presupposes a single, all-encompassing standard of truth without due regard for the context-relativity of all truth claims.27 So, the label scientific antirealism covers a wide range of positions concerning theoretical truth. What they have in common is a tendency to challenge or reject one or more of the three stances that together

170  Truth and Science characterize scientific realism: semantic literalism concerning theoretical claims, ontological realism concerning theoretical entities, and epistemological realism concerning the status of theoretical knowledge. Although one does not need to subscribe to a correspondence theory of truth in order to be a scientific realist, a correspondence theory does seem most easily compatible with what Chakravartty calls the “general recipe” for scientific realism, namely, that “our best scientific theories give true or approximately true descriptions of observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent world.”28 This general recipe assumes both the distinction and the relation between (theoretical) propositions and (scientific) facts that correspondence theories stress. Not surprisingly, then, many scientific antirealists also take issue with correspondence theories of propositional truth, with the main exceptions to this occurring among empiricist antirealists. Accordingly, we can expect disagreements with scientific realists to pertain in part to the scope and character of this correspondence relation. Empiricists, for example, tend to limit purportedly truth-establishing correspondence to observation statements and observable facts; historicists tend to deny that either theoretical propositions or scientific facts transcend their historically dated paradigm; and social constructivists and feminists emphasize the social embeddedness of both theorizing and factfinding, thereby questioning the social autonomy of the search for theoretical truth that scientific realists tend to assume. Such conflicts over scientific realism pose a direct challenge for an approach like mine that offers an alternative to correspondence theories concerning propositions, facts, and their interrelations, and also acknowledges the historicity and social embeddedness of science as a social domain, but does not embrace either the skepticism or the relativism to which various antirealist positions are prone. Eventually, after laying out my views about the roles of science in society, I shall try to meet this challenge (see section 7.3.3). First, however, let me summarize and comment on two debates about the viability and necessity of scientific realism. I distinguish these as the historical and the structural debates. The historical debate involves positions about what, following Hilary Putnam in his early “metaphysical realist” stage, philosophers of science call the “no miracles argument.” According to Putnam, realism concerning theoretical truth “is the only philosophy that doesn’t make the success of science a miracle.”29 The structural debate, by contrast, concerns the epistemic implications that follow from the manifest underdetermination of scientific theories by the relevant data. Whereas scientific realists think such underdetermination does not imply that theories should not be believed to be truth-apt, their opponents insist that it clearly does. For each debate, I  shall single out one scientific antirealist who has forced

Truth and Science  171 scientific realists to respond: Larry Laudan, with respect to the historical debate, and Bas van Fraassen, with respect to the structural debate. 7.2.1.1  Historical Debate Assuming, as I  do, that the primary task of science is to achieve true knowledge (of a certain sort, I  would quickly add), scientific realists make two historical claims, one about a historical fact and the other about an historiographic explanation: (1) the sciences have been successful in the past, and (2) the best way to explain such success is to point to the (approximate) theoretical truth of successful scientific accounts. Scientific accounts succeed, the scientific realist says, because their theories properly align with the way the world is—that is, because their theories are “literally” true. If the theories were not true, such success would be inexplicable—it would be a miracle, as Putnam puts it. In the words of Stathis Psillos, the scientific realist claims “that accepting that successful scientific theories describe truly (or, near truly) the unobservable world best explains why these theories are empirically successful” (SR 71). In order not to be question-begging, this no miracles argument cannot equate being successful with being true. Hence, part of the historical debate pertains to what can mark the success of a scientific theory: explanation? prediction? understanding? Yet scientific antirealists tend to accept that, in some sense, scientific accounts have succeeded in the past and can be expected to succeed in the future. What antirealists dispute is that the purported truth of theories explains such success. Their objections cluster around two topics: first, questions about the legitimacy of an abductive argument of this sort, this inference to the best explanation (IBE henceforth); and second, doubts concerning the argument’s factual basis—that is, whether all or even most successful scientific theories have been true—doubts that have acquired the general label of the pessimistic induction or meta-induction. Before laying out these objections, however, let’s consider what scientific realists actually claim, using the account given by Psillos as our guide.30 Stipulating that, as a sort of IBE, the no miracles argument should be viewed as part of “a thorough externalist and naturalistic realist epistemological package” (SR 71), Psillos embraces an “explanationist” defense of scientific realism. Derived from the work of Richard Boyd, the defense boils down to three claims: (1) Scientific methodology is deeply informed and guided by the background theories that scientists accept. (2) The theory-laden methods in science reliably “lead to correct predictions and experimental success.”

172  Truth and Science (3) The best way to explain such predictive and experimental success is that “the theoretical statements which assert . . . specific causal connections or mechanisms . . . are approximately true.” (SR 78) In other words, scientific realism concerning theoretical truth provides the best explanation for scientific success. Moreover, such an explanationist defense of scientific realism employs exactly the sort of abductive inference that the sciences themselves regularly and successfully employ and thereby also defends the reliability of scientific abductive inference “in producing approximately true theories and hypotheses” (SR 79). This explanationist defense of scientific realism obviously does not assume that every theory is successful. Nor, according to Psillos, should it imply that all components of a successful theory are true and explanatory of the theory’s success. Rather, the scientific realist “should concentrate on particular theory-led successes . . . that require explanation” and should attribute such successes to theories’ containing “truth-like theoretical constituents (i.e. truth-like descriptions of causal mechanisms, entities and laws)” (SR 80–81). Even with these refinements in place, however, the no miracles argument faces two sorts of objections: first, whether such an abductive argument is legitimate and second, whether it has an adequate basis in the historical record. The objections about the argument’s legitimacy take two forms. One is that the no miracles argument is viciously circular: in employing ­abduction, it presupposes the reliability of the very form of inference— IBE—that is in dispute. Why should a critic of scientific realism grant that the best way to explain the empirical success of scientific theories is to engage in abductive inference to the best explanation? To this objection, Psillos replies that the no miracles argument does not engage in “premisecircularity.” And, to the extent that it exemplifies “rule-circularity,” the circularity is not vicious (SR 81–90). A second objection about legitimacy is that the no miracles argument does not adequately consider other explanations for the success of ­science—in other words, it commits the fallacy of converse accident or hasty generalization. Can one legitimately conclude that theoretical truth best explains predictive and experimental success if one has not really considered other, possibly better, explanations? Arthur Fine, for example, argues that the instrumental reliability of scientific theories provides a far better explanation for scientific success than does their purported truth. Although Psillos provides a specific response to Fine’s argument (SR 90–95), the larger concern it raises about hasty generalization recurs in objections to the effect that the historical basis for the no miracles argument is too thin. It is to those objections, grouped together as the pessimistic induction, that we now turn.

Truth and Science  173 Perhaps the most telling formulation of the pessimistic induction, and the one to which Psillos primarily responds, comes from Larry Laudan. Based on his groundbreaking work about the question of scientific progress,31 Laudan wrote several articles in which he forcefully refutes the scientific realists’ no miracles argument. Whereas the realist infers the truth of scientific theories from their empirical success, Laudan shows in considerable detail that, within the history of science, many theories have been empirically successful over long stretches of time, yet their deepest theoretical claims have been false. From such abundant examples, we can inductively infer (1) that a theory’s empirical success does not warrant the claim that it is (approximately) true, and (2) that currently successful theories are more likely to be false than true. If this pessimistic induction holds up, then scientific realism has been shown to fail both as a historical explanation and as an account of contemporary science.32 There are several angles from which a committed scientific realist can resist Laudan’s pessimistic induction, as Psillos shows. One is to challenge the long list of historical counterexamples that Laudan poses to the realist thesis that empirical success implies theoretical truth. The list includes the humoral theory of medicine, catastrophist geology, the phlogiston theory of chemistry, both caloric and vibratory theories of heat, and various nineteenth-century theories of ether—all of which, according to Laudan, were empirically successful in their day but are regarded as false by present-day science.33 The realist can significantly reduce this list, Psillos claims, by holding theories to a more rigorous standard of empirical success and restricting the sorts of theories that should receive serious consideration. If, for example, a theory needs to generate novel predictions and be a mature theory in order to be considered genuinely successful, then that knocks many contenders off the list of historical counterexamples (SR 108). But what about the remaining counterexamples, such as the caloric theory of heat and nineteenth-century optical ether theories?34 Here Psillos recommends and performs a “divide and conquer” move. Rather than simply accept the claim that such theories are false, Psillos suggests that certain central constituents—theoretical laws and mechanisms, for example—were once responsible for their empirical success and have been retained in “our current scientific image.” So, we cannot simply declare such theories false by our current scientific lights. Their central theoretical constituents are sufficiently “truth-like” to have generated novel predictions in the past and to continue to play a role in mature, empirically successful theories today (SR 108–113). Hence, for every forceful argument against the scientific realists’ no miracle argument, the committed scientific realist can mount an initially persuasive counterargument. Nor will this historical debate lose its significance any time soon, for a fundamental issue is at stake: namely, the character and importance of theoretical truth for science as a social

174  Truth and Science domain of knowledge. The same issue surfaces in what I have labeled the structural debate. 7.2.1.2  Structural Debate Whereas the historical debate about scientific realism revolves around the link between theoretical truth and empirical success, the structural debate concerns the relation between theoretical truth and empirical evidence. The primary question at stake is epistemic: in Psillos’s words, whether “acceptance of a mature and genuinely successful [scientific] theory should be identified with belief that the theory is approximately true” (SR 162). Scientific realists typically answer yes, and their opponents typically answer no. Van Fraassen, for example, a prominent critic of scientific realism who calls his own approach “constructive empiricism,” says that theory-acceptance does not involve belief that a theory is true but rather belief that a theory is empirically adequate. And this is in keeping with what science tries to achieve, he says: “Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate” (SI 12, italics removed). The primary reason antirealists typically give for not identifying theory acceptance with belief in a theory’s truth is that the empirical evidence for a theory does not uniquely confirm it as being true. They usually elaborate this reason in an argument from the underdetermination of (scientific) theories by (scientific) evidence, or UTE for short. The UTE argument begins with the premise, widely accepted by scientists and philosophers alike, that the same empirical evidence can well support more than one theory, even when two mature and successful theories are incompatible rivals. If two such theories are incompatible rivals, however, one cannot reasonably believe either one to be true. So, accepting either one cannot be a matter of believing it to be true. Further, for any theory, there will likely be at least one incompatible competitor that, as Lyons puts it, is “empirically on par” with that theory. And this means, contra scientific realism, that despite their empirical success (in explanation or prediction, for example), “we cannot justifiably believe that our favored theories, rather than their competitors, are (approximately) true” (OHPS 572). Formalizing the UTE argument, Psillos says it rests on two premises, the empirical equivalence thesis and the entailment thesis. The first premise says that “for any theory T and any body of observational evidence E, there is another theory T’ such that T and T’ are empirically equivalent in respect to E.” The second premise claims that “the entailment of the evidence is the only epistemic constraint on the confirmation of a theory” (SR 165). Then he proceeds to challenge each premise. With respect to the empirical equivalence thesis, Psillos concludes that at most it has local rather than global force: occasionally there might be

Truth and Science  175 empirically equivalent rival theories, but this is not the case for every theory. Moreover, when such equivalence does occur, there remain ways to decide which theory to accept as true. So too, contrary to the entailment thesis, Psillos argues both that the “empirical consequences” of a scientific hypothesis or theory do not necessarily confirm it and that empirical evidence which does confirm a hypothesis need not “logically follow” from it (SR 168–70). Hence, neither the empirical equivalence thesis nor the entailment thesis can stand, and the UTE argument fails. Like the historical IBE debate, the structural UTE debate has had many iterations, with nearly every leading philosopher of science weighing in. It does not appear that either debate will be settled soon. Nor is it my intent to endorse or advance either side in either debate. Rather, I regard these debates as emblematic of a deep disagreement about the character and importance of truth in science. They also suggest the need for a different conception of theoretical truth than the ones under dispute. That is what I plan to offer in a preliminary fashion, discussing first the relation between theoretical truth and ordinary propositional truth and then the relation between theoretical truth and empirical adequacy. 7.2.2  Theoretical Truth: Beyond Scientific Anti/Realism Earlier I characterized scientific truth as a dynamic correlation between evidence-based accuracy and discursively arguable validity, one that heightens the correlation between accuracy and inferential validity in the truth of propositions. If this characterization of scientific truth is right, then one can identify three respects in which debates about scientific realism misfire. First, they fail to distinguish sufficiently between theoretical truth and ordinary propositional truth. Second, they turn the indissoluble correlates within scientific truth into irreducible alternatives. Third, both in failing to distinguish sufficiently and in distorting indissoluble correlates, the scientific realism debates tend to reduce scientific truth—a complex relationship and process—to a single property or a fixed possession. Let me explain. 7.2.2.1  Theoretical and Propositional Truth To begin, I need to clarify my terminology. You will have noticed that sometimes I write of “scientific truth” and at other times of “theoretical truth.” These are not synonyms. Although debates over scientific realism focus on the topic of theoretical truth—the truth of theories, theoretical assertions, and theoretical terms—there is more to scientific truth than simply theoretical truth. Scientific truth pertains to the whole of what science as a social domain of knowledge seeks to achieve. Although the pursuit of theoretical truth is indispensable to such achievement, there is more to the truth of science than its theoretical truth. At a minimum,

176  Truth and Science scientific truth also includes what other philosophers might label empirical adequacy. Theoretical truth is, however, the focus of the scientific realism debates, and it is indeed indispensable to achieving scientific truth. Precisely because theoretical truth is indispensable, however, it is crucial to note a qualitative distinction between theoretical truth and ordinary propositional truth. For in no other social domain of truth, except perhaps under the impact of science in the broad sense, does the pursuit of truth require the formation and confirmation of full-fledged theories. Either the type of knowledge specific to a domain will be pre-propositional and, in that sense, also intrinsically pre-theoretical; or it will be post-propositional and, in that sense, always already oriented toward the practical implications rather than the theoretical validity of scientific work. What is a scientific theory? The answer varies dramatically among different philosophers of science, depending in part on whether mathematics, the natural sciences, the social sciences, or the humanities provide their primary subject matter, and in part on which school of thought philosophers belong to. Among schools of thought focused primarily on mathematics and the natural sciences, for example, one can contrast older logical positivist syntactic approaches (e.g., Rudolph Carnap) with more recent semantic views or model theories (e.g., van Fraassen), set-theoretic views (e.g., Patrick Suppes), and even what Hans Halvorson calls “the no-theory view” that “we needn’t ever use the word ‘theory’ in our philosophical discussions of science.”35 There is a proclivity among such approaches toward logical or mathematical formalization. Because my account of science includes the entire range of academic disciplines, however, and because I do not think such formalization can do justice to the entire range, I propose a more expansive and informal account. In my view, a scientific theory is a more or less systematic and abstract account of a delimited field of virtualized entities, developed with a view to achieving inferentially valid, objectively disclosive, discursively arguable, and evidentially grounded knowledge concerning the identities of the entities in that field and the distinctions and relations among them. A scientific field can be delimited in one of several ways: in terms of an entity-crossing aspect (e.g., physics as the theoretically informed study of all entities in their physical aspect), an entity-encompassing type (e.g., botany as the theoretically informed study of plants and plant life in their various aspects), or either transaspectual or transtypical phenomena or even phenomena that are both transaspectual and transtypical (e.g., ecology as the theoretically informed study of how different types of organisms interrelate with each other and their environment[(s]). Although some academic disciplines do not clearly circumscribe their fields of investigation in one of these ways—philosophy, arguably, being one of these exceptions—nearly all of them do, such that scientific theories,

Truth and Science  177 whether in mathematics, the natural sciences, the social sciences, or the humanities, pertain to delimited fields of virtualized entities. The term virtualized entities calls attention to my earlier claim that theoretical approaches to the objects science studies stages them for the sake of predicative self-dis/closure. “Objects,” however, is too limited a term for what scientific theories are about. Theories are not merely about the things of everyday experience that I  call practical objects but also about events, processes, structures, and relations, all within theoretically delimited fields. The term virtualized entities includes all of these. At the same time, it is misleading to call such matters, when they are perceptually unobservable, “theoretical entities.” Although the development of a theory about them does frame how they disclose themselves, they are not theoretical in the sense that they are either simply constructs of a theory or merely fixed referents for theoretical terms. For, on the one hand, theoretical terms like “electron” and “gene” could not be used successfully to refer to phenomena in the field of investigation unless the virtualized entities being studied (objects, events, processes, etc.) offered themselves for such theoretical reference. On the other hand, the entities being studied would not offer themselves in this way unless they were theoretically virtualized, approached abstractly within one aspect of their existence, for example, or with regard to one type of entity rather than others. The virtualized entities science theoretically studies are not “real” in the same sense that a practical object is real. Yet they also are not “unreal” in the sense of being mere fictions, concepts, or theoretical instruments. They are virtualized entities whose existence can be understood only in the interrelation between scientific theories and objective self-dis/closure. That is why I find it crucial to get clear about both the distinction and the relation between theoretical truth and ordinary propositional truth. A failure to do so lies at the core of the scientific realism debates. Both sides tend to assume that theoretical terms, if they refer, must refer in the manner of ordinary language.36 Scientific realists insist that they do so refer: theoretical terms like electron and gene “literally” refer to electrons and genes that really exist. Scientific antirealists deny such literal reference. Often, they also deny the existence of the entities to which theoretical terms purportedly refer. But this way of posing the problem of theoretical reference simply begs the question of whether we use theoretical terms to refer in the same way we use ordinary referring expressions like “water” or “cat.” I submit that we don’t. Rather, due to theoretical abstraction, there is a qualitative difference in the way we use theoretical terms, compared with ordinary language usage. This difference in reference connects with another qualitative difference the scientific realism debates tend to downplay, namely, the difference in manners of existence between the practical objects about which we ordinarily make propositional claims, on the one hand, and the virtualized

178  Truth and Science entities about which we make theoretical claims in science, on the other. Ordinary practical objects exist in relation to an array of daily human practices, and they predicatively self-disclose in relation to ordinary linguistic practices of reference and predication. The virtualized entities in a scientifically delimited field, by contrast, exist in relation to theoretical practices of inquiry and debate, and they self-dis/close within that relation. These virtualized entities really do exist, but not in the manner of ordinary practical objects. Not only do theoretical reference and the existence of theoretically virtualized entities qualitatively differ from ordinary reference and how practical objects exist but also the validity that matters most in scientific truth qualitatively differs from the inferential validity required for the truth of ordinary propositions. Inferential validity is, of course, also required in scientific work. Indeed, some of the most heated debates among ­philosophers of science have pertained to which form of ­inference—deductive, inductive, or abductive—best secures s­cientific truth. Yet, more than ordinary inferential validity is required. This “more” pertains to the difference between ordinary inferential validity and what I call theoretical validity. As I shall explain, theoretical validity both poses more stringent expectations and displays more variable meaning than does ordinary inferential validity. Theoretical validity is the overarching normative horizon within which scientific theories and their components (models, laws, hypotheses, assertions, terms, and the like) are developed, proposed, tested, and revised or rejected. In theorizing, it is not enough to strive for fidelity to the societal principle of logical validity. One must also try to adhere to the principle of theoretical validity. What this actually comes to varies from one discipline or group of disciplines to the next. In general, however, the pursuit of theoretical validity requires that the hypotheses entertained and the assertions made be coherent within the framework of the (emerging) theory. This requirement, perhaps more than any other, helps explain the (more or less) systematic quality of scientific theorizing. Due to the abstract character of scientific theories, validity within them also means that theoretical truth claims aim to have both universal scope and precise delimitation. On the one hand, theoretical truth claims are supposed to hold for the entire range of virtualized entities within a scientific field and be valid for anyone who takes a scientific theory seriously. On the other hand, when scientific work is done well, the theoretical truth claims made should not purport to hold without question for entities outside the field or unavoidably invalidate propositional truth claims within other social domains. Moreover, because of the reflexive discursivity of scientific knowledge, the pursuit of theoretical validity requires a special kind of normative reflection and assertoric conduct. In scientific inquiry, it is not enough to appeal to a widely shared societal principle for thought (i.e., logical

Truth and Science  179 validity) and wait until challenged before trying to confirm one’s assertion. Instead, the scientific inquirer must consider all along how well one’s theoretical assertions fit the theory and should demonstrate, at least in a preliminary fashion, why and how they fit. Whereas ordinary propositional truth claims need not be argued in order to be legitimate, theoretical truth claims, to be legitimate, must be argued claims and must always remain open to further argument. It is intrinsic to theoretical truth claims that they are discursively arguable. Accordingly, theoretical validity itself, unlike ordinary logical validity, is intrinsically a discursively arguable principle, one that continually calls for discourse concerning its meaning in the very process of our adhering to it. To summarize: As the overarching normative horizon of scientific inquiry and its results, theoretical validity is the discursively arguable societal principle that enjoins theoretical coherence and properly delimited universality in the pursuit of scientific truth. It is both more stringent in the expectations it poses and more variable in the meaning it holds than the principle of logical validity is. Yet it presupposes the latter principle, and if people did not pursue logical validity in ordinary thought, the societal purpose for pursuing scientific truth would become opaque. That is one reason why post-truth politics—propositional-truth-dismissing politics—is so threatening to science as a social domain. All of this implies, in turn, not only that the distinctions and relations between propositional and theoretical truth matter but also that the notion of scientific truth needs to be reconceived. In the first instance, scientific truth is not a fixed property that one can simply (realistically) assign or (antirealistically) deny with respect to a theory or theoretical assertion or theoretical term. Instead, scientific truth is a complex relationship and process within which specific theories or assertions or terms can emerge. In this sense, any theory or theoretical assertion, if it is true, will be “approximately” true: not, pace Psillos, because “exact truth” cannot be had concerning what is unobservable,37 and not, pace van Fraassen, because the most we can reasonably claim about a successful scientific theory is that it is “empirically adequate” (SI 12), but because scientific truth is not the sort of thing that theories, assertions, and terms can simply have or lack. For scientific truth, as I’ve already suggested, is a dynamic correlation between validity and disclosure of a unique sort: between theoretical validity and virtualized self-dis/closure. Unfortunately, as I now hope to show, the scientific realism debate treats these not as indissoluble correlates but as irreducible alternatives, in the form of an apparent opposition between empirical adequacy and theoretical truth. 7.2.2.2  Empirical Adequacy and Theoretical Truth As we saw earlier, the two leading scientific realism debates among philosophers of science pertain to the relation between theoretical truth and

180  Truth and Science empirical matters. The historical debate over the no miracles argument raises questions about the link, if any, between theoretical truth and the empirical success of a scientific theory. The structural debate over the epistemology of theory acceptance raises concerns about the relation between theoretical truth claims and empirical evidence. The background to these debates in a now-discredited logical empiricism is not hard to find. Once Quine and others had dismissed the logical empiricists’ verifiability criterion of meaning, new accounts were needed for the relation between theoretical statements, which seem to raise claims to knowledge and truth but cannot all be empirically confirmed, and the observation statements on which logical empiricists had hung their alethic hats. It is against this background that Psillos portrays scientific realists like himself as “epistemic optimists.” For realists reason, he says, “that science can and does attain theoretical truth no less [than] it can and does obtain observational truth” (SR 185). Empiricist antirealists, by contrast, are considerably less optimistic, he says, for they are agnostic about whether anyone can have sufficient justification to believe that theoretical assertions are “literally” true. Among the most sophisticated of these empiricist agnostics is Bas van Fraassen. Psillos devotes an entire chapter to scrutinizing van Fraassen’s “constructive empiricism.” Without going into the intricacies of either van Fraassen’s position or Psillos’s alternative, let me highlight some matters in dispute, in order to introduce pertinent issues for my own account of scientific truth. According to Psillos, van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism tries to skirt the question whether we should be agnostic about the truth of theoretical assertions and says we should ask instead “whether . . . we need to be epistemic optimists” about attaining theoretical truth (SR 191). Van Fraassen answers that we don’t. It suffices, for the purposes of giving a philosophical account of science, to say “science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate.” A scientific theory is empirically adequate, van Fraassen explains, “if what it says about the observable things and events in this world, is true” (SI 12, italics removed).38 Van Fraassen juxtaposes his concept of empirical adequacy to the scientific realists’ emphasis on theoretical truth as the primary aim of scientific inquiry. On each topic where scientific realism would emphasize theoretical truth—the structure of science (i.e., the relation between theory and empirical content), the role of scientific methodology, the importance of explanatory power—van Fraassen’s account re-emphasizes the empirical adequacy of theories, not their truth, as the primary aim of science. Hence, for example, van Fraassen accounts for the empirical “content” or “import” of a scientific theory in terms of an alignment between “actual appearances” and what he calls the “empirical structures” of the models this theory specifies. For that is what matters in science: establishing the empirical adequacy of theories and sorting out their empirical

Truth and Science  181 equivalence, not believing in the truth of theories with respect to unobservable matters (SI 64). In keeping with this view of scientific structure, van Fraassen also emphasizes the intimate methodological intertwinement between experimentation and theory construction in the sciences. Again, the point is to construct and test empirically adequate theories, not to achieve and empirically confirm theoretical truth (SI 73–80). So too, whereas other philosophers of science might regard explanation as a primary aim of scientific inquiry, and explanatory power as a strong independent reason for accepting a scientific theory, he accounts for these as pragmatic factors having to do with the contexts in which scientific theories are developed. Unlike epistemic virtues such as logical consistency and empirical adequacy, which have to do with either the internal syntax of a theory or its semantic relation to the world, explanatory power is a pragmatic virtue, van Fraassen says, and it does not provide evidence for the truth of a theory. Indeed, explanation is not even a central aim of science (SI 97–157).39 Not surprisingly, when a scientific realist like Stathis Psillos criticizes van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, he tries to show that empirical adequacy fails to explain such features of science, whereas theoretical truth succeeds. Moreover, Psillos argues that the constructive empiricist account of scientific structure relies on a problematic notion of observability (SR 193–200), despite van Fraassen’s own critique of the logical empiricist division between observational and theoretical language (SI 13–19, 53–56). Contra van Fraassen, if theories can be true about observable phenomena, then there is no reason why they cannot be true about what is purportedly unobservable. So too, refining an argument initially proposed by Putnam that van Fraassen himself addresses (SI 83–87, 222n5), Psillos claims that only the truth of a theory, not its empirical adequacy, can account for the gains in “observational consequences” and empirical “confirmation” that come from conjoining two distinct and accepted theories (SR 204–11). Moreover, in opposition to van Fraassen’s “attempt to sweep explanation under the carpet of information,” Psillos holds that comparative judgments about different (potential) explanations typically consider whether and to what extent the explanations confirm the truth of certain theoretical beliefs by, for example, yielding novel predictions (SR 224). If theoretical truth were not the primary aim of science, then, according to Psillos, neither the explanatory power of scientific theories nor the theory-laden character of empirical evidence nor the alethic basis for conjoining theories would make sense. By juxtaposing the empirical adequacy of scientific theories to their theoretical truth, the dispute over scientific realism quickly leads to an apparent impasse, one that recalls the conflict over alethic realism I canvassed in chapter 5. Just as, in that conflict, Putnam and Alston seemed to

182  Truth and Science talk past each other, despite the seriousness of their engagement and the sophistication of their arguments, so too, in the scientific realism dispute, interlocutors such as van Fraassen and Psillos seem either unwilling or unable to consider the insights their opponents offer. At the same time, however, both the intensity of these debates and their irresolvable character stem, it seems to me, from the fact that the opposing sides share a problematic conception of truth—propositional truth, in the conflict over alethic realism, and both theoretical and scientific truth, in the dispute over scientific realism. Earlier I  tried to incorporate insights from both sides in the alethic realism conflict by proposing a conception of propositional truth that supersedes them, in a position I labeled “post-anti/realism.” Now let me attempt something similar with respect to the scientific realism dispute, showing how my proposed conception of scientific truth can incorporate elements from both sides but go beyond both and thereby move beyond the dispute itself. Just as the key to sorting out the alethic realism conflict was to reconceive the relation between propositional truth claims and discursive confirmation, so perhaps the best way to move through the scientific realism dispute and beyond it is to reconsider the relation between theoretical truth claims and their empirical confirmation. Whereas an empiricist antirealist such as van Fraassen, with his emphasis on empirical adequacy, rightly insists that theoretical truth claims need to be empirically confirmed (although van Fraassen would not express it like that), a scientific realist such as Psillos, with his emphasis on theoretical truth, rightly argues that such claims cannot be empirically confirmed unless they are true. Because both sides conceive of scientific truth along the lines of a semantic relation between statements and entities, however, they quickly land in a dispute about whether theoretical assertions and terms “literally” refer and whether “theoretical entities” really exist. In this way, empirical adequacy and theoretical truth come to be set in opposition, rather than being recognized as correlates within a more encompassing conception of scientific truth. On my view, the empirical adequacy of a scientific theory points to the degree to which the truth of the theory can be empirically confirmed, whether through the successful explanations and predictions the theory supports or through other means. It would be a mistake, however, to limit the empirical to the observable, as van Fraassen tends to do. Such a limitation assumes a truncated understanding of human experience, which includes a large array of different human practices, only some of which are perceptual. It would also misconstrue the methods of empirical confirmation in many academic disciplines, especially hermeneutical approaches in the humanities and qualitative research in the social sciences. To be empirically confirmed, the truth of a scientific theory must be borne out with respect to the practices and objects of daily life—­ practices and objects that are more diverse than mere perceptions, even

Truth and Science  183 when instruments and experiments extend the range of what is “observable.” Moreover, such bearing out of theoretical truth is always, in a sense, indirect, for it requires that theoretical truth claims be grounded in appropriate interactions with the entities investigated, and these are methodically regulated interactions designed to provide evidence. To be more precise, the empirical confirmation of theoretical truth, like the discursive confirmation of propositional truth, revolves around two complementary practices: the justification of theoretical truth claims, and their corroboration. Whereas justification primarily pertains to questions of validity, corroboration primarily pertains to accuracy. Because, in my view, scientific truth involves a dynamic correlation between discursively arguable validity and evidence-based accuracy, the empirical confirmation of theoretical truth claims requires both justification and corroboration. I have already highlighted the discursive reflexivity of scientific knowledge and truth: the need to argue for the theoretical validity of one’s claims and findings is built into the pursuit of scientific truth. What I have not emphasized, however, is how this need for theoretical discursive justification is part and parcel of the process of empirical confirmation. Empirical confirmation is not just a matter of finding satisfactory evidence for the accuracy of scientific truth claims. It is also a matter of connecting such evidence-based accuracy with discursively arguable theoretical validity. In other words, the truth of a scientific account needs to be borne out simultaneously in both its theoretically justifiable inferences and its methodically secured evidence. In this sense, there is no reason to privilege either theoretical truth or empirical adequacy. As a specialized correlation between validity and accuracy, scientific truth requires both. The empirical confirmation of a theory does not make it true, but the purported truth of a theory always calls for empirical confirmation. Accordingly, it would be a mistake to limit the notion of scientific truth to theoretical truth and then construe theoretical truth as no more than a semantic relation between theoretical claims and theoretical entities, as Psillos tends to do. Scientific truth involves a complex relationship in which (1) the accuracy of scientific claims with respect to the self-dis/ closure of virtualized entities (whether “observable” or not) needs to be borne out by methodically developed evidence, (2) the validity of such claims needs to be justified with reference to the theory that frames them, and (3) the evidence-based accuracy of a scientific account must dynamically correlate with its discursively arguable validity. To pursue truth in science is to aim to be faithful (“true”) to a heightened principle of logical validity (i.e., theoretical validity) in the process of letting theoretically virtualized entities self-dis/close, always with a view to empirically confirming (i.e., both justifying and corroborating) our claims and findings. Hence, a true theory needs to be empirically adequate in the sense of being empirically confirmed, and the empirical adequacy of a theory bears

184  Truth and Science witness to its truth. Empirical adequacy and theoretical truth should not be pitted against each other, nor should one be reduced to the other, for scientific truth requires both: the correlated validity and accuracy of a scientific account need to be borne out in scientific practice. Indeed, truth in science cannot be reduced to a single property or a fixed possession. It is in the process of theoretically investigating a delimited field of virtualized entities and empirically confirming our claims and findings that scientific truth unfolds. It unfolds as a dynamic correlation between fidelity to the principle of theoretical validity and the predicative self-dis/closure of virtualized entities in the field under investigation. The truth of a particular claim or finding always stems from that process and links back to it. Such a post-anti/realist conception of scientific truth leaves behind the shadows logical empiricism has cast on philosophy of science since the 1950s. It also helps address contemporary concerns about the role of science in society, as I now intend to show.

7.3  Science in Society I have characterized scientific truth as a dynamic correlation between theoretical validity and evidence-based accuracy, the results of which are to be both justified and corroborated in scientific practice. That characterization might seem to put my conception at odds with the antirealist philosophies of science that can be grouped together as types of sociohistorical contextualism, especially historicist, poststructuralist, social constructivist, and feminist approaches. All of these approaches emphasize the social and historical situatedness of knowledge, including scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is situated, contextualists say, within a historical paradigm or disciplinary matrix (Kuhn) or within a historical episteme or regime of truth (Foucault); or situated within an array of social forces (David Bloor); or situated with respect to social markers of identity such as race, class, and gender (Lorraine Code). My emphasizing theoretical abstraction and discursive reflexivity as characteristics of scientific knowledge, along with my portraying scientific truth as a correlation between theoretical validity and evidence-based accuracy, might suggest that I  do not regard science as situated in any of these ways. Nevertheless, I  have called science in the broad sense a social domain of knowledge and truth, and I consider it one of several such domains within society as a whole. What does it mean to call science a social domain of truth? What implications flow from the proposed conception of scientific truth for the roles of science in society? And how does my view of these roles respond to the issues raised by sociohistorical contextualism concerning scientific truth? To address these questions, let me take up three topics: first, what the pursuit of scientific truth legitimately contributes to society (section  7.3.1); second, which societal tendencies block or distort such

Truth and Science  185 contributions (section 7.3.2); and third, what implications follow from such considerations for sociohistorical contextualism with respect to scientific truth (section 7.3.3). Throughout, I shall emphasize what I call the relational autonomy of science. 7.3.1  Social Legitimacy My calling science a social domain of knowledge and truth presupposes the social ontology sketched in chapter 4. There I introduced a triaxial model of how social life is organized. Along the first axis, I said, interpersonal relations, cultural practices, and social institutions configure human actions and interactions. These frameworks of social interaction intersect a second axis, namely, three macrostructures—civil society, proprietary economy, and administrative state—that govern much of social life in contemporary society. And, along a third axis, an array of societal principles such as solidarity, resourcefulness, and justice obtain for social life within both the frameworks of social interaction and the macrostructures of society. I also explained that the notion of a social domain of knowledge and truth pertains primarily to the first and third axes: that is, to how interpersonal relations, cultural practices, and social institutions configure social life, and which societal principles obtain for life within these configurations. The primary social domains of truth are specific constellations of relations, practices, institutions, and principles, all of which emerge and change historically, and none of which is normatively more decisive than others for the unfolding of truth as a whole. To call science a social domain of truth, then, is to identify it as a specific constellation of social patterns and societal principles within which we can attain a certain sort of insight. Whereas a historicist or poststructuralist would emphasize the historical contingency of particular scientific theories and claims, I affirm the intrinsically historical character of science as such: this specific constellation of social patterns and societal principles has emerged historically as one social domain alongside others, and it develops in tandem with them. And whereas a social constructivist or social epistemologist would stress the social forces or social markers of identity that impinge on scientific inquiry, I insist on its inherent sociality: scientific inquiry is carried out by people who are always already socially interrelated by way of intrinsically cultural practices of inquiry and within historically evolving social institutions of schooling, research, and the like. So, social factors like new technologies, political and economic pressures, or identity-based struggles for justice and recognition are not irrelevant for understanding the task of science and its role in society. Yet they are not the primary ways in which science is a social domain of knowledge and truth. Instead, the primary ways in which science is a

186  Truth and Science social domain have to do with what sorts of agents and agencies engage in scientific inquiry, which practices, objects, and results characterize such inquiry, what societal principles hold for these practices and results (including their confirmation), and which social institutions primarily organize attempts to follow these principles. To describe scientific knowledge in terms of abstraction and reflexivity or to circumscribe scientific truth in terms of theoretical validity and evidence-based accuracy does not ignore or deny the social and historical situatedness of scientific knowledge. Instead, it tries to specify the actual sociohistorical character of science as such. Another way to put this is to say that theoretical abstraction and discursive reflexivity have emerged historically as primary characteristics of the sort of knowledge we now call scientific (in the broad sense), and there are many historiographic accounts of how this has happened.40 So too, the specific correlation between fidelity and disclosure that characterizes scientific truth has emerged historically and has taken definite shape in a certain societal formation. Hence, for example, the specific epistemic and alethic character of modern science is inextricably bound up with the development of an industrial and capitalist economy, a shift toward more democratic forms of governance, and the emergence of a deliberative public sphere. Moreover, economic globalization, political polarization, and the ubiquity of new social media in contemporary society tend to raise questions about the legitimacy and importance of what I have characterized as scientific truth. Yet, to characterize scientific truth, and not simply to ignore the normative question of what science should pursue—that is, what its societal task is—one must pay attention to the internal workings of science as a sociohistorically developed domain of knowledge. 7.3.1.1  Pursuing Scientific Truth In other words, to call science in the broad sense a social domain is to say that it is an autonomous branch of knowledge with its own legitimate task. Yet it is also to say that the autonomy of science, like the autonomy of art, is relational: science has its own legitimate task in relation to other social domains and by virtue of various institutional interrelations, both those that help constitute science as a social domain and those that help sustain it. Such distinctive legitimacy-in-relation takes three forms: as interpersonal autonomy in how people pursue scientific truth; as internal autonomy in how, as an interrelated social domain, science has a distinctive task and makes distinctive contributions; and as societal autonomy in how the institutions of science relate to other social institutions and, especially, to societal macrostructures. The issues of interpersonal autonomy pertain to what Merton calls the “ethos of modern science,” which he distilled in the four institutional

Truth and Science  187 imperatives discussed earlier: universalism, communality, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. These imperatives concern the right sorts of conduct in science, the procedures and professional patterns that support them, and the types of schools and research organizations that make such conduct possible. To pursue scientific truth, people must relate to each other in the right way, and the practices and institutions of science must support and enable such interrelations. Given a methodological bias toward individualism in much of contemporary social science, it is not surprising that, when it comes to questions about the autonomy of science, interpersonal relations receive greatest attention in contemporary sociology of science. They also tend to receive more attention from philosophers of science than the other two forms of science-related autonomy do, under the heading “ethics of science.”41 I, by contrast, wish to focus on what I  have labeled internal autonomy and societal autonomy. For without these, interpersonal autonomy in the conduct of science would lose its point: science would no longer be the distinctive social domain of truth I have claimed it to be. By internal autonomy I mean the characteristics that help distinguish science from other social domains of truth and make it both intrinsically worthwhile and societally important. To ask about the internal autonomy of science is to inquire into its legitimate task, in distinction from other domains and in relation to them. It is also to wonder about the domainspecific contributions that science can make to truth as a whole. These questions imply, in turn, that other social domains also have their own distinctive legitimate tasks and that, in fulfilling these, they can make their own domain-specific contributions to truth as a whole. Recall that I  have characterized truth in general as a dynamic correlation between human fidelity to societal principles and a life-giving disclosure of society. Truth in each social domain echoes and participates in this general process and structure. So too does scientific truth, as a dynamic correlation between being faithful to the societal principle of theoretical validity and pursuing the predicative self-dis/closure of virtualized entities. It is in carrying out this specific correlation that science has its distinctive and legitimate task in society and makes its own contributions to truth as a whole. That this task is distinctive is not hard to see. Many philosophers and historians of science remark on how different scientific knowledge is from nonscientific knowledge, even though they disagree about how to characterize scientific knowledge. From my own previous descriptions of artistic truth and religious truth, which chapter 9 expands, it is also apparent why philosophers who strongly privilege scientific truth have a hard time regarding cogently imaginative disclosure and trustingly worshipful disclosure as types of truth. For these are quite different from the theoretically valid and virtualized objective self-dis/closure that science pursues.

188  Truth and Science What makes the task of pursuing scientific truth legitimate? The social legitimacy of this task does not come from the technological “applications” or economic “payoffs” or political “advantages” that might accompany the pursuit of scientific truth. Rather, the pursuit is socially legitimate insofar as it arises from the ordinary practices and results of propositional truth and modifies them. The truth that science pursues takes the ordinary correlation of inferential validity and propositional accuracy to a new level of precision and scope that is otherwise unavailable in daily life. Yet the enactment of this ordinary correlation—propositional truth—is intrinsic to human life in society. So, the pursuit of scientific truth is legitimate to the extent that it arises from ordinary propositional truth and takes it to a new level. If, due to either institutional failures or macrostructural pressures, science were to lose touch with its grounding in ordinary propositional knowledge, the pursuit of scientific truth would lose its social legitimacy. Let me explain. In our daily social interactions, we ordinarily rely on the insights we gain via practical engagements with others and with the shared objects of our practices. When appropriate, we can articulate such beliefs, often in the form of assertions, and normally we assume our beliefs are reliable and our assertions correct. In many situations, however, we find others do not share our beliefs or they disagree with our assertions. We also discover many matters with respect to which we don’t know what to believe or why we assert what we do. Science in the broad sense has the task of both addressing such gaps in our propositional knowledge and taking our beliefs and assertions to a different level, one where the propositional claims made are much more precise and the matters they help uncover are much more thoroughly disclosed. If scientific inquiry is done well, and if its results become publicly available in the right way, it can enhance the reliability of our beliefs and the correctness of our assertions. In other words, the pursuit of scientific truth can enrich and strengthen the pursuit of propositional truth in ordinary social life. That is the key to its social legitimacy. None of this happens without conflict and disruption, of course. In societies where science has become a prominent social domain of truth, there is continual pressure either to dismiss scientific findings and claims simply because they challenge accepted beliefs and assertions or to reject ordinary beliefs and assertions simply because they are not scientific. If my account of scientific truth is on the right track, however, then we should see such struggles over the legitimacy of science as both unavoidable and potentially beneficial, provided they are not irreparably distorted by other pressures. For the pursuit of scientific truth both arises from and significantly differs from the ordinary pursuit of propositional truth.

Truth and Science  189 7.3.1.2  Distinctive Contributions The heightening of precision and scope achieved by pursuing scientific truth helps explain the distinctive contributions science can make both to other social domains of truth and to truth as a whole. Take as an example the complex field of health care. Many who lived through the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2022 became acutely aware of how significantly adequate health care depends on scientifically informed expertise. This is most obvious, perhaps, in the development and delivery of appropriate medical procedures and effective new vaccines. But it also shows up in statistical tracking of cases and trends, continually updated recommendations for hygienic practices (masking, social distancing, and the like), and the development of new platforms for communication in both business and personal life. Not so obvious, perhaps, but equally important have been historical studies that uncover precedents and exceptions to contemporary life under pandemic conditions, social-psychological investigations of isolation, grief, and loss, and crossdisciplinary interrogations of the patterns of racism and oppression that show up as inequities in access to adequate health care and reinforce these. Although one cannot ignore the highly politicized rejection of scientific expertise by surprisingly many, at least in the United States, the extent to which such expertise, across many academic disciplines, informs the provision of adequate health care is indeed remarkable. Without the science that informs such expertise, we would likely be ignorant of the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19, have few clues about how exactly it infects people, mutates, and spreads, be perpetually guessing about how to treat or prevent it, share little more than anecdotal memories of pandemic conditions in the past, and be even more unprepared to address patterns of injustice and suffering. That’s why science’s heightening of precision and scope matters. By itself, pursuing scientific truth does not “solve” any of these “problems.” But without it, we would have more difficulty pursuing truth in other social domains. What science can contribute to truth as a whole is to make our fidelity to societal principles more precise and to extend the scope of life-giving disclosure. On the one hand, by pursuing scientific truth when investigating other social domains, we can more carefully examine the meaning and implications of other societal principles. In the contexts of law and government, for example, we undoubtedly have working understandings of what it means to pursue social justice and what indicates whether social justice is achieved. When we hold these understandings up to scientific scrutiny, however, we can both refine them and examine whether in fact our institutions of law and government foster and further social justice.

190  Truth and Science On the other hand, the pursuit of scientific truth with respect to other social domains also enables us to establish more comprehensively than otherwise what interconnected flourishing actually comes to. With regard to the biosphere, for example, we would be hard-pressed to understand how best to sustain life on Earth, today and into the future, without persistent scientific study of global climate change and its multiple ramifications. Moreover, without such study, citizens and governments would have a limited understanding of how, for example, the pursuit of social justice can and should link up with concerns about global sustainability. In these ways, and in many others, the pursuit of scientific truth can help refine and expand correlations between fidelity and disclosure in other social domains. That, in turn, enables a society to scrutinize the current sociohistorical shape of these correlations and consider new visions of what society needs and what truth as a whole might require. Although such visionary social critique might seem remote from how work in the sciences actually proceeds, it is, I submit, the most decisive reason why the pursuit of scientific truth—in itself a legitimate social task—is important in society and significant for truth as a whole. 7.3.2  Societal Autonomy The pursuit of scientific truth would not have societal importance if it occurred in a societal vacuum. Not only must other social domains lend support, but also other social institutions must not block, distort, or derail this pursuit. Conversely, however, the pursuit of scientific truth also should not come at the expense of other types of truth, and sciencerelated institutions of education, research, and communication should not lose sight of the central task that gives science social legitimacy. In other words, the internal autonomy of science depends on its societal autonomy, just as the societal autonomy of science presupposes its internal autonomy. The societal autonomy of science refers to its having the requisite mixture of independence and interdependence with respect to other social domains and social institutions. This mixture takes different shapes under different sociohistorical conditions. During the time of Galileo, when religious institutions had much more power in Europe than they have today, the pursuit of scientific truth unavoidably required an intense struggle with religious authorities. Today, however, and not only in Europe, the primary threats to science’s societal autonomy come from how two macrostructural systems, one of them economic and the other political, impinge on the institutions of science and from how the institutions of science feed into these systems. Obviously, this is a huge and controversial topic, one I  can barely sketch here. Nevertheless, it is a crucial topic, since so much of what science can offer to the pursuit of truth as a whole depends on how the

Truth and Science  191 institutions of science interlink with other social institutions. To make the topic more manageable, let me focus on the university as a center in civil society for science-related education, research, and communication, leaving aside other science-related organizations such as commercial research and development, government science agencies, and independent think tanks. Despite the proliferation of such organizations in recent decades, universities remain central to education, research, and communication in all the academic disciplines. As I have explained elsewhere,42 two systemic macrostructures govern much of social life in contemporary society across the various social institutions and social domains. One is the proprietary economic system of global capitalism. The other is the political system known as the administrative state, as evidenced by different governments at different levels (national, regional, and local) and in different countries. On my diagnosis, these two pervasive systems are both structurally problematic and normatively deficient. They are structurally problematic because they tend to dominate other social institutions and undermine their potential contributions to social life. Habermas calls this hegemonic tendency the “colonization of the lifeworld.”43 The dominant economic and political systems are also normatively deficient. Whereas, in my view, the proper task of a modern economy is to carefully steward all of Earth’s potentials for the sake of interconnected flourishing, the global capitalist economy thrives on exploiting such potentials for private profit.44 Moreover, this economic distortion of the societal principle of resourcefulness simultaneously undermines the pursuit of solidarity and justice in other social institutions. Similarly, whereas the proper task of constitutionally democratic governments is to secure and maintain public justice among the individuals, communities, and institutions within their jurisdictions, the administrative state system thrives on harnessing this task to the pursuit of political privilege and bureaucratic control. This political distortion of the societal principle of justice simultaneously reinforces capitalism’s economic distortion of resourcefulness and undermines the pursuit of solidarity in other social institutions. 7.3.2.1  Systemic Pressures As centers for education, research, and communication, universities are not as such primarily economic or political institutions, nor is it their task simply to maintain and further the capitalist and administrativestate systems. Nevertheless, universities do unavoidably have economic and political dimensions, and the pursuit of their missions necessarily relies on the operations of economic and political systems, most obviously, perhaps, in the commercialization of research findings and the procurement of government funding. As a consequence, despite their relative

192  Truth and Science independence and purported prestige, universities are no less susceptible to the structural problems and normative distortions of capitalism and the administrative state than are noncommercial and nongovernmental organizations in health care and the arts. Two systemic pressures in particular pose an ongoing threat to the relative independence of universities and thereby to the societal autonomy of science. One, stemming primarily from how the capitalist economy operates, I call hypercommercialization. The other, stemming primarily from how the administrative state works, I call performance fetishism. Hypercommercialization is the tendency to treat the agents, practices, and results that are decisive for the social legitimacy of science as primarily or even exclusively economic commodities. Signs of this tendency include marketing higher education for the competitive advantages it allegedly secures for students in domestic and international labor markets; restructuring universities according to narrowly construed cost/ benefit ratios, which usually work to the disadvantage of supposedly less “popular” or “commercially viable” fields in the arts and humanities; and steering fundamental research, especially in the STEM disciplines but also in the social sciences, toward projects that either attract corporate investments or generate new revenue streams. The long-term effect of such trends is not hard to foresee. When internalized by universities and left unchecked, hypercommercialization undermines the pursuit of scientific truth and thereby destroys the social legitimacy of science. The other systemic pressure—performance fetishism—is the tendency to subordinate all decisions about planning, governance, and daily operations at a university to strategic calculations with narrowly defined and measurable outcomes. Along with this tendency comes an explosion of administrative offices and positions aimed at steering university teaching, research, and communication toward calculable results. Indications of such calculative bureaucratization include the “retooling” of university curriculum and pedagogy to achieve immediate “effectiveness”; the substitution of administrative decision-making for deliberative faculty governance; and the replacement of full-time faculty with more easily managed (and supposedly cheaper!) part-time and adjunct faculty. Pressure in these directions often stems from how governments gear their oversight and funding toward indicators of performance and output that can be bureaucratically certified. When universities fully internalize the bureaucratic “logic” of the administrative state, the pursuit of scientific truth becomes either a secondary “objective” or a quaint relic of the “pre-rational” past. Again, the social legitimacy of science is destroyed. Universities are not innocent victims of systemic pressures beyond their control, however. For the systems from which these pressures stem depend heavily on academic input, and universities themselves have internalized tendencies toward hypercommercialization and performance fetishism. That makes the proper interlinkage between universities and other social

Truth and Science  193 institutions all the more important, not only for the societal autonomy of science but also for the normative redirection of societal macrostructures and for the structural transformation of society as whole. 7.3.2.2  Transforming Universities Three developments strike me as especially crucial to science’s achieving the requisite mixture of independence and interdependence with respect to other social institutions under current macrostructural conditions. First, universities need to renew and strengthen their ties with other institutions and organizations in civil society. Second, universities need to create or reinvigorate internal means to resist the systemic pressures of hypercommercialization and performance fetishism. Third, universities need to redirect their science-related education, research, and communication toward challenging the structural hegemony and normative distortions of global capitalism and the administrative state. Each of these developments would both presuppose and promote a robust understanding and pursuit of scientific truth. Earlier I described the university as a center in civil society for sciencerelated education, research, and communication, with the understanding that “science” encompasses all the academic disciplines. Accordingly, to properly fulfill its mission, the university needs to align itself with the concerns of civil society. Here civil society is viewed as an informal macrostructure within which a diffuse array of institutions, organizations, and social movements foster social interaction in the arts, education, public media, social advocacy, and other fields. Economically, civil society gives priority to a social economy, in what I call the civic sector: an economic zone inhabited by cooperative, nonprofit, and mutual benefit organizations. Politically, civil society gives priority to democratic communication, in a vast network of media and publics that I call the public sphere. The primary societal principle to which this informal macrostructure responds is not either (capitalistically distorted) resourcefulness or (administratively distorted) justice but rather the call to pursue solidarity in society. By solidarity, I mean the expectation within modern democratic societies that no individual, group, or community should be excluded from the recognition people owe each other as fellow human beings. Understood as a center in civil society, the university would not see its mission as either promoting a capitalist economy or advancing the agenda of the administrative state. Instead, its mission would consist in fostering a sociocultural good in the interests of society-wide solidarity. That sociocultural good, as I  understand it, is the pursuit of scientific truth. The best way to foster this, and thereby also to resist the pressures of hypercommercialization and performance fetishism, would be to align the university more decisively with other institutions and organizations

194  Truth and Science in civil society—community health providers, nonprofit arts organizations, public museums, noncommercial primary and secondary schools, and the like. Community-based research, service learning, and universitybased centers for social ethics are among the ways this alignment already takes place. If carried out with sufficient vigor and care, (re-)alignment with civil society would help redirect the university’s priorities, while also strengthening the networks of solidarity in civil society that, like the university itself, are under constant systemic pressures. It would also allow the university to provide more effective forums for public deliberation about social issues and public policy. By renewing and strengthening their ties with other institutions in civil society, universities would more fully become the centers for dialogical learning, critical inquiry, and creative exploration that they have long aspired to be. Such (re-)alignment will not occur, however, unless universities also either create or reinvigorate internal means to resist systemic pressures. For universities have internalized hypercommercialization and performance fetishism, and they directly contribute to the economic and political macrostructures that induce such systemic pressures. Signs of this are not hard to find. So much of university-based research, e­specially in the so-called hard sciences, is either government-funded or commercially driven, and increasingly it takes place under the umbrella of “Big Science” (e.g., the Human Genome Project) and with the means of “big data.” As Helen Longino and others have pointed out, these trends raise difficult questions about trust and authority in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.45 They also make even more urgent the need to challenge systemic pressures within universities, for the sake of their solidaristic mission to foster the pursuit of scientific truth. I can envision two means of resistance. One is to create or reinvigorate university-based centers for public education and deliberation about science policy. These centers would allow citizens, scholars, and students to debate the direction of scientific education and research and to have their debates inform the decisions scholars make about the priorities, topics, conduct, and societal implications of their research projects. This would provide an alternative to simply having research agendas set by the dominant sources of funding. A second means would be to promote critical reflection on the societal implications of scientific endeavors within self-evaluations for internal and external funding (e.g., research grant applications), professional promotion (e.g., tenure reviews), and departmental or divisional program reviews. These would be self-evaluations, not external evaluations, designed to respect the integrity of scientific work but not to allow the autonomy of science to function as a smoke screen for systemic business as usual. They would also be more qualitative than quantitative, thereby counteracting the pressure toward calculative rationality.

Truth and Science  195 In addition to realigning with civil society and internally resisting systemic pressures, universities need to give institution-wide priority to a critique of current economic and political systems. This critique would be both structural and normative. Structurally, it would expose and question the ways in which the capitalist economy, administrative state, and the mutually reinforcing relations between them have come to dominate so much of social life. This structural critique would uncover the human suffering and hidden environmental costs such dominance incurs, and it would suggest alternative ways to structure society as a whole. The requisite critique would also be normative. It would ask what the normative tasks of a life-giving economy and polity would be, and it would indicate how current economic and political institutions could better fulfill these tasks. Moreover, because the scope of such structural and normative questions lies beyond the purview of any one academic field or discipline, a university-led critique of current systems would need to be interdisciplinary in the best sense. Interdisciplinary structural and normative critique would not be simply a fashionable way to attract funding or meet government mandates. Rather, it would be a collaborative inquiry into the societal conditions that either hinder or support the pursuit of scientific truth. If universities care about the pursuit of scientific truth, as they historically have purported to, then they will need to stand up to the very macrostructures that make their existence possible. The point of doing this is not to bite the hands that feed them. Rather, the point is to envision the transformation of these macrostructures, and of universities as well, in the direction of greater fidelity to societal principles such as solidarity, resourcefulness, and justice and toward a life-giving disclosure of society. By fostering the pursuit of scientific truth in the direction of truth as a whole, universities would promote what I discuss in chapter 10 as a “differential transformation” of society. 7.3.3  Sociohistorical Contextualism and Scientific Truth An emphasis on the relational autonomy of science need not result in relativism concerning scientific truth, no more than an emphasis on the ontology of science needs to deny the historical and social situatedness of scientific knowledge. Instead, this combination of accents—relational autonomy and social ontology—provides a way to endorse the sociohistorical character of scientific knowledge and truth without sliding into the epistemic and alethic relativism toward which many types of sociohistorical contextualism incline. Again, like the matter of systemic threats to science’s societal autonomy, the link between contextualism and relativism is a large and highly disputed topic, one I can only touch on here. Rather than taking up many different authors and positions or summarizing the extensive literature,

196  Truth and Science let me simply stipulate what I mean by sociohistorical contextualism and relativism concerning scientific truth and then indicate how my conception of scientific truth and its roles in society responds to issues they raise. Sociohistorical contextualism with regard to scientific knowledge and truth is the general position that these are inescapably situated within social and historical contexts. What these contexts are, and how science is situated within them, will vary from one contextualist position to the next. Why such situatedness matters also varies, with some contextualists saying the context governs the meaning of scientific claims and findings, others suggesting it determines whether claims and findings are significant, others claiming it controls their quality, and still others combining two or more of these options. In general, we can say sociohistorical contextualism concerning scientific knowledge and truth regards these as situated within social and historical contexts in such a way that the contexts are decisive for the meaning, significance, or quality of scientific claims and findings. Construed in this way, sociohistorical contextualism need not entail relativism with regard to scientific knowledge and truth, what henceforth I designate as sociohistorical epistemic and alethic relativism, or sociohistorical relativism for short.46 7.3.3.1  Sociohistorical Relativism Sociohistorical relativism concerning scientific truth arises when contextualists claim that social and historical contexts are decisive not only for the meaning, significance, and quality but also for the validity and accuracy of the truth claims raised by scientific theories, assertions, arguments, and the like. The sociohistorical relativist holds that theoretical validity and evidence-based accuracy are relative to the social and historical contexts in which scientific truth claims arise or to which they are addressed or within which they are assessed. In other words, whether a scientific truth claim is true depends on either its sociohistorically situated origin (e.g., from gendered experience) or its sociohistorically situated interpretation (e.g., to shore up white privilege) or its sociohistorically situated evaluation (e.g., vis-à-vis a classist standard) or some combination of these. Because they argue that the validity and accuracy of scientific truth claims are sociohistorically relative in these ways, sociohistorical relativists question the purported universality and objectivity of scientific truth claims. From a sociohistorical relativist’s perspective, scientific truth claims will always already be biased. They can only ever be “true” for some people in certain sociohistorical contexts and can never be true for everybody, regardless of contexts. Clearly, such sociohistorical relativism challenges how many philosophers, on both sides of the scientific realism debate, have understood scientific truth. In raising this challenge, however, it highlights something

Truth and Science  197 that too often goes missing in the debate over scientific realism. Sociohistorical relativism rightly emphasizes that, like ordinary propositional truth claims, scientific truth claims are just that: they are claims that someone addresses to someone else in a certain context of assessment, and such intersubjectivity in the making, interpreting, and assessing of scientific truth claims is inescapably situated in sociohistorical contexts. As feminists, postcolonialists, and critical race theorists have shown, scientific truth claims arise in certain contexts. To a sometimes surprising extent, these contexts govern which claims get made, how they are made, whether they are taken seriously, and by whom. By demonstrating such sociohistorical contextuality, critical theory in the broad sense challenges patterns of exclusion and oppression not only in the academy but also in society as a whole. These contributions are ones I readily support and vigorously applaud. Yet, like many philosophers with whom I otherwise disagree, I do not think the truth of a scientific claim can simply depend on its contexts of origin, interpretation, or evaluation. For what is claimed in a scientific truth claim is not that is true for someone or other but that it is true. And whether it is true does not depend on whether someone presents or interprets or assesses it as being true but rather on whether it is both theoretically valid and evidentially accurate in a correlated way. Moreover, it is intrinsic to the import of theoretical validity as a historically emergent societal principle that whatever raises a claim to scientific truth—a theory, an assertion, a finding, and so on—claims to be valid for anyone who can take the claim seriously. Sociohistorical situatedness might limit the number of those who can formulate, employ, or assess a scientific truth claim (some truth claims in theoretical physics, for example, lie beyond the ken of scholars in other academic disciplines). Yet the theoretical validity being claimed does not depend on who is in that group or how it historically arises and changes. So too, it is intrinsic to the import of evidence-based accuracy as a historically emergent aim of scientific inquiry that the virtualized entities about which scientific truth claims are made do indeed self-dis/closively present themselves in the manner claimed. Whether or not a scientific claim is accurate in an evidence-based way does not depend on the gender, class, race, nationality, or historical time frame of those who make, consider, or evaluate the claim. Such social and historical factors do, no doubt, play into the formulation and use of scientific truth claims and help account for their meaning, significance, and quality. Yet the evidence-based accuracy being claimed does not depend on who formulates and uses them. Accordingly, scientific truth claims inescapably make a claim to universality and objectivity. If they did not make this claim, they could hardly be counted as scientific truth claims. That they make such a claim does not mean that the claim is always met. Nor does it mean that the claim is somehow shielded from challenge or dispute out of diverse

198  Truth and Science sociohistorically situated perspectives. It does mean, however, that to do justice to scientific theories, assertions, and findings, the critic needs to show how they fail to live up to their own truth claims—that is, the critic must demonstrate that they are either theoretically invalid or evidentially inaccurate or both. In my view, the best feminist, postcolonialist, and anti-racist criticisms of mainstream science have been of this sort. They have undertaken the patient labor of immanent criticism and, in the process, they have helped change entire fields of inquiry, changes that were sorely needed and admirably achieved. Immanent criticism in support of degendering, decolonizing, and deracializing mainstream science is not incompatible with a robust conception of scientific truth. It is, in fact, a project my own conception supports. Still, one could object that framing contextualist science-critique in this way itself fails to do justice to the truth claims of sociohistorical relativism. For, one could argue, the relativist does not simply assert that the truth claims raised by particular scientific theories, assertions, and findings are relative to sociohistorical situations. Full-blown relativism also argues that theoretical validity and evidential accuracy as such are sociohistorically situated notions that cannot themselves be universal and objective in the manner apparently claimed. In other words, the sociohistorical relativity of scientific truth goes all the way up and all the way down; it does not stop at the threshold to philosophy of science. I have two responses to this line of argument. The first, as one might expect, is to ask the full-blown relativist to show, through immanent criticism, not only that the proposed conception of scientific truth is sociohistorically situated—something I  readily acknowledge—but also how such situatedness renders the truth claims this conception makes about scientific truth either invalid or inaccurate or both. It is not enough, in my view, to raise suspicions about the situatedness of truth claims. One also needs to show how this situatedness affects the truth being claimed. My second response is to say there is more to a philosophical conception of scientific truth than its simply raising truth claims about how to characterize scientific truth. Just as important is to say why scientific truth matters in society and for truth as a whole. Explaining this is all the more urgent due to the sociohistorical situation in which Western universities and scholars currently find themselves, caught between truth-threatening systemic pressures, on the one hand, and truth-dismissing post-truth politics, on the other. Now is precisely not the time to give up on scientific claims to theoretical validity and evidential accuracy. But that, in effect, is what full-blown sociohistorical relativism would ask us to do. 7.3.3.2  Solidarity and Science I have more to say about post-truth politics in the next chapter. For now, permit me a few remarks about how sociohistorical contextualism both

Truth and Science  199 feeds into and draws from certain tendencies in civil society, where universities play a central role. Earlier, I suggested that solidarity is the primary societal principle to which civil society responds. Solidarity is not the only principle, but it is the primary one, such that it inflects considerations of resourcefulness and justice within civil society. Normatively, what matters most for the organizations and institutions of civil society is that no individuals, groups, or communities be excluded from mutual recognition. This historically developed and society-wide imperative for inclusion lies at the heart of contemporary struggles for recognition, which take the form of identity politics, new nationalism, and religious fundamentalism. Moreover, as civil-societal centers for education, research, and communication, universities cannot but be caught up in such struggles. Recent sociohistorical contextualism concerning science both expresses and responds to struggles for recognition in civil society. Compared with the capitalist economy and administrative state, contemporary civil society, including its university centers, is no land of sweetness and light. Although its social economy and social polity offer alternatives to the patterns of macrostructural systems, civil society has its own normative distortions and structural limitations, ones that reinforce the deficiencies of macrostructural systems. The social ethos of contemporary civil society has been more one of liberal tolerance and charity than one of robust participation and inclusion. Further, under the impact of both struggles for recognition and corporately controlled new social media, that liberal ethos has recently given way to one of mutual intolerance and disdain, the near opposites of participation and inclusion. The current challenge for universities is not only to resist the systemic pressures of hypercommercialization and performance fetishism, then, but also to promote normative and structural repairs to civil society. For this, a robust and appropriately sociohistorical conception of scientific truth is needed, one that, for the sake of genuine solidarity within the current sociohistorical situation, resists sociohistorical relativism. Perhaps inadvertently, sociohistorical relativism leaves each truth-contesting group in its own alethic echo chamber: there is no overarching principle or shared evidence to which they all can rightly appeal. What we need instead, both in universities and in the larger civil society, is a view that welcomes all contenders into the same forum, one where solidarity toward others matters in the very pursuit of scientific truth, enriches that pursuit, and results in better science. If universities were to reject the notions of universality and objectivity that flow from the expectations of theoretical validity and evidential accuracy, then academic sociohistorical relativism will have accomplished what the anti-intellectual agents of illiberal hatred can only wish for, namely, the destruction of genuine solidarity at the center of civil society. Despite what defenders of sociohistorical contextualism like

200  Truth and Science Richard Rorty might claim, genuine solidarity cannot be limited to one’s own group, not even if that group is understood to include everyone who belongs, or aspires to belong, to “the community of the liberal intellectuals of the secular modern West.”47 Solidarity is a principle of radical inclusion, one that science, when it is done well, does not resist but emulates. To promote a more robustly solidaristic civil society, universities must foster the genuinely democratic undertaking that lies at the heart of their mission, namely, the pursuit of scientific truth. Taken in a broad sense to encompass all theoretically informed academic disciplines, science, this chapter has argued, is an important social domain of truth. Thanks to the theoreticity, evidentiality, discursive reflexivity, and intersubjective fallibilism of scientific knowledge, ordinary propositional truth achieves a new level of precision and scope in this social domain, precision and scope that genuine solidarity enhances but sociohistorical relativism undermines. By conceiving of scientific truth as a dynamic correlation between fidelity to the societal principle of theoretical validity and the predicative self-dis/closure of virtualized entities, I have tried to move past the juxtaposition between theoretical truth and empirical success or adequacy in the scientific realism debates. And, by emphasizing the sociohistorical character of science as a social domain, I  have tried to show why scientific truth is sufficiently important to call for resistance to both systemic pressures and sociohistorical relativism. Yet science is only one social domain of truth; normatively, it is not more important than other such domains. Which other important social domains truth as a whole might include, the next three chapters explore.

Notes 1 For more extensive consideration of what scientism is and why it matters, see Scientism: Prospects and Problems, eds. Jeroen de Ridder et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 2 For a classic summation of such internal criticism, see Carl Hempel, “Empiricist Criterion of Cognitive Significance: Problems and Changes,” in Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 101–22, a revision and combination of two articles first published in 1950 and 1951. 3 Willard Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), in From a Logical Point of View: Logico-Philosophical Essays, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 20–46. 4 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); originally published in 1962. 5 See, for example, the debate in the 1960s between Adorno and Sir Karl Popper and their followers in Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976); originally published in German in 1969. 6 See especially Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1969 and 1971), trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).

Truth and Science  201 7 Especially instructive in the current context are Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) and “The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2019/entries/scientific-knowledge-social/. 8 See, for example, Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Joseph Rouse, Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 9 See especially Steve Fuller, Social Epistemology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 10 Heather Douglas, “Values in Science,” in OHPS 609–30. Martin Carrier, “Social Organization of Science,” in OHPS 862–81. 11 Stathis Psillos, “Having Science in View: General Philosophy of Science and Its Significance,” in OHPS 145. 12 Sven Ove Hansson, “Science and Non-Science,” in OHPS 487. 13 Ibid., 489. 14 Ibid., 487–88; italics removed. 15 Robert K. Merton, “A Note on Science and Democracy,” Journal of Legal and Political Sociology 1 (1942): 115–26. Merton says these “institutional imperatives” or “mores” derive from the “institutional goal” of science (i.e., “the extension of certified knowledge”) and the “technical methods” employed to reach this goal (117). 16 Ibid., 118, italics removed. 17 See the pathbreaking book by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Evidentiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 18 Merton, “A Note on Science and Democracy,” 121. 19 Ibid., 125. 20 Ibid., 126. 21 Hansson, in OHPS 487. 22 As is well known, Popper rejected verifiability as a criterion of meaningfulness and replaced it with falsifiability as the demarcation criterion for distinguishing science from pseudo-science. See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1968), especially 40–42, and Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1963, 1965), 33–65. 23 Cf. Anjan Chakravartty, “Scientific Realism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/scientific-realism/. By literal interpretation scientific realists mean that scientific claims about the world, especially claims about unobservable entities and processes, should be construed as being either true or false. I put “literal” in scare quotes because I do not share the views of language, truth, and interpretation that inform the semantic realist use of this term. 24 Perhaps the most influential and sophisticated elaborations of such empiricist instrumentalism come from Carl G. Hempel. See both his widely used textbook Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966) and his Aspects of Scientific Explanation, especially the chapter “The Theoretician’s Dilemma” (173–226). 25 See especially chapter  10 in Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 111–35. For a useful survey of the impact of Kuhn’s book, see Philip Kitcher, “After Kuhn,” in OHPS 633–51.

202  Truth and Science 26 Two influential early statements of this approach are David Bloor, “The Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge,” in Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 1–19; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979). For an attempt during the late 1990s to sort out the notion of “social construction” in the context of then-current “science wars,” see Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 27 The three options summarized here roughly correspond to the three feminist approaches to how gender situates scientific knowledge that Sandra Harding distinguishes in The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), namely, feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism. For an overview of how these approaches have shaped feminist perspectives on science and epistemology, see Elisabeth Anderson, “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/feminism-epistemology/. For a forceful argument that mainstream epistemology’s emphasis on propositional knowledge implies a male knower and should be replaced by an emphasis on interpersonal knowledge, see Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 28 Chakravartty, “Scientific Realism.” 29 Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter, and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 73. 30 See especially chapter 4 (“In Defence of Scientific Realism”), SR 70–97. 31 Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 32 Lyons has argued that the pessimistic induction is better construed as a noninductive, modus tollens argument that does not claim that our contemporary theories are (likely) false but rather demonstrates through historical counterexamples that the “realist meta-hypothesis” is false. See Timothy D. Lyons, “Scientific Realism,” in OHPS 564–84. Because Laudan seems to understand his own argument as a form of induction to a conclusion about contemporary theories, however, and because Psillos takes it that way, I also treat it as an inductive argument. See, for example, Larry Laudan, “Realism without the Real,” Philosophy of Science 51, no. 1 (1984): 156–62. 33 Larry Laudan, “A Confutation of Convergent Realism,” Philosophy of Science 48, no. 1 (1981): 26–27 and 33. Laudan’s list is reproduced by Psillos (SR 101–2). 34 Psillos devotes an entire chapter to the caloric theory of heat and nineteenthcentury optical ether theories, in an effort to defeat their inductive use as pessimistic counterexamples to the realist thesis about theoretical truth and empirical success. See chapter 6 (“Historical Illustrations”), SR 115–45. 35 Hans Halvorson, “Scientific Theories,” in OHPS 605. 36 They also presuppose views of ordinary reference that I consider problematic. But I leave that complication aside. Psillos provides an illuminating discussion of the issues that arise from regarding theoretical reference as on par with ordinary linguistic reference—see SR 280–300—but he endorses what he calls a “causal descriptive” theory of reference for both ordinary referring expressions and theoretical terms. 37 “Truth-likeness is the working notion of truth in science. In our [scientific] interactions with the world, the exact truth cannot generally be had, especially

Truth and Science  203 concerning the unobservable and spatio-temporally remote aspects of the world. A perfect match between theories and the world is almost impossible” (SR 276). My own approach dispenses with the search for such a match, whether perfect or not. 38 In the same passage, van Fraassen renders the empirical adequacy of a theory more precisely as follows: “such a theory has at least one model that all the actual phenomena fit inside,” where “all” includes phenomena not actually observed (SI 12). 39 For an overview of debates about explanation in analytic philosophy of science, see Henk W. de Regt, “Explanation,” in The Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Science, eds. Steven French and Juha Saatsi (London: Continuum, 2011), 157–78. In response to van Fraassen, de Regt argues that, although explanation has “an essential pragmatic element,” it is not merely pragmatic. Moreover, because scientific practices are so varied, “explanations can have very different forms” (171). 40 Prior to Kuhn’s game-changing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, classic accounts from quite different perspectives include Edmund Husserl’s posthumous The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (1954), trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970); J. D. Bernal, Science in History (New York: Cameron Associates, 1954); Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (London: G. Bell, 1957). Influential post-Kuhnian approaches to the history of science include Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (New York: Vintage Books, 1973, c1970); Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989). 41 For an overview of the issues under this heading, see David B. Resnick, “Ethics in Science,” in OHPS 252–73. 42 See Part II (“Civil Society”) in Lambert Zuidervaart, Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 89–203. 43 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987), especially vol. 2, 332–403. 44 In a more expansive account of global capitalism, one would need to distinguish, as Jason Moore does, between exploitation and appropriation. Whereas “exploitation” refers to the extraction of what Marx called “surplus value” from the deployment of wage labor, “appropriation” refers to how exploitation inescapably depends on taking advantage of unpaid resources, especially what Moore calls the Four Cheaps: unpaid human labor (e.g., family caregiving), food, energy, and raw materials. It is only by seeing the link between these two processes that one can not only adequately understand how the capitalist system feeds into and benefits from the ongoing environmental crisis but also really envision a sustainable way out. See Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015). To Moore’s Four Cheaps, I would add personal data as a Fifth Cheap, which capitalism in its current digital phase harvests and deploys mostly without either economic compensation or political regulation. 45 Longino, “The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge.” 46 Although such relativism concerning science usually implies commitments to relativism concerning knowledge and truth in general, more generalized epistemic and alethic relativism is not my focus here. Nor will I discuss what

204  Truth and Science the literature distinguishes as conceptual relativism, cultural relativism, and moral relativism. For a useful overview, see Maria Baghramian and J. Adam Carter, “Relativism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2021/entries/relativism/. 47 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 29. As is apparent from my emphasizing a certain notion of objectivity in science, I refuse to juxtapose solidarity to objectivity in the manner of Rorty, who prefers what he calls “ethnocentrism” (and what others have called “relativism”) to scientific realism and the scientism it purportedly underwrites. See especially Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 21–45. For an account of how Rorty subsequently modified his attempt to reduce objectivity to solidarity, largely in response to Davidsonian criticisms lodged by Bjørn T. Ramberg, see chapter 5 (“What Is Truth For?”) in Ronald A. Kuipers, Richard Rorty (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 149–72.

8 Truth and Politics

To propose a robust notion of scientific truth in an era of post-truth politics may seem quixotic. When climate science denial, fake news, and “alternative facts” can become the modus operandi of democratically elected political administrations, what is the point of philosophically explaining scientific truth and defending its importance? Isn’t that like tilting at windmills? Wouldn’t it be better to show why post-truth politics is false? These are legitimate and urgent questions. To address them, one needs to sort out how truth and politics are related. And doing that requires a conception of truth that is sufficiently capacious to distinguish and include both scientific and political truth. Immediately, however, an obstacle appears: many philosophers doubt that politics can be true. Either they try to shield truth from political corruption or, perhaps inadvertently, they support the politicization of truth. Because they fail to understand the truth of politics, they also misconstrue the politics of truth. This chapter discusses essays by two interdisciplinary philosophers who take up the topic of truth and politics, namely, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. After summarizing and evaluating their positions (sections 8.1 and 8.2), I propose an alternative way to think about the truth of politics and the politics of truth (section 8.3).

8.1  Hannah Arendt: Speaking Truth to Power Hannah Arendt’s well-known essay “Truth and Politics,” first published in 1967 in response to criticisms of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, opens asking whether truth is by nature politically impotent and whether political power is essentially deceitful. After showing why such questions arise and what they imply, Arendt concludes that truth has a strength of its own, such that truthtellers can speak truth to political power. As Michael Ure argues, the essay aims “to defend the political value of truthtelling” and, in making this defense, it lays out “various types of truthtelling in the political domain.”1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021-8

206  Truth and Politics Yet, in defending the political value of various ways to speak truth to power, Arendt insists that truth and truthtelling are essentially nonpolitical. And this, I shall argue, limits how she understands the truth of politics and the politics of truth. It would be a mistake, however, to suggest Arendt simply places truth in opposition to politics. For that is precisely what she accuses Plato of doing, to the detriment of both truth and politics.2 Rather, she warns against conceptions of truth and approaches to politics that either politicize truth or undermine politics. 8.1.1  Scenes of Conflict To sound this warning, and to defend the political value of truthtelling, Arendt begins the essay with reflections on the abiding worth of truthtelling. No human world worth preserving could be conceived, she says, if there were no people “willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is” (TP 547). In other words, if there were no truthtellers, culture and society would not survive. Then Arendt distinguishes between rational truth (the sort of truth pursued by mathematics, theoretical sciences, and philosophy) and factual truth (the sort of truth established by historical inquiry and public discussion) (TP 548).3 It is factual truth that Arendt considers not only especially vulnerable to political abuse but also crucial for resisting and challenging political power. Further, as Ure puts it, “Arendt’s key thesis is that factual truth and truth-telling are the very ground of ‘the political.’ Truth and truth-tellers, she argues, are necessary conditions of the political as a space of freedom.” Moreover, as Arendt’s essay develops, “she also concedes that under certain conditions even philosophical . . . truth-tellers can contribute to this political domain.”4 The distinction between rational and factual truth allows Arendt to explore two different ways that, in the history of the West, truth and politics have come into conflict. On the one hand, the philosopher’s search for unchanging metaphysical truth stood opposed to the life of citizens, for whom “ever-changing opinions about human affairs” are the currency of political life. When Plato degraded opinion to being mere illusion, he attacked a prerequisite for political power, and his concomitant elevating of philosophical claims about justice to the status of absolute truth struck “at the very roots of all politics,” Arendt says (TP 549–50). In the modern world, however, with the spread of political democracy and postmetaphysical philosophy, this conflict either lessens or disappears. Now “neither the truth of revealed religion . . . nor the truth of the philosopher . . . interferes any longer with the affairs of the world” (TP 551). On the other hand, an increasingly large-scale clash has developed between factual truth and politics. This clash does not arise from metaphysical absolutism but from what Arendt calls organized lying. Organized lying takes two political forms: the totalitarianism of Hitler’s

Truth and Politics  207 Germany and Stalin’s Russia, which tabooed public discussion of unwelcome facts, and the hypercommercialism of so-called free countries, where “unwelcome factual truths .  .  . are often .  .  . transformed into [mere] opinions” (TP 552). And that raises anew the question of truth— now, factual truth—versus opinion. Since, in Arendt’s view, opinions are the currency of political life, the relation between opinion and factual truth is politically even more important than that between opinion and philosophical truth. Facts, like opinions, inhabit the political realm, she says, where in principle a plurality of views and interests seek common ground. So factual truth—by which Arendt primarily means truth about current and historical events and circumstances—always involves plurality: plurality in how it is experienced, established, and sustained. Because plurality is intrinsic to both politics and factual truth, factual truth is, she says, “political by nature” (TP 553). 8.1.2  Opinions, Facts, and Organized Lying Yet this does not mean that facts are simply opinions. While related, facts and opinions are distinct: Facts inform opinions, and opinions . . . can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation (TP 554). Arendt does not think even the most radical historicist can deny the existence of such “brutally elementary data” as that, at the beginning of the First World War, Germany invaded Belgium, and not the other way around. Yet she does not doubt that a “power monopoly over the entire civilized world” could wage war even on such undeniable factual truths. All the more reason, she suggests, to ask whether a commitment to factual truth is fundamentally “anti-political” (TP 554). Arendt highlights two respects in which factual truth differs from opinion, to the point of opposing it. One has to do with how factual assertions claim “coercive” validity. Once a factual statement such as “In August 1914 Germany invaded Belgium” is declared true, it is “beyond agreement, dispute . . . or consent.” To someone who accepts the statement, it does not matter how many people either agree or try to persuade one otherwise, for its content “is not of a persuasive nature but of a coercive one” (TP 555). By contrast, persuasion, considering other standpoints, and striving for consent are central to the exchange of opinions in political life. So, by raising the peremptory claim to be acknowledged

208  Truth and Politics without debate, factual truth challenges “the very essence of political life” (TP 556). The other difference from opinion pertains to the “annoying contingency” of facts. Whatever the facts are, they could have been otherwise, and no amount of rationalization can conjure their contingent existence away. At the same time, whereas opinions can easily change, the most stubborn facts cannot. This despite the dependence of factual truth upon being established through testimony and documentation, which makes it easy for “opinion-holders” to “discredit factual truth as just another opinion” (TP 557). The most forceful opponent of factual truth is not opinion, however, but deliberate falsehood or lying. And lying more easily aligns with politics than factual truthtelling does, Arendt claims, because the liar is “a man of action” and the truthteller “most emphatically is not.” Whereas a liar has no trouble using lies to advance particular political interests, a truthteller cannot use facts in this way without compromising one’s “personal truthfulness,” which alone lets the truth being told appear plausible (TP 563). Although truthtellers have the stubborn facts on their side, liars have the political advantage: they can always mold the “facts” to fit partisan or commercial interests. This picture changes, however, under the conditions that Arendt calls organized lying, where an entire political community embraces deceit and “everybody lies about everything of importance.” There, just by continuing to uphold the factual truth, truthtellers engage in political action that, if they survive, makes “a start toward changing the world” (TP 564). Arendt, who had already written a massive study on totalitarianism,5 is especially concerned with the relation between factual truthtelling and what she describes as “the relatively recent phenomenon of mass manipulation of fact and opinion as it has become evident in the rewriting of history, in image-making, and in actual government policy” (TP 564). When, in the so-called free world, “gigantic interest organizations” instrumentalize the facts, and national government propaganda employs deceptive image-making learned from Madison Avenue, self-deception becomes politically pervasive. Under such conditions, those who try to tell the factual truth come to seem “more dangerous, and even more hostile, than the [nation’s] real opponents” (TP 567). Carried to the extreme, the mass manipulation of facts and opinions leads not so much to the confusion of lies with factual truth as to the destruction of “the category of truth vs. falsehood,” which we need in order to “take our bearings in the real world” (TP 568). Yet Arendt takes comfort from the stubbornness of facts, especially facts about the past. Not even the most deceptive political image-maker can undo the past, she says, and the past is the basis for both current and future action. Political regimes come and go, but the facts do not change: “In their stubbornness, facts are superior to power” (TP 570).

Truth and Politics  209 8.1.3  Telling the Truth Faced with the opposition between organized political lying and the stubborn persistence of factual truth, how should we understand the status and political value of the truthteller? Throughout the essay, Arendt’s own stance raises this question, for the essay regards politics from the outside. If truthtellers (like Arendt) tried to engage in political action and speak “the language of persuasion or of violence,” they would forfeit their position and the validity of what they say. For although, in contrast to political power, truth “possesses a strength of its own,” truthtellers must stand outside politics to uphold this strength (TP 570). Arendt characterizes truthtelling’s essentially apolitical standpoint as one of being alone: “the solitude of the philosopher, the isolation of the scientist and the artist, the impartiality of the historian and the judge, and the independence of the fact-finder, the witness, and the reporter” (TP 570–71). Pursuing these various modes of truthtelling precludes ­having a specific political commitment or adhering to a particular political cause, she says. At the same time, however, many solitary truthtelling practices are made possible by state-supported public institutions where, “contrary to all political rules,” truth and truthfulness are the highest standard. Arendt specifically mentions “the judiciary” and “institutions of higher learning,” especially “the historical sciences and the humanities.” Just as an independent judiciary upholds the rule of law despite political pressures, so the academy uncovers “very unwelcome truths” despite the powers that be. As “refuges of truth,” they greatly improve “the chances for truth to prevail in public.” What truthtellers offer is politically relevant, but only because truthtellers stand outside the political realm. For, unlike political pursuits, their work requires “non-commitment and impartiality, freedom from self-interest in thought and judgment” (TP 571–73). By placing limits on the political realm, the truth frees us to be genuinely political. To be genuinely political, as Arendt had hinted earlier in the essay, is to form one’s opinions about human affairs “by considering a given issue from differing viewpoints,” not by blindly adopting “the actual views of those who stand somewhere else,” but by imagining “how I would feel and think if I were in their place” (TP 556). As Ure puts it, Arendt envisions a sort of “representative truthtelling” in politics: pursued with an enlarged mentality, deliberations “among politically free and equal citizens” allow truth to arise “from rather than independently of citizens’ opinions.” Because representative truthtellers “both maintain the factual reality that is the ground of political action, and . . . formulate valid judgments . . . attuned to the plurality of political opinions,” they are politically necessary.6 Yet even here, in the midst of politics, impartiality rather than narrow self-interest or group partisanship must prevail. The “very quality” of a

210  Truth and Politics political opinion or judgment depends, Arendt says, “upon the degree of its impartiality” (TP 557). That is why, at least in this arena, truth is not by nature politically impotent nor is political power essentially deceitful. Rather, in the political deliberations of representative truthtellers, “the fatal conflict between truth and politics dissolves.”7 Accordingly, although Arendt begins her essay by distinguishing rational truth from factual truth, and although she highlights many conflicts between truth and political power, implicit all along has been a third sort of truth, not actually labeled as such. This truth both exceeds the initial distinction between rational and factual truth and escapes truth/ power conflicts. Perhaps we can call it the truth of genuine politics, the truth that both guides and issues from impartial and representative political deliberation. It is the truth of what would be best for all concerned, based on commonly accessible facts and held with a view to a wide range of opinions among a plurality of political agents. The prospect of such political truth, at which Arendt’s essay only hints, raises difficult questions she does not address. One is why the standpoint of any solitary truthteller, whether philosopher, scientist, artist, historian, reporter, or judge, must lie outside the political domain. If representative truthtellers can remain impartial while they engage in political deliberation, why would this not be possible for solitary truthtellers? Another question concerns the political character of political truth. It would seem that the acquisition and exercise of power are intrinsic to politics as such, including the participatory democracy Arendt strongly prefers. Yet most of her essay concerns conflicts between truth and political power, such that it becomes difficult to envision a truthtelling mode of deliberation that is not politically either impotent or marginal, one that would actually make a political difference. If organized lying can be as damaging to factual truth as Arendt rightly suggests, why would it not be even more destructive of genuine political deliberation? In other words, even though Arendt does not simply pit truth against politics, she has not successfully reconceptualized the relation between truth and power. For this, we need to turn to the work of Michel Foucault. Whereas Arendt narrows the relation between truth and power to the domain of politics, Foucault expands the domain of politics to a wide-ranging relation between truth and power.

8.2  Michel Foucault: Linking Power to Truth When one considers the relation of truth to power in Foucault’s work, one immediately confronts two challenges. First, Foucault seems to have changed his mind about these themes more than once. Moreover, in his many published interviews, he regularly redescribed his earlier writings to fit his current concerns. Consequently, as Amy Allen observes, his late interviews “are littered with claims about what he was really up to all

Truth and Politics  211 along: his main concern was not power but the subject, not the subject but truth, neither power nor the subject nor truth but problematization, and so on.”8 The first challenge, then, is to develop a plausible reading across both the apparent discontinuities in his work and the diverse redescriptive continuities he later provided. We can call this the hermeneutical challenge. A second challenge arises from how Foucault deploys ideas such as power and truth. Even though they play central roles in his historical narratives and theoretical constructions, rarely does he explicate their historical provenance or theoretical meaning. Moreover, when he does offer historical or theoretical observations, he seems to say different things in different contexts, such that the content of these concepts comes to seem either arbitrary or opaque. Here the challenge is to develop a plausible account of what the concepts of power and truth come to in Foucault’s work. We can call this the conceptual challenge. One cannot address these two challenges without undertaking considerable textual and conceptual reconstructions. Fortunately, many others have attempted such reconstructions. So I  do not need to start from scratch. Instead, drawing on their work, I can focus on “Truth and Power,” a wide-ranging interview conducted in 1976 and first published in 1977, in which Foucault himself thematizes the relation between power and truth. This interview stems from the years surrounding the French publication of Discipline and Punish (1975)9 when Foucault presents a conception of disciplinary power and modifies the emphasis on power as domination and repression that threads through his earlier writings.10 8.2.1  Regimes of Truth “Truth and Power” reviews Foucault’s work as a response to worries about “the political status of science and the ideological functions which it should serve,” worries that provoke a host of questions concerning “power and knowledge” (P/K 109). By the end of the interview, Foucault has proposed the notion of the “specific intellectual” as a way to understand the political role of scholars and professionals in postwar France. This notion implies a different understanding of truth from that of either traditional Marxism or the academic establishment (P/K 126–33). Foucault himself did not always grasp this different understanding of truth, however. In his earlier archaeological work, culminating in The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), where he gave historical accounts of how one discursive formation suddenly gives way to another, he did not really pose his investigation as an inquiry into different regimes of truth, where “regime” implies a nexus of truth and power that can undergo “a global modification” (P/K 113). Moreover, his new understanding of truth requires a new understanding of power—not negatively and monistically, as a legal prohibition wielded

212  Truth and Politics primarily by the state, nor as a primarily economic process of class domination, nor even as predominantly psychological repression, but positively and pluralistically, as institutionally diverse productive forces and relations. As Foucault demonstrates at great length in Discipline and Punish, power on this new understanding “traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse” (P/K 119). More precisely, Foucault aims to replace a “juridical” or “sovereign” theory of power, according to which a sovereign ruler exercises power by negatively enforcing the rule of law, with a “disciplinary” model, according to which, at least since the end of the eighteenth century, power flows through all sorts of social technologies, such as school discipline, public administration, population control, medicine, and social services (P/K 121–25).11 Whereas on the sovereign theory power is possessed, flows top down from a centralized source, and is primarily repressive, on the disciplinary model power is exercised, emerges from the bottom up, and is primarily productive.12 As Joseph Rouse suggests, now Foucault also seeks an understanding of truth that is appropriate to post-sovereign power. In rejecting a sovereign theory of power, Foucault simultaneously rejects a “sovereign” conception of truth: Just as a sovereign power stands above and adjudicates conflicts among its subject powers, epistemic sovereignty is the standpoint above disputes among competing truth-claims. Epistemic sovereignty constitutes knowledge as the unified . . . network of truths that can be extracted from the circulation of conflicting statements. . . . Foucault has the same dual objection to this conception of epistemic sovereignty as to that of political sovereignty. On the one hand, this conception of knowledge overlooks the micropractices through which particular candidates for knowledge . . . are produced. . . . On the other hand, it demarcates an aspiration to power, to the suppression of all conflicting voices and lives, which Foucault saw as one of the chief dangers confronting us.13 Or, to state the matter positively, a pluralist and productive model of power calls for a pluralist and generative understanding of truth. Rather than uphold a monolithic theory of truth, through which all truth claims can be adjudicated, politically engaged intellectuals need to recognize and address the diverse sites of truth. What are the diverse sites of truth? Despite the prominent role of Foucaultian language and analysis in contemporary identity politics, Foucault’s interview does not actually tie these sites to diverse markers of collective identity such as race, gender, class, or sexual orientation. Although his approach in the mid-1970s does not preclude that sort of identity-based pluralism, this was not his primary concern. Instead, the

Truth and Politics  213 sites of truth pertain to the diverse practices and institutions in which intellectuals are always already imbricated, such as “housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family and sexual relations.” They are, to use my own terminology, social domains of truth. And these provide the contemporary terrain for political struggles by what Foucault calls “specific intellectuals.” Unlike the traditional “left intellectual” who, as a “master of truth and justice,” spoke for “the universal,” “specific intellectuals” take up struggles indigenous to the sectors where they live or work and where they can use their expertise and their relation to truth “in the field of political struggles” (P/K 126–28). To sustain such sector-specific struggles, however, intellectuals need to understand how truth and power interlink. Truth, says Foucault, “isn’t outside power, or lacking in power . . . Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power” (P/K 131). The key to understanding this interlinkage between truth and power lies in Foucault’s notion of a regime of truth. This is the dynamic pattern that governs the acceptability and authority of statements in the conduct of social life. Every society has such a pattern, Foucault says, consisting of the types of discourse it accepts and authorizes (“makes function as true”), the means by which true statements are distinguished from false ones and sanctioned, the methods valorized in the pursuit of truth, and “the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true” (P/K 131). There is no way for such a dynamic pattern to lie “outside power”: authority, sanctions, and valorization are built into a regime of truth, such that the regime both constrains the conduct of social life and helps produce various practices and institutions. Moreover, historically, we can distinguish one general regime of truth from another—say, that which obtained in what The Order of Things calls the Classical age (roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe) and the truth-regime of the subsequent modern age (roughly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Through such historical distinctions, we can also get greater clarity about the contemporary regime of truth. According to Foucault, writing in the mid-1970s, the regime or “political economy” of truth in “societies like ours” is such that truth centers on scientific discourse and organizations and responds to continual economic and political demands for truth. Truth circulates widely through institutions of education and information, arises and spreads under the dominant control of “a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media),” and attracts society-wide confrontation and debate. Because our regime of truth is so tied up with the role of scientific discourse in what, following Habermas, I call our economic and political systems, Foucault urges intellectuals not only to take up struggles over sector-specific truth claims but also to struggle over the

214  Truth and Politics regime itself. At this level, the battle for truth is “a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays.” And that raises the question of “a new politics of truth,” one aimed not at the chimera of “emancipating truth from every system of power” but rather at “detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony . . . within which it operates at the present time” (P/K 132). 8.2.2  Systematic Reconstruction “Truth and Power” leaves little doubt that, contrary to deflationary and minimalist approaches to truth in analytic philosophy, Foucault’s work embodies a robust regard for truth. As he indicates in another interview, his entire project is “to see how [people] govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth,” by “the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent.”14 Less obvious, however, are what truth, power, and their interlinkage actually come to. Such relative unclarity helps prompt wide divergence in responses to Foucault’s work. Charles Taylor, for example, reads Foucault’s “regimes of truth” as a “profoundly Nietzschean” and internally contradictory idea that mistakenly subordinates truth to power. It fails to evaluate different forms of power, Taylor claims, and it refuses to see truth as (potentially) subversive of power.15 Joseph Rouse, by contrast, interprets Foucault as consistently taking a historically situated position with respect to both power and truth, one that rightly avoids the “conception of epistemic and political sovereignty” that, according to Rouse, Charles Taylor presupposes.16 So too, whereas Nancy Fraser claims that, due to “conceptual ambiguities in Foucault’s notion of power,” his work is “normatively confused” and desperately lacks “normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of power,”17 Michael Kelly argues that the alleged “cryptonormativism” in Foucault’s genealogical critique of power18 simply reflects the challenge he shares with Critical Theorists like Fraser and Habermas: all of them face the inescapable but apparently impossible demand to offer a self-referential critique of modernity.19 Rather than sort out these divergent responses, however, let me attempt a systematic reconstruction of Foucault’s conception of power, truth, and their relation. To begin, I would distinguish more explicitly than Foucault does between philosophically general concepts of power and truth and historically specific concepts. “Disciplinary power” is a historically specific concept. It emerges from a complex social history whose stages Foucault’s genealogical historiography uncovers, and it is distinct from other historically specific concepts such as “juridical” or “sovereign power.” To compare and contrast these historically specific concepts, as Foucault does, presupposes that they do in fact belong to the same conceptual

Truth and Politics  215 field, that both disciplinary power and sovereign power are concepts of power and not concepts of two completely different matters. Foucault rarely thematizes his philosophically general concepts of power and truth, however, preferring to submerge them in his genealogical historiography. So, initially it is difficult to say what they come to. Yet a few general features have already surfaced. For one thing, Foucault regards both power and truth as relational concepts—they are concepts not of substances or nonrelational properties, to use Aristotelian categories, but rather of relations and processes. Moreover, he regards the two concepts as tightly interlinked, such that he cannot really talk about one without talking about the other. Not only are they intrinsically relational concepts, then, but also they necessarily relate to each other. In this sense, Foucault’s general concepts of power and truth are also interrelational concepts. To be genuinely interrelational, however, the two concepts also need to be distinct. Foucault understands that to make historically specific claims about how power and truth interrelate, he cannot equate them.20 Nor can he say one trumps the other. Hence, in explicitly rejecting the Platonic “myth” of an absolute separation between truth and power, Foucault implicitly also refuses a hyper-Nietzschean reduction of truth to power. Instead, at the most general philosophical level, he insists that power and truth are mutually imbricated. What, then, are the relations that the concepts of power and truth pick out? At the most fundamental level, Foucault’s concept of power points to relations of influence between social forces and human identity, life, and conduct. The social forces shape, in some sense, who we are, how we live, and how we act. Exactly what these forces are, and precisely how they exert influence, are matters for sociohistorical analysis, as is the question of whether categories of social critique such as oppression, repression, and domination apply to how social forces operate.21 Power as such, then, is not a “negative” concept, and what it identifies need not be violent. Similarly, Foucault’s most general concept of truth as a relation does not reduce it, in a radically contextualist manner, to “what passes for true”22 or to “what our peers will, ceteribus paribus, let us get away with saying.”23 He ties truth to knowledge, and for Foucault, knowledge, which occurs in distinct social domains, always involves subjects, objects, concepts, and methods or techniques.24 While it is so that he regards all of these epistemic elements as historically constituted, such that truth itself is historical, this does not mean that he reduces either knowledge or truth to a relation between subjects—to an intersubjective relation. Instead, Foucault regards truth as a complex, conceptually articulated, and methodically secured relation between epistemic subjects and the objects of their search for knowledge. The fact that scientific discourse and the scientifically informed professions figure prominently in

216  Truth and Politics his account of the contemporary regime of truth does not merely reflect his diagnosis of disciplinary power. It also manifests a general relational concept of truth that nearly equates it with scientific truth.25 For Foucault, the general interrelation between truth and power has two primary characteristics. First, truth, as a relation between epistemic subject and object, is a necessary condition for the exercise of power, for the employment of social forces to influence human identity, life, and conduct. If, to use a later formulation, relations of power are ways of acting upon the actions of “acting subjects,”26 then such influence on others’ actions cannot occur if the influencing agency cannot achieve true knowledge about the acting subject and its actions. For how could the exercise of power be efficacious if the influencing agency were irremediably ignorant or perpetually mistaken about the actor and its actions? Second, and conversely, power, as a relation of social influence, is a necessary condition for the pursuit and achievement of truth, for establishing the desired epistemic relation between subject and object. Put simply, we could not achieve, or even claim to achieve, true, conceptually articulated, and methodically secured knowledge of objects if there were no social ways to shape our identity, life, and conduct, including the practices that enter a pursuit of knowledge. For how could we pursue what is true if we were not instructed, trained, and directed to pursue it and if there were no socially organized practices and institutions in which to do so? Hence, truth and power are necessary conditions of each other, such that we cannot have one without having the other. Yet this does not mean that the one is the only necessary condition of the other. Perhaps more than power is needed in order to arrive at truth and perhaps something besides truth is needed in order to exercise power—Foucault does not really say. Nor does the tight link between truth and power entail that they are sufficient conditions of each other. Truth and power are interrelated; they are not synonymous. 8.2.3  Critical Questions Where other philosophers might either try to give a more precise account of this interrelation or dismiss it altogether as not definitive for truth, Foucault mostly uses his relational concept of truth to describe historically specific interrelations between truth and power. The interrelation of primary importance in the modern regime of truth lies between scientific or scientifically informed truth and disciplinary power. And this regime of truth is different from other such regimes. Such usage of the truth concept to specify historical interrelations raises questions about what could be called the historicist, constructivist, and perspectivist aspects to Foucault’s conception of truth.27 Not only does he seem to make truth a historically relative concept but also he sometimes

Truth and Politics  217 seems to reduce it to a product of power tied to particular frameworks of interpretation. Let me comment briefly on each aspect. It is clear that Foucault thinks the modern regime of truth differs from other such regimes. Yet, as I read him, this does not result in an extreme sociohistorical relativism. For, in positing this difference, Foucault is not in the first instance making a claim about discrete national societies, identity groups, or economic classes, and certainly not about individuals. Foucault does not say that each country, race, class, or individual has its own truth. Rather, he makes a claim about large-scale sociohistorical formations, akin to Karl Marx’s “modes of production” and, to a lesser extent, Louis Althusser’s account of interpellation. Like a mode of production such as capitalism, a regime of truth can last hundreds of years, and it can permeate many different countries and cultures. A regime of truth characterizes an entire societal formation. Foucault shows that increasingly, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Western society has accepted scientific and professional discourses as true, has relied on scientific methods and instrumentation to distinguish true statements from false ones, and has charged scientists and professionals “with saying what counts as true” (P/K 131). Moreover, such valorizing of science and the scientific professions has played a key role in the operations of both economic and political systems. That is the modern West’s regime of truth. Although contemporary authoritarian populism, with its dismissal of science and celebration of “alternative facts,” might appear to challenge this regime, Foucault would likely say it does not really provide any alternative to the dominant truth-producing discourses, truth-sorting mechanisms, or truth-claiming authorities. Just as Foucault’s historicist specification of regimes of truth does not make truth relative to particular groups or individuals, so his constructivist thesis that truth is a product of power does not mean that what is true is whatever people who exercise power say it is. Instead, Foucault insists that truth arises and receives confirmation in discourses that are themselves ways to exercise power. In the modern regime of truth, truth can occur “only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint”—constraints, for example, concerning which discourses are considered truth-­conducive, what counts as true, and who is authorized to establish truth—and these forms of constraint are themselves relations of power. It is by being ­produced under such constraints that truth itself “induces regular effects of power” (P/K 131). For, in the modern West, how people live, act, and understand themselves is unavoidably shaped by the truth-producing discourses of science and professional expertise, by their findings and pronouncements, and by their status in society. In this sense, not only do relations of power produce truth but also the relations of truth have powerful effects. What Foucault’s perspectivist thesis adds to the historicist and constructivist theses, in my view, pertains specifically to the making of truth

218  Truth and Politics claims. It says that all truth claims arise within frameworks of interpretation and rely upon them. As we have seen, for Foucault, the primary frameworks of truth-claiming interpretation in the modern West are scientific and professional discourses. Consequently, if you want to claim your statements about health care or the prison system are true, for example, you will need either to rely on the established discourses of medicine and criminal justice or employ relevant different frameworks such as alternative medicine and the discourse of prison reform. This does not entail that different perspectives will always be incommensurable. It does mean, however, that truth claims in such social domains are never neutral with respect to questions of alethic power—that is, questions about which discourses and authorities support the truth claims being made. In other words, the historicist, constructivist, and perspectivist aspects to Foucault’s conception of truth are not especially problematic, so long as one reads them as an explanation of the modern regime of truth. Rather, they are highly illuminating, and they have important implications for contemporary political thought and action. Yet, unavoidably, there is more to Foucault’s conception than such regime-illumination, and that is where a very important issue arises for both politics and truth theory. The issue pertains to the intrinsic normativity of truth and power. This issue arises within Foucault’s conception of truth because Foucault employs transhistorical concepts of knowledge, power, and truth to specify their nexus in the modern regime of truth. The issue is not that he employs such transhistorical concepts. I think they are unavoidable, even for the most radical historicist. Rather, the issue is that Foucault fails to think through their normative implications. Although not exactly the same problem as what Habermas, following Fraser, labels “cryptonormativism,” it is closely related. We saw earlier that, in general, Foucault understands both truth and power as relational concepts that are unavoidably interrelated, such that each is a necessary condition of the other. We also saw that, in general, Foucault views truth as a relation of knowledge between epistemic subject and epistemic object, and he regards power as a relation of influence between social forces and human actions. What Foucault either ignores or downplays, however, is that both of these concepts, as well as their interrelation, are intrinsically normative notions. For as soon as one posits truth as an epistemic subject/object relation, one faces the question of whether there are better and worse forms of this relation—not simply different forms, but normatively preferable forms. Similarly, one cannot conceive of power as a social force/human action relation without raising the question of which forms of this relation would be better or worse for society and human life.

Truth and Politics  219 Moreover, if these claims about the intrinsic normativity of truth and power as relational concepts are right, then it follows that the relation between them, insofar as they are necessary conditions of each other, must also be normative. For certain forms of the epistemic subject/object relation will be more conducive than others to the sorts of power that are better for society and human life. And, conversely, certain forms of the social influence/action relation will be more conducive than others to the sorts of knowledge needed or desired. Note, however, that nothing in what I have said so far denies the historical character of truth and power. I think Foucault is right to describe them and their interrelation as historically emergent and ­historically dynamic. But he goes off track when his Nietzsche-inspired anti-­ Platonism and anti-transcendentalism leads him to treat transhistorical normativity as if it would require the “myth” of ahistorical universals and transcendental subjectivity and, in response, he sometimes writes as if truth and power were always only historically specific and nonnormative concepts. Yet even when Foucault himself writes of a “will to knowledge” and a “will to truth”—phrases redolent of Nietzsche’s “will to power”—he cannot avoid hints of transhistorical normativity. In the early 1970s, for example, as he transitioned from archaeology to genealogy, Foucault asked “what has been, what still is, throughout our discourse, this will to truth which has survived throughout so many centuries of our history,” and he described it as one of the “great systems of exclusion governing discourse.”28 His question and description could not avoid suggesting that truth and power are intrinsically desirable, that the desire for them lasts across historical divisions and permeates different regimes of truth, and that exclusions endemic in the desire-laden pursuit of powerknowledge, as he subsequently called it, are normatively problematic. What he did not say, however, and perhaps could not say, is why truth and power are desirable and why the accompanying exclusions are normatively problematic. A better approach, as I explain in the next section, would be to acknowledge the normativity intrinsic to power, truth, and their interrelation and then spell out the transhistorical expectations to which such normativity attaches. This alternative approach is motivated by both the insights and the issues in Arendt and Foucault’s reflections on truth and politics. Although Arendt sheds considerable light on the importance of factual truth and democratic deliberation for politics, her work raises questions about the political character of truthtelling and truth. Likewise, although Foucault gives illuminating explanations of how truth and power intersect in the modern regime of truth, his work raises questions concerning the alethic character of power relations in general and of politics in particular. To address both sets of questions, while acknowledging important insights,

220  Truth and Politics let me propose a different way to think about the truth of politics and the politics of truth.

8.3  Political Truth 8.3.1  The Truth of Politics As we have seen, Arendt asks how truth and politics relate because the power of organized lying, which suppresses every attempt to tell the truth, can make all pursuits of truth seem completely powerless. But if truth and politics are not as distinct as Arendt often assumes—if instead the proper pursuit of political power actually serves the truth—then, I suggest, we need to reframe Arendt’s question. We need to ask about politics as a social domain of truth, alongside science, art, religion, and other social domains. This suggestion assumes, of course, that one can distinguish politics from other social domains. It also assumes that not every relation of power is a political matter, strictly speaking, that power in society includes more than political power. As a first approximation, let me delimit the political domain by stipulating three meanings for the term politics, meanings that are distinct but overlap. First, politics in a very broad sense refers to any struggle for liberation from oppression, domination, exclusion, and the like. Such struggles are collective, involving communities, groups, and classes, and they usually last for more than a generation. What sociologists and critical theorists call “new social movements” are contemporary expressions of such political struggles. One can speak, in this sense, of gender politics or identity politics. Second, politics also refers to how people participate in informal networks of communication and influence with respect to matters of public concern such as health care, schooling, climate change, and a living wage. Politics in this sense pertains to what many theorists call the public sphere, where civil society and the administrative state intersect. For example, debates about the sociocultural implications of new social media raise many issues concerning politics in the public sphere. Third, and more traditionally, politics refers to activities and events within the structures of legally stipulated jurisdictions. In other words, it refers to what happens within what political theorists call the state, provided we understand this broadly enough to include both governments and suprastate organizations connected to treaties, international courts, trade regulations, and the like. Although these three meanings might seem only loosely connected, I think they share a deeper unity. For all of them involve both power and justice. More precisely, within all three forms of politics, people engage in power struggles in order to achieve justice, and they struggle over justice from positions of relative power. An oppressed minority fighting for its rights tries to gain or use sufficient power to pursue a just end, even as

Truth and Politics  221 it tries to make that end an achievable goal. The same pattern holds for a not-for-profit organization that promotes new environmental regulations and a political party that tries to propose and enact new tax legislation. All of them engage in politics as a power struggle over justice and a justice struggle over power. That is the general sense in which, from here on, this chapter speaks of politics. Politics, then—including liberation struggles, public communication, and the affairs of state—is never merely a matter of power. It is also and just as much about justice. Nor are concerns for justice ever nonpolitical, not even in those modes of “truthtelling” (philosophy, science, art, history, journalism, etc.) that Arendt declared apolitical. Even if it is “purely intellectual,” a concern for justice always contains or suggests a position about how justice is properly achieved and how power is properly exercised. Accordingly, politics in its most general meaning is intrinsically normative, and that in two respects, with respect to both power and justice. Struggles for power within the political domain always raise issues about whether the power exercised is both legitimate and appropriate to the ends of justice. At the same time, political struggles for justice always raise issues about the scope of the justice sought and whether it can be achieved. This double normativity of politics entails that, in principle, truth and politics do not conflict. Instead, as I  have already suggested and now intend to show, politics, as the empowered struggle for justice, is a social domain of truth: pursuing truth is intrinsic to politics, and political efforts can contribute to the unfolding of truth as a whole. Let me explain. Chapter  6 characterizes truth as a whole as a dynamic correlation between human fidelity to societal principles, on the one hand, and a life-giving disclosure of society, on the other. A life-giving disclosure is one that furthers the interconnected flourishing of all creatures. I  have claimed that this dynamic correlation unfolds in different social domains of knowledge and truth, domains that, while distinct, are nevertheless isomorphic with one another and with truth as a whole: in each one a distinct correlation between fidelity and disclosure echoes the correlations in other social domains and thereby participates in the dynamic correlation that makes up truth as a whole. When I say politics is a social domain of truth, I mean it is one among several distinct arenas where human beings can practice fidelity to societal principles and promote a life-giving disclosure of society. Specifically, the leading societal principle in the political domain to which truth requires fidelity is that of justice, and the most important way in which political efforts contribute to life-giving disclosure is by liberating people and other creatures from oppression. Politics, as a social domain of truth, involves a dynamic correlation between justice and freedom.

222  Truth and Politics Neither justice nor freedom can be pursued, however, without a struggle for power. And the normative primacy of justice and freedom in the political domain places limits on this struggle, for whatever power people exercise in the political domain must truly serve the ends of justice and promote liberation. Indeed, the political exercise of power must itself be faithful to a fundamental principle that we could describe as the expected justifiability of power: political power must either promise or prove to further justice and freedom. Exercises of political power that violate this expected justifiability cannot be legitimate, nor can they be appropriate to the ends of justice. Although other societal principles also call for human fidelity in the political domain—I think, for example, of the principles of solidarity and resourcefulness mentioned in previous ­chapters—the societal principle of justice is politically decisive, also with respect to the justifiability of power in this domain. Hence, in principle, politics is not opposed to truth, and truth is not powerless in the political domain. Instead, politics is itself a social domain of truth. It is a domain where being faithful to the societal principle of justice and pursuing it on the basis of justifiable power can dynamically correlate with freeing the oppressed and can thereby contribute to the interconnected flourishing of all creatures. The justifiably empowered and liberating pursuit of justice characterizes the truth of politics: by virtue of this dynamic correlation, politics is a social domain of truth. None of this is intended to ignore widespread falsehood within much of contemporary politics, falsehood both in the sense of the organized lying that Arendt rightly decried and in the sense of injustice, oppression, and abuses of power. There is no denying the prevalence of what I would call political untruth. Yet the point I want to stress, one other political philosophers often overlook, is how intrinsic to politics the expectation of truth is. Because of this, truth in the sense of political truth (not simply either factual accuracy or what Arendt calls “rational truth”) is not essentially impotent and political power is not essentially untrue. For, in principle, political power can let truth unfold—it can let fidelity to justice correlate with liberation from oppression—provided this power is justifiable and serves the ends of justice. That is why, beyond deplorable attacks on philosophical insight and factual accuracy, political power that, in Arendt’s words, “gives no heed to truth” is indeed “despicable” (TP 545–46). It is despicable because, despite its apparent strength, such power is politically untrue: it resists the call to justice and cannot be justified. But what about a politics that is completely deceitful in the way Arendt feared, what we now label post-truth politics? What about a politics in which supposed leaders, including most prominently the former president of the United States, habitually bullshit, lie, promote conspiracy theories, attack conscientious journalists, and deny scientific findings? Wasn’t Arendt right to call out the “mass manipulation of fact and opinion” and

Truth and Politics  223 urge professional truthtellers to maintain their intellectual integrity “at any price”(TP 564, 573)? Yes, emphatically, yes. Still, I  want to emphasize the political reason why everyone should despise post-truth politics and should expect intellectual integrity. The political reason is that political deceit undermines political truth, and intellectual integrity supports it. Politics is a post-propositional social domain of truth. As such it requires support from the pursuit of propositional truth, especially in the scientific domain. How can we address issues of justifiable power, achievable justice, and genuine liberation if we cannot rely on factually accurate findings and logically valid claims? How can we achieve such findings and claims if the people most responsible for developing them lack intellectual integrity? And how can propositional truthtellers support our addressing the most urgent political issues when supposed political leaders continually dismiss their work and belittle their integrity? The massive deceitfulness of post-truth politics poisons the body politic. It kills the passion to achieve justice, and it blocks any commitment to justifiable power, including the rule of law. Post-truth politics is despicable because it is politically false. 8.3.2  The Politics of Truth From a Foucaultian perspective, Arendt’s concern about organized lying and my own rejection of political untruth might well seem naïve. For if Foucault is right about the modern regime of truth, then the admixture of truth and power is too pervasive and complicated to be confined to the political domain. It implicates the very “truthtelling” professions and organizations, including the arts and humanities, that Arendt deems apolitical, albeit politically significant. Although Foucault might have agreed with me that such professions and organizations are not nonpolitical, his reason for saying this would not have been that concerns for justice are intrinsically political but rather that these modes of truthtelling are central to a modern regime that makes power and truth mutually interdependent. Moreover, if power and truth are not normative concepts, as Foucault sometimes seems to suggest, then professional truthtellers would themselves be no more than societally privileged players in an ongoing struggle for power, and notions like “intellectual integrity,” “factual accuracy,” and “logical validity” would have no more normative standing than blatant political bullshit. I do not think Foucault ever held such a cynical position. Yet it is not hard to see how cynicism about science and the “learned professions” could find support from certain interpretations of his writings on disciplinary power. The best way to challenge such cynicism, I want to argue, is to develop a normative conception of power and of its relation to truth. And that is what Foucault fails to provide. As I indicated earlier, this failure reflects his reticence or refusal to think through the normative

224  Truth and Politics implications of the transhistorical concepts he unavoidably uses to historically specify the nexus of power and truth in the modern regime. In this context, “transhistorical” does not mean ahistorical or unchanging or timeless. Instead it points to shared normative expectations that emerge from history itself and continue to unfold as history unfolds. Justice, for example, is such an expectation. I call these normative expectations societal principles. Societal principles not only emerge historically amid social struggles but also are always at stake in any social acquisition and exercise of power. We can say, in general, that a diverse array of societal principles is at stake in the exercise of power. I  have suggested already that power in the political domain is answerable to the principles of justifiability and justice. That is just one way in which societal principles are at stake in the exercise of power; in other social domains, other principles stand out. At bottom, however, an exercise of power, whether political or not, that fails to promote the wellbeing of those affected by it, whether human or nonhuman, is normatively problematic. The ways in which it is problematic become apparent as failures to live up to societal principles such as solidarity and justice. To live up to such societal principles, the exercise of power must follow its own primary principle, which is a necessary condition for the promotion of wellbeing. I call this primary principle for exercising power the horizon of serviceability: any exercise of power, to be worthwhile, requires workable means and should satisfy genuine needs; that is, it should be serviceable. Serviceability is a complex normative horizon, involving expectations of worth, effectiveness, and satisfaction, and it is intrinsic to the exercise of power, even when this fails to live up to other societal principles such as solidarity and justice. Hence, the exercise of power brings with it three sorts of normative concerns—wellbeing, serviceability, and other societal principles—and it can be evaluated and criticized in all three respects. For example, in the political domain, as already indicated, the exercise of power raises three sorts of normative concerns: not only whether it serves the ends of justice (a societal principle) and freedom (which is intrinsic to human wellbeing) but also whether the exercise is justifiable (i.e., serviceable in these regards). Moreover, the normative concerns of serviceability, wellbeing, and other societal principles are neither recent inventions nor ancient traditions. Instead, they are transhistorical horizons that have emerged and changed through centuries and millennia of social struggle and that continue to unfold toward the future. Similarly, as already explained, the pursuit of truth involves a diverse array of societal principles. At its core, truth is a dynamic correlation between fidelity to such societal principles, and a life-giving disclosure of society. This dynamic correlation takes on different contours in different social domains. Here, too, normative concerns are inescapable: the call

Truth and Politics  225 to fidelity; the expectations of solidarity, justice, and other societal principles; and the prospect of interconnected flourishing. Again, these are neither purely recent nor simply ancient but rather transhistorical—that is, historically emergent—concerns. If both the exercise of power and the pursuit of truth are intrinsically normative, then so must be their interrelation. What Foucault understands better than most, even though he misconstrues it, is that truth cannot be pursued without exercising power, and power cannot be exercised without truth being at issue. In my own terms, how could anyone be faithful to principles of solidarity and justice, for example, and promote a life-giving disclosure of society without competently engaging in social practices that can effectively help achieve greater solidarity, justice, and interconnected flourishing? Or, conversely, how could anyone exercise power in relation to others without raising the concern whether this does or does not contribute to their wellbeing as framed by the dynamic correlation that makes up truth? Accordingly, it is not only the case that, as Foucault indicates, power and truth are necessary conditions of each other, but also they have mutual normative implications. No matter how sincere (wahrhaftig), an incompetent attempt to “do the truth” is normatively defective. So is a “successful” attempt to influence the behavior of others that undermines the pursuit of truth. To the extent that what Foucault calls disciplinary power is structured for such truth-undermining “success,” it is normatively problematic, no matter how much it interlinks with scientific truth. So too, insofar as scientific “truth” has become isolated from concerns about solidarity, justice, and interconnected flourishing, it is normatively defective, no matter how much “success” it achieves in the exercise of disciplinary power. An interlinkage between truth-undermining “power” and power-­ protecting “truth” is the potential normative disaster of the modern regime of truth. Although Foucault alerts us to this real danger, he lacks the normative language to say why it should be resisted and how the modern regime of truth should be transformed. Moreover, even though, following Enrique Dussel, one could say that Foucault’s source of normativity lies in the lives of the victims excluded by the mechanisms of disciplinary power,29 it is not clear how, within his own critique, their needs and aspirations could be both recognized and voiced. 8.3.3 Neither/Nor Compared with Arendt, Foucault correctly shows that the domain of political struggle in contemporary society far exceeds the state and the public sphere. Unfortunately, however, he does not have sufficient conceptual resources to delimit politics, even in this expanded sense, to an empowered struggle for justice and freedom. In the absence of such a

226  Truth and Politics delimitation, every conflict, disagreement, and difference can become political and, concomitantly, every finding and claim of propositional truth can become a political tool. So there is an understandable progression, one Foucault neither makes nor recommends, from an unlimited expansion of the political domain to what the introduction to this book calls the political instrumentalizing of propositional truth—that is, its politicization. When that happens, questions of factual accuracy and inferential validity get reduced to or replaced by questions about whether and how well a finding or claim serves the pursuit of political power. But these are two different sorts of questions, secured by different social domains, and to reduce one to the other is bad for both truth and politics. On the one hand, reducing accuracy and validity to political effectiveness blocks the potential for sharing propositional insight and learning something new. On the other hand, it also undermines the legitimacy of political power. For if we cannot really assess factual claims for accuracy and validity, then we also cannot accurately measure or legitimately claim their effectiveness for the pursuit of justice and freedom. Just as striving for propositional truth supports the empowered pursuit of justice and freedom, so the exercise of genuine political power relies on the availability of noninstrumentalized propositional truth. There is also a larger sense in which the politicizing of propositional truth is bad for both truth and politics. By, in effect, eliminating the distinct legitimacy of propositional truth, politicization also throws doubt on all other social domains of truth, both those like art that are prepropositional and those like religion that are post-propositional. For the distinct legitimacies of these domains depend in part on their differences from and relations to the domain of propositional truth, just as the internal differentiation among modes of propositional truth hinges on how such truth relates to various social domains of truth. If the sort of fidelity and disclosure indigenous to propositional truth could be reduced to matters of effectiveness in the pursuit of political power, what would prevent a similar instrumentalizing of artistic, religious, and other forms of truth? So too, in a larger sense, politicizing propositional truth also damages the entire political domain. For such politicizing undermines all normative claims about politics as a domain of truth, reducing it to nothing more than a raw struggle for power. Like factual claims, normative claims, when politicized, become worth nothing more than their political effectiveness. To claim, then, that the exercise of political power properly serves the ends of justice and freedom, and that it should be justifiable in these regards—as I  have claimed—would simply be a power move and, I suspect, would be regarded as a relatively ineffective one as well. In other words, might would make right. Indeed, might would be right, although what “right” would now mean is far from obvious. In short, the politicizing of propositional truth threatens to reduce politics to nothing

Truth and Politics  227 more than a normatively nonevaluable struggle for power that has no regard to the ends it should serve. That, I submit, is just as bad for the entire domain of politics as it is for truth as a whole. Yet the proper alternative to politicizing propositional truth does not lie in immunizing it from politics or treating propositional truth as completely apolitical, as Arendt in certain passages seems to suggest. Such immunization or depoliticization would misconstrue both truth and politics. On the one hand, to regard propositional truth as completely apolitical would ignore all the ways in which the logical practices that result in propositions link up with nonlogical practices, including those of politics. Seldom do we just think in the abstract. We think politically or aesthetically or morally, for example, and the results of our practical thought can rightly be considered political or aesthetic or moral propositions. Moreover, the social setting within which we undertake such modes of practical thought is always already permeated by political struggles over justice and freedom, even when we do not recognize or deliberately take up these struggles. In that sense, no thought and no results of thought, including accurate and valid propositions, can be completely apolitical. On the other hand, to regard propositional truth as completely apolitical would also misconstrue what politics is like. In the modern world, people cannot undertake empowered struggles for justice and freedom without appealing to certain facts, for example, about racism or poverty or environmental destruction. They also cannot avoid making assertions about such facts and about the normative expectations that guide their struggles. Because political struggles rely on politically relevant facts and politically shaped understandings, there is no way for propositional truth concerning such facts and understandings to be completely apolitical. Politics is a post-propositional social domain of truth. Without support from politically relevant and intrinsically true propositions, it would disintegrate or disappear. This assumes, of course, that a proposition can be both intrinsically true and politically relevant, that not only can it result from a correlation of accurate insight and inferential validity but also it can be politically germane. Consider, for example, an argument to the effect that because the policies and actions of a local police department both exhibit and perpetuate systemic racism, therefore the police should be “defunded.” Clearly an argument along these lines would be a political argument: it makes claims about the government-supervised exercise of (police) power, with a view to (implicit) claims about justice (removal of discrimination) and freedom (liberation from racism and its life-destroying effects). An argument like this would appeal to many politically relevant facts (e.g., about population patterns, tendencies in law enforcement, and the size and proportionality of municipal budgets). At least implicitly, it would also appeal to politically relevant understandings of the proper roles of policing and government oversight as well as the

228  Truth and Politics political effectiveness of budgetary pressure. It seems entirely plausible to me that we should expect both the factual and the normative claims to be as accurate as possible and to hang together in a logically valid way. Moreover, this expectation of propositional truth in no way conflicts with the political relevance of these claims. Rather, the greater the degree of accuracy and validity, the more politically relevant and indeed persuasive the argument can be. Although there is more to the political effectiveness of public arguments than the accuracy and validity of the propositions they employ, propositional truth is a necessary condition. Conversely, and in the long run, propositional untruth undermines the truth of politics. So we see that, although not all of truth is political, truth is also not apolitical, and that in two respects. First, politics is, as I have argued, a social domain of truth. Alongside it are other social domains of truth that, strictly speaking, are not political. Nevertheless, by virtue of isomorphic correlations between fidelity and disclosure in various social domains, politics participates along with them in the same truth as a whole. Truth includes the empowered struggle for justice and freedom. Second, truth is not apolitical in the additional sense that political truth relies on propositional truth. Moreover, the propositional truth on which political truth relies is and must be politically relevant. The political relevance of true propositions is not the same as their propositional truth. Yet their relevance for the social domain of political truth necessarily relies on their intrinsic truth—their accuracy and validity—within the propositional domain. That is why both politicizing and depoliticizing propositional truth are bad for both truth and politics. For both tendencies undermine the necessary contribution of propositional truth to the truth of politics and thereby to truth as a whole. As I have tried to show, neither Foucault nor Arendt endorses either the total politicizing or depoliticizing, respectively, of truth. Yet there are ways of interpreting them that lead to such results. A better approach, which this chapter has attempted, is to critically retrieve their insights for a new understanding of the relation between truth and politics. On this understanding, truth is neither completely political nor purely apolitical. Instead, politics itself is a social domain of truth.

Notes 1 Michael Ure, “Arendt’s Apology,” Philosophy Today 62, no. 2 (2018): 420. 2 See Valeria Pashkova and Mikhail Pashkov, “Truth and Truthfulness in Politics: Rereading Hannah Arendt’s Essay ‘Socrates’,” Philosophy Today 62, no. 2 (2018): 447–50. 3 Arendt inherits this distinction from Leibniz, who distinguished the necessary truths of reasoning from the contingent truths of fact. For a discussion of Leibniz’s distinction, see Campbell, TH 222–35.

Truth and Politics  229 4 Ure, “Arendt’s Apology,” 424. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Harvest Book, 1968). 6 Ure, “Arendt’s Apology,” 430. 7 Ibid. 8 Amy Allen, “The Normative and the Transcendental: Comments on Colin Koopman’s Genealogy as Critique,” Foucault Studies 18 (October 2014): 238. 9 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 10 In this connection, see especially the seminal 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64. 11 See also Fred Dallmayr, Polis and Praxis: Exercises in Contemporary Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 77–103. 12 See Michael Kelly, “Foucault, Habermas, and the Self-Referentiality of Critique,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 374–79. Kelly derives this contrast from Jana Sawicki’s essay “Foucault and Feminism: Toward a Politics of Difference,” in Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, eds. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 220–21. 13 Joseph Rouse, “Power/Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 106–7. 14 Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in After Philosophy: End or Transformation? eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 100–17; quotation from 108. The interview stems from 1978. It first appeared in 1980, followed by an English translation in 1981. 15 Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in Foucault: A  Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 90–95. 16 Rouse, “Power/Knowledge,” 114–16. 17 Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” chapter 1 in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 31, 33. 18 “Cryptonormativism” refers to Foucault’s allegedly invoking norms that he cannot justify because to justify them would require an appeal to universals like “justice” or “truth” whose validity transcends the current regime of truth. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 282–86, where Habermas favorably cites the 1981 version of Fraser’s “Foucault on Modern Power.” 19 Kelly, “Foucault, Habermas, and the Self-Referentiality of Critique.” According to Kelly, Foucault and Habermas agree that any normative basis for a critique of modernity must emerge from modernity itself. They disagree about whether the validity of this basis is limited to the modern “regime of truth” (Foucault) or transcends it (Habermas). 20 Foucault explicitly says this about power and knowledge. See, for example, his following comment in a 1983 interview: “when I read—and I know that it was being attributed to me—the thesis ‘Knowledge is power’ or ‘Power

230  Truth and Politics is knowledge,’ I begin to laugh, since studying their relation is precisely my problem. If they were identical, I would not have to study them and I would be spared a lot of fatigue as a result. The very fact that I pose the question of their relation proves clearly that I do not identify them.” Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism” (1983), in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley et al., ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 455. 21 An additional complication, which Foucault takes up in his later writings, is the question of the extent, if any, to which individual human beings give shape to the social forces that influence them. 22 Barry Allen, Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 149–76. 23 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 176. 24 That Foucault ties truth to the relation between epistemic subjects and epistemic objects is obvious from his most systematic and complete account of how he understood knowledge. See The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1969 and 1971), trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1972). Although written prior to the genealogical studies of truth and power that I have cited, this book establishes key claims about objects of discourse and levels of knowledge that Foucault neither abandoned nor revoked. See also Maurice Florence, “Foucault,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 459–63, which describes Foucault’s project as a “critical history of thought” that analyzes “the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed and modified, insofar as those relations constitute a possible knowledge [savoir]” (459). The editor explains that this entry from the early 1980s was written mostly by Foucault and signed pseudonymously. 25 Although Foucault’s later writings on sexuality and ethics appear to supplement this concept with one of personal authenticity and truthtelling, he does not, so far as I can tell, give up his primary general concept of truth as a relation between epistemic subjects and objects. See especially Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (the Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the College de France 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gross, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 26 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power” (1982), in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley et al., ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 326–48; quotation from 340. 27 These aspects correspond to the first three “faces of truth” that Prado uncovers in Foucault’s work and labels the criterial, the constructivist, and the perspectivist notions of truth. The other two faces, which I  do not discuss here, are the “experiential” and the “tacit-realist” notions of truth. See C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000). 28 Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language” (1971), the appendix in The Archaeology of Knowledge, 215–37; quotations from 218–19. Foucault gave this inaugural lecture when he took up his chair in The History and Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. 29 Enrique Dussel, Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, trans. Eduardo Mendieta et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 278, 333–34, 351, 356–59.

9 Truth in Art and Religion

In modern society, people readily link truth with science. They also regularly exempt politics from truth. As we have seen, however, the linkage to science often presupposes a reduction of truth as a whole to scientific truth, and the price for exempting politics is the surrender of truth to supposedly raw relations of power. Both tendencies—both the privileging of scientific truth and the surrendering of political truth—have ramifications for social domains where claims to truth unavoidably arise but the truth being claimed is neither straightforwardly scientific nor readily reducible to relations of power. Three such domains have figured prominently in the modern world: art, religion, and philosophy. To mount effective challenges to both scientism and politicization, a holistic and pluralist conception of truth needs to account for art, religion, and philosophy as distinctive and interlinked domains of truth. Among modern philosophers, G. W. F. Hegel has most forcefully argued not only for the distinctiveness and the interlinkage of these domains but also for their crucial roles in the process of truth as a whole. In fact, he places art, religion, and philosophy at the pinnacle of that process: they are domains of “absolute spirit,” Hegel says, revealing “absolute truth.” Although, following Theodor Adorno, I  neither endorse Hegel’s Idealism nor embrace his conception of absolute truth, Hegel’s philosophy of absolute spirit provides significant clues to the character and roles of artistic, religious, and philosophical truth. Accordingly, this chapter and the next have Hegel and Adorno as their primary interlocutors. The current chapter has two parts. The first summarizes my conception of artistic truth (section 9.1) and discusses the alethic relation between art and politics (section 9.2). The second part lays out a conception of religious truth (section  9.3) and explores the alethic relation between religion and science (section 9.4). Then, in the final chapter, I will consider the topic of philosophical truth, from three angles: the interrelations among philosophy, art, and religion; the historicity of truth and philosophy; and the roles of philosophy in social critique and the pursuit of practical wisdom. DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021-9

232  Truth in Art and Religion

9.1  Artistic Truth Previous chapters have already pointed to the arts as a distinct social domain of pre-propositional knowledge and truth. Artistic knowledge is, I have suggested, a complex relationship involving the practices and results of imagination, the experience and production of aesthetic signs, and responses to the societal principle of imaginative cogency. Within this relationship, artistic insight can arise, and when it arises, it can be true and can be confirmed in its truth. Artistic truth involves a dynamic correlation between imaginative disclosure and fidelity to the principle of imaginative cogency. Such disclosure and fidelity are each necessary conditions for artistic truth, and in correlation they are jointly sufficient. To be true, an art product or art event must be cogently and imaginatively disclosive. Artistically true insight—that is, cogent imaginative disclosure—occurs within one or more of three relations that permeate the ontology of art as a social institution: the relation between the artist and the art product or event; the relation between the art public or audience and the art product/event; and a relation internal to the art product/event when it is constituted as a work of art. It is within and through these three relations that artists and their audiences interconnect and artistic truth is shared. Now let me lay out this conception of artistic truth in a little more detail.1 9.1.1  Art and Imagination Art, in my view, is a complex social institution that includes many different art forms (dance, film, music, poetry, visual arts, etc.), spans diverse branches (e.g., folk art, high art, popular art, and mass-mediated art), and encompasses various social types (e.g., liturgical art, social protest art, and what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls memorial art).2 This complex social institution is historical through and through. As Hegel shows in great detail, art changes and develops across many different cultures and eras. And, as Adorno insists, the emergence of art’s relative independence as a social institution in the modern Western world—its so-called autonomy—is tied to the development of other social institutions such as a capitalist economy and a formally democratic state. Moreover, as a sociohistorical institution, art has many dimensions, not only perceptual and aesthetic, for example, but also economic, political, and moral, to mention several. Given such complexity, historicity, and multidimensionality, it is not only difficult but also misguided to try to define the unchanging “nature” of art, despite many philosophical attempts to do just that. Instead, borrowing an image from Adorno, I think of art as a historically changing constellation of prominent features (AT 2–3/11–12). At different times and in different societies, some features will stand out more brightly than others, and some might fade out altogether. What art is cannot be

Truth in Art and Religion  233 divorced from what it was and what it could still become. Nevertheless, thanks to the development of fine art (schöne Kunst, beaux arts) in modern Western society, two features have become especially prominent in the social institution of art. One is the artifactual character of art. The other is its aesthetic character. Although, as already suggested, art has many other dimensions, these two—the artifactual and the aesthetic— have become nearly definitive for art in the modern West, definitive not only for high art but also for art in its other branches. The artifactual character of art consists in the central emphasis given to making and interpreting individual products and events. In every artform, and across the various types and branches of art, three sorts of social practices stand out, as Wolterstorff indicates: practices of making art products and events (e.g., composing, painting, and writing poems), practices of performing or presenting them (e.g., singing songs, displaying paintings, and reciting poems aloud), and practices of engaging with these products and events (e.g., listening, viewing, and reading).3 Making artifacts and presenting and interpreting them are central to art as a social institution. This is not to say such practices are either exclusive to art or exhaustive of it. Many other social institutions rely heavily on the production and distribution of artifacts, and there is more to art than its artifactual character. Nevertheless, because the development of fine art led to an increasing emphasis on artists making individual artifacts that can stand on their own as works of art to be presented and interpreted by others, what we could call artifactual practices (i.e., making, presenting, and interpreting artifacts) have gained prominence in the constellation of art as a social institution. Although many art products and events are not works of art—in the sense that they are not made to stand on their own, for example, as pieces of concert music or gallery art—a fine art focus on the production and reception of free-standing artworks has helped highlight the artifactual character of all art.4 The rise of fine art in the modern West has also called attention to the aesthetic character of art. Again, like art’s artifactual dimension, its aesthetic character is not an invention of fine art, nor is it restricted to fine art. All art has an aesthetic dimension. This dimension has undergone and continues to undergo historical change, and it displays many different guises, depending on the form, branch, and type of art where an art product or event takes shape and plays a role. Yet, by insisting that art serves or should serve primarily aesthetic purposes rather than, say, religious, moral, political, or commercial purposes, the development of fine art gives an unavoidable prominence to the aesthetic character of all art. Hegel, who discusses art’s aesthetic character in terms of “beauty” and considers it intrinsically alethic, puts the point like this: Art’s vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration [Kunstgestaltung], to set forth the reconciled opposition

234  Truth in Art and Religion just mentioned, and so to have its final end [Endzweck] in itself, in this very setting forth [Darstellung] and unveiling. For other ends [Zwecke], like instruction, purification, [moral] betterment [Besserung], financial gain, struggling for fame and honour, have nothing to do with the work of art as such, and do not determine its concept [Begriff] (A 1: 55/13: 82). The “opposition just mentioned” is the unresolved dualism between nature and freedom that accompanies the claim that moral betterment is the final end of art (A 1: 51–55/13: 77–82). According to Hegel, Kant and, more broadly, modern culture fail to get past this dualism. To get past it, art, like philosophy, must accomplish the mediation of nature and freedom. That’s why art’s vocation lies in setting forth this reconciled opposition and not in pursuing moral betterment, which presupposes a nature/freedom opposition and leaves it unreconciled. A similar problem besets all the other purposes Hegel mentions when they are regarded as art’s “final end.” What Hegel says about art’s vocation seems to me most directly applicable to fine art. Yet such an emphasis on fine art’s aesthetic character sheds light on all of art, as Hegel himself tries to show. Unlike Hegel on a certain reading, however, I do not consider this aesthetic character to be so definitive for art that all nonaesthetic purposes become simply secondary or even suspect.5 Rather, thanks to the development of fine art, art’s aesthetic character has become decisive for how all these other purposes are understood and pursued within the social institution of art. What such decisiveness actually comes to depends, of course, on what the aesthetic dimension of art involves. Before taking up that topic, however, let me make two additional comments about the prominence of artifactual and aesthetic dimensions in the social institution of art. First, their prominence is negatively confirmed by attacks upon art from within this social institution, attacks by so-called anti-art (actually anti-fine art) movements like Dada and Neo-Dada. For what these movements question are precisely the artifactual and aesthetic features of art. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, for example, challenges both the assumption that art should involve the creation, presentation, and interpretation of individual art products and the assumption that aesthetic qualities or experiences are a primary reason for undertaking such artifactual practices. Although these attacks are effective as forms of social protest, they do not actually eliminate the prominence of artifactual and aesthetic features in art after the development of fine art in Western society. Instead, the attacks show just how prominent these features have become. Art has become a social institution within which people pursue artifactual practices for aesthetic purposes. Obviously they can and do also pursue other purposes via these artifactual practices. Yet they cannot avoid pursuing aesthetic purposes. If they could avoid this, then either they would not be

Truth in Art and Religion  235 participating in the social institution of art as it has developed in the West or art’s constellation would have decisively shifted. My second comment is this: there is more to the prominence of the artifactual and the aesthetic than their shining out in art’s constellation. They also stand in a close relation to one another, such that the production and experience of aesthetic signs is intrinsic to art’s artifactual character, and the pursuit of art’s aesthetic practices directly depends on the creation, presentation, and interpretation of individual products and events. Within art, the artifactual and the aesthetic are mutually interdependent: to carry out aesthetic practices there, we need simultaneously to carry out artifactual practices, and in carrying out artifactual practices, we produce and experience aesthetic signs. Aesthetic practices are not, however, peculiar to the arts: they occur throughout everyday life and within many different social institutions. By aesthetic practices, I mean three practices that make up the intersubjective process I call imagination. As a process, and not simply a personal capacity or trait, imagination is a complex way in which people interact with each other and with the world they inhabit. The three practices that make up this intersubjective process are exploration, presentation, and creative interpretation. To explore is to try to discover something without being sure in advance what we hope to discover. Although obviously prominent in the production and experience of art, the aesthetic practice of exploration is also important in education, science, technology, and many other social domains. Presentation is the activity of calling attention to the nuances of meaning in things and doing so in a pre-linguistic and pre-logical way. This can be done, for example, simply by dwelling within a landscape and letting it “speak” to you. But it can also involve our fashioning an object or event, such as a public ceremony, so that it captures or conveys certain nuances of atmosphere and tone. Either way, presentation is an aesthetic practice, a practice of imagination, and it occurs throughout ordinary experience. Whatever carries such nuances of meaning can be called an aesthetic sign. The notion of aesthetic sign points to how things (objects, products, and events) offer themselves for exploration and carry nuances of meaning. Like all other signs, aesthetic signs call for interpretation. In their case, however, the interpretation called for will honor their nuances of meaning and not directly aim for linguistic clarity or logical precision. In other words, aesthetic signs call for creative interpretation, the third aesthetic practice within the process of intersubjective imagination. Creative interpretation is responsive to what, via exploration and presentation, offers itself in a nuanced way, trying to make sense of it within its nuances of meaning. By calling exploration, presentation, and creative interpretation aesthetic practices, I  wish to indicate that these imaginative engagements

236  Truth in Art and Religion intrinsically appeal to certain standards. There are better and worse ways to engage in aesthetic practices, and their objects and results—what is explored, presented, and creatively interpreted—can also be better or worse. This is, of course, a controversial position to take, given the long history of disputes about whether aesthetic taste is rational and whether beauty (or any other aesthetic quality) is merely in the eye of the beholder. My point is simply this: even if people ignore or dismiss aesthetic standards, we cannot undertake the practices of imagination without expecting these practices to yield evaluable results. In modern Western society, the standards for such practices and results, as formulated in aesthetics and related disciplines, are expectations of complexity, depth, and intensity. All things considered, for example, a practice or result of imagination that is richly suggestive will be better, and will be considered better, than one that is obvious and trite. Accordingly, the practices and results of imagination raise the general expectation that they will be valid in specific respects, that they will live up to specifiable standards. I call this the expectation of aesthetic validity, and I try to give it content by saying that, in general, people expect their aesthetic practices and results to be cogent in an imaginative way. Whatever aesthetic standards we follow or spell out, we pursue them within the open horizon of imaginative cogency. Imaginative cogency is a societal principle. It holds for all who undertake aesthetic practices, and it draws them onward. Like other societal principles such as logical validity, solidarity, and justice, the principle of imaginative cogency calls for human fidelity in the practices of daily life. The importance of such fidelity becomes especially obvious when we strive for truth in art. Artistic truth, as I shall now explain, is a matter of cogent imaginative disclosure. 9.1.2  Cogent Imaginative Disclosure Just as truth as a whole consists in a dynamic correlation between human fidelity to societal principles and a life-giving disclosure of society, so too, as indicated in the previous chapters on science and politics, each social domain of truth involves a dynamic correlation between fidelity to a specific societal principle and a specific mode of disclosure. Within art, this specific correlation occurs, across all of art’s forms, branches, and types, in the aesthetic dimension. It is a dynamic correlation between fidelity to the societal principle of imaginative cogency and the imaginative disclosure of whatever the products and events of art are about. Although, as already claimed, imaginative cogency provides a normative horizon for all aesthetic practices and results and not only for those that occur within art, art heightens this horizon’s prominence. This is so because of the tight interdependence between aesthetic and artifactual practices in art as a social institution. For in art, the exercise of

Truth in Art and Religion  237 imagination unavoidably accompanies the production and experience of individual art products and events, such that the pursuit of aesthetic merit in art is always already connected to the pursuit of artifactual excellence. We cannot strive for imaginative cogency in art without at the same time trying to meet standards of excellence in the creation, presentation, and interpretation of artistic artifacts. That is why, according to Adorno, questions of what he calls artistic technique (Technik) provide indispensable clues to the truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt) of an artwork (AT 212–16/316–22). By the same token, the importance of artifactual standards and their pursuit in all the various sorts of art gives added prominence to whether artistic production and experience live up to the expectation of imaginative cogency. Although artifactual standards are not the same as aesthetic standards, in art we cannot pursue the one without also pursuing the other. Artistic truth arises when the insight achieved via artifactually anchored aesthetic practices is imaginatively cogent. The acquisition and dissemination of such insight occurs within aesthetic practices and their results. Because these practices—exploration, presentation, and creative ­interpretation—all belong to the process of imagination, and because they aim to unveil nuances of meaning, I call the sort of insight aesthetically generated within art, and the process of generating it, imaginative disclosure. The arts, thanks to their capacity for imaginative disclosure, are avenues for uncovering, sharing, and testing pre-linguistic and prelogical insights into ourselves, others, and the world we inhabit. To generate such imaginative insights, artists and their publics rely on specific media, such as visual imagery, musical tones, and dramatic enactments. We can call these the media of artistic imagination. They are the historically shaped and sensuous pathways through which artifactual and aesthetic practices can together lead to imaginative insights. It is in imaginatively employing such media, whether as maker, presenter, or interpreter, that people pursue and attain the imaginative insights art products and events afford. Hence, in the first instance, imaginative insights can be available in art without being articulated in language and without having propositional content: they are pre-linguistic and pre-logical. This does not mean, however, that art’s imaginative insights are not truth apt, no more than it means they can never be linguistically articulated or translated into propositions. The point, rather, is that their truth does not hinge on the deployment of language and logic. It hinges instead on a dynamic correlation between imaginative cogency and imaginative disclosure. In this sense, one can say with Hegel that art’s vocation is “to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration” (A 1: 55/13: 82). Although this might not be art’s sole vocation, art is indeed a distinctive social domain of truth, one where true insights can arise in the process of imaginative disclosure.

238  Truth in Art and Religion Imaginative disclosure occurs in three art-constitutive relations: between the artist (whether collective or individual, and whether a maker or a presenter) and the art product (e.g., a piece of music) or art event (e.g., a recital); between the art public or audience and the artistic artifact (a term that covers both product and event); and within the artistic artifact itself when it is constituted as a work of art. Moreover, regardless of whether the artifact is an artwork, it helps establish and maintain an artmediated interrelation between artists and their audiences: they interact with each other via their making, presenting, and interpreting products and events of art. Because of these distinct art-constitutive relations, I distinguish three ways in which artistic artifacts, and the imaginative insights they carry, can be true, and I  designate them with the terms authenticity, significance, and integrity. Whereas authenticity indicates artistic truth with respect to the artist’s intentions and significance points to artistic truth with respect to the interpretive needs of an audience or art public, integrity, which presupposes the artifact’s institutional status as an artwork, refers to artistic truth with respect to an artwork’s internal demands. To say that an artistic artifact is “true with respect to” is simply to say that it is cogently and imaginatively disclosive of the artist’s intentions, the audience’s interpretive needs, or the artwork’s internal demands. It is in disclosing these matters that art can provide true insights into ourselves, others, and the world. A good way to think of these three modi of artistic truth is as interrelated expectations that participants commonly bring to the production and experience of various sorts of art. So, for example, it is common for artists to strive for authenticity when they make artistic artifacts, just as it is common for their audiences or publics to expect authenticity in the making and presenting of art. Here “authenticity” refers to the manner in which an artistic artifact is made or presented. Artists and audiences alike commonly expect that how an art product or event is made or presented should be true with respect to the artist’s own vision or experience. Such truth is not a matter of assertoric correctness or propositional accuracy. It is more open-ended than that. Instead, we expect the artifact to be cogently and imaginatively disclosive of the vision or experience from which competent artistry allows it to arise. The authentic art product or event gives us cogently imaginative insight into the world of the artist and thereby into the world where artist and audience interact. That is why, at least in the modern West, we tend to praise artistic artifacts we consider “original”: they give surprising and compelling expression to the vision or experience from which they originate. In other words, we find them authentic—artistically true—in that regard. Similarly, it is common for art audiences and art publics to expect art products and events to be significant to some degree, just as artists regularly try to make and present artistic artifacts that can be significant.

Truth in Art and Religion  239 This shared expectation arises because people need cultural presentations that are worth their while, that are worth the effort of interpreting them. More specifically, people have a need for artifacts whose imaginative meaning speaks to their own need to make sense of themselves and the world they inhabit, their need for cultural orientation. An artistic artifact that speaks to this double need—the need for suitable sense-making artifacts—can be considered significant. Significance, then, is the shared expectation for art products and art events to be true with respect to an audience or public’s need for worthwhile cultural presentations. We expect these artifacts to be imaginatively and cogently disclosive of our own need for what they offer. That is why art interpretation is never merely about the artifact itself and its meaning. It is simultaneously about those who engage in interpretation. Significant artifacts of art give us cogently imaginative insight into our own social world. Accordingly, art audiences and publics tend to gravitate toward art products and events they find “inspiring” or “gripping.” Such artifacts address our interpretive needs in telling and provocative ways; we find them significant—artistically true—in that regard. Unlike authenticity and significance, which pertain to all artistic artifacts and arise in relations between these and their makers, presenters, and interpreters, the expectation of integrity pertains primarily to artifacts that are artworks, and it arises via a relation internal to the artwork itself. Unlike other art products and events, artworks are institutionally constituted to stand on their own. Although, like all aesthetic signs (including other artistic artifacts), artworks present nuances of meaning about something other than themselves, unlike other artistic artifacts, artworks present such nuances of meaning by deliberately presenting themselves. Artworks thereby call attention to their own status and role as nuanced meaning-presenters. So, while the meaning internal to an artwork is about something external to the artwork, it is simultaneously about the artwork itself. I call this intrinsically doubled and self-­ referential meaning the import of the artwork. To expect an artwork to have integrity is to expect its import to be true, something that Plato’s Republic, for example, could never have expected. For an artwork’s import to be true, the work must succeed in presenting itself while simultaneously presenting something else. In living up to its own internal demand to present itself, the artwork whose import is true lives up to more than this internal demand. So we can describe integrity as the expectation that artworks should be true with respect to (i.e., cogently and imaginatively disclosive of) their own internal demands. When an artwork succeeds at this, true import points us to the work’s own world, a world that exceeds both the world of the artist and the world of the audience or public and thereby serves to orient or disorient or reorient those whose interaction the work mediates. Not surprisingly, then, participants in high art, where artworks predominate over other

240  Truth in Art and Religion art products and events, tend to admire artworks that are “unique” and “challenging”: their import, as sensuously configured in the works themselves, is cogently and imaginatively (self-)disclosive. We find they have integrity—artistic truth—in that regard. Hence, the concept of artistic truth as cogent imaginative disclosure encompasses three normative expectations tied to three art-constitutive relations: authenticity in relation to art production, significance in relation to art interpretation, and integrity with respect to the intrinsically doubled import internal to a work of art. Although many art products and events fail to live up to one or another of these expectations and can be artistically untrue in that regard, an artwork that meets all three will provide true insights not only into the artist’s vision and an audience’s interpretive needs—and thereby into their personal and social worlds— but also into the artwork’s own import—and thereby into a world that exceeds those of the artist and audience. That is how art, when it is true, offers cogent imaginative insights into ourselves, others, and the world. Art’s capacity for cogent imaginative disclosure helps explain its importance in society, as both Hegel and Adorno recognize, each in his own way. For art that is true can put us in touch with artistic visions that challenge our own approaches, for example, to solidarity, justice, and interconnected flourishing. It can call attention to unfulfilled needs we tend to forget or ignore. It can also introduce us to imaginative worlds that place our own world in question or inspire us to seek transformation. Far from removing art from ordinary life, then, the question of artistic truth points to the important roles art plays in society. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the relation between art and politics.

9.2  Art and Politics When Hegel said art’s vocation primarily lies in unveiling the truth and not in serving moral or commercial ends, he could easily have added political engagement to his list of at best secondary purposes. Adorno, despite his criticisms of Hegel’s Idealism and absolutism, remained a true Hegelian in this regard. For Adorno, too, unveiling the truth is art’s primary vocation, and any contribution it makes to politics must be indirect. The political contribution properly provided by artworks is not the impact they have on people, says Adorno, but lies “encapsuled [verkap­ selt] in their truth content” (AT 247/367). That is why his essay on the idea of politically engaged art famously concluded that, in Germany during the early 1960s, it was not the right time for “political works of art; rather politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art, and it has penetrated most deeply into works that present themselves as politically dead.”6 Posing a contrast in this way between artistic autonomy and political engagement—implicitly, in Hegel’s case, and explicitly in

Truth in Art and Religion  241 Adorno’s—presupposes a conception of artistic truth that restricts it to the import of artworks, to what I have labeled integrity. Such a conception ignores the possibility that artistic truth also occurs in the relations between people and artistic artifacts and thereby in the human interrelations these artifacts mediate. In other words, the Hegelian conception ignores what I have described as authenticity and significance. In that sense, it reproduces the “grand narrative” that, according to Wolterstorff, privileges high art to either the exclusion or denigration of other branches and types of art, among them, politically engaged art. Yet Adorno’s claim that the political contribution of artworks lies encapsuled in the truth of their import cannot be entirely wrong. Even Wolterstorff, who draws a strong contrast between social protest art such as Käthe Kollwitz’s graphic art prints and fine art intended for disinterested attention, traces the political effects of social protest art back to the “world of the work” that such art fictively projects—that is, to the import of the social-protest artwork and its being, in Wolterstorff’s terms, imaginatively “true to reality.”7 In that sense, even the political effect of social-protest artworks lies “encapsuled in their truth content,” as Adorno claimed, or, to use my own terms, in their cogently imaginative and disclosive import. The challenge this brief discussion of Adorno poses is to acknowledge the political implications of artistic import without either restricting artistic truth to the truth of artistic import or limiting the political contributions of artistic truth, in all three of its modi (i.e., authenticity, significance, and integrity), to social protest art and other forms of art-political engagement.8 To address this challenge, let me first discuss how artistic truth can support political truth. Then I consider how political truth can encourage artistic truth, and I argue that neither the politicizing of art nor the aestheticizing of politics serves the unfolding of truth. 9.2.1  Art and Political Truth The previous chapter distinguished three senses of the term politics: struggles for social liberation, participation in the public sphere, and state-related activities and events. Common to all three, I suggested, is that they involve interlinked struggles over power and justice. Because politics can occur in such diverse arenas, and because art is also internally complex, the topic of how art and politics interrelate quickly becomes very complicated. At a minimum, however, we can say the political role of art in emancipatory movements likely differs from art’s political roles in the state and the public sphere, even though these roles overlap. Such differences can be seen in differences among various types of art. So, for example, what Wolterstorff calls social protest art, which challenges deep-seated social injustice, usually arises within or alongside emancipatory movements such as abolitionism in the nineteenth century

242  Truth in Art and Religion and anti-racism today. Many monuments and memorials, by contrast, which often carry official status, arise within the context of state activities, including warfare. So do political propaganda and agitprop. By contrast, what I have labeled “art in public” primarily occurs in the public sphere, some of it arising from emancipatory movements and some of it state sponsored, but all of it serving to generate and enhance public dialogue about matters of general concern. Yet all such art has a political role, whether in emancipatory movements, in the state, or in the public sphere. The questions we face now are, first, how artistic truth supports such political involvement and, second, how artistic truth supports political truth. Let me take up this second question. I have characterized artistic truth as a dynamic correlation between fidelity to the societal principle of imaginative cogency and an imaginative disclosure of whatever art is about. This process occurs in the relations between artist and artifact (authenticity), between audience and artifact (significance), and within the artwork itself (integrity). What are the political implications of art’s cogent imaginative disclosure? More specifically, what does artistic truth contribute to political truth? To answer, we must recall what has been said about political truth. Political truth consists in a dynamic correlation between our seeking justice on the basis of justifiable power, on the one hand, and our liberating the oppressed and thereby contributing to a life-giving disclosure of society, on the other. Political truth unfolds when the exercise of justifiable power serves interlinked justice and freedom, where justice is understood as a societal principle everyone shares, and freedom is the condition of being liberated to flourish. How, then, does cogent imaginative disclosure contribute to the justifiably empowered and liberating pursuit of justice? In three ways: by giving voice to social needs, challenging current arrangements of power, and inspiring commitments to the cause of justice. Together, these three ways of contributing to political truth make artistic truth an avenue of both social critique and social imagination, a way in which injustice, oppression, and unjustifiable power are imaginatively exposed and new conditions of justice and freedom envisioned. There is, of course, no strictly causal connection here: the presence of artistic truth need not engender political truth. Yet, by giving voice to social needs, challenging power arrangements, and inspiring people to strive for justice, art that is true gives support to the justifiably empowered and liberating pursuit of justice. By social needs I mean ones that are widely shared and are shaped by the societal formation where they occur. Adequate food and shelter, for example, are social needs. When such needs are either unmet or poorly met, people suffer; when social needs are met, often people celebrate. To the extent that true art gives voice to unmet social needs, it is, as Adorno suggests, a language of human suffering (AT 260–61/386–87). To the

Truth in Art and Religion  243 extent that true art articulates the fulfillment of social needs, however, it is also, contra Adorno, a language of celebration, of joy at the removal of suffering. It is not enough for those who would achieve political truth to reject that in society which destroys life. We also need to embrace what frees people from oppression and injustice—not only what could, sometime in the future, free them but also what already does. Artistic truth lends support to political truth in both of these respects. Cogently imaginative and disclosive art can also help challenge current arrangements of power. Under conditions of oppression and injustice, some people wield power at the expense of others, whether such power is cultural, economic, or political in a narrow sense. When their exercise of power oppresses others and denies them their rights, such power is unjustifiable. Hence, the patterns whereby it is acquired, held, and exercised need to be resisted and overturned. True art can help in this regard: it can call attention to the destructive effects of oppressive power, and it can point toward conditions under which justice is no longer denied. Sometimes this happens when an art product or event gives compelling expression to an individual or collective artist’s social protest. At other times, it occurs when an artistic artifact persuasively articulates the griefs and longings of an exploited group or community. At still other times, an artwork’s import will have such integrity that the world it presents, whether one where oppressive power illegitimately reigns or one where justice would prevail, cannot be ignored. Such cogently disclosive art does not by itself bring about political change. But without it, oppressive power would more easily remain in effect, and paths to justice and freedom would more likely remain blocked. In giving voice to social needs and challenging oppressive power, true art also inspires commitments to the cause of justice. Even though justice is among the most readily recognized—and most widely disputed—of shared expectations, fidelity to this societal principle is not easy to sustain. Oppressive power can seem so deeply entrenched, and failures to achieve justice, whether through social struggle, public communication, or government action, can seem so pervasive, that political cynicism or despair takes hold. How do people remain committed to the cause of justice in the face of overwhelming power and frequent failure? Among the most inspiring ways, I would suggest, are artistic artifacts and interactions that are true. That is because true art discloses historical possibilities. Exploring and highlighting possibilities are intrinsic in the making, presenting, and interpreting of art, indeed, in all imaginative practices. The nuances of meaning that art discloses always include the historical possibilities of the present day: how might our personal and social worlds have evolved differently than they did, and how might they change in the future? Such attention to historical possibilities, both past and future, exposes art to the charge of being either mere fiction or completely unrealistic. When art is true, however, when it is cogently and imaginatively

244  Truth in Art and Religion disclosive of either personal and social worlds or the world of the artwork, it brings to the fore historical possibilities—ways things could be or could have been—that inspire both critique and hope: critique of the way things have been, and hope for a better future. By inspiring such hopeful critique, true art encourages faithfulness to the societal principle of justice, despite the historical record and current odds. In this way, too, artistic truth supports political truth. Art does not need to be politically involved in order for it to be true in ways that support political truth. But when art is politically involved— when it plays a definite role in emancipatory movements, public communication, or the affairs of state—its direct contribution to the pursuit of justice and freedom will depend on its being artistically true. Not even the most persuasive propaganda is exempt from this implied double deliberation: Does it indeed further political truth, and is it artistically true? What Adorno said concerning the import of the autonomous artwork also holds for politically engaged art: its political contribution depends on its artistic truth. 9.2.2  Politics and Artistic Truth Even if one grants that artistic truth supports political truth, it would be easy to deny that political truth encourages artistic truth. For using art to serve emancipatory movements or as deliberate propaganda or statesanctioned monuments seems to conflict with the imaginative cogency and disclosiveness that characterize artistic truth. Doesn’t social protest art strip away nuances of meaning? Mustn’t deliberate propaganda reduce artistic import to an explicit message? How can a state-sanctioned monument retain the openness to interpretive needs that characterizes significant art? The denial that political truth encourages artistic truth arises because of two assumptions. First, the denial incorrectly assumes that artistic truth only occurs via the import of autonomous artworks. Because much of politically engaged art is not autonomous in this sense and often not even constituted as artworks, it thereby appears to lack or even oppose the sort of truth that accrues to artistic import. Second, the denial hastily assumes that political encouragement of artistic truth can only occur via politically engaged art. Because, based on the first assumption, politically engaged art seems incompatible with artistic truth, it looks as if there is no way for political truth to encourage artistic truth. To counter this denial, I would point to the more expansive conceptions of artistic truth and political truth already proposed. Artistic truth pertains not only to the import of artworks but also to the intentions of artists and the interpretive needs of their audiences. And political truth pertains to a nexus of justice, power, and freedom that no art can entirely avoid. Far from conflicting with artistic truth, the justifiably empowered

Truth in Art and Religion  245 pursuit of justice and freedom calls for art that engenders social imagination and social critique, art that is attuned to social needs, resistant toward unjustifiable power, and revelatory of historical possibilities. For such art, cogent imaginative disclosure is a sine qua non, whether or not the art is politically engaged. In this sense, then, political truth calls for artistic truth and, in calling for it, encourages artists and their audiences to pursue it. Much of the time, however, participants in the arts are no more conscious of such political alethic encouragement than political agents are aware of how artistic truth supports their pursuit of interlinked justice and freedom. Paradoxically, this constructive alethic interrelation becomes most apparent when it breaks down, precisely by virtue of its absence. Breakage of the interrelation between artistic and political truth usually happens in one of two ways: either a destructive politicizing of art or an equally destructive aestheticizing of politics. To speak of a destructive politicizing of art is not to say that art should always be politically neutral or that it should never be politically engaged. Because artistic truth supports political truth, political neutrality is neither feasible nor desirable in art, and political engagement can be both acceptable and worthwhile. Art becomes destructively politicized, however, when a struggle for political power becomes the singular goal for artistic practices, such that the only permissible reason for making and presenting art is to carry out this power struggle, and the only acceptable standard for interpreting art is whether and how an artistic artifact advances a political agenda. The singular focus on political power undermines both fidelity to the principle of imaginative cogency and pursuit of the process of imaginative disclosure. Hence it undermines artistic truth. It also indirectly subverts the political truth that artistic truth would support, thereby reinforcing the attack on political truth that normatively unconstrained power already carries out. Just as art can be politically important without being politicized, so politics can be artistically enriched without being aestheticized. If, in principle, political truth encourages artistic truth, then the worry about aestheticizing politics cannot be that the employment of art and imagination for political ends would somehow corrupt or impede the struggle for interlinked justice and freedom. Rather, the concern here is that artistic practices and, more broadly, the practices of imagination can become a substitute for actually struggling to bring about justice and freedom. This happens, for example, when political oratory and rhetoric become ends in themselves or when advertising and new social media create a constant churn of political distraction where patterns of oppression and injustice cannot rise to the surface. As a result, politics becomes a supercharged world of hyperbolic make-believe, to the detriment of both fidelity to the societal principle of justice and the process of liberation. In other words, the aestheticizing of politics destroys political truth and, indirectly, also

246  Truth in Art and Religion discourages artistic truth, thereby reinforcing the attacks on artistic truth that the politicizing of art directly performs. Both politicizing and aestheticizing tendencies have become prominent recently in supposedly democratic countries, just as they were during the rise of fascism in Europe a century ago. Accordingly, questions about relations between art and politics have acquired renewed urgency. The urgency of these questions should not obscure, however, what both of these destructive tendencies inadvertently reveal: the contemporary pursuit of truth requires both art and politics and, in the relations between art and politics, neither artistic nor political truth can be lacking.

9.3  Religious Truth Western philosophers since the time of Hegel have become increasingly reluctant to regard religion as a social domain of truth, not to mention a domain of absolute truth, as Hegel thought. Adorno’s stance toward religion is emblematic in this regard. Despite having a conception of artistic truth that draws significantly from Hegel’s philosophy of absolute spirit, Adorno regards the truth content of religion as irreversibly a thing of the past. In his 1945 “Theses upon Art and Religion,” for example, he claims that, to be truthful, modern art must rigorously keep distance from religion: “art can keep faith to its true affinity with religion, the relationship with truth, only by an almost ascetic abstinence from any religious claim or any touching upon religious subject matter. Religious art today is nothing but blasphemy.”9 A similar skepticism pervades Adorno’s understanding of how philosophy should relate to religion. In a short programmatic piece from the late 1950s on “Reason and Revelation,” Adorno confesses to see “no other possibility” for contemporary philosophy “than an extreme askesis toward any type of revealed faith [Offenbarungsglauben].”10 His primary reason for this is that people no longer substantially affirm or follow religious revelation. They do not turn to religion for the “truth and authenticity” of revelation but rather out of a false need for security. As a result, religion no longer offers the sort of truth content that Hegel attributed to it, if it ever did; it has turned into “an authoritarian view of the world, in which compulsion and caprice intertwine.”11 Today, however, leading social philosophers are no longer sure about the Weberian secularization thesis that supports Adorno’s religious skepticism. Charles Taylor, whose early volume on Hegel called attention to both the relevance and the outdatedness of Hegel’s philosophy of absolute spirit,12 has argued more recently that Western secularization has not yielded a world where religion is completely passé. Rather, it is a world where options for seeking religious or spiritual meaning have proliferated.13 So too, Jürgen Habermas, Adorno’s successor who reformulated the Weberian secularization thesis in the early 1980s,14 later

Truth in Art and Religion  247 characterized much of the West as a “postsecular society” where religion retains an important public role.15 And in his recent magisterial alternative to Hegel’s history of philosophy, Habermas casts the interactions between religion—especially Christianity—and philosophy—especially Greek philosophy—as a central source for the West’s most important achievements, including modern science, moral universalism, and democratic governance. Not surprisingly, Habermas concludes his account by taking issue with the religious skepticism in Adorno’s “Reason and Revolution.” Habermas suggests instead that contemporary religion might retain “the presence of a strong transcendence” from which “secular reason” could still learn.16 For Hegel, of course, religion is not simply a source of what Habermas calls “uncompensated semantic contents” to be translated “ ‘into the profane’.”17 Rather, religion is an indispensable domain of absolute truth, alongside art and philosophy: even though its truth content can be translated into properly philosophical truth claims, the truth of religion has both a distinct character and an abiding importance. And, despite Adorno’s skepticism and the long history of even sympathetic interpreters dismissing Hegel’s philosophy of religion, I want to claim that Hegel is roughly right. Religion is—it has become—a distinct social domain of truth, and the truth it offers is both legitimate in its own right and important for society as a whole. Before I make this argument, however, permit me three caveats. First, as already indicated, I do not subscribe to Hegel’s conception of absolute truth. Whereas for Hegel truth as a whole reveals God as the absolute, and this revelation reaches its pinnacle in art, religion, and philosophy, I consider truth as a whole to be an ongoing process of human fidelity and societal disclosure. In that sense, truth can never be absolute. Second, as both Fackenheim and Houlgate have indicated, Hegel’s strongest claims about the distinctiveness and importance of religious truth pertain in the first instance to Christianity as he understands it. Moreover, his claims assume that Christianity is the highest form of religion.18 My own account of religion is more open-ended than that. It aims to be both compatible with current conditions of religious pluralism and cognizant of the suffering and destruction wrought over the millennia, and also today, in the name of Christianity. In the third place, unlike Hegel and Adorno, I distinguish between religion and spirituality. I make this distinction in light of the fact that many people in contemporary society are not adherents of a religion, nor do they want to be. Nevertheless, they continue, both individually and collectively, to care deeply about the direction of their lives, communities, and organizations, and they seek throughout their lives to pursue what matters most. In this sense, they are “spiritual people,” as the phrase goes, practicing spirituality without the trappings of traditional religions. Although there is considerable overlap in the concepts of religion and

248  Truth in Art and Religion spirituality—both, for example, have to do with a quest for ultimate meaning—to do justice to contemporary forms of experience and practice, it is important to keep them distinct. In what follows, I first summarize Hegel’s account of religion as a distinctive domain of knowledge and truth. Next, I propose a conception of religious truth that reconstructs and revises Hegel’s account. Then I show how this conception helps illuminate the relation between religious and scientific truth. 9.3.1  Hegel on Religious Knowledge As laid out in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel’s philosophy of religion takes aim at two ways in which his contemporaries denied the knowledge of God: the Enlightenment path, which so limits knowledge to empirical and propositional understanding that what exceeds such understanding cannot be known—as represented within religion by what Hegel calls “rational theology”—and the Romantic path, which privileges feeling and intuition as the proper mode of access to the divine and thereby dismisses the importance of propositional knowledge—as seen, according to Hegel, in the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher.19 Against both approaches, but also against the tendency of orthodox theology to reduce religion to a dogmatic affirmation of philosophically indefensible doctrines, Hegel proposes a more expansive conception of religious knowledge. While assigning supportive roles to both feeling and propositional understanding, Hegel incorporates them into a larger whole where practices of worship (“the cultus,” in Hegel’s terms) take the lead. 9.3.1.1  Double Self-Knowledge For Hegel, religion at bottom is the knowledge of God, where “of” indicates both an objective and a subjective genitive: religion is not only human knowledge of God but also God’s self-knowledge. Indeed, God comes to know God’s self through human knowledge of God, and in such knowledge, humans gain knowledge of themselves. So religion amounts to double self-knowledge, both divine and human, each of which mediates the other. As Hegel states in his Philosophie des Geistes: “God is God only so far as he knows himself: his self-knowledge is, further, a self-consciousness in man and man’s knowledge of God, which proceeds to man’s self-knowledge in God.”20 In such double self-knowledge, both God and humanity show themselves to be spirit (Geist) (LPR 1: 383). How, specifically, does religion accomplish such self-knowledge? Hegel singles out four moments or dimensions to the religious knowledge of God: feeling (Gefühl), representation (Vorstellung), thought (Denken), and practices of worship (Kultus).21 Whereas the first two are modalities

Truth in Art and Religion  249 of faith (Glaube) as an “immediate knowledge” of God, the third and fourth are modalities of a more mediated knowledge. 9.3.1.2  Feeling, Representation, and Thought Hegel describes faith as conscious and direct certainty that there is a God both independent of one’s consciousness and related to it. Although faith is a kind of immediate knowledge, by itself it does not amount to religious knowledge as such, which is more complex and mediated. As manifested in feeling, faith is a personal surety, peculiar to each individual, that can help orient one toward God but cannot confirm the truth of what one feels: “The content must be true in and for itself if the feeling is to count as true” (LPR 1: 395–96). To learn what is true, we need, to begin with, faith manifested in representation, which first gives us the content of our certainty, namely, God. By representation (Vorstellung) Hegel means all the images (Bilder), metaphors, stories, and historical narratives that point beyond their manifest meaning toward that which is divine. Activities (e.g., God’s creating the world), relationships (e.g., God’s loving creation), and attributes (e.g., God’s wisdom) can also be religious representations. Whether they are religious representations depends on the function they fulfill. As Fackenheim puts it, all religious representations refer “to the Infinite in a finite way, e.g., by using analogies from natural life . . . and—above all!— by taking the Infinite referred to as external to the human person who does the referring.”22 It is through religious representation that ordinary human beings are conscious of God and their faith receives content. That is why, according to Hegel, the question whether faith is true pertains primarily to representation rather than feeling (LPR 1: 403). To fully address questions of religious truth, however, we must go beyond representation to the mode of conduct Hegel calls thinking or thought (Denken). Whereas religious feeling dwells in the land of subjective individuality, and religious representation in the zone of objective particularity, Hegel says “the general form of thought is universality” (LPR 1: 404). Rather than images and the like, thought develops and employs concepts; rather than have one thing stand for another, thought draws logical inferences. It is, in my own terms, the propositional dimension of knowledge. Thought, according to Hegel, always tries to discover necessary relations. Because of religious thought, religious knowledge is not simply immediate: as “knowledge of necessity regarding the content” felt and represented in faith, religious thought gives us “mediated knowledge” (LPR 1: 407–8). Moreover, in retrospect, the role of thought in religious knowledge helps us see that not even immediate knowledge, the knowledge of faith, is immediate, for it occurs in relationship both to interrelated objects and to thought itself. Although we can distinguish immediate knowledge from

250  Truth in Art and Religion mediated knowledge, at bottom “there is no immediate knowledge. . . . Immediate knowledge is knowledge in which we do not have any consciousness of mediation; but mediated it is” (LPR 1: 410). Yet, at the same time, there would not be any mediated religious knowledge without moments like religious feeling or intuition that, in the abstract, are immediate. Hegel regards this complex relation between immediate and mediated knowledge as especially important for understanding a historically traditioned (“positive”) and revelation-based religion. In a “revealed religion” such as Christianity, religious instruction offers “knowledge that is mediated through doctrine,” and doctrine is a product of religious thought. So too, because revelation is external to the individual, faith within a revealed religion is “essentially mediated through revelation” (LPR 1: 411). This is not to deny, however, the importance of a felt surety of God’s presence—an internal revelation that neither doctrinal instruction nor external revelation can bring about or replace. Such inner surety is the seedbed of religious knowledge, Hegel says, and through it our spirit bears witness to God as spirit (LPR 1: 413). Yet the seedbed is not the full flower; religious knowledge draws religious feeling into the nexus of representation and thought. In this way, Hegel’s account of religion as double self-knowledge tries to transcend (aufheben) the contradiction between Romantic feeling and Enlightenment understanding, but without equating religious knowledge with adhering to orthodox doctrines. Indeed, religious knowledge as a whole is a movement of elevation, what Hegel calls “an elevation to God.” In this movement we pass over from the “finite content” in our feelings, representations, and thoughts to the “absolute, infinite content,” namely, God. Such elevation involves both a passage in being from finite things to the infinite being (i.e., God) and a passage in concept from God “as . . . known by us” to God “as actual being” (LPR 1: 414–15). Indeed, in the conceptual elevation to God, spirit overreaches itself.23 9.3.1.3  Practical Religious Knowledge The moments of religious knowledge already considered—feeling, representation, and thought—together make up what Hegel calls a “theoretical relationship” to God: one feels, represents, and thinks of God as one’s object. But there is more to religion, and to religious knowledge, than this. For the religionist also takes up a stance toward oneself in relation to God: “I have not only to know the object, to be filled, but to know myself as filled by this object, to know it as within me and likewise myself as within this object that is the truth—and so to know myself in the truth” (LPR 1: 442). This mode of relating to oneself in relation to God is practical, not theoretical, Hegel says, for it is accomplished in action.

Truth in Art and Religion  251 Such practical religious knowledge occurs in the cultus. In the nexus of worship practices, the religionist becomes one with God via “the including, within my own self, of myself with God, the knowing of myself within God and of God within me” (LPR 1: 443; italics in original). These practices presuppose that God and humanity are always already reconciled, and they enact such reconciliation. Hegel considers a personal feeling of joy at this union to be “the innermost feature of the cultus” (LPR 1: 445). Beyond this feeling, and informed by it, lie three sorts of worship practices: devotion, sacrifice, and repentance. Where devotion helps elevate the self toward God in prayer and meditation, for example, and sacrifice employs rituals in which the self surrenders whatever blocks communion with the divine, repentance, as a process of self-purification, “raises oneself up to the realm of the purely spiritual.” When, through such practices of worship, “heart and will are earnestly and thoroughly cultivated for the universal and true,” practical religious knowledge issues forth into what Hegel calls ethical life (Sittlichkeit): the life of the citizen, family member, economic agent, and so forth. In fact, to the extent that religious consciousness is directly bound up with such social roles, “ethical life is the most genuine cultus” (LPR 1: 446). 9.3.1.4  Philosophy of Religion Hence, we see that, for Hegel, the concepts of religion and religious knowledge are expansive ideas. They include a “theoretical” relationship of conscious elevation between finite subject and divine object; a “practical” relationship whereby the subject enacts this elevation and becomes one with the object; and a speculative relationship, carried out by philosophy and exemplified in Hegel’s own philosophy of religion, whereby both the theoretical and practical relationships are themselves comprehended. From at least one perspective, then, philosophy itself, Hegel claims, is “a continual cultus” whose object is “the true in its highest shape as absolute spirit, as God” (LPR 1: 446). Indeed, the clear implication of the paragraph concluding the first part of Hegel’s 1827 lectures is that philosophy itself is “actual religion” (LPR 1: 448–49). Although this conclusion does not entail that only philosophy (i.e., true philosophy) is actual religion, it does suggest both that a speculative dimension is intrinsic to religion as such and that, in comprehending religious knowledge, philosophy participates in religion and makes an indispensable contribution to it. As Hegel puts it in his Aesthetics, true philosophy is a form of worship, ever in service to God (Gottesdienst) (A 1: 101/13: 139). In this sense, like religion as the mediated knowledge of God, Hegel’s account of this knowledge is a philosophy of religion in both the objective and subjective genitive: it not only offers comprehensive knowledge

252  Truth in Art and Religion about religion but also provides the knowledge religion calls for. Moreover, because of the double genitive in religious knowledge of God, as both human knowledge concerning God and divine self-knowledge, Hegel’s philosophy of religion also serves God’s self-knowledge. That is how Hegel ends up claiming to speak the absolute truth about absolute truth. Yet one does not need to follow this absolutist path in order to glean crucial insights into religious truth from Hegel’s philosophy. 9.3.2  Reconceiving Religious Truth If, as Hegel shows, religious knowledge involves a complex mediation of faith and worship, then the pursuit of religious truth must also be a matter of faith and worship. If, as Hegel argues, propositional thought is not extraneous to religious knowledge, then religious truth would best be regarded as post-propositional. And if, as Hegel suggests, religiously attuned social life is “the most genuine cultus,” then the authentication of religious truth will not lie in the religion-specific practices of faith and worship but rather, as I  indicated earlier, in other social domains.24 In these ways, without subscribing to Hegel’s conception of absolute truth and without endorsing his claim that Christianity is the highest form of religion, one can appropriate his insights into religion as a social domain of truth both legitimate in its own right and important for society as a whole. 9.3.2.1  Faith and Worship Unlike Hegel, however, my account of religious truth does not begin with feeling and religious representation as forms of consciousness but rather with faith and worship as forms of practice. Although I  do not deny that feelings, imagery, and the like play an indispensable supportive role within religious knowledge, I  believe they receive their specifically religious texture from religious practices, which are the key to religious knowledge. Moreover, these religious practices—the practices of faith and worship—are in the first instance shared and interpersonal rather than private and personal, such that religious observance is always already a matter of participating in a community and a tradition rather than simply pursuing personal devotion, self-sacrifice, and repentance (to recall the cultic practices Hegel highlights). Accordingly, unlike Hegel, I do not understand faith as either a feeling of surety or a representational awareness of the divine. Neither, unlike the orthodox theologians Hegel challenges, do I regard faith as mere adherence to a set of teachings or doctrines. Instead, faith is a way of life. It is a continuously enacted practical stance characterized by hope and trust: hope for a promised future, and trust in that which promises this future. Certainly feelings of, say, confidence and loyalty will play a role in faith,

Truth in Art and Religion  253 as will images of, say, nirvana or the Messianic condition or a new Earth. Yet faith is not simply a matter of feeling or imagery. It is a way of life. Moreover, the orientation of faith lies toward that which people in a religion collectively worship. They worship what they experience and regard as ultimately sustaining both them and the world they inhabit. In a religion, people of faith place their hope and trust in their ultimate sustainer, in that which they worship as always upholding them, amid both good and evil, at every level of their lives—personal, interpersonal, societal, historical, and transhistorical. For many people, this ultimate source of sustenance, which can have diverse names and can show up in various ways, is what they call “God.”25 “God,” we can say, is the object of religious knowledge, as both the basis of hope and trust and the focus of people’s worship. How, then, do religious adherents come to know the object of their faith and worship? Although there are many ways, I think two are central to nearly every religion, namely, the telling and retelling of stories (which include historical narratives) and the enacting and re-enacting of rituals (which include practices of personal piety). In one way or another, the stories in question are stories about “God’s” faithfulness in the past and promises for the future. These stories of faith can be oral or written or both oral and written. They are not only told but also repeatedly retold. In their being told and retold, a community of faith can listen for and hear the voice of “God.” The stories of faith figure prominently in the activities and symbols whereby the adherents of a religion carry out their worship. The rituals of a religion, as developed and passed on from one generation to the next, are ways in which “God” shows up for a religious community. They are not simply rotes or routines, although they can become that when, to use Hegel’s term, the spirit has left a religion. Rather, religionists undertake the rituals of worship in order to celebrate what ultimately sustains them and thereby to participate in “God’s” appearance. Both sorts of practices—both telling and retelling the stories of faith and enacting and re-enacting the rituals of worship—serve to disclose the ultimate meaning of life, not only the ultimate meaning of life for a religious community and its members but also the ultimate meaning of the institutions, society, and world they belong to. This meaning is found in relation to the ultimate sustainer the faithful worship. Moreover, as Hegel recognized in his own way, what is thereby known—that is, ultimate meaning—is not simply projected by the story-telling worshippers. No, in a way that is extremely hard to pin down, it is offered by the “object” of religious practices. The stories of faith and the rituals of worship are human media of divine self-revelation: they are how “God” speaks and shows up, in the very telling or retelling and in the actual enactment or re-enactment. In that sense, every religion, not simply Christianity, is what Hegel called a “revealed religion.”

254  Truth in Art and Religion Yet there is something distinctive about religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in which certain “sacred writings” uniquely guide the stories of faith and rituals of worship. In such scriptural religions, as I call them, the stories of faith told in their canonical scriptures provide both a summation of what the faithful’s hope and trust come to and an ongoing test for the quality of their faith. The inscripturated stories of faith are also the primary source and inspiration for such a religion’s rituals of worship. In both of these ways, as both authoritative touchstone for faith and inspiring source for worship, the sacred writings of a scriptural religion offer a tradition-forming, community-building, and generation-spanning storehouse of revelation. These writings also provide a focal point for conflicts, both within a religious community and with other communities, that either decide or destroy the significance of the revelation which purportedly occurs in a religion’s faith and worship. Accordingly, the interpretation of sacred writings plays a prominent role in scriptural religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Because of this, it is perhaps easier to see there what Hegel calls the mediation of thought than in religions that rely heavily or exclusively on oral traditions. For, in a scriptural religion, (re)telling the stories of faith relies on many linguistically articulable beliefs about what the scriptures say, how various texts interrelate, and how best to interpret them. The interpretation of scriptures also clearly requires the making of propositional claims and logical inferences and, when hermeneutical disagreements arise, as they repeatedly do, discursive adjudications as well. The results of such text-oriented propositional thought in a scriptural religion are not simply teachings. Every religion, whether scriptural or not, will have its teachings, insofar as religious leaders try to gather and pass along the ultimate meaning a religious community finds significant. But the results of text-oriented propositional thought often become not simply teachings but doctrines and creeds, distilled from generations of hermeneutical conflict and usually the products of considerable scholarship. The temptation in a scriptural religion is to make such propositional distillations definitive for what faith and worship mean. As Hegel partially recognized, however, they are not definitive. Doctrines and creeds result from attempts to make propositionally explicit the meaning that a religious community finds significant in its (re)telling the stories of faith and (re)enacting the rituals of worship. To the extent that doctrines and creeds are both propositionally true and properly indexed to such significant meaning, they can provide support for the truth of a religion. But they cannot substitute for religious truth, which, not being primarily propositional, stretches the limits of what can be propositionally known. 9.3.2.2  Faithful Disclosure Religious truth consists in a dynamic correlation between fidelity to the principle of hopeful trust in “God,” on the one hand, and worshipful

Truth in Art and Religion  255 disclosure of “God,” on the other. That is why the practices of both faith and worship are so central to religion as a social domain. In the practices of faith, religionists can seek to honor a societally embedded calling to expect a promised future and to count on the source of this promise. In other words, the practices of faith are how religionists pursue fidelity to the societal principle of hopeful trust. Moreover, insofar as the practices of faith can inspire fidelity to other societal principles such as justice or solidarity, these practices can also encourage the pursuit of truth in other social domains. So too, in the practices of worship, religionists can both disclose and have disclosed the ultimate meaning of their lives and world in relation to their ultimate sustainer. In this way, the practices of worship can be practices of ultimate disclosure. And, insofar as the pursuit of disclosure in any other social domain can receive guidance from the disclosure of ultimate meaning, the practices of worship can also serve to orient the pursuit of nonreligious truth. It is in the correlation between faith and worship that religious truth occurs. Or, to say this more carefully, it is in the correlation between faith-practicing fidelity to the societal principle of hopeful trust and worshipful disclosure of ultimate meaning that religious truth occurs. It occurs when people let the worship of their ultimate sustainer orient lives of hope and trust, even as the practices of faith inspire a sense of life’s ultimate meaning. Accordingly, when it comes to pursuing truth in religion, faith and worship are inseparable; in the absence of one or the other, there would be no religious truth. Does this approach imply that religious truth is simply a human construct, a mere invention of religious practices? Does it lead to the conclusion that every religion is equally true (or equally false, for that matter)? No, I do not regard religious truth as no more than a human construct. Nor do I embrace a simple-minded religious relativism. While it is so that “God” shows up in the practices of faith and worship, that which shows up as the ultimate sustainer cannot be the product or result of these practices. “God” is, as Hegel puts it, the object of religious practices, not their product or result, no more than the objects about which we make assertions are simply products or results of our assertoric practices. Just as the identity of an object that offers itself for predication and reference exceeds its predicative availability, so, as the religious object that self-discloses for faith and worship, “God” exceeds this religious self-disclosure. That is one reason why most religions acknowledge nonreligious modes of divine self-revelation, whether in so-called nature, for example, or in personal experience, cultural phenomena, and social life. Because religions seek to serve the self-revelation of a “God” whom most religions acknowledge as exceeding the practices of faith and worship, religious truth—the truth of “God’s” self-revelation—cannot simply be an invention of religious practices. So too, just as there are better and worse ways to make assertions about objects, such that some assertions are correct and others incorrect,

256  Truth in Art and Religion some are well-formed and others not, and some are intelligible and others confused, there are better and worse ways to engage in religious practices. Further, the established practices in different religions are more or less faithful and disclosive. Although, unlike Hegel, I  do not think it is philosophy’s place to make absolute judgments in this regard, I do agree with him that the notion of religious truth would make little sense if such discriminations were either impossible or impermissible. For if religious truth requires both “God”-related fidelity and “God”-related disclosure in their dynamic correlation, then practices that block trusting fidelity, worshipful disclosure, or both would be religiously untrue, both in the sense that they fail as religious practices and in the sense that they obscure God’s self-revelation. Not every religion will be equally true in either sense, and no religion will always be fully true in both senses. Moreover, there are ways to sort out religious truth from religious falsehood that go beyond the internal workings of a religion’s practices of faith and worship. Because religions aim to be faithful to what their adherents regard and experience as the ultimate sustainer and to disclose the ultimate meaning of life, the truth of a religion receives confirmation in how its adherents conduct themselves in a social context. If, for example, religionists worship a God of love and justice, then the truth of their religion will be borne out when they pursue love and justice in politics, economics, and civil society, and it will be disconfirmed when they promote hatred and violence. How they conduct themselves in these nonreligious domains will or will not attest to the truth of their religion. Religious truth is authenticated in social life; failures to pursue truth in politics, economics, and other social domains cast doubt on the purported truth of any religion. Hence, there are two ways to sort out religious truth from religious falsehood: internally, with regard to practices of faith and worship, and externally, with regard to other social practices and social institutions. Although the first is primary when it comes to religious truth, the external route of authentication is perhaps more telling for those who are not adherents of the religion in question.26 9.3.2.3  Fundamentalism versus Secularism Nevertheless, I  am keenly aware that, as was hinted in chapter  6, my response to the worries about religious subjectivism (i.e., that religious truth is merely a human construct) and religious relativism (i.e., that all religions are alethically equal) will not satisfy the current contenders over religious truth. It will not satisfy either religious fundamentalists, who tend to restrict truth to their own religion, or adamant secularists, who tend to deny the truth of all religions. I am also convinced that the ongoing conflict between fundamentalists and secularists is one of the most far-reaching and often destructive struggles around the world today. So

Truth in Art and Religion  257 how does the proposed conception of religious truth help address this conflict? In some ways, the current conflict between religious fundamentalists and adamant secularists globalizes the sort of contradiction between Romantic and Enlightenment theologians that Hegel tried to transcend. Whereas the Romantics appealed to pre-propositional feeling or intuition, the Enlighteners appealed to scientific understanding. Neither side, Hegel said, comprehended the full scope of religious truth, where both feeling and understanding play a role but their speculative and cultic mediation is the key to truth. Today, religious fundamentalists tend to consider the purported truth of their own religion sacrosanct, and adamant secularists tend to regard any alleged truth other than scientifically established or establishable truth as illegitimate. Genuine debates between these two positions seem excluded at the outset. Like Hegel, I want to say neither position comprehends the full scope of religious truth, where both nonpropositional religious practices and propositional thought play a role, but the truth attained is neither sacrosanct nor scientific. Yet religion is a legitimate social domain of truth, and religious truth is too important for society as a whole to be regarded as sacrosanct. To recognize the legitimacy of religious truth, however, one must have a more expansive conception of truth than one that limits it to propositional truth and tends to privilege science. And to avoid absolutizing the truth of a particular religion, one must regard religious truth as just one of several social domains, while taking seriously the presence of both religion-internal falsehood and nonreligious disconfirmation. Such superseding of the secularist/fundamentalist conflict is what holistic alethic pluralism tries to accomplish. Obviously, however, a philosophical reconception of truth will not actually reconcile the conflicting parties. Their struggle is just as much political, economic, and civil-societal as it is philosophical and religious. Indeed, at bottom, it is a spiritual struggle, a struggle over the direction of society as a whole and thereby also a struggle over what truth as a whole comes to—over whether and how to be true to societal principles as well as whether and how to pursue life-giving disclosure. And, as a spiritual struggle, it not only encompasses both science and religion but also implicates everyone, regardless of whether they adhere to a particular religion. Although a transformed idea of truth can illuminate this struggle and even suggest pathways through it, the actual resolution will not be philosophical. Yet there is one area of struggle where philosophical illumination might be especially relevant, namely, conflicts over the relation between religion and science. For the parties to the secularism/fundamentalism struggle distort this relation, in part because each of them misconstrues both scientific and religious truth. Let’s consider, then, the alethic relation between religion and science.

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9.4  Religion and Science The societal stakes in contemporary conflicts over religion and science are extremely high. If there were any doubts about just how high, surely they disappeared in 2020, when both a global coronavirus pandemic and a hotly contested U.S. presidential election fed directly on such conflicts. Goaded by political opportunists and religious combatants, many Americans lost whatever confidence they might have had in medical science and public health experts, with devastating results. At the same time, President Trump could cast so much doubt on publicly confirmed facts that a strong majority of Republicans came to dismiss his loss (by more than 7 million popular votes) as the fraudulent result of a “rigged” election, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. By then, climate science denial, conspiracy theories, and blatant lies pervaded a loyal Trumpian political base marked by both fundamentalist fervor and populist suspicion of academically trained expertise. And, on the other side of a deep political divide, many who rightly opposed Trump’s authoritarian populism nevertheless seemed at a loss to say why truth, whether scientific or religious, actually matters. I cannot pretend to sort out this troublesome struggle here—that would take a different kind of book. Yet it does provide a strong motivation for trying to reconceive the apparent conflict over truth between religion and science. I shall argue that not only are both religion and science social domains of truth but also each is needed in order for the other flourish. Because both are needed, neither religious fundamentalism nor adamant secularism is conducive to the pursuit of truth in either religion or science. As explained in chapter  7, I  use the term science in the expansive ­nineteenth-century sense of Wissenschaft to include all academic disciplines where theoretical inquiry plays a decisive role. The term in this sense encompasses the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Although the issues at stake in conflicts between religion and science differ from one scientific field to the next, and although significant methodological and epistemological differences occur among various disciplines, I believe fundamental commonalities occur at the level of social ontology, such that together these fields and disciplines belong to a single social domain. Hence, I do not hesitate to designate all of them as sciences, all of which have the normative task of pursuing scientific truth. If both religion and Wissenschaft are social domains of truth, then, in principle, there should be no alethic conflict between them. In practice, of course, this is definitely not the case, nor has it ever been the case, so far as I can tell. The contemporary prevalence of conflicts over truth between religion and science (Wissenschaft) raises the question whether certain features intrinsic to religion and science might foster such

Truth in Art and Religion  259 conflicts. I want to answer yes.27 Indeed, due to such intrinsic features, three areas of potential alethic conflict occur in the relationship between religion and science. One pertains to the societal principle that stands out in each social domain. A second concerns the sort of disclosure that each domain pursues. A  third has to do with how truth in each social domain is authenticated. Yet the very features of religion that could foster alethic conflicts with science, if properly understood, can also encourage the pursuit of scientific truth. Something similar applies to such features of science: while they might foster alethic conflicts with religion, they can also support the pursuit of religious truth. Let me explain. 9.4.1  Trust and Validity I have proposed that hopeful trust is the primary principle to which practices of faith must answer in order to yield true insights within the religious domain. In science, by contrast, the primary societal principle is that of theoretical validity. Theoretical validity, a heightened form of ordinary logical validity, requires inferences to be organized within a theoretical framework. It is not enough for scientific inferences to be logically valid. In their logical validity, they must also be valid within the theory they are supposed to articulate or confirm. Initially, it might appear that the primary societal principles of religious and scientific truth are in direct conflict. The calling to place hopeful trust in “God” would seem to preclude fidelity to the principle of theoretical validity: organizing inferences within a theoretical framework appears to be precisely not what it means to await a promised future and count on the source of this promise. If we could give a theoretically valid account of “God,” what would be the point of practicing hopeful trust? Conversely, if hopeful trust were the leading principle in our lives, why would we bother to propound theories about anything and organize our inferences accordingly? Wouldn’t it make more sense to abandon the theoretical enterprise altogether? The appearance of conflict between hopeful trust and theoretical validity arises for two reasons: misunderstandings about the alethic primacy of specific societal principles, and confusion about what fidelity to societal principles consists in. In the first place, to say that hopeful trust and theoretical validity have alethic primacy in the domains of religion and science, respectively, does not mean that each principle holds for only one domain or that other principles do not hold for the same domain. Alethic primacy means that a certain societal principle takes the lead in a certain social domain of truth and thereby inflects fidelity to other principles in that domain. In religion, for example, the alethic primacy of hopeful trust does not preclude the importance of, say, justice as a societal principle for religious organizations and communities to follow. Rather, it inflects their

260  Truth in Art and Religion pursuit of social justice as a way to practice hopeful trust. Similarly, to the extent that theoretical endeavors occur within religious organizations and communities—as such endeavors surely do—the pursuit there of theoretical validity will be a way to practice hopeful trust. The pursuit of theoretical validity in a religion’s theology, for example, will need to align with practices of faith. From a normative vantage point, this means theoretical arguments and conclusions about what “God” is like or how to interpret a religion’s sacred writings cannot be decisive for the life of faith. Rather, as was suggested earlier with respect to doctrines and creeds, such religion-internal theoretical endeavors need to remain indexed to the ultimate meaning a religious community finds significant. The primacy of hopeful trust within religion as a social domain of truth must orient the theological pursuit of theoretical validity. In the second place, it is tempting but misguided to think that fidelity to a specific societal principle can and should occur only within the social domain where this principle has primacy. Confusion on this score has led many to regard science and closely related endeavors as the only areas where logical validity needs to be pursued, simply because this societal principle has preeminence there, in the heightened form of theoretical validity. Underlying this mistaken view is the assumption, challenged at length in earlier chapters, that all knowledge must be propositional and that pre- and post-propositional sorts of insight are not genuinely cognitive. Rather, although the pursuit of logical validity plays an indispensable role within post-propositional social domains of knowledge such as politics and religion, it is not the key to their truth. Moreover, to the extent that contemporary fidelity to other societal principles, such as justice and hopeful trust, depends on the articulation and confirmation of appropriate theories, the social domains of truth where justice and hopeful trust have primacy (i.e., politics and religion, respectively) also unavoidably depend on the pursuit of theoretical validity. Conversely, the pursuit of theoretical validity always points beyond itself to what has not been and perhaps never can be scientifically explained, including that which calls for hopeful trust. That is why climate science denial is a genuinely disturbing feature of the current political-religious landscape. Not only does it undermine the scientific basis on which suitable ecological policies and practices can be debated and affirmed, but also it tries to untether politics and religion altogether from the expectation of theoretical validity on which truth in these social domains nevertheless depends. At the same time, climate science denial also appears to cut science loose from any effort to open the pursuit of theoretical validity to societal principles such as justice and hopeful trust that are crucial for interconnected flourishing. Although fidelity to the societal principles of logical and theoretical validity is not the key to either political or religious truth, blatant rejection of these principles undermines a crucial basis upon which political or religious

Truth in Art and Religion  261 efforts could be true. Fidelity to a specific principle such as justice or hopeful trust requires simultaneous fidelity to other societal principles, including logical and theoretical validity. So too, fidelity to the principle of theoretical validity supports simultaneous fidelity to justice and hopeful trust. Hence, the primacy of hopeful trust within religion does not necessitate a conflict with the primacy of theoretical validity in science. Rather the appearance of a conflict arises when people mistakenly think either that religion does not need to rely on appropriate pursuits of theoretical validity or that the pursuit of theoretical validity leaves no room for hopeful trust. 9.4.2  Worship and Theory Just as issues concerning the scope of societal principles and fidelity to them generate the appearance of conflict between theoretical validity and hopeful trust, so questions concerning disclosure lead to apparent tensions between what science and religion seek to accomplish. Truth as a whole correlates human fidelity to societal principles with a lifegiving disclosure of society. In the social domain of science, such disclosure occurs as what I have described as the predicative self-dis/closure of virtualized entities. In religion, by contrast, it occurs as the worshipful self-revelation of “God.” So it would be easy to think either that these two sorts of disclosure are too disparate to belong to the same process of truth as a whole or that pursuing one sort would preclude pursuing the other. For, as the “object” of worship, “God” appears to be quite unlike any of the virtualized entities that various academic disciplines treat as “objects” of theoretical inquiry. Moreover, disclosure via the practices of religious worship seems dramatically different from disclosure via the practices of scientific virtualization. In one sense, such differences cannot be denied: if religion and Wissenschaft are distinct social domains of truth, then both their leading societal principles and their sorts of disclosure must differ. So the real question is not whether religious and scientific disclosure differ but rather how, in their differing, they should interrelate and what, in their interrelating, they have in common. Let me consider the question of commonality first. I have described life-giving disclosure as a process in which society is opened up, such that human beings and other creatures come to flourish in their interconnections. If both religious and scientific disclosure participate in this process—as they must, if both religion and science are social domains of truth—then that participation is what they have in common. They participate by contributing to life-giving disclosure, each in its specific way. Worshipful disclosure contributes by pointing all social practices and institutions beyond themselves toward the ultimate source of sustenance

262  Truth in Art and Religion on which they depend. This has the effect of challenging every pretense to absolute truth, every supposition that a specific social domain (including both religion and science) or any practice or result within a social domain (including both religious practices and scientific findings) has accomplished or could accomplish the full life-giving disclosure that, in correlation with fidelity, would make up truth as a whole. Not even the ultimate meaning disclosed in religious worship is absolute, for it depends on a divine self-revelation the worshipping community welcomes but does not control. In a society where such relativizing of domain-specific truth did not occur, where, for example, the truth of science or politics or religion were considered absolute, life-giving disclosure would be blocked. So too, scientific disclosure helps open up society toward interconnected flourishing by helping to secure the objective knowledge whereby people can do justice to the practical objects on which life depends, whether those objects be physical things, plants, and animals or the products and patterns of human life itself.28 Ignorance about exactly what these objects are and what they mean in their sociohistorical contexts would make it much more difficult to engage with them in a life-giving way. Scientific inquiry aims for the sort of precise and comprehensive insights that remove such ignorance, allowing the identity and relations of practical objects to self-dis/close. In a contemporary society where such inquiry is suppressed or dismissed, it becomes much more difficult to do justice to practical objects, thereby obstructing other pathways to life-giving disclosure. The different contributions of religion and science to life-giving disclosure return us to the question of how, in their differing, these two sorts of disclosure should interrelate. The answer is already implied by how each contributes to life-giving disclosure. On the one hand, the disclosure accomplished in religious worship should serve to relativize scientific findings, continually reminding the scientific community that what it discovers is not the final word, and how it makes these discoveries is always answerable to larger considerations of life and society. In other words, the role of worship in relation to science is to unsettle any claim to absolute scientific truth. On the other hand, the disclosure accomplished via scientific inquiry should serve to enlighten the religious community about the societal implications of its worship practices, continually pointing out how the sustaining of life actually occurs and how, when worship is misguided, it can destroy what “God” is supposed ultimately to sustain. In other words, the role of scientific disclosure vis-à-vis religion is to expose and critique societal ignorance and naiveté. When it comes to life-giving disclosure, religion needs science to help keep it honest, and science needs religion to help keep it modest. In rejecting science, religious fundamentalism refuses such honesty; in rejecting religion, adamant secularism resists scientific modesty. Neither position

Truth in Art and Religion  263 understands why life-giving disclosure needs both religion and science. To that extent, both religious fundamentalism and adamant secularism obstruct the pursuit of truth. 9.4.3  Religious Testimony and Scientific Confirmation Religion and science also appear to conflict in how they authenticate truth. Whereas in religion the truth of faith and worship must be borne out by how religious adherents conduct themselves in nonreligious domains of social life, scientific truth requires empirical confirmation that is internal to science. From a religious vantage point, the specialized confirmation of scientific truth might appear unduly constrained and insular, leading to mistaken fundamentalist suspicions of the academic enterprise as inherently “biased” and “elitist.” From the standpoint of science, by contrast, lived testimony to religious truth might appear unduly enthusiastic and expansive, leading to mistaken secularist suspicions of religion as inherently “irrational” and “dogmatic.” Although the conflict over authentication is more than merely ­apparent— the opposition between religious fundamentalism and adamant secularism is all too real in the contemporary public sphere—the appearance of conflict stems, I  think, from truncated understandings of what religious testimony and scientific confirmation involve. Let’s consider religious testimony first. I have characterized religious knowledge and truth as post-propositional, and I have described the authentication of religious truth as a process that occurs in nonreligious domains of social life, in politics, economics, civil society, and the like. If these characterizations are on the right track, then religious authentication must occur in discursive as well as nondiscursive ways, and it must also occur in the scientific domain. It is intrinsic to religious testimony that, among other things, it makes and defends propositional truth claims. And if religious communities want to attest in social life to a dynamic correlation between their hopeful trust in “God” as ultimate source of sustenance and the worshipful disclosure of this source, then they will also need to bear testimony toward Wissenschaft and the matters it studies. This has two implications for how religious testimony relates to scientific confirmation. First, if a religious community wants to bear witness in scientific matters, as it should, then it should do so in the language, and according to the norms, of science. That means religious propositional truth claims on scientific matters, whether cosmology, climate change, or human sexuality (to mention just three areas of controversy), must be held open for vigorous debate in the light of scientific evidence. They should not be simply asserted and dogmatically defended. In other words, when it comes to scientific matters, religious authentication must embrace and incorporate discursive confirmation. It cannot be “irrational.”

264  Truth in Art and Religion Second, insofar as the point of authentication is to bear witness to truth, religious communities who engage with scientific matters must remain open to having their propositional articulations of religious truth—their teachings, doctrines, and creeds—challenged and revised by virtue of such engagement. If instead they seek to “immunize” their teachings and the like from “infection” via scientific debate, their testimony will lose discursive credibility and thereby cast doubt on the truth of “God’s” selfrevelation. Far from protecting faith and worship, religious dogmatism with respect to science undermines religious truth. By the same token, even though it primarily occurs within science, and not in other social domains, the empirical confirmation of theoretical truth claims in science cannot be insular. Although science is a distinctive and legitimate social domain of truth, what science studies pertains to all of social life, including religion, and what science discovers has implications for all other social domains of truth. Specifically, science cannot be closed to religious critique. For in bearing witness to the source of ultimate sustenance, religious communities raise questions about the ultimate meaning of science itself and of the matters science studies. If such testimony leads religious adherents to question the point or legitimacy of particular scientific projects and findings, then the commitment to pursuing scientific truth obliges scholars and their organizations and professions to pay attention. Science should not be biased in advance against all religious questioning. Moreover, as indicated in earlier chapters, discursive confirmation includes not only the justification of propositional truth claims but also their corroboration. And in science, the empirical confirmation of theoretical truth claims spills over into what one could call pragmatic corroboration. Pragmatic corroboration tries to bear out the fruitfulness of a scientific theory, discovery, or explanation for the social domain or domains where it is most relevant. Although, under conditions of digital turbocapitalism, such fruitfulness is often equated with technological applications, it is a much broader concept. At bottom, it has to do with whether what science offers promotes interconnected flourishing. On this topic, no one social domain, not even science, has the final word. Religion also does not have the final word. Yet, because of its orientation toward ultimate sustenance, religion does have much to say about what interconnected flourishing is like and what would contribute to it. Because so much is at stake in the pragmatic corroboration of scientific truth, and because religion can offer worthwhile insights in this regard, the specialized confirmation of scientific truth cannot afford to be insular. Avoiding all elitism, science needs to remain open to religious insights into life-giving disclosure. Hence, despite the apparent alethic conflicts between religion and science over societal principles, modes of disclosure, and the authentication of truth, religious and scientific truth need each other in order to thrive.

Truth in Art and Religion  265 Religion needs science’s commitments to logical validity, theoretical disclosure, and empirical confirmation in order to resist religion-internal tendencies that undermine religious truth, namely, religious relativism, fundamentalism, and complacency. Science needs religion’s commitments to hopeful trust, worshipful disclosure, and lived testimony in order to resist internal tendencies that undermine scientific truth, namely, scientific absolutism, adamant secularism, and academic hyper-specialization. Neither social domain of truth can thrive in the absence of the other. Indeed, truth as a whole needs both religious and scientific truth. Like art, then, religion is a social domain of truth. And, as Hegel recognized, both art and religion resist the reduction of truth as a whole to propositional truth. They thereby also challenge the scientism that often accompanies this reduction. At the same time, however, art and religion, when they are true, resist the politicization of truth that pervades current conflicts over science in the public sphere. As the next chapter explains, a philosophy that would critique both scientism and the politicization of truth needs to pay attention to both art and religion.

Notes 1 For extended accounts of artistic truth and the roles of art in a democratic society, see Lambert Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 2 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 123–66. 3 Ibid., 83–106. By calling these social practices, Wolterstorff, following MacIntyre, highlights that they involve social interaction among the practitioners, carry traditions of know-how, and embody standards of excellence. Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 187–203. 4 “Free-standing” is, of course, misleading, since an elaborate set of social-­ institutional supports makes it possible to produce and experience art products or events as artworks. A  piece of concert music, for example, is institutionally constituted to stand on its own. To use Adorno’s terminology, it is both autonomous and a social fact (AT 225–28/334–38). 5 My disagreement with Hegel (on a certain reading) reflects the legitimate point Wolterstorff makes when he rejects what he calls the “grand narrative” about art in the modern world. Yet I find his brief discussions of Hegel overly polemical and dismissive. See Art Rethought, 40–41, 71–73, 123–25. 6 Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment” (1962), in Can One Live After Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 258. 7 Wolterstorff, Art Rethought, 207–16. Wolterstorff characterizes social protest art as “art created to energize and give expression to protest against social injustice” (195). He says it accomplishes these purposes by helping us imagine what it is like to be a victim of social injustice, evoking appropriate emotional and moral responses, and allowing us to transfer these responses to our own lives and society.

266  Truth in Art and Religion 8 I discuss Adorno’s cultural politics at greater length in Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming). 9 Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses upon Art and Religion Today” (1945), in Ge­sammelte Schriften 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 649. 10 Theodor W. Adorno, “Reason and Revelation” (1958), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 142. 11 Ibid., 137, 140. 12 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 13 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 14 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987). 15 See especially “Faith and Knowledge” (2001) in Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 101–15, and “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006): 1–25. 16 Jürgen Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (This Too a History of Philosophy), 2 vols. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019), vol. 2, 807. 17 Ibid. 18 “Hegel considers the revealed Christian religion .  .  . as the comprehensive truth of all religions.” Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 167. “Other religions also reveal aspects of the truth, in Hegel’s view, but only Christianity reveals the truth adequately.” Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991), 182. 19 See especially the section titled “The Position of the Philosophy of Religion vis-à-vis the Needs of Our Time,” within the Introduction to the 1824 lectures in LPR 1: 121–28. 20 Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §564, p. 298. 21 There is considerable variation in how Hegel specifies the moments of religious knowledge. Here I rely primarily on the sections titled “The Knowledge of God” and “The Cultus” in the 1827 lectures (LPR 1: 380–449). 22 Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought, 155. 23 On the central role that the spirit’s power to overreach plays in Hegel’s philosophy in general and his philosophy of religion in particular, cf. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought, 20, 90–106, 143–54, 193–214, and 256n35. Hegel sees conceptual elevation distortedly accomplished in traditional proofs of God’s existence. Although important in its own right, the long discussion of these proofs in Hegel’s 1827 lectures does not add much to his phenomenology of religious knowledge, however, and can be bypassed in the current context. But see LPR 1: 414–41, especially the editorial note at 415n111. 24 See the section titled “Religious Testimony” in chapter 6 above. 25 Again, as noted in chapter  6, this is a functional rather than prescriptive characterization; it does not presuppose that religions must be monotheistic or must comfortably align with standard “God-talk” to be genuine. 26 Although I distinguish between internal and external modes to the critique of religion, I also believe both modes should be incorporated into what I call a comprehensive critique of religion with respect to deeply entrenched regimes of oppression and domination. A comprehensive critique asks both whether and how religion fosters societal evil and what religion should offer to society

Truth in Art and Religion  267 as a whole. See Lambert Zuidervaart, “Critical Transformations: Macrostructures, Religion, and Critique,” Critical Research on Religion 1, no. 3 (December 2013): 254–55. 27 This is not to deny, however, that such contemporary alethic conflicts also stem from the very manner in which conceptual distinctions between religion and science have arisen historically and solidified in the West. In this connection, see Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 28 Although I call all of these practical objects, in the sense that human practices can be directed toward them, I  do not believe that any of them are no more than practical objects. Many animals, for example, are practical agents in their own right, and a sufficiently robust ethology would help us recognize this.

10 Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom

One cannot propose a philosophical conception of truth without assuming a certain view of philosophy. Nor can one explicate a specific view of philosophy—of its aims, subject matter, and methods—without presupposing a certain conception of truth. Across the diversity of epochs, schools, and traditions that make up the rich historical tapestry of philosophy in the West, the commitment to seeking truth stands out as a central interwoven strand. That is why contemporary skepticism or indifference toward the very idea of truth raises troubling questions about the future of philosophy itself. It is also why one’s conception of truth and one’s view of philosophy are so closely connected. This close connection poses a double challenge for any attempt to present a new philosophical conception of truth. On the one hand, one needs to anticipate and where possible address potential objections from philosophers who have notably different conceptions of truth or who do not see the point of proposing a new conception. On the other hand, one also must make plausible a different view of philosophy than the views embraced by potential interlocutors. Moreover, neither can be done without doing the other, and both require maintaining the integrity of one’s own philosophy without rendering it unintelligible. Previous chapters have considered potential objections to holistic alethic pluralism and have exemplified the sort of philosophy this conception of truth presupposes and supports. Now, however, it is time for explicit reflection on the connection between philosophy and truth. In providing such explicit reflection, I hope to synthesize the arguments and claims already made. As in the previous chapter, Adorno and Hegel will be my primary interlocutors. The current chapter has three sections. First, building on chapter  9, I  ask how, as a social domain of truth, philosophy relates to art and religion (section 10.1). Then, responding to Hegel’s claims, I discuss the historical character of both truth and philosophy (section  10.2). The chapter concludes with reflections on the vocation of philosophy in contemporary society, emphasizing both social critique and the pursuit of practical wisdom (section 10.3). DOI: 10.4324/9781003342021-10

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  269

10.1  Art, Religion, and Philosophy As the previous chapter showed, to regard art and religion as social domains of truth provides a way to resist both the politicization of truth and the privileging of science. It also substantiates my repeated claims that there is more to truth than propositional truth and that there are both pre-propositional and post-propositional kinds of truth. Yet the philosophical embrace of artistic and religious truth raises questions about the character of that embrace. Does it turn philosophy into a mere mouthpiece for imaginative and worshipful modes of disclosure? If so, how can philosophy remain the vigorously theoretical enterprise it has long aspired to be? Or does this philosophical embrace instead make art and religion subservient to philosophy, such that their truth ultimately depends on how philosophy interprets it? If so, how can philosophy avoid the Hegelian stance of absolute knowing that Adorno and others have found so problematic? How should the relations among art, religion, and philosophy be conceived? According to Hegel, art, religion, and philosophy all aim to disclose absolute truth. They are forms of absolute spirit, he says, where divine selfknowledge unfolds within human self-knowledge. Whereas art accomplishes this via sensuous configuration and interpretation, and religion accomplishes it via religious representations and cultic practices, philosophy grasps absolute truth in conceptual thought, thereby both uniting and surpassing what art and religion offer. Only philosophy can offer the true thought of truth, the Idea of truth. And the Idea of truth is, he claims, “the most real and most objective [sachlichste] universality which only in thinking can apprehend itself in the form of its own self” (A 1: 104/13: 144).1 What Hegel recognizes, in my own terms, is that truth as a whole is at issue in all three of these domains—in art, religion, and philosophy. Moreover, precisely because philosophy seeks to comprehend truth as a whole, it needs to pay special attention to what art and religion disclose. If instead philosophy regards science as the sole or primary social domain of truth, philosophy will quickly surrender its own quest for truth. For the sort of propositional knowledge philosophy properly pursues will always burst the confines of scientific truth. That’s why philosophy needs to be attentive to pre-propositional and post-propositional forms of truth, especially in art and religion, and to their concern for truth as a whole. Accordingly, I  wish to consider (1) how truth as a whole is at issue in art, religion, and philosophy, and (2) what this tells us about the character of philosophical truth. 10.1.1  Truth as a Whole To say that truth as a whole is at issue in art, religion, and philosophy does not mean every artwork or religious practice or philosophical

270  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom position must be about truth as a whole. Rather, it means that the vocations of art, religion, and philosophy as social domains of truth—what they contribute to society and social life—are circumscribed by a concern for truth as a whole. This concern receives a specific inflection within each domain, as I hope to show, such that art, religion, and philosophy are complementary ways to experience truth as a whole. As explained in chapter 6, by truth as a whole I mean the entire directed process and structure of dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure, an entirety that is internally differentiated into three kinds of truth (pre-propositional, propositional, and post-propositional) across distinct social domains. For convenience and variety, I sometimes refer to truth as a whole as truth in general or comprehensive truth. It is what Hegel means by the Idea of truth. I avoid the term idea in this context, however, in order not to create the familiar impression—familiar thanks to both Kant and the empiricist tradition—that truth as a whole is merely a conception of truth. That certainly is not what Hegel meant by “the Idea of truth,” and here I follow Hegel, while avoiding his term. Although I have proposed a conception of truth as a whole, I  do not regard truth as a whole as merely a conception of truth. Compared with other social domains, the peculiarity of art, religion, and philosophy is that, although a specific correlation between fidelity and disclosure characterizes each of them, how they carry out their specific correlations raises issues about truth as a whole. These issues have an especially reflexive character, for they pertain to the question of how we come to reflective awareness of comprehensive truth. Like Hegel, I would answer that we primarily come to such reflective awareness via art, religion, and philosophy. There is a sense, however, in which not even these three domains suffice for becoming aware of truth as a whole. For, if truth as a whole is as comprehensive as I have suggested, encompassing different kinds and domains, and pertaining to society as a whole, then truth probably comprehends us more than we comprehend it: we are enfolded within truth’s unfolding, and we participate in this unfolding, or resist it, without full awareness. And, if we are so enfolded, then truth as a whole will be both the stuff of daily experience and an ongoing mystery. Accordingly, art, religion, and philosophy do not suffice. There will always be elements to our experience of truth that these three domains miss, even as truth as a whole exceeds our experience. Nevertheless, to the extent that we can grasp what truth as a whole is like and why it matters, we necessarily rely on art, religion, and philosophy for decisive clues. For it is in these three domains, more than any others, that we plumb the deepest currents of contemporary social life and catch sight of a different future. It is in such sounding and sighting that the widest meaning of fidelity and disclosure takes shape. Moreover, these three domains span the three kinds of knowledge and truth

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  271 (i.e., propositional, pre-, and post-), and in each domain, including philosophy, the propositional kind of knowledge receives a special inflection toward a comprehensive truth that both challenges and encompasses propositional knowledge. Let me briefly review how all of this—not only the sounding and sighting but also the inflecting—takes place in art and religion before I discuss it at greater length in philosophy. Artistic truth, I have said, consists in a dynamic correlation between fidelity to the societal principle of imaginative cogency and the imaginative disclosure of whatever an art product or event is about. Such cogent imaginative disclosure occurs within relations among artist, art product/ event, and audience or public, where it offers pre-propositional insights into ourselves, others, and the world we inhabit. Because of its capacity for cogent imaginative disclosure, art can put us in touch with unfulfilled social needs and thereby foster a longing for fulfillment. It can call attention to failures to meet the societal expectations of solidarity, justice, and the like and thereby point us toward greater fidelity. Cogently disclosive art can also give voice to historical possibilities and thereby inspire both a critique of how things have been and hope for a better future. In all of these ways, art as a social domain of truth provides imaginative clues to the contemporary shape of truth as a whole, to the contours in general of the correlation between fidelity to societal principles and a life-giving disclosure of society. Because of their imaginative and pre-propositional character, such clues tend to be suggestive rather than precise, provocative rather than definitive, exploratory rather than conclusive. Yet it is exactly this suggestive, provocative, and exploratory character that makes artistic truth so important in the search for truth as a whole. For it counteracts the tendency, especially pronounced in a culture dominated by economic and political systems, to seek cost-effective and manageable solutions to well-defined problems and thereby not only lose sight of the larger normative concerns tied up with truth as a whole but also ignore the suffering endured by the victims of societal untruth. Religious truth also provides important clues to the contemporary shape of truth as a whole, but in a different way. Recall that by religious truth, I  mean the dynamic correlation between fidelity to the societal principle of hopeful trust and the worshipful disclosure of that in which religious adherents place their trust. The “object” of such trust and worship is what people experience as ultimately sustaining them and the world they inhabit. Whether a religious community’s trust and worship are indeed true will be borne out in how its members conduct themselves in other domains of social life. Because religion concerns matters of ultimate sustenance, the practices of faith and worship carry significance well beyond the domain of religious truth. In its capacity for trustful and worshipful disclosure, religion can raise questions about the importance and legitimacy of other social domains of truth, including, for example, art, science, and politics. How

272  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom do these domains, in their current configuration, help sustain social life or block its sustenance? What would a sustaining society actually look like, in terms of both human fidelity to societal principles and interconnected flourishing? And what difference, if any, can religious adherents make in that regard? By raising such questions via trustful worship, religion provides openended orientation toward truth as a whole in its current configuration. The orientation is open-ended because the key to religious truth—the “object” of its trust and worship—necessarily lies both within and beyond the practices of religion. Because of such immanent transcendence, if I may call it that, fidelity to societal principles, albeit crucial to truth, will never be enough, and the human pursuit of interconnected flourishing, also crucial, will never suffice. There is always more to truth as a whole than we can either think or imagine, and religion points to this “more.” Unlike the imaginative clues provided by art, however, religion’s pointing occurs in post-propositional ways. For the teachings of a religion, its organized patterns of worship, and its ongoing interpretations of sacred stories all incorporate propositional thought. Yet their meaning, as told and enacted, pushes beyond the limits of what propositional thought can articulate. Religious truth, then, provides open-ended and post-­ propositional orientation toward truth as a whole. And in this, it can inspire fidelity to other societal principles and the pursuit of interconnected flourishing within other social domains, even as it relativizes what occurs in such domains. 10.1.2  Philosophical Truth Artistic truth and religious truth, then—the one pre-propositional and the other post-propositional—provide important vistas upon truth as a whole. Although, unlike Hegel, I do not regard art and religion as forms of absolute spirit, I do consider them to be modes of fidelity and disclosure, primarily nonpropositional and nondiscursive, that point toward truth in general. I thereby retain Hegel’s emphasis on their vocations as social domains of truth that share philosophy’s concern for truth as a whole. Philosophical truth is primarily propositional and discursive, however. That creates a tension with both art and religion. Because of the shared concern for truth as a whole, however, it also puts philosophy at odds with more delimited forms of scientific inquiry, for which truth as a whole challenges the confines of both theoretical validity and ­evidence-based accuracy. Indeed, the way in which philosophical truth is propositional and discursive disturbs many philosophical theories that model philosophical truth along the lines of propositional and scientific truth. For, as Hegel insists, the propositions that are most characteristic

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  273 of philosophy—including propositions pertaining to truth as a whole— destroy “the general nature of the . . . proposition, which [includes] the distinction of subject and predicate.” The characteristically philosophical proposition—what Hegel calls the speculative proposition (spekulativer Satz)—posits unity where ordinary propositions would emphasize diversity, and it uncovers wholeness where scientific assertions would insist on distinctions.2 In other words, the claims central to philosophy do take propositional form and do call for discursive confirmation. Yet they are not ordinary propositional truth claims. Nor do they seek theoretical validity and empirical adequacy in the manner of scientific truth claims. Although, like all other propositional truth claims both scientific and nonscientific, philosophical truth claims need to achieve inferentially valid and accurate insight, the subject matter, content, and methods of philosophical inquiry modify what validity and accuracy come to in philosophy. The central truth claims of philosophy are not straightforwardly logical, even though they do have their own logic. Nor are they plainly empirical, even though they do aim to do justice to how things are. Unlike straightforwardly logical or empirical truth claims, philosophical truth claims address the ontological, epistemological, and sociohistorical conditions under which logical and empirical claims can be made. To address these conditions, philosophy must take logic and evidence to a different level. Philosophical truth claims about the nature and value of truth clearly illustrate this issue. Take, for example, a correspondence theory that claims (1) all truth is propositional, and (2) truth consists in the correspondence between propositions and facts. If one asked to which facts these two claims correspond, one would quickly discover that philosophical truth claims about the nature of truth do not readily fit the proposition/fact model of correspondence theory. For “all truth” is hardly the sort of thing about which simple facts can be established, and one cannot argue that a correspondence theory itself corresponds to what truth is like without begging the question. Yet philosophers cannot avoid making these sorts of claims about truth as a whole, even when their approaches head in a deflationary direction. For philosophy asks about the general conditions under which all truth claims are made. And it discovers, so Hegel argues, and I agree, that truth as a whole is not the sort of thing about which straightforwardly logical or empirical truth claims can successfully be made. This metalogical point is central to Hegel’s own efforts to develop a dialectical logic. It also helps explain my own resistance to any truth theory that reduces truth to propositional truth. Any such reduction, when pushed to an extreme, will fail to provide a sufficiently robust conception of truth, even of propositional truth. For the conditions that underlie propositional truth do not lend themselves to ordinary or scientific propositional truth claims.

274  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom Once one grants this metalogical point, however, the question arises as to how philosophy itself accounts for truth as a whole. And here my emphasis on the plurality of social domains leads to a different answer from the one Hegel gives. For Hegel, the comprehensive thought that philosophy undertakes allows the unfolding of truth as a whole to culminate in the thought of truth, in what he calls the Idea of truth. Precisely because it provides thoughtful articulation to this Idea, philosophy is the culminating form of absolute spirit. Although art and religion make their own contributions to the unfolding of truth as a whole, they are, compared with philosophy, inferior or incomplete forms of absolute spirit. According to Hegel, only in philosophy does the absolute knowing of truth reach its peak. If, however, the diversity to the social domains of truth is a genuine plurality, then philosophy cannot be privileged in this way. What enables philosophy to develop a vigorously argued and propositionally expansive conception of truth simultaneously keeps it from claiming to be more than a conception. Truth as a whole is not a mere conception, and no philosophical conception of truth is the same as truth as a whole. There is always more to truth than what we can conceive and capture in philosophical truth claims; one task of philosophy is to refute any claim to the contrary. In my view, then, philosophy properly asks about truth as a whole, but because of the diversity within that whole, philosophy must constantly question its own response and hold itself open to insights from other social domains. This implies, in turn, that, when it comes to comprehending truth as a whole, philosophy is more dependent on art and religion than much of contemporary truth theory recognizes. And a philosophy that keeps its distance from art and religion, whether to achieve analytic purity or to maintain postmetaphysical respectability, will have difficulty grasping truth as a whole. For even though philosophical truth claims, in their comprehensiveness, take accuracy and logical validity to a different level, nevertheless such claims are propositional and therefore inherently limited. There are artistic and religious ways to access truth as a whole that philosophy cannot replicate, no matter how creative or reverential the pursuit of philosophical understanding becomes. For, in the end, philosophy is a propositional and discursive enterprise, and it depends on other social domains for pre-propositional and post-propositional insights into what truth comes to. Specifically, with regard to truth as a whole, philosophy depends on the insights of art and religion: insights, for example, into the most pressing social needs today or into the incompletion of truth as a whole. At the same time, however, philosophy can make alethic contributions to the social domains on which it depends. Philosophy can help artists and their publics recognize the distinctiveness of artistic truth and understand its significance for what art contributes to society. Philosophy can

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  275 help remind religious adherents and their leaders that religious truth is not absolute and that it needs to be borne out in social life. And philosophy can help everyone better understand the importance of both artistic and religious truth, even in a society that marginalizes or dismisses both. One test for the adequacy of a philosophical conception of truth as a whole, it seems to me, is whether it facilitates such contributions to art and religion. Philosophy is a comprehensive discipline in search of comprehensive truth. Because truth as a whole encompasses different kinds of truth and diverse social domains, philosophy needs to account for these different kinds and diverse domains of truth. But it also needs to show how the various kinds and domains interrelate and how, at bottom, they all manifest the process and structure of truth as a whole. Thanks to this double emphasis on both the unity and the diversity of truth, on both its wholeness and its social plurality, the logic of philosophy becomes dialectical, continually on the move between analysis and synthesis and always ready to refute philosophy’s own claims to completion. Concerned for truth as a whole, then, philosophy pursues a unique vocation, namely, a dialectical disclosure of social life. In pursuing this vocation, philosophy aims to be faithful to a dialectical version of logical validity, continually orienting itself toward other societal principles such as solidarity and justice, staying attuned to both the possibilities for interconnected flourishing and whatever blocks it, and remaining open to what both art and religion disclose about truth as a whole. That, in my view, is how a philosophical conception of truth can contribute to the truth of philosophy. To make this contribution, however, it must address the historical character of both truth and philosophy.

10.2 Truth and Historicity3 Hegel introduced what can be called the historical turn into philosophy and truth theory. More than anything else, the legacy of Hegel’s historical turn explains the primary differences between contemporary continental and analytic philosophers concerning the topic of truth. Whereas, for the most part, philosophers such as Heidegger, Adorno, Foucault, and their successors regard truth as a historical phenomenon, Frege, Russell, early Wittgenstein, and their successors do not. Although there are disagreements within analytic truth theory about whether the truth of propositions is eternal, rarely do these disputants consider whether such truth might be not just temporal but fully historical—except, of course, among sociohistorical contextualists, who are more favorably disposed toward continental philosophy than mainstream analytic truth theory is. By historical turn I mean three things. First, the content of p ­ hilosophy— its categories, arguments, and claims—is understood as both historically dated and deeply indebted to the content of historically earlier

276  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom philosophies. The nature of such datedness and indebtedness is, of course, a matter of dispute. Hegel’s philosophy tries to encompass the entire historical sweep of Western philosophy, and it claims, at least in places, to be the logical and alethic culmination of that historical process.4 Yet one does not need to take such a stance of absolute knowing to regard the content of philosophy as thoroughly historical.5 Second, the historical turn in philosophy means that its primary subject matter—what philosophy tries to understand and explain—is regarded as unavoidably caught up in the unfolding of human history. Even socalled nature, insofar as it gives rise to human life and undergoes cultural and social development, is in that sense historical, a platform and partner for human history. This emphasis on the historicity of philosophy’s subject matter leads Hegel to treat nature as primarily a preparatory stage in the historical unfolding of spirit (Geist) that finds its culmination in philosophy. As Adorno demonstrates, however, one does not need to endorse such Hegelian culturalism to regard the primary subject matter of philosophy as historical.6 Historically, as I  have already suggested, the topic of truth has lain near the center of philosophy’s content and subject matter. That certainly was so for Hegel. And it is to Hegel that we owe the third meaning of the historical turn in philosophy, namely, the claim that truth itself, both as the content of philosophy and as the subject matter this content is about, is intrinsically and unavoidably historical. This means, in Hegel’s case, that the conception of truth his philosophy advances both arises from the historical process and aims to illuminate the process from which it arises. When Hegel famously claims that “The True is the whole,” he has precisely this double imbrication of truth in history in view. For, as he goes on to say, the whole is nothing other than the essence or the absolute “consummating itself through its development,”7 and this development occurs in the historical unfolding of culture and society that philosophy illuminates. In other words, truth comes to fruition across the wide expanse of human history, and the task of philosophy is to trace and encapsulate what truth comes to. Similarly, when Adorno, perhaps not as famously but just as strikingly, claims that “The whole is the false,”8 he suggests a double inversion to Hegel’s conception of truth, implicitly asserting, first, that to regard the entire process of human history as an unfolding of truth is a false ideology and, second, that the society toward which Hegel thought this process headed, rather than realizing human freedom, entrenches societal domination; in that sense, society as a whole is false. Nevertheless, the claim that truth is historical, Adorno does not dispute. As articulated in previous chapters, holistic alethic pluralism also regards truth as a historical process, both as a philosophical content and as a subject matter. Yet it takes distance from Hegel and Adorno’s understandings of the historicity of truth. Although I share Adorno’s worries

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  277 about the ideological implications of considering history as a whole to be an unfolding of truth, I  do not endorse his attribution of falsity to contemporary society as a whole. And, although I  share Hegel’s sense that the historical unfolding of truth is cumulative and not haphazard or arbitrary, I do not think the cumulative unfolding of truth has an unavoidable culmination in the present. Let me explain. 10.2.1  Historicity of Truth As a whole, I have said, truth is a directed process and structure in which human fidelity to societal principles dynamically correlates with a lifegiving disclosure of society. Such fidelity and disclosure occur within the practices and institutions that organize life in society, practices and institutions that emerge, evolve, and sometimes disappear in human history. In that sense, both the fidelity and the disclosure that correlate within truth are intrinsically historical, and so is their correlation. One cannot pursue or conceptualize political truth, for example, without considering the societal structures of governance and conditions of oppression that, at a certain historical time and place, give shape to the pursuit of justice and liberation. So too, the societal principles to which we try to be true are themselves the outcome of historical struggles, just as the possibilities for life-giving disclosure are historical possibilities, embedded in how society and its practices and institutions have developed. The same goes for the social domains in which truth unfolds: they are the outcome of long-range historical tendencies, and they continue to undergo historical development. This does not mean, however, that the unfolding of societal principles and the opening of historical possibilities for life-giving disclosure occur as a linear progress. For human fidelity to societal principles, on which their unfolding depends, is always partial and incomplete and, as often as not, the opening of some historical possibilities requires others to be closed. Arguably, for example, the meaning of solidarity has expanded in recent decades as economic and technological globalization makes people around the world ever more densely interconnected. Yet contemporary political struggles over racism and nationalism show that many people today would either reject the societal principle of solidarity in this expanded sense or narrow it to the preservation of their own group’s identity. So too, as the global climate crisis makes the need for interspecies solidarity ever more apparent, it becomes equally obvious that, to meet this need, the wealthiest countries, corporations, and communities must constrain and redirect their own economic privileges: to open the historical possibility of ecological responsibility, we must close the historical possibility of unfettered exploitation. Although the unfolding of truth is a historical process, it is not a simple matter of historical progress.

278  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom Nevertheless, aspects to this process do represent steps in a historical learning process that are intrinsically worthwhile and not easily undone.9 One of these is the gradual differentiation of societal principles, in tandem with a differentiation of the practices and institutions within which social life occurs. Another is the gradual and often halting realization that humans are responsible not only for the social conditions within which societal principles are pursued but also for giving shape, through their responses, to the principles themselves. Yet another important and nearly irreversible historical step has been recognition of the interconnected character of human flourishing—that to be genuine, the flourishing of some people cannot occur at the expense of others, and that humans cannot truly flourish when other creatures do not. Let me briefly comment on each of these steps forward. The gradual differentiation of societal principles marks a historical learning process in two respects: it increases the transparency of human responsibility, and it makes such responsibility more likely to be achieved in society. On the one hand, where the normative tasks of, say, solidarity and justice become distinct (albeit interrelated), it becomes apparent that neither solidarity nor justice suffices by itself, that both are required for humans to flourish. In that sense, our responsibility in social life becomes more transparent. On the other hand, such differentiation in principles occurs in tandem with a differentiation in social institutions, such that some institutions are more suited to the pursuit of solidarity, for example, and others to the pursuit of justice, yet none are exempt from the full array of societal principles. Consequently, we now have interrelations and organizations in civil society specifically dedicated to the pursuit of solidarity, and others, such as governments and related organizations, specifically dedicated to the pursuit of justice. This does not exempt civil-societal organizations from pursuing social justice, no more than it removes the need for governments to foster political solidarity. But it does mean that certain types of organizations can take the lead with respect to either solidarity or justice. In this way, the differentiation of societal principles, together with the differentiation of social institutions, makes it more feasible to accomplish both solidarity and justice in society, despite countervailing systemic pressures. The historically emergent realization that human beings are responsible for giving shape to these societal principles also marks an important learning process, in two respects. First, this realization means we can no longer rely on either the natural order or supernatural revelation for the content of shared expectations that govern wide expanses of social life. Rather, we need to work out such content in struggles with one another. Although this does not preclude our consulting sources of ancient wisdom or heeding the injunctions of religious and ethical traditions, we can no longer hide behind their authority when we try to establish what, say, solidarity or justice means and requires. Second, the realization of

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  279 human responsibility for the content of societal principles gives added significance to our attempts to be faithful to them. For fidelity no longer means mere conformity to a natural law or unquestioning obedience to a divine command. Yet it also does not mean simply heeding one’s own conscience or seeking personal authenticity. Rather, fidelity to societal principles involves a collective struggle with others over what these principles mean and require. That gives our fidelity added significance. This added significance calls attention to a third historical learning process, namely, the growing recognition that human flourishing is interconnected. Although one might not recognize this if one paid attention only to the bombast of post-truth politics and the buzz of new social media, exclusionary and exploitative pursuits of human wellbeing have become societally untenable, and so have other dominant trends in the Anthropocene. The interconnected character of human flourishing has become impossible to ignore, despite the difficulty of establishing what interconnected flourishing would actually come to under current societal conditions. This recognition, like the differentiation of societal principles and the realization of human responsibility for them, is a historical achievement. Understood as a dynamic correlation between fidelity to differentiated societal principles and the pursuit of interconnected flourishing, truth is a historical process. Moreover, my conception of truth readily acknowledges its own indebtedness to this very same process: one could not conceive of truth in this way if societal principles had not differentiated, if the realization had not dawned in society that humans are responsible for the shape of these principles, and if recognition of the need for interconnected flourishing had not spread around the world. Yet, unlike Hegel, I do not claim my conception is the unavoidable outcome of this worldhistorical process. Nor, unlike Adorno, do I think the patterns of societal domination currently block the process of truth. The key to resisting both Hegelian exuberance and Adornian despair concerning the historicity of truth as a whole is to take seriously the role of hope in Adorno’s own conception of truth. As I  have demonstrated elsewhere,10 Adorno’s entire critique of contemporary society as a false totality depends on there being a historical basis to hope for a dramatically different future. The possibility of that different society is currently blocked, Adorno says, yet achieving it is historically not impossible. He calls this historically not impossible society “the humanly promised other of history” (ND 404). It would be a society in which domination and societally induced suffering have ended. Like Adorno, I think it makes little sense to see current society as one in which the historical unfolding of truth has culminated: there are too many ways in which both fidelity and disclosure go awry or in which the very structure of society as a whole makes them nearly impossible. Yet, unlike Adorno, I do think that the differentiation of societal principles,

280  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom together with growing acknowledgement of both human responsibility and the need for interconnection, provides a significant historical basis within current society to hope for a future in which societal obstructions to faithful disclosure are removed. 10.2.2  Historical Sources Hope for the future, however, is only one way to anchor one’s conception of truth in human history. One also needs to show how this conception itself arises from previous philosophical attempts to say what truth is and why it is important. To do that comprehensively would, of course, require a different sort of book, one closer to Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy or, to cite a more recent example, Habermas’s Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie. Nevertheless, the current book and its companion volume on Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School do indicate how holistic alethic pluralism arises from and responds to prominent conceptions of truth in both analytic and continental philosophy from the past hundred years or so. In that more limited sense, then, I  have tried to locate my conception of truth in the (recent) history of philosophical truth theory. Beyond that, and without pretending to offer a comprehensive historical reconstruction à la Hegel or Habermas, let me sketch how holistic alethic pluralism responds to two early sources of truth theory in the West, namely, Parmenidean poetic reflection and Hebrew wisdom literature. In these two sources surface the different understandings of fidelity and disclosure that permeate the history of truth theory in the West, understandings to which my own conception responds. On the one hand, we have the pre-Socratic “Poem of Parmenides.” Parmenides aligns truth (aletheia) with unchanging and perfect being. To search for truth is, according to Parmenides, to seek out what is “uncreated and indestructible,” what is “complete, immovable, and without end.”11 As the love of wisdom, philosophy is the path toward such immutable truth and away from the path most people follow, satisfied as they are with mere opinions about changing appearances. Already here, well before Plato and Aristotle entered the philosophical scene, we have a certain vision of fidelity and disclosure as correlates within truth. For Parmenides, the path to truth requires what Richard Campbell calls “faithful adherence to the Real” (TH 32), an adherence one accomplishes in thought. The correlate to such fidelity is the revelation of absolute being itself, its thought-mediated self-disclosure. Through such linkage between thoughtful fidelity to being and its thought-mediated self-disclosure, Parmenides “began Philosophy proper,” as Hegel says,12 sending Western philosophy down a path to depersonalizing truth and removing it from history (TH 35–39). Contemporary understandings of propositional truth as “objective,” in the sense of being completely

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  281 unbiased and context-free, provide distant echoes of the Parmenidean poem.13 Quite different, on the other hand, is the understanding of fidelity and disclosure in Hebrew wisdom literature from around the same time. In Psalm 85, for example, truth (emeth) is linked not with unchanging being but with steadfast love (chesed). Truth in this context does not mean faithful adherence to the real. Instead, it means being faithful in relationship to others, both human and divine. When people are faithful to others, they become enveloped in God’s lovingkindness. In such a condition, as the Psalmist puts it, justice and peace embrace.14 The vision of fidelity and disclosure offered by Hebrew wisdom literature stands the Parmenidean vision on its head. Ordinary people, not esoteric philosophers, are called to the path of truth, and this path requires a walk of life rather than an exercise of thought. Further, to walk this way is not to flee either connections with other creatures or the changes that occur in daily life but rather to pursue faithfulness within relationships and amid historical change. Nor is the correlate to such fidelity a thought-mediated disclosure of being; instead, it is the action-oriented revelation of an all-embracing lovingkindness. Even though Hegel ties his own emphasis on the historicity of truth to Heraclitus, a contemporary of Parmenides,15 I believe the impetus for this emphasis goes back to Hebrew wisdom traditions as mediated, in Hegel’s case, by a Protestant understanding of Jesus as “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).16 For it is in the Hebrew scriptures, rather than in Greek philosophy, that the historical character of truth comes to light. This, even though, as Campbell shows, the dominance of an eternalist conception of truth in Christian theology, inherited from Plato and Aristotle, delayed the philosophical recognition of truth’s historical character (TH 251–68). The fundamental difference between an eternalist conception of truth as timeless and a temporalist conception of truth as historical stems, it seems to me, from the Jewish and Christian understanding of human existence as belonging to a good creation.17 This creation is temporal through and through, and human existence within it is thoroughly historical. Moreover, such temporality and historicity are not to be avoided or denied. Rather, they are to be welcomed as the loving embrace of a good Creator. As Campbell demonstrates in great detail, this understanding of human existence as thoroughly historical never meshed easily with the “Platonic ideal of truth as timeless, unchanging, and free from all relativity,” despite many illuminating attempts by Patristic, medieval, and early modern philosophers and theologians to achieve a synthesis. What led Hegel and some subsequent philosophers to abandon the conception of timeless truth was “the slowly dawning realization of the historicity of human existence,” thanks in part “to the intrusion into our culture of themes from biblical thought” (TH 5).

282  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom Nevertheless, the dominant alethic strand within Western thought has been that of Parmenides, as mediated by Plato and Aristotle, not the legacy of Hebrew wisdom literature, as mediated by the life and teaching of Jesus. That helps explain the contemporary crisis of truth. When it becomes obvious, as it has, that a hankering after timeless truth is, as Campbell says, “not attainable by historically relative mortals,” and yet people still assume truth would have to be timeless, alethic skepticism looms. Or, in a professional rearguard maneuver, minimalists and deflationists might so restrict the scope of what truth comes to that it no longer has much to do with anything important in life and society. Either way, philosophy today faces a choice between working out a suitably different conception of truth or giving up altogether. Like Campbell, I consider that choice “one of the profound philosophical challenges of our time” (TH 6). It would not suffice, however, simply to embrace the wisdom-inspired historicizing strand and reject the philosophy-inculcated eternalist strand. Rather, as Hegel recognized and strove mightily to achieve, one must creatively and critically think these traditions together, recognizing how, in one way or another, they have been potentially intertwined all along. Here it helps to acknowledge that both strands connect fidelity with disclosure, even though each strand construes this connection differently. Whereas the Parmenidean strand connects fidelity to being (or the real) with its thought-mediated self-disclosure, the Hebraic strand links faithfulness toward others with the disclosure of divine blessing. What the first strand grasps, it seems to me, is that truth in thought requires us to do justice to the objects of thought, whatever they are, and that the objects do disclose themselves to our thought when we approach them in the right way. That connection between valid thought and objective self-disclosure lies at the core of propositional truth. It also permeates the heightening of propositional truth via scientific endeavors, which aim to refine the truth of thought. What the Parmenidean understanding of aletheia cannot acknowledge, however, is that both thought and its objects are caught up in human history, as is the societal principle of logical validity that our thought needs to follow. Neither the truth we seek in thought nor the thoughtful truth we achieve is timeless. Indeed, thought itself is a complex of human practices, especially linguistic and logical practices, and in that sense, thought is historical through and through. Little of this important emphasis on thought and its objects comes out in the truth strand that stems from Hebrew wisdom literature, with its linkage between truth (emeth) and love (chesed). Hence, it is tempting for those who appreciate this strand to adopt an anti-propositional stance toward the idea of truth, reducing truth, for example, to a matter of personal authenticity (à la Søren Kierkegaard) or interpersonal connection (à la Martin Buber). But such a stance would miss the radical implications of the Hebraic strand for propositional truth. For one can learn

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  283 from the emphasis on other-oriented fidelity and divine blessing that the pursuit of propositional truth and its scientific refinement are themselves ways in which people can be true to each other and can contribute to the wellbeing of human beings and other creatures. Moreover, failures or refusals to pursue propositional truth would undermine the prospects in contemporary society for interconnected flourishing. This gives thought a social significance that alethic eternalism distorts and that existentialism and personalism ignore. Yet, it follows from the Hebraic strand that there is more to truth than truth in thought, that truth pertains to multiple dimensions of human existence and to all the various ways in which we interrelate with others. Hence, truth in thought, while important, is not enough, and, if we pit it against or divorce it from truth in the other practices and institutions that make up human life in society, then truth in thought suffers. At bottom, all kinds of truth, including propositional truth, and all truth’s social domains, including science, require both fidelity to others and the opening of society toward interconnected flourishing. On my own understanding of what fidelity to others comes to, this requires a continual effort to be faithful to widely shared expectations, such as solidarity and justice, that have emerged historically from ongoing struggles to exercise other-oriented fidelity. It is in this way that, stripped of its eternalist trappings, the Parmenidean connection between thoughtful fidelity and thought-mediated self-disclosure, when intertwined with the Hebraic strand, can be transformed into a holistic and pluralist understanding of truth as a dynamic correlation between human fidelity to societal principles and a life-giving disclosure of society. And that correlation is an ongoing historical process. 10.2.3 Metacritique Such historically informed reflections illustrate both the potential and the limits to how I approach other conceptions of truth. This book and its companion volume engage in what I call metacritique. Loosely modeled along the lines of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, metacritique is a process of inquiry whereby, through immanent criticism of dialectically interconnected positions in the history of philosophy (including contemporary philosophy), one tries to arrive at a better and timely understanding of the matters under dispute. It is a process of immanent criticism with metacritical intent. Like Hegel and Adorno, although in my own terminology, I consider this process central to the project of philosophy, indispensable both for historical accounts of how philosophy has developed and for systematic attempts to address the issues that emerge from this history. Unlike Hegel in his more expansive moments, however, I do not claim such critical retrieval of insights from other conceptions must result in

284  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom the conception of truth that I  propose. For example, I  do not regard holistic alethic pluralism as the unavoidable consequence of reflectively reappropriating the Parmenidean and Hebraic strands of philosophical truth theory. Other responses to this mixed heritage are both possible and defensible, including the rejection of either one strand or both. Nor do I claim that the history of (Western) philosophy necessarily culminates in the proposed conception of truth. Instead, I simply claim that holistic alethic pluralism provides a plausible reworking to two central strands in the Western alethic tradition. I also hope this reworking offers a timely and helpful response to the historical alethic situation of contemporary philosophy and society. This historically oriented way of proceeding faces two sorts of objections, however. On the one hand, many philosophers do not think situating one’s truth theory in the history of philosophy has much to offer philosophy proper. Like Quine, they distinguish between two types of people who have an interest in philosophy: those who are genuinely interested in philosophy, and all the others who merely have an interest in the history of philosophy.18 For such philosophers, philosophy is not a historical enterprise, and reflecting on the history of philosophy would be of little use for proposing a new conception of truth. For them, my attempt to appropriate two alethic strands from the history of philosophy would be largely irrelevant. A different worry might come from the side of actual historians. They might object to my seeming to play fast and loose with the historical record. For obviously the texts I allude to are much more nuanced and complex than my brief interpretations can suggest, and the permutations of alethic debates over the centuries are much more complicated and multilayered than my highlighting of two strands can show. So, such reflections on the history of philosophy would seem insufficiently historical. In a sense, both objections are instructive. I do not embrace an ahistorical approach to truth theory. At the same time, however, I have not attempted a historical account of how truth theory has emerged and changed in the West. Yet I  also do not dismiss the need for both analytic clarity and historiographic nuance. Instead, I try to subsume these desiderata into the larger process of historically informed and systematic reflection that I  call metacritique. When focused on the idea of truth, a metacritique cannot be either simply a systematic analysis of what truth is and why it matters or a purely historiographic account of how other philosophers have thought about truth. Instead, it must incorporate significant elements of both systematic analysis and historiographic interpretation. Hence, both analytic clarity and historiographic nuance are necessary for a truth-focused metacritique. Yet they are not sufficient. For the aim is not simply to analyze and not simply to interpret. Rather, the aim is, via both analysis and interpretation, to engage in a critical retrieval of crucial insights from the history of alethic debates

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  285 in philosophy, including its recent history, and to weave those insights together into a comprehensive, historically informed, and conceptually rigorous alternative. Accordingly, a metacritique focused on the idea of truth in Western philosophy needs to accomplish what I have described elsewhere as “a combination, often precarious, of dependence upon, and transcendence of, the object of criticism.”19 The object of criticism, in this case, includes the entire history of alethic debates in Western philosophy, with an emphasis on the past hundred or so years. A truth-focused metacritique tries not only to learn from this history but also to break it open to a different future, acknowledging dependence on the positions it criticizes even as it tries to go beyond them. Described in this way, a metacritique focused on the idea of truth comports well with the conception of truth that I  have proposed. Acknowledging that truth as a whole is a historical process, the metacritic will try to enter and follow this process as it unfolds within the history of philosophy. Recognizing that truth involves a dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure, the metacritic will aim to discover whether and when other philosophers have been faithful to their vocation and have uncovered life-giving insights into truth itself. Aware that the alethic process is never finished, that it ever remains open to an inbreaking future that not even the most astute philosopher can imagine, the metacritic will refuse to pretend that any conception of truth, including the metacritic’s own conception, can provide the final word about what truth is and why it matters. Seeing propositional truth as important but not all-important, the metacritic will consider what happens to the idea of truth—and to human life—when philosophers either valorize or reject propositional truth. And, giving due weight to the plurality of social domains of truth, including science, the metacritic will ask what happens to a society—and to philosophy itself—when philosophers privilege one domain—whether art, science, politics, or religion— at the expense of others. This is not to suggest, however, that one must have a fully worked out conception of truth before undertaking the labor of metacritique. Nor is it to suggest that the only way to develop a comprehensive conception of truth is to engage in a metacritique. Instead, the described truth-focused metacritique and the emerging conception of holistic alethic pluralism belong to the same philosophical project, and they have developed in tandem. Central to this project is the conviction, learned primarily from Hegel and Adorno, that if one regards truth as historical, then one must take the history of philosophy seriously. Conversely, if one takes history of philosophy seriously, then one must also grapple with the issue of whether truth itself is historical. Metacritique offers a way to take the history of philosophy seriously with a view to the issue of whether truth itself is historical. It also helps one consider fundamental questions about

286  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom the place of philosophy in society and human life. It is to those questions that we now turn.

10.3  Social Critique and Practical Wisdom If, as I have argued, truth is a dynamic correlation between fidelity and disclosure and if, as many philosophers since Parmenides have thought, the vocation of philosophy is to search for truth, then several implications follow for the roles of philosophy in society. First, philosophy needs to ask what fidelity, disclosure, and their correlation come to in contemporary society. That means philosophy, in collaboration with other academic fields and social domains, must try to identify the leading societal principles in contemporary society and establish what, under current social conditions, the life-giving disclosure of society would be like. It also needs to reflect on how fidelity to specific societal principles can both contribute to and rely on such disclosure. Here, too, the reflection must be collaborative, not only drawing on insights from other fields and domains but also offering insights to them. (From here on I indicate the collaborative character of such philosophical truth-seeking with the label transdisciplinary.) Society as currently constituted erects many roadblocks to the fidelity and disclosure that truth requires. Hence, in the second place, transdisciplinary philosophy also needs to identify the factors that work against truth as a whole and in specific social domains. Which social forces make it difficult or even impossible to pursue fidelity to societal principles? What deep-seated tendencies work against a life-giving disclosure of society? And how do such forces and tendencies prevent a correlation between fidelity and disclosure? Together, these first two sets of implications give transdisciplinary philosophy the societal roles of articulating truth and challenging falsehood. Both the articulation and the challenge make up philosophy’s task of social critique. Yet there is more to social critique than simply saying what, within contemporary society, truth consists in and how it is blocked. For philosophy also needs to envision how falsehood can be overcome. In other words, social critique includes the future-oriented role of social envisaging, which spills over into the pursuit of practical wisdom. Let me conclude this book, then, with some reflections on social critique and practical wisdom. 10.3.1  Social Critique Unlike many post-Hegelians who share my view of philosophy as a type of social critique, I  emphasize finding traces of truth in contemporary society rather simply focusing on signs of falsehood. Further, I  regard these as more than mere traces. Although contested and often rejected

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  287 or ignored, societal principles such as solidarity and justice are deeply embedded in the fabric of contemporary society, just as the desire for interconnected flourishing is widespread, even when it takes distorted forms. If philosophers were to concentrate simply on pointing out how contemporary society is false—and, as Adorno recognized, the ways are myriad—we would all-too-easily, even if inadvertently, feed the truthnihilism that comes to expression in post-truth politics. The risk, of course, is that, by emphasizing what is true, one softpedals signs of untruth and mutes the need to let suffering speak, a need that, as Adorno said, is “a condition of all truth” (ND 17–18). Such soft-pedaling would defeat the social-critical purpose of identifying what is true, namely, to help people and practices and institutions overcome what is untrue. For one cannot point in this direction if one covers up or ignores what needs to change—if one occludes how contemporary society is false and, in its falsehood, creates and perpetuates both human and nonhuman suffering. Nevertheless, the key to addressing such falsehood and suffering is to indicate the historically developed expectations that people share with respect to social life and the societally embedded historical possibilities for a better future. In other words, exposing social untruth requires us to identify both extant societal principles and current openings for life-giving disclosure. 10.3.1.1  Finding Guidelines and Openings I have identified several such principles in the course of this book, mostly in the context of distinguishing and describing specific social domains of truth. I have singled out the societal principle of imaginative cogency as a key to truth in the artistic domain, for example; logical validity, as a key to propositional truth, and theoretical validity, as a key to scientific truth; justice, as a key to political truth; and hopeful trust, as a key to religious truth. In addition, I have mentioned other societal principles in conjunction with other social domains: serviceability (work and technology), solidarity (civil society), and resourcefulness (economy). Still others, which I  have not mentioned before and do not plan to elaborate here, would be the societal principles of intelligibility—a key to truth in language and communication—and intimate care—a key to truth in personal relationships. Although I hope my discussions of specific social domains have adequately indicated the content of imaginative cogency, logical and theoretical validity, justice, and hopeful trust, I believe philosophers should be cautious about attempting definitive accounts of such societal principles. There are two reasons for caution. One is that identifying such principles is an inherently transdisciplinary project: in the quest for societal principles, philosophy needs to be in dialogue and debate with other academic disciplines and with practitioners in the relevant fields. Hence,

288  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom for example, if philosophers want to explain the leading societal principle in the domain of artistic truth, they should do so in communication with arts-related disciplines (e.g., film studies, literary theory, and musicology) and arts-related practitioners (e.g., artists, arts educators, and arts organizations). Even if philosophers are in a unique position to attempt philosophical circumscriptions of specific societal principles, they do not have an exclusive claim to insight into what these principles mean and what they require. My second reason for caution is that societal principles emerge historically from social struggles, and their content changes as social struggles continue. Although philosophers who identify a societal principle aim to point out a widely shared expectation, they do not necessarily speak for everyone in the struggle, nor do they speak in a language everyone shares. Sociohistorical context matters, and so does one’s location among the groups that are struggling to be heard. Accordingly, the attempt to give a philosophical account of a societal principle needs to remain open to other voices and show solidarity in that regard. Something similar holds for attempts to establish what the life-giving disclosure of society comes to. In general, the idea of life-giving disclosure points to the interconnected flourishing of human beings and other creatures. As soon as one tries to say more precisely what would count as interconnected flourishing, however, one enters a crowded and turbulent arena where many different philosophical positions contend and countless disciplinary, social-institutional, and communal voices ask to be heard. A philosophical attempt to fill in the details needs to listen to such positions and voices. Although one can try to address many of them, there’s no way to speak for all. Two points are worth emphasizing, however, since they might not have emerged with sufficient clarity and vigor on previous pages. First, although specific societal principles provide keys to truth in specific social domains, their scope extends beyond such domains. Justice, for example, is a key to political truth, yet its scope is not limited to the political domain. Each human being and every social institution must respond to the call to justice, in ways that are appropriate to a person’s social context and an institution’s social task. So too, the historical horizon of imaginative cogency envelopes everyone in the aesthetic dimension of their social lives—whether arts-related or not—and the arts are not the only social institution where aesthetic validity matters. In the second place, to say at greater length what life-giving disclosure comes to, one must discuss different modes of disclosure: artistic, scientific, religious, and so on. For social life is inherently multidimensional, and how we conduct social life necessarily occurs via distinct domains. In a differentiated society, people do not just “live” in the abstract. They live within interpersonal relations and cultural practices and social institutions—as workers and consumers, for example, or

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  289 citizens, or family members. To flourish, then, they must flourish in different domains. Correlatively, an inability to flourish in one domain often undermines the opportunity to flourish in another. Hence, interconnected flourishing means to flourish not only in connection with other people and other creatures but also across the various domains of social life. To spell out what truth comes to in contemporary society, then, philosophers must identify the societal principles and types of disclosure whose correlation constitutes truth in specific domains, always attentive to the diverse voices that ask to be heard, and never equating truth in one social domain with truth as a whole. While making such identifications, philosophers need to uncover the dynamics whereby fidelity to one societal principle enhances fidelity to another, and the pursuit of one type of disclosure feeds into others. And, where conflicts appear to emerge among different social domains of truth, philosophers should uncover the forces and pressures that generate such conflicts. That, in turn, is part of what it means to challenge falsehood. 10.3.1.2  Exposing Barriers To challenge falsehood, philosophers must expose the barriers contemporary society places before the unfolding of truth, both in specific social domains and with respect to truth as a whole. These barriers take three forms: normative deficiencies, structural distortions, and directional dead ends. Although such barriers occur together and mutually reinforce each other, distinguishing these three forms increases the scope and precision of a social critique. Consider first the issue of normative deficiencies. This pertains primarily to how a society undermines or twists the meaning of societal principles. Earlier, for example, I indicated that, measured by the societal principle of resourcefulness, global capitalism is a normatively deficient economic system. Rather than carefully stewarding the Earth’s potentials for interconnected flourishing, the capitalist economy exploits them for the sake of private profit. This normative deficiency is not a minor and easily fixable flaw. It is central to how the economic system operates. Capitalism turns fidelity to the societal principle of stewardship or resourcefulness into the pursuit of wealth and consumption for their own sakes, usually at the expense of needy countries, communities, and individuals as well as vulnerable habitats. Yet it is crucial to keep in mind that, for the most part, a normative deficiency is not a total failure. It is not as if capitalism completely ignores the need for resourcefulness or entirely blocks all economic attempts to take care of the Earth’s potentials, both human and otherwise. Rather, capitalism as a system responds to this need, but does so in ways that obscure or subvert what resourcefulness comes to. And that puts pressure

290  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom on other social institutions to compensate for the normative deficiency of the economic system, whether, for example, through government regulations and programs or through cooperative and not-for-profit ventures. Even when such compensatory efforts are necessary and worthwhile, they do not remove the original normative deficiency, which would require a drastic shift in the economic system. Part of the point to challenging falsehood is to call attention to the need for significant normative reorientation. Normative deficiencies are both induced and reinforced by structural distortions. In a differentiated society, structural distortions occur when one (or more) of the social domains of truth thrives at the expense of others—and, as we have seen, at the expense of its own sort of truth. This usually occurs when power becomes concentrated in certain social institutions. Earlier, for example, I discussed how the systemic pressures of hypercommercialization and performance fetishism impinge on universities and threaten the pursuit of scientific truth. These systemic pressures stem, I suggested, from the inordinate power—the hegemony—of the capitalist economy and the administrative state. At the same time, hypercommercialization and performance fetishism would not be such a threat if universities did not internalize them—and that means universities can also resist them in various ways. To resist these systemic pressures, however, would call attention to a cascading series of structural distortions: the inordinate power of economic and political systems in a supposedly democratic society; the privileging of science—especially the hard sciences—over other social domains of truth; the failure of universities to become generative centers within civil society for public dialogue and debate; the tilting of university governance and operations toward administrative decisions and away from faculty deliberations, and so forth. One cannot address the normative deficiencies of contemporary universities without taking these structural distortions into account. To challenge falsehood in society requires the removal of structural distortions. The third kind of barrier to the unfolding of truth is what I call directional dead ends. This is the most difficult kind of barrier not only to describe but also to remove. Previous chapters have touched on it several times when, for example, I questioned both scientism and sociohistorical relativism, resisted both the politicization and the depoliticization of truth, and rejected not only religious fundamentalism but also adamant secularism. There is more to these disputed positions than the notions of normative deficiency and structural distortion can capture: they attract heartfelt allegiance or disavowal, and they pertain to what, following Hegel, one can call the very spirit of truth. For such positions raise questions not only about what truth is and why it matters but also about why anyone should care enough to pursue it. These are questions about the spirit or direction in which our pursuit of truth unfolds. When the

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  291 answers given seem to block the unfolding of truth, we are dealing with a directional dead end. Discussions of falsehood at this level are extremely fraught, as the history of debates about ideology and the critique of ideology indicates. One reason why the so-called positivist dispute in German sociology became so intense and tangled in the 1960s, for example—apart from the fact than none of the participants actually considered themselves positivists— is that both Theodor Adorno and Karl Popper, as well as their defenders, regarded their opponents’ positions as dangerous ideologies. Whereas Adorno thought Popper’s critical rationalism blindly endorsed the latecapitalist status quo, Popper thought Adorno’s dialectical critique irrationally promoted an illiberal revolution.20 Although it is a mistake to reduce well-articulated positions concerning truth to nothing more than expressions of ideology, a philosopher who cares about truth cannot avoid taking a stance about the direction in which society is headed and criticizing social and cultural tendencies, including philosophical ones, that seem to take society in the wrong direction. A critique of the direction in which society is headed, and of the tendencies that misdirect it, presupposes a view of what makes for goodness in social life. As is apparent, my conception of truth regards both fidelity to societal principles and interconnected flourishing as crucial in this regard. Appealing to such a view, one can also zero in on tendencies that point society away from goodness in social life. When such tendencies become thoroughly embedded in the fabric of a society, I do not hesitate to apply the label societal evil. By this term I mean life-destroying tendences that are so deeply entrenched in a society that they are difficult to recognize, hard to take responsibility for, and tricky to resist. They also are not easy to challenge in philosophy. Partial or piecemeal criticisms do not suffice: one needs to question the direction of society as a whole. Because, in my view, contemporary societal evil nests in relationships among economic, political, and civil-societal macrostructures, my own philosophical questioning of society’s direction involves what I  call an architectonic critique, one that examines the mutually reinforcing normative deficiencies and structural distortions among these macrostructures. This architectonic critique provides some of the sociohistorical context for my objections to scientism, relativism, and the like in earlier chapters. Although each is problematic on its own terms, for reasons I have explained, they also feed into tendencies that point society in the wrong direction: scientism, by discrediting nonscientific sources of wisdom; sociohistorical relativism, by undermining the normative basis for social criticism; politicization, by giving free reign to illegitimate power; depoliticization, by casting doubt on the political relevance of propositional truth; religious fundamentalism, by blocking the exploration of alternative social directions; and adamant secularism, by suppressing the need for social transformation.

292  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom 10.3.1.3  Envisaging a Future Just as, in criticizing such positions, one needs to offer an alternative conception of truth, so, while engaging in a social critique of normative deficiencies, structural distortions, and directional dead ends, one needs to envision how society could be true. It does not suffice to say, with Adorno, that the whole is the false. One also wants to consider why and in which respects society as a whole is not wholly false. Nor does it suffice to say, with Hegel, that the true is the whole. One also wishes to reflect on what society would look like if it were wholly true. Hence, philosophy as social critique needs to go beyond saying what truth consists in and how truth is blocked. It must also suggest how falsehood in contemporary society can be overcome. In other words, philosophy as social critique needs to envision how truth would unfold if the truth already in society were unblocked. I realize, of course, that such social-critical envisaging has a speculative character many postmetaphysical philosophers will find offensive. Who in their right mind can claim to know what a wholly true society would be like? What entitles any philosopher to make claims along these lines? What prevents such philosophical speculation from shading off into the worst sort of utopian ideology? These are legitimate questions. To address them, let me explain more fully what I have in mind. Truth as a whole, as I have frequently said, continually unfolds. That means not only that truth is intrinsically historical but also that it is open to a future no one fully comprehends. We do not know now what, for example, the societal principle of justice will mean in one hundred years or what fidelity to this principle will then require. Nor do we know now what will then either block or promote life-giving disclosure. Yet we can know what justice and other societal principles mean and require now, as well as what in society either prevents or fosters interconnected flourishing. If we could not know these matters, then truth itself would be beyond our grasp, and philosophy would have little basis for a truthoriented social critique. At the same time, however, the historicity of truth means that how truth unfolds now, and how it has unfolded in the past, creates possibilities for its unfolding in the future. These are not simply logical possibilities, such that they are merely conceivable. They are historical possibilities: given the requisite changes in the contemporary practices and institutions that organize social life, this unfolding could actually occur. A comprehensive social critique will ask what historical possibilities contemporary society holds for the unfolding of truth. It is in view of such possibilities that one can suggest how society as a whole needs to change. In my own work, this futural orientation toward historical possibilities has led me to envisage a differential transformation of contemporary society. By this, I  mean a process of significant change in society

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  293 as a whole that occurs within diverse interpersonal relations, cultural practices, and social institutions; across the structural interfaces among economic, political, and civil-societal macrostructures; and with respect to distinct societal principles, especially the principles of resourcefulness, justice, and solidarity. I have tried to show how removing normative deficiencies and structural distortions in one macrostructure requires similar removals in the others, just as fidelity to one societal principle requires simultaneous fidelity to others. The changes needed involve both normative reorientation and structural transformation, and they must not only occur in many diverse sites and but also move in mutually reinforcing directions. I  have also tried to show that the changes needed are historically possible, by pointing, for example, to the elements of a social economy within both capitalism and the administrative state. Far from being utopian in a questionable way, then, an idea like differential transformation aims to help people envision a historically achievable society in which humans and other creatures can more fully flourish. It also helps them re-imagine their own part, and that of their organizations and communities, in achieving such a society. This, it seems to me, is the legitimate and indispensable role of social-critical speculation in philosophy. It is also the place where, perhaps more than any other, the project of philosophical social critique intersects the pursuit of practical wisdom. 10.3.2  Social-Ethical Wisdom Philosophy, countless philosophers have said, is the love of wisdom. It is out of such love that philosophers seek the truth. Once one undertakes the philosophical search for truth, however, one also begins to ask what truth is and why it matters. And to take such questions seriously, one also needs to care deeply about truth. Accordingly, true lovers of wisdom, as Socrates argues in Plato’s Republic, are lovers of the truth.21 But what sort of wisdom does the philosopher love, and how does the philosophical search for truth link up with the love of wisdom? If one followed the Parmenidean path, one would equate wisdom with theoretical contemplation and comprehension of the nature of reality, as Plato and many philosophers after Plato tended to do. If, by contrast, one followed the path of Hebraic wisdom literature or other religious wisdom traditions, one would align wisdom with reliable guidance for daily life, and one would not necessarily turn to professional or academic philosophy for that. Moreover, which of these paths one follows will also shape one’s philosophical conception of truth. As was indicated earlier, my general conception of truth tries to incorporate insights learned along both the Parmenidean and the Hebraic paths. On the one hand, truth in thought does indeed require us to do justice to the objects of thought and their self-disclosure. Yet, contra

294  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom Parmenides, this is not the sole prerogative of philosophy, nor is it the key to truth as a whole. On the other hand, truth as a whole does indeed require us to be faithful to others and their flourishing. Yet, contra certain interpretations of wisdom literature, this requirement does not override truth in thought but embraces it instead. From such crossing of two distinct paths, it follows that practical wisdom and philosophical truth-seeking are neither opposed nor reducible one to the other. For although philosophy, as Plato recognized, is a theoretical enterprise, yet its discoveries have a bearing on daily life. And practical wisdom, although life-oriented, can both inform philosophy and benefit from it. Perhaps such mutuality between philosophy and wisdom is most apparent in the area I call social ethics. By social ethics I mean reflection on the most important normative considerations that govern interpersonal relations, cultural practices, and social institutions. Although social ethics does not preclude reflection on the conduct and responsibilities of individual moral agents—the focus of most moral philosophy—that is not its primary concern. Rather, distinguishing as Hegel does between ethicality or social-ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and morality (Moralität),22 social ethics asks what makes for goodness in the relations, practices, and institutions that people inhabit. This notion of social ethics assumes a robust and multi-faceted conception of the common good, which I understand as whatever contributes in a social context to the interconnected flourishing of all Earth’s inhabitants. Moreover, I  believe we can articulate our understanding of the common good in terms of societal principles that hold for all members of a society and for the relations, practices, and social institutions in which they participate. So, I use the term social ethics to refer to reflection upon the ways in which, following societal principles such as solidarity and justice, human beings, in their relations, practices, and institutions, can contribute to interconnected flourishing, to the common good. At this point, truth theory spills over into social ethics, just as reflection on social goodness flows into a conception of truth. Indeed, truth and goodness intersect. We touched on this intersection when chapter 6 discussed the authentication of truth. There I said truth unfolds by being borne out within the fabric of social life. So understood, authentication does not preclude the possibility of individuals bearing witness to truth in their own life and conduct. Nor does it dismiss the importance of such personal testimony. The focus, however, is on the social fabric within which people live and to which they contribute. To bear witness to truth is to do what truth requires, and, for the most part, that occurs within social relations, practices, and institutions. Hence, although there is a sense in which to authenticate truth is simply to do the truth or to live the truth, one should not reduce such matters to merely personal deeds and decisions.

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  295 In line with this account of authentication, we can understand practical wisdom as the social-ethical insights gained from living the truth. We can also say philosophy as social critique both learns from the pursuit of practical wisdom and contributes to it. Philosophical social critique learns from this pursuit because the meaning of societal principles unfolds in lived attempts to be faithful to them, just as the scope of life-giving disclosure emerges from organized efforts to foster interconnected flourishing. Often such emergent meaning and scope take more definite shape via academic research findings and professional policy ­recommendations— all the more reason why philosophy needs to be transdisciplinary. At the same time, however, philosophy as social critique also contributes to the pursuit of practical wisdom, in three ways: by helping people seek and embrace the good within social life; by encouraging them to resist societal evil; and by articulating reasons to live in hope. Let me comment on each way in turn. Earlier I said that, to spell out what truth comes to, social-critical philosophers must identify societal principles and types of disclosure and their correlation in specific social domains. Carried out in sufficient detail and properly attentive to diverse voices, such philosophical articulation of domain-specific truth can support people’s pursuit of the good within social life. It can help them be faithful to a domain’s primary societal principle without losing sight of other relevant principles. It can also point them toward the ways in which domain-specific practices and organizations foster life-giving disclosure. It is in implications for the fabric of social life that a conception of truth is itself authenticated. To help people seek and embrace the good in social life, social-critical philosophy should also encourage them to resist that which blocks or twists the good. Here I am especially concerned with what I have called societal evil. Societal evil is not the same as what philosophers call moral evil. The notion of moral evil assumes that it results from the intentional conduct or inaction of specifiable moral agents (e.g., murder). Societal evil also is not the same, however, as what philosophers call natural evil—bad things that happen to us without anyone intending this (e.g., suffering due to “natural disasters”). Societal evil is more complicated than this. It occurs even though no one person or group or organization seems responsible for it, yet it occurs in and via cultural practices and social institutions for which everyone in a society is responsible. So, there is a sense in which both no one and everyone is responsible for societal evil, even as it is hard to recognize the tendencies that constitute societal evil and very difficult to resist it. For societal evil has to do with the direction in which society as a whole is headed and with how a nexus of interlinked practices and institutions sets this direction.23 In reflecting on the direction of society as a whole, philosophy as social critique seeks to specify wherein societal evil lies and to suggest resources for resistance. This can encourage the pursuit of practical wisdom in

296  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom several ways. First, it helps people understand and care about destructive societal tendencies beyond their personal control that directly affect their social lives, tendencies like climate change, large-scale poverty, and growing hostility toward so-called aliens. Second, such philosophical exposure helps people acknowledge their own involvement in societal evil without misassigning responsibility for it. And that, in turn, encourages people to resist societal evil in the spirit of truth. In other words, philosophical social critique can help make resistance to societal evil intrinsic to our authentication of truth. To resist societal evil in the spirit of truth, people need to have futureoriented hope. They must have hope that the relations, practices, and institutions in which they participate can more fully align with relevant societal principles and more fully contribute to interconnected flourishing. They need to expect that attempts to “live the truth” are not in vain, despite the pervasiveness and power of societal evil. And they need to have some sense that contemporary societal evil is not an inevitable fate, that the constellation of tendencies and forces currently destroying social life not only can be resisted but also, in the long run, can be transformed. By itself, philosophy cannot provide such future-oriented hope, nor should it try. Yet, because of its futural orientation toward historical possibilities, social-critical philosophy can help articulate reasons why such hope is not misplaced. It can indicate how past attempts to follow and formulate societal principles have enhanced social life, despite societal obstacles, and have helped remove the obstacles. Social-critical philosophy can also help people understand how their participation in social institutions can contribute to change for the better and not simply reinforce destructive patterns. And, if it is sufficiently nuanced and perceptive, it can help people envision a society-wide transformation to which, within their communities and organizations, they can contribute. Philosophy cannot remove social indifference or despair. In the ways just mentioned, however, it can help people find reasons for social hope. If philosophy derives such reasons from a sufficiently capacious and truthoriented social critique, then these will not be reasons for false hope. And philosophy itself, in its pursuit of truth, will give expression to a hopeful love of wisdom. 10.3.3  Alethic Transformations We come, then, to the end of this book-length attempt to reconceive the idea of truth. Yet, in a sense, the end is just the beginning. For if truth is the dynamic process and structure I have tried to describe, it will always outstrip a philosophical conception and call for new redescriptions. Nevertheless, if my attempt has succeeded, then it is clear the holistic alethic pluralism proposed in this book calls for a series of interlinked changes in philosophy, society, and truth itself. Such interlinked changes

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  297 go to the root of what these are and why they matter. I call them alethic transformations. To say these changes are interlinked is already to propose a transformation in philosophy. For the most part, professional philosophy in the West today specializes in specialization. Like most other academic disciplines, philosophy has become a house of many niches with neither roof nor windows. Specialists gather in each niche. Sometimes we bump into specialists from other niches. But we have little sense of a shared philosophical vocation, and meaningful conversations with a wider public rarely occur. Truth theory has become one such niche. If that description of contemporary philosophy is roughly right, then to propose a holistic and internally differentiated idea of truth is to call for a drastic reconstruction in philosophy, to borrow a century-old phrase from John Dewey. For, to the extent that a passionate search for truth remains central to philosophy, we philosophers cannot rest secure in our little niches, doing our professional things while the world around us goes up in flames. Truth requires us to reconnect the disaggregated parts of our discipline, address central issues that arise in other academic fields and social domains, and undertake two-way conversations about life and society with a non-academic public. We no longer have the luxury—and really, we never did—to act as if truth does not matter or to doubt that it does. Rather, we need to show, beyond the confines of specialized epistemology and truth theory, why truth matters, not just in philosophy, but in society as a whole. Holistic alethic pluralism also suggests that society, too, needs to change. Despite the historical learning processes already identified, contemporary society, at least in the West, is beset by normative deficiencies, structural distortions, and directional dead ends. Moreover, if the truth-oriented social critique that I have identified is on the right track, then these forms of falsehood cannot be adequately addressed outside complex relationships among economic, political, and civil-societal macrostructures. For it is in these macrostructural interrelationships that contemporary societal evil nests. Only by addressing the forms of falsehood in each macrostructure and across their interrelationships can society as a whole more fully be in the truth. In such a society, no social domain would obstruct the ongoing correlation between fidelity and disclosure, and every social domain would appropriately contribute to truth as a whole. Thus, holistic alethic pluralism envisions a fundamental transformation of contemporary society. Made historically possible by how society has developed, this transformation will not occur without significant and simultaneous changes across many social domains of truth, including the arts, science in a broad sense, politics, and religion. Philosophy, too, has its own part to play. For philosophy can provide the sort of truth-oriented social critique that calls for societal transformation and

298  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom supports the pursuit of social-ethical wisdom. Yet philosophers cannot provide the requisite social critique if they do not put their own house in order. Hence, societal transformation and philosophical reconstruction are interlinked, and how philosophers conceive of truth matters for social life and for society as a whole. The reconstruction of philosophy and the transformation of society interlink in the alteration of truth itself, an alteration that, as I shall show, occurs in three senses. To speak of alteration in this context is to take issue with the long Parmenidean legacy of eternalism in Western philosophy— the thought that truth is eternal and does not change. Even though the Parmenidean legacy sheds important light on the character of propositional and scientific truth, I follow Hegel in thinking it is fundamentally mistaken about truth as a whole, a whole that includes propositional and scientific truth. Truth, I have claimed, is intrinsically historical. Like everything historical, it is temporal, and it changes. That is the first sense in which truth alters, such that philosophical reconstruction and societal transformation interlink in its alteration: they interlink in truth’s being a historical process and a historically emergent structure of fidelity/disclosure correlation. Even though truth as such is not simply a philosophical conception or a social construct, truth would not be what it has become without the historical contributions of philosophical thought and the historical development of society. That means, in turn, the idea of truth and how philosophers conceive of that idea can and must also change. And this points to the second and third senses of alethic alteration: the idea of truth can alter, and so can philosophical conceptions of truth. To elaborate these senses of alethic alteration, I need to make explicit distinctions that have implicitly run throughout the entire book among (1) truth as such, (2) the idea of truth, and (3) philosophical conceptions of truth. Truth as such is the dynamic multidimensional process and structure of correlation that I have described. It is what can be called the subject matter of philosophy when philosophy considers what truth is and why it matters—the subject matter, in fact, of this book. The idea of truth, by contrast, is the accumulated and accumulating content of how philosophers and others have thought and continue to think about truth as such. This content changes over the generations and across the diversity of positions taken. Yet there is enough historical continuity and conceptual commonality for us to talk about this cumulative content as the idea of truth and not simply a collection of diverse ideas. Amid such continuity and commonality, however, the idea of truth can and does change, sometimes incrementally and sometimes more dramatically. Indeed, alethic holistic pluralism advocates just such a dramatic change, from an idea that privileges propositional truth to one that includes more than propositional truth and thereby resituates and redescribes propositional truth. Moreover, the recommended change both

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  299 implies and requires concomitant alterations in philosophy and society. And that, characteristically, is how changes in the idea of truth occur, namely, in conjunction with changes in both philosophy and society. Alethic holistic pluralism itself is what I call a philosophical conception of truth. It is a philosophical attempt to understand truth as such by elaborating the idea of truth. Such elaboration occurs in the process of considering other conceptions and attempting a critical retrieval of truthrelated insights from them, a process described earlier as metacritique. That is why I have taken up different conceptions of propositional truth (e.g., Frege and Russell), propositional alethic pluralism (Lynch), and the relation between propositional truth and discursive justification (Alston and Putnam) and, in response, have proposed a more robust conception of the truth of propositions. It is also why I have entered debates in philosophy of science about scientific realism (Psillos, Laudan, and van Fraassen) and sociohistorical contextualism (e.g., Rorty) and have fashioned a conception of scientific truth that points beyond these debates; have responded to Arendt and Foucault concerning the relation between truth and power by reconceiving politics as a social domain of truth; and have tried to sort out what is living and what is dead in Hegel’s conception of art, religion, and philosophy as complementary modes of comprehensive truth. By elaborating the idea of truth, these critical retrievals aim to achieve a more complete comprehension of what truth is and why it matters. Yet, like any other conception of truth, holistic alethic pluralism has emerged historically, and it remains open to additional alteration in light of how both philosophy and society change. This conception of truth attempts to connect the reconstruction of philosophy with the transformation of society as a whole. The truth of the proposed conception does not depend on whether philosophy and society undergo the recommended transformations. If these do occur, however, even if only partially and with temporary reversals, they will serve to authenticate the truth of holistic alethic pluralism and of the alteration it envisions in the idea of truth. The truth of alethic alterations will be borne out by alethic transformations in philosophy and society. As a dynamic process and structure, then, and as both a philosophical idea and a proposed conception, the unfolding of truth matters. It matters for philosophy. It matters for society. And it matters for anyone who wishes to live in the truth. This book has tried to show why.

Notes 1 In Part Three to his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Hegel describes philosophy as “the intelligible unity (cognized by thought) of art and religion.” Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 302. 2 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 38. Hegel illustrates what he means by “speculative

300  Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom proposition” by discussing two examples: the propositions “God is being” (Gott ist das Sein) and “The actual is the universal” (Das Wirkliche ist das Allgemeine). 3 I borrow this title from Richard Campbell, TH and thereby acknowledge how much I owe to his account of the history of the idea of truth in Western thought. 4 Without getting into the intricacies and controversies of Hegel interpretation, one could say the very end of his Phenomenology of Spirit is one such passage. 5 Robert Piercey, The Crisis in Continental Philosophy: History, Truth and the Hegelian Legacy (London: Continuum, 2009) argues that, in fact, Hegel has bequeathed a “mixed message” concerning the historical datedness and indebtedness of philosophy, such that continental philosophy is ambivalent about whether inquiry into the history of philosophy is genuinely philosophical. 6 See especially “World Spirit and Natural History” in ND 300–60. 7 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 11. 8 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), 50. 9 I borrow the concept—but not the exact content—of historical learning ­process from Habermas’s attempt to give a Marx-inspired account of social evolution that does not reduce it to economic and technological developments. See “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism” in Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas Mc­Carthy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 130–77. For an astute problematizing of Habermas’s apparent commitment to the idea of historical progress, see Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 37–79. 10 Lambert Zuidervaart, “History and Transcendence in Adorno’s Idea of Truth,” in The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School, eds. Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth (New York: Routledge, 2018), 121–34. 11 Parmenides, “Poem of Parmenides,” fragment 8, in John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 4th ed. (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1930), 174. 12 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), vol. 1, p. 254. 13 For a perceptive discussion of holistic alethic pluralism as a response to this eternalist strand in Western truth theory, see Joshua Lee Harris, “Parmenides’ Challenge and Zuidervaart’s Stereotheticism: A  Project Both Ancient and Original,” in Seeking Stillness, or the Sound of Wings: Scholarly and Artistic Comment on Art, Truth, and Society in Honour of Lambert Zuidervaart, eds. Héctor Acero Ferrer et al. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2021), 56–73. 14 I elaborate on these themes from Hebrew wisdom literature in Lambert Zuidervaart, Shattering Silos: Reimagining Knowledge, Politics, and Social Critique (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), 20–30. On the philosophical importance of the intimate connection between truth and love, see Henk Hart, “Filled with All God’s Fullness,” in Seeking Stillness, 20–26. 15 Hegel credits Heraclitus with being the first to understand the absolute as the dialectic where “the philosophic Idea is to be met with in its speculative form . . . Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I  have not adopted in my Logic.” Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, p. 279. 16 An emphasis on Jesus as the embodiment of divine love is especially pronounced in Hegel’s early writings. See especially G. W. F. Hegel, “The Spirit

Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom  301 of Christianity and Its Fate” (1798–99), in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1948, 1975), 182–301. The way in which Hegel here characterizes “the spirit of Judaism” and juxtaposes it to “the spirit of Christianity” is profoundly problematic. Nevertheless, the emphasis on love remains a key to both Hegel’s epistemology and his social philosophy. See, for example, Merold Westphal, History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology, 2nd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990); Shannon Hoff, The Laws of the Spirit: A Hegelian Theory of Justice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014). 17 Campbell touches on this when he demonstrates the incompatibility between the doctrine of creation and Greek metaphysics (TH 163–67), credits this doctrine with making possible the conception of human historicity as “self-making-in-a-situation” (TH 401), and says “the ancient Hebrew understanding of emeth . . . presents a historical dimension and relevance which is completely lacking from the Greek idea of aletheia” (TH 437). 18 Campbell, TH 7, with reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay “The Relationship of Philosophy to Its Past.” 19 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), xx. See also the Introduction to Lambert Zuidervaart, Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School: Critical Retrieval (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 1–16. 20 Tellingly, Popper titled his final and brief response to the debate “Reason or Revolution?” See Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), 288–300. 21 Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992), Book VI, 484a–491a, pp. 157–64. 22 See especially G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a more succinct account, see the section on objective spirit in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, 241–91. 23 Few philosophers I  know of use the term societal evil. Nevertheless, the resurgence of philosophical interest in the topic of evil, first after the Holocaust in the Second World War and then, more recently, after an upsurge in international terrorism and counterterrorism, indicates a need to distinguish societal evil from either moral or natural evil. Hannah Arendt’s application of the Kantian term radical evil to antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism and Claudia Card’s account of “evil institutions” and “structural evil” both point in this direction. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Harvest Book, 1968); Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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Index

abstraction 43, 47 – 8, 64 – 5, 164 – 5, 186 accuracy 10–11, 18, 20–1, 48–9, 51–2, 57, 63–5, 115–19, 183–4, 222; and relativism 196–8; and validity 18, 66–7, 72, 78–80, 83, 85–8, 116, 144, 166–8, 184, 226, 228 administrative state 191 – 2 Adorno, Theodor 5, 22, 132, 231 – 2, 240 – 3, 246 – 7, 276, 279 – 80, 283, 287, 291; Aesthetic Theory 232, 237, 240, 242, 265n4 aesthetic judgment 80 – 3, 151, 236 aesthetic practices see imagination aesthetic signs 62, 81 – 3, 235, 239 aesthetic validity see validity, aesthetic Alcoff, Linda Martín 7 – 8, 121n11 aletheia 9, 23, 280 – 3, 301n17 alethic monism 6, 75 alethic pluralism 6 – 8, 14 – 17, 74; functionalist 7, 18 – 19, 74 – 8; holistic x, 17 – 19, 23 – 4, 92 – 4, 122 – 6, 132 – 8, 284 – 5, 297 – 9, 300n13; propositional 14 – 15, 18 – 19, 74 – 80, 89, 93 – 4; see also pluralism alethic transformations 296 – 9 Allen, Amy 210 – 11 Alston, William 19, 75, 97 – 111, 114 – 17; A Realist Conception of Truth 97 – 111, 117, 120n2, 120nn5 – 6, 121n13 Anderson, Elizabeth 202n27 Anselm 11 antirealism see realism

Arendt, Hannah 21, 205 – 10, 219 – 23, 228; “Truth and Politics” 205 – 10, 223 Aristotle 11, 56n52, 280 – 2 Armstrong, David 17, 28, 30, 49, 52n8 art 61, 232 – 4, 238 – 40; aesthetic/ artifactual character of 233 – 5, 237 – 8; appreciation of 149 – 50; audience 232, 238 – 9; and discovery 149 – 50; and illumination 149 – 50; politicization of 22, 245 – 6; and politics 240 – 6; product/event 70, 156n16, 232 – 3, 237 – 8; protest 241 – 2, 265n7; in public 90 – 1, 242; and religion 246, 265, 269 – 72, 274 – 5; as social domain 22, 61 – 3, 135 – 6, 236 – 40, 271; as social institution 127, 134 – 5, 232 – 5 artistic truth 25n21, 70, 91, 133, 135, 232, 271; authentication of 147 – 51; as authenticity 147 – 9, 151, 238 – 41; as cogent imaginative disclosure 91, 127, 147 – 8, 232, 236 – 40; as integrity 147, 150 – 1, 238 – 41; and political truth 241 – 6; as pre-propositional 133, 135 – 6, 151; as significance 147, 149 – 51, 238 – 41 art talk 63, 135, 151 artworks 148 – 50, 155n9, 156n16, 232 – 3, 237 – 40, 265n4; import of 150, 239 – 41, 244 assertions 8, 10, 63 – 4; and facts 45 – 7; in Frege 34 – 5; and

318

Index

propositions 48, 50 – 1, 55n48, 116; scientific 166 – 8, 188 Austin, J. L. 39 – 40 authentication 20, 122, 138 – 44, 157, 294 – 5; of artistic truth 147 – 51; discursive 144 – 7, 154 – 5; of religious truth 151 – 5, 252, 256, 263 – 5; see also bearing witness; confirmation; testimony Beaney, Michael 38, 54n27, 55n41 bearing witness 20, 119 – 20, 138 – 44, 147, 151, 153 – 4, 264 beauty 233 – 4, 236 Bedeutung 33 – 5, 38 – 9, 41, 51, 54n27, 54n33 beliefs 10–11, 53n21, 57, 188; and practical objects 43–5, 63, 165; and propositions 10, 18, 30–2, 37, 44, 48–9, 63; religious 153, 156n20, 254 bullshit 2, 71, 73n14 Campbell, Richard 8 – 9, 11, 25nn21 – 2, 280 – 3; Truth and Historicity 300n3, 301nn17 – 18 capitalism 191, 203n44, 289 Card, Claudia 301n23 Chakravartty, Anjan 169 – 70 Chaplin, Adrienne Dengerink 155n9 Carrier, Martin 159 chesed 281 Christianity 247, 250, 254, 266n18, 300 – 1n16 civic sector 193 civil society 193 – 5, 199 – 200 Code, Lorraine 184, 202n27 coherence 10, 26, 66, 74 – 5, 78, 118 conceptual schemes 102 – 4, 110, 112 – 14 concordance 79, 84 – 6 confirmation: discursive 19 – 20, 116 – 19, 144 – 5, 152; empirical 182 – 3; scientific 263 – 5; see also authentication constructive empiricism 180 – 1 contextualism: radical 3 – 4, 8 – 9; semantic 38 – 9, 55n41; sociohistorical 21, 184 – 5, 195 – 200

correctness 10 – 11, 46 – 9 correspondence theory 17, 26, 29, 32, 34, 37 – 40, 53n9, 53n12, 53n20, 66, 74 – 8, 84 – 5, 99 – 100, 103 – 5, 120n9, 121n11, 122 – 3, 170, 273 corroboration 19 – 20, 116, 118 – 20, 144 – 5, 167, 264 COVID-19 189 Critical Theory ix – x, 24n5 critique: architectonic 91, 291; comprehensive 266 – 7n26; immanent 198, 283; structural/ normative 195; see also metacritique; social critique cryptonormativity 214, 218, 229n18 David, Marian 32, 37 Davidson, Donald 17, 29 – 31, 47, 49, 53n9, 53n12 decontextualization 17 – 18, 42 – 9, 57, 145 deflationism 3 – 5, 7 – 8, 40, 55n43 De Sousa, Ronald 11 – 12, 25n19 Dewey, John 43, 56n50, 297 differential transformation 292 – 3 differentiation 278 – 80 disclosure: decontextualized 17 – 8, 40 – 9, 57, 65, 67, 115; discursive 62 – 3; faithful 254 – 6; of historical possibilities 243 – 4, 277, 292; imaginative 22, 62, 129, 148, 232, 236 – 40, 271; life-giving 20, 128 – 30, 140 – 1, 221, 261 – 3, 286 – 9; propositional 123 – 4; in religion and science 261 – 3; societal 128 – 31; worshipful 22 – 3, 152, 254 – 6, 261 – 2, 271; see also predicative self-disclosure discourse 48, 116, 155; and action 146 – 7; art 150 – 1; religious 151, 153 – 4; scientific 162, 213; theoretical 62 discursive justification 3, 9 – 11, 19, 60, 114 – 20, 144 – 5; see also authentication discursive reflexivity 160, 162, 166 – 8, 178 – 9, 183, 186 disquotationalism 3, 40

Index Dooyeweerd, Herman ix, 15, 126 Douglas, Heather 159 dynamic correlation 20, 67, 221, 270 – 1; of accuracy/validity 18, 21, 67, 78, 83, 88, 92, 115 – 16, 122, 125, 164, 166 – 8, 175, 179, 183; in art 22, 147 – 9, 232, 236 – 7, 242, 271; of fidelity/disclosure 22 – 3, 122 – 6, 128, 130 – 3, 138, 141 – 3, 147, 184, 187, 232, 279, 283, 285 – 6; in politics 221 – 2, 242; in religion 22, 152, 254 – 5, 271; in science 21, 166 – 8, 179, 183 – 5, 200; in truth as a whole 92, 124, 221, 224 – 5, 236, 270 Edwards, Douglas 14, 55n43, 94 – 5n8, 95n15 Elgin, Catherine 139 – 40, 145 emeth 9, 23, 281 – 2, 301n17 empirical adequacy 168, 174, 176, 179 – 84 Engel, Pascal 31 epistemic constraint 98, 103, 105 – 10, 114 – 15, 118; see also truth theory, epistemic epistemology 8, 16, 20, 58, 139, 180, 202n27; see also social epistemology ethics see social ethics evidentiality 160 – 1, 165, 168 evil 266 – 7n26, 291, 295 – 6, 301n23 Fackenheim, Emil L. 247, 266n18, 266n23 facts 18, 34, 51, 53–4n22, 99–100, 123, 165, 207–8; and assertions 45–7; atomic 36, 39; and opinions 207–8; as predicative self-disclosure 46–7; and propositions 35–6, 38, 51–2, 103–5, 109, 114–15; in Russell 31–2, 35–8; and states of affairs 27–30, 48; as truth makers 26–30 faith 156n17, 249 – 50, 252 – 5 faithfulness 9, 25n22, 281; see also fidelity feminism 16, 159, 169 – 70, 197 – 8, 202n27

319

fidelity 13, 126 – 32, 136 – 8, 278 – 9, 282 – 3; logical 65 – 6 Fine, Arthur 172 Foucault, Michel 4, 21, 24n6, 205, 210 – 19, 223 – 5, 228, 229 – 30n20, 230nn24 – 5; “Truth and Power” 211 – 14, 216 – 17 Fraassen, Bas van 168, 171, 174, 179 – 82 Frankfurt, Harry 2, 73n14 Fraser, Nancy 214 freedom 21 – 2, 206, 221 – 2, 224, 227 – 8, 242 – 4 Frege, Gottlob 17, 32 – 5, 38 – 9, 41, 50 – 1, 54nn26 – 7 fundamentalism 23, 154, 256 – 7, 263 God 137, 248 – 53, 255 – 6, 259, 262 Goodman, Nelson 139 goodness 126, 291, 294 Habermas, Jürgen 55n48, 191, 246 – 7, 300n9 Hansson, Sven Ove 160, 163 Harding, Sandra 202n27 Hart, Hendrik xii – xiii, 300n14 Haugeland, John 121n14 Hegel, G. W. F. 1, 5, 11, 23, 95n14, 231 – 4, 237, 240 – 1, 246 – 57, 269 – 70, 272 – 6, 279 – 81, 283 – 4; Aesthetics 233 – 4, 237, 251; Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion 248 – 51, 266n23; Phenomenology of Spirit 24n9, 133, 272 – 3, 299 – 300n2, 300n4 Heidegger, Martin 132, 140 Hempel, Carl G. 200n2, 201n24 historicity 23, 186, 275, 280 – 2 Honneth, Axel 92, 95n16 hope 22, 33, 44, 132, 152, 156n17, 244, 252 – 5, 259 – 61, 271, 279 – 80, 295 – 6 Hornsby, Jennifer 49, 52n3 Houlgate, Stephen 247 hypercommercialization 192 – 4, 207 IBE (inference to best explanation) 171 – 2

320 Index identity theory 37, 49, 52n3, 99 ideology 3 – 4, 291 IJC (ideal justifiability conception) see justifiability imagination 61 – 2, 82; as exploration, presentation, and creative interpretation 235 – 7 imaginative cogency 61 – 2, 147 – 8, 236 – 7 impartiality 209 – 10 insight 44 – 5, 57, 59, 61 – 5, 71, 92, 118, 124 interconnected flourishing 130 – 1, 264, 278 – 9, 283, 288 – 9; see also disclosure, life-giving interpersonal identity 90 interpersonal interaction 15, 90, 185, 193 interpretation: of art 148 – 50, 239 – 40; of language 51, 110 – 1; moral 86; of scripture 254 intersubjective fallibilism 160, 163, 168 isomorphism: across social domains 20, 61, 122, 124, 132, 134, 157; of belief/fact 31, 43 – 4; correlational 122 – 6; of proposition/fact 37, 39 – 40, 50 – 1 James, William 43 Jesus 281, 300 – 1n16 justice 21 – 2, 71 – 2, 126 – 8, 130 – 1, 142 – 3, 146 – 7, 154, 189 – 91, 220 – 8, 229n18, 242 – 5, 259 – 61, 278 – 9, 287 – 8, 292 – 3 justifiability 112, 117; ideal 105 – 8, 114 – 16 justification see discursive justification Kant, Immanuel 80 – 2, 113, 151; Critique of the Power of Judgment 81 – 2 Kelly, Michael 214, 229n19 Kirkham, Richard 6 – 7, 31, 53n20 knowledge 212, 215; artistic 61 – 2, 70, 232; as complex relationship 59 – 60; JTB (justified true belief) account of 16, 57 – 60, 63; nonpropositional 60 – 3, 67 – 9;

objective 18, 67 – 72; and power 71 – 2, 229 – 30n20; propositional 58 – 60, 63, 91, 164; religious 248 – 53, 263; scientific 160 – 4; social domains of 16 – 17, 61, 91 – 2; theoretical 165 Kuhn, Thomas 159, 169 Künne, Wolfgang 32, 37, 40, 53n9, 53n19, 55n43, 98 Langer, Susanne K. 136, 155n9 Laudan, Larry 171, 173, 202n32 Levinas, Emmanuel 140 – 1 logical atomism 35 – 7, 50 logical thought 64 – 5; see also practices, logical logical validity see validity, logical Longino, Helen 194 Lynch, Michael 6 – 7, 14, 18 – 19, 74 – 9, 84 – 9, 93, 104 – 5; Truth as One and Many 74 – 7, 84 – 5, 88, 94n7, 95n9 Lyon, Timothy 174 meaning 253 – 4, 261 – 2 Medina, José 7 Merton, Robert 160 – 2, 186 – 7, 201n15 metacritique 23, 283 – 5, 299 Moore, Jason 203n44 morality 79, 83 – 9, 95nn13 – 14, 139, 294 – 5, 301n23 necessity 28 – 9, 48, 145 – 6, 151 “no miracles” argument 170 – 3, 180 normativity 7 – 8, 218 – 19, 221 – 6 objectivity 75, 197 – 8 objects 31, 81 – 2, 102; knowable 63 – 4, 67, 165 – 6; practical 43 – 5, 47 – 52, 57, 59, 63, 65 – 72, 112 – 14, 121n14, 123, 125, 129, 165, 177 – 8, 262, 267n28; and reference 108 – 11; and states of affairs 48, 64, 165 ontology 7 – 8; social 89 – 91 opinion 206 – 10 ordinary language 12 – 13, 16 organized lying 207 – 9

Index Parmenides 280 – 1 performance fetishism 192 – 4 pessimistic induction 173, 202n32 philosophy 2, 23, 268 – 9, 272 – 5; analytic/continental 6 – 8, 138 – 9; and art/religion 23, 268, 274 – 5; and history 275 – 6, 283 – 5; reconstruction of 24, 297 – 9; reformational ix – x; and social critique 23 – 4, 286 – 93; transdisciplinary 286 – 9; and wisdom 280 – 3, 293 – 6 Plato 206, 280 – 2, 293 – 4 pluralism 212, 274; conceptual 102 – 3; holistic epistemological 61 – 3; practical 19, 78 – 89; social ontological 15 – 17, 19, 91 – 4; see also alethic pluralism political truth 21 – 2, 25n21, 71, 205 – 10, 220 – 3, 227 – 8; and art 22, 241 – 6; and scientific truth 21 politics: aestheticization of 22, 245 – 6; and artistic truth 241 – 6; post-truth 21 – 2, 179, 198, 205, 222 – 3, 287; as social domain 21 – 2, 220 – 2; and truth 205 – 10, 219 – 22, 226 – 8, 231 Popper, Karl 291 post-anti/realism 19, 21, 97, 114 – 20, 182; see also realism power 210 – 16, 224, 242 – 3; justifiability of 222; struggle for 222, 226 – 7 practical agents 17, 44, 267n28 practical availability 45 – 6, 111 – 14, 165 – 6; see also predicative availability practical objects see objects, practical practices 8 – 9, 51; aesthetic 81 – 2, 235 – 7; cultural 15 – 16, 40; discursive 144 – 7, 154 – 5; hypostasizing 42; imaginative 81, 148 – 50, 235 – 6, 243; logical 64 – 5, 79, 82, 144; moral 86 – 7; of reference and predication 41 – 3, 46 – 8, 55n45; religious 137, 250 – 5 Prado, C. G. 230n27 predication 36, 41 – 3 predicative availability 45 – 6, 112, 136 – 7, 165 – 6

321

predicative self-disclosure 45 – 8, 51 – 2, 123, 125, 129, 165 predicative self-dis/closure 62, 165 pre-predicative experience 113 – 14 primitivism 40, 53n19 propositional attitude 44 propositional truth x, 17, 20, 26 – 30, 40, 42 – 52, 54n24, 56n54, 106 – 7, 134 – 5, 272 – 4, 282 – 3; and beliefs 30 – 2, 48; as dynamic correlation 124 – 5; and facts 27 – 30, 32, 35 – 6; in Fregean account 17, 32 – 5, 37 – 9, 41 – 2, 50 – 1; heightening of 164, 166; and justifiability 106 – 8, 112, 115 – 19; justification of 9 – 11; moral 83 – 9; and nonpropositional truth 11 – 15, 19, 69 – 72, 132 – 8, 148, 151; and objective knowledge 67 – 72; pluralism within 14, 49, 74 – 80, 93 – 4; in Russellian account 17, 31 – 2, 35 – 42, 50 – 1; and scientific truth 157 – 8, 166 – 8, 188 – 9; and theoretical truth 168 – 71, 175 – 9; within truth as a whole 124 – 5; see also accuracy; correctness; reliability propositional truth claims 116 – 18 propositions 10, 18, 31 – 4, 42 – 3, 55 – 6n49; aesthetic 80 – 3, 86 – 7; and assertions 48, 50 – 1, 116; atomic/ molecular 36 – 7, 76; and beliefs 30 – 1, 44 – 5; domain-specific 91 – 2; and facts 18, 35 – 7, 51 – 2, 114 – 5; and knowledge 57 – 63; moral 84; pleonastic 41 – 2, 52; and speech acts 41 – 3, 50; and states of affairs 37, 47 – 9; structured 37 – 41, 51 public sphere 193 Putnam, Hilary 19, 97 – 8, 101 – 3, 105 – 17, 170 – 1; Reason, Truth and History 112 – 14, 118, 120n9 Quine, Willard 3, 24n2, 158, 180 racism 87 – 8, 142 – 3, 189, 227, 277 realism: alethic 9 – 11, 97, 101 – 3, 182; and antirealism 9 – 10, 97, 169 – 71, 174, 177; common sense 97; and facts 100 – 1; internal/pragmatic

322

Index

19, 97, 103, 105 – 14; metaphysical 100 – 2, 110 – 11, 120n9, 169; minimal alethic 19, 97 – 100, 102 – 5, 107 – 8, 111, 115; scientific 168 – 84, 196 – 7, 201n23; see also post-anti/ realism Reeve, Pamela 155n4 reference 33 – 4, 38, 40 – 3, 46, 50 – 1, 108 – 11, 177 – 8; see also Bedeutung; sense relativism 21, 109, 112, 255 – 6, 203 – 4n46; of conceptual schemes 102 – 5, 110 – 12, 114; sociohistorical 21, 195 – 8, 217 reliability 10 – 11, 44 – 5, 48 – 9, 63 religion 137, 151 – 5, 266n18, 266 – 7n26; Hegel on 247 – 52; and philosophy 246 – 8, 251 – 2, 269 – 72, 274 – 5, 299n1; and science 22 – 3, 258 – 66, 267n27; scriptural 254; and secularization 246 – 7; as social domain 22 – 3, 137, 152 – 4, 247 – 8, 252, 257, 259 – 62, 265; and spirituality 247 – 8 religious truth 231, 246 – 7, 252 – 65, 271 – 2; authentication of 151 – 5, 256; as post-propositional 133, 136 – 8; and scientific truth 23, 258 – 65 resourcefulness 191, 287, 289 – 90 responsibility 127 – 8, 139 – 40, 278 – 80 Rorty, Richard 3, 200, 204n47 Rouse, Joseph 212, 214 Russell, Bertrand 17, 31 – 3, 35, 38 – 41, 50 – 1; “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” 32, 35 – 6, 50; “Truth and Falsehood” 31 – 2, 53n21 Schiffer, Stephen 38, 40 – 3, 55n40, 55 – 6n49 science 20 – 1, 61, 89 – 90, 157 – 61, 169 – 71, 176 – 7, 215; aims of 158 – 61, 164 – 8, 174, 180 – 1, 183; autonomy of 187, 190 – 4; legitimacy of 21, 185, 188 – 90, 192; philosophy of 158 – 9; as social domain 21, 62, 155, 158 – 68, 184 – 6, 200; social role of 21,

158, 163, 184 – 90; and solidarity 199 – 200, 204n47; as Wissenschaft 61, 159 – 60, 127, 258 scientific truth 20 – 1, 135, 137, 157 – 8, 163 – 85, 195 – 8, 200, 201nn22 – 3, 202n27, 202 – 3n37, 217 – 18; and artistic truth 61 – 3; and religious truth 23, 257 – 65 scientism 89 – 90, 157 – 8, 200n1 Searle, John 40 – 2, 54n33, 55nn45 – 6 secularism 23, 154, 246, 256 – 7, 263 sense 33 – 4, 38; see also reference; Sinn serviceability 136, 224, 287 Sinn 33 – 5, 51 slingshot argument 29 social constructivism 169 social critique 23 – 4, 24n5, 132, 190, 195, 215, 242, 245, 279, 286 – 99; as challenging falsehood 286, 289 – 91, 297; of directional dead-ends 289 – 92, 297; as envisaging a future 286, 292 – 3, 296; of normative deficiencies 289 – 90, 292 – 3, 297; of structural distortions 289 – 90, 292 – 3, 297 social domains see truth, social domains of social epistemology 16, 159, 169, 185 social ethics 86, 95n14, 294 social institutions 15 – 17, 90, 134, 232 – 5 social needs 242 – 3 social struggle 141 – 2, 220 – 2, 224 – 5, 228, 245, 257, 278 – 9 societal macrostructures 90 – 1, 185 – 6, 191, 291 – 3, 297 societal principles 23, 65, 71, 86, 90 – 3, 122 – 34, 137 – 8, 141 – 3, 146 – 7, 185 – 7, 189, 221 – 2, 224 – 5, 236, 259 – 61, 271 – 2, 278 – 80, 286 – 9, 291 – 6; alethic primacy of 259 – 61 solidarity 193 – 4, 198 – 200, 204n47, 224 – 5, 277 – 8, 287 – 8 speech acts 18, 41, 43, 50, 55n48 state, the see administrative state states of affairs 37, 64 – 5, 115; in aesthetics 81 – 2; and facts 27 – 30, 48

Index Stathis, Psillos 159, 169, 171 – 5, 179 – 83, 202n32; Scientific Realism 171 – 5, 180 – 1, 202n32, 202n36 Strawson, P. F. 39 – 41 supercoherence 78 – 9, 84 – 6, 94n7 systemic pressures 191 – 4 Tarski, Alfred 29 – 30, 98, 121n13 Taylor, Charles 214, 246 testimony 139 – 41, 144 – 5, 151 – 5, 263 – 5 theoreticity 160 – 1, 164, 168, 186 transformation see alethic transformations; differential transformation; university, transformation of transhistorical concepts 224 – 5 triaxial model 90 – 1, 185 Trump, Donald 258 trust 22, 152 – 3, 156n17, 252 – 5, 259 – 61, 271 – 2 truth: absolute 247, 269; and authentication 138, 140 – 55; and beliefs 43 – 4; as dynamic correlation 126, 130 – 2; existential 14; factual 206 – 9; as fidelity to societal principles 126 – 8, 130 – 1; historicity of 23, 275 – 83, 292, 298; idea of 1 – 5, 13, 24, 79, 268 – 70, 284 – 5, 296 – 9; importance of 1 – 8; and justification 60, 105 – 8, 112, 114 – 20; kinds/types of 132 – 4; as life-giving disclosure 20, 128 – 30, 140 – 1, 221, 261 – 3, 286 – 8; as lived 8 – 9, 11 – 14, 127 – 8, 140 – 3, 152 – 4, 252 – 3, 256, 283, 288, 293 – 5; nature/value of 4 – 7, 27; as ontological and axiological concern 4 – 10; Parmenidean/ Hebraic strands of 280 – 4, 293 – 4, 298; in philosophy 231, 268, 272 – 5, 282, 297; and politics 21 – 2, 205 – 10, 226 – 8, 231, 241 – 6; politicization of 3 – 4, 9, 226 – 8, 245 – 6; post-propositional 132 – 8; and power 3 – 4, 24n6, 210 – 19, 224 – 5; pre-propositional 132 – 7; as process 128 – 31, 138, 231, 261, 270, 276 – 8, 285, 296 – 8; rational

323

206, 210; and rationality 109, 112; regimes of 211 – 14, 216 – 18, 225, 229n19; social domains of 14 – 17, 19 – 23, 25n19, 89 – 94, 133 – 8, 147 – 55, 213, 220 – 2, 270; theoretical 168, 171 – 84; unfolding of 138, 142 – 4, 270, 289 – 90, 292; as a whole 15, 20, 123 – 6, 128 – 32, 138, 247, 269 – 72, 274 – 5, 277; see also artistic truth; political truth; propositional truth; religious truth; scientific truth truth bearers/makers 17, 26 – 32, 40, 43, 48 – 9, 98, 100, 123 truth theory 6 – 9, 26 – 7, 40, 49 – 52, 95n15, 273 – 5, 280, 284; epistemic 9 – 10, 98, 105 – 9; monothetic/stereothetic 12 – 15, 157; propositionally inflected 11 – 12, 27 – 40, 273; see also alethic monism; alethic pluralism; coherence; correspondence theory; deflationism; disquotationalism; identity theory; logical atomism; primitivism T-schema 98 – 9, 102 – 3, 107, 120nn6 – 7, 121n13 universals 28 universalism 145 – 6, 160 – 1 universality 145 – 6, 151, 196 – 7, 249 university 21, 191 – 5, 290; transformation of 193 – 5, 199 – 200 Ure, Michael 205, 209 UTE (underdetermination of theory by evidence) 174 – 5 validity: and accuracy 18, 66 – 7, 72, 78 – 80, 85 – 8, 116, 144, 166 – 8, 184, 226, 228; aesthetic 61 – 2, 82, 236, 288; discursively arguable 167, 179, 183; inferential 66 – 7, 78, 115 – 18, 178; logical 57, 62, 65 – 8, 71 – 2, 73n8, 82, 123 – 5, 178 – 9, 259 – 60; and relativism 196 – 8; theoretical 178 – 9, 183 – 4, 197 – 8, 259 – 60 virtualized entities 62, 165 – 6, 177 – 8 Vollenhoven, Dirk ix, 15

324

Index

wisdom 23 – 4, 280 – 2, 286, 293 – 6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 32, 35, 53 – 4n22 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 232 – 3, 241 – 2, 265n3, 265n5, 265n7 Wood, David 7 worship 152 – 3, 251 – 5, 261 – 3, 271 – 2 Wright, Crispin 94n7, 120n1

Zuidervaart, Lambert: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory 301n19; Art in Public 95n17 – 18, 203n42, 265n1; Artistic Truth 55n47, 73n5, 156n16, 265n1; Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation 155n3; Shattering Silos 155n10, 300n14; Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School 23, 120n3, 121n16, 155n2, 155n5, 301n19