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Truth: A Guide (Simon Blackburn) — Truth 1
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Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today we are undertaking what might be, well, one of the highest stakes investigations possible. We're doing a really rigorous, in -depth exploration of the nature of truth itself. It's a huge topic. Yeah. And it's a debate that, you know, philosophers used to think was kind of contained safely in the academic ivory tower. Right. Just abstract thought experiment. Exactly. Yeah. But as our primary source today, Simon Blackburn's fantastic work, Truth, A Guide. really demonstrates this is a battlefield. It's spilled out into politics, into culture, science, everywhere, really. So we're going to be dissecting Blackburn's arguments pretty much chapter by chapter, and we'll supplement them with some classic and, well, contemporary counter theories, things like correspondence, coherence, pragmatism. Oh, the big ones. Yeah.
Our mission really is to guide you through these core intellectual currents, identify the foundational questions, and maybe most importantly, show you why the answers you accept. Well, they fundamentally shape your view of the world. We're going from, you know, the classical recoil arguments of Socrates all the way up to modern ideas like conceptual engineering and pluralism. Yeah. It's quite a journey. So, yeah. Prepare to question maybe everything you thought you knew about fact and fiction. Let's unpack this. Okay, so Blackburn kicks off his book with this really powerful rejection of a historical assumption. The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, he once sort of minimized the seriousness of academic errors. Yeah, he suggested that, well, errors in religion are genuinely dangerous, sure, but philosophical errors are merely ridiculous, he thought. Like a bad idea would just fade away on its own. Exactly.
It would just wither on the vine. And Blackburn argues quite convincingly, I think, that this position is actually dangerously naive, especially in the modern world. How so? Well, today, these philosophical concepts, they aren't just kept in lecture halls, are they? The stakes have become culturally enormous. We're seeing ideas like, you know, deep relativism or certain kinds of postmodernism. They're being treated not just as interesting academic theories, but as, well, diabolical forces by some. Diabolical. That's a strong word. He uses that word. He does, quoting others using it. These theories get accused of corrupting and corroding the universities and the public culture and even, you know, rotting our precious civilization from within. Wow. OK, so when the language gets that charged, you know, the disagreement runs much deeper than just semantics.
Absolutely. And the debates become so intense because it really centers on an epistemological issue. Epistemological meaning. Meaning it's about the relationship between belief, justification, and fact. How do we know what we know? And the goal of those attracted to strong relativism is often quite explicit. They want to destroy the pedestals that elevate some beliefs above others. So if there's no universal objective standard. Then all belief systems stand equally. Or perhaps equally without any real foundation.
Depends on your perspective, I suppose. This immediately sets up our, well, our two main philosophical camps in these modern culture wars, right? Pretty much. On one side, you've got the absolutists. These are the folks who stand on what they see as plain, unvarnished, objective fact. They cherish reason, objectivity. They hold out for the possibility of absolute, non -negotiable truth. Simple common sense observations. But even they don't apply it everywhere, do they? No, rarely. Even the staunchest absolutists might readily accept absolute truth in, say, chemistry, but they often exclude fields like aesthetics or humor or deep moral judgments. Areas where the idea of a single fixed fact seems much harder to pin down. Yeah, if you press an absolutist, they might say something like, sure, 2 plus 2 to 4 is absolutely true, but whether Hamlet is the greatest play ever written? Well, it's just a matter of taste. Exactly.
But that selective application, it already concedes some ground, doesn't it? It does. Okay, so then you have the other side, the relativists. And they position themselves as the tough -minded realists. Yeah. They look at the absolutist's position as a kind of innocent faith. Innocent faith. Yeah, claiming that absolutism just can't stand up to the sheer complexity of human history and cultural variety. The relativist aims to show that all standards of success and failure in belief systems are actually internally determined. Determined by the language game or the social group itself? Precisely. rather than being externally imposed by some mysterious universal reality out there. Okay, so this clash over foundational standards, it forces us right back to that most frustrating universal question. What is truth?
It's the killer question. Yeah. Even historical figures like Pontius Pilate apparently treated it rhetorically, didn't he? Implying the answer was impossible or maybe just useless to find. And the philosopher Voltaire, he famously gave that platitude. Truth is simply a statement of the facts as they are. Sounds nice and simple. It does sound wonderfully straightforward, doesn't it? But it's a brilliant way to illustrate the philosophical quicksand we're wading into. If truth is correspondence to a fact, well, we then have to define fact and correspondence. Ah, and if we define fact as, say, a true state of affairs.
You've used the very word true that you're trying to define. It's a classic circularity problem. Right. How do you analyze something so basic without referring back to itself? Exactly. If we can't define correspondence or fact without presupposing truth, then Voltaire's definition, well, it doesn't actually take us anywhere useful. It just asserts that truth exists without defining its nature. And that foundational challenge, that's why we have to ask, does truth even possess a discernible nature? And if it does, is it genuinely objective and absolute or is it somehow irreducibly subjective and relative? Big questions. Huge.
And that's the rest of the book and our deep dive tries to grapple with. OK, so we've kind of framed this high stakes political and conceptual battlefield. Now, let's zoom in a bit on the the moral weight of what we choose to believe. Blackburn really forces us to think about our duty to truth. Yeah, this is a really crucial pivot because we often just assume that beliefs are judged by their truth or falsity. And that's the end of the story. Like it might be extremely comforting or maybe even useful for my career. To genuinely believe I'm incapable of failure. Right, but your comfort or the utility of that belief, that doesn't make it true, does it? Conventionally, truth seems to have rights and privileges that are independent of how comfortable it makes us feel. And this sets up that classic philosophical showdown, the one between W .K. Clifford and William James. That's right. Clifford took a really hard line. He argued for a strict moral duty to verify our beliefs. He argued fiercely against making what he called a leap of faith when an issue simply couldn't be decided by rational means. So no wishful thinking allowed. Basically, yes. And Clifford's argument wasn't just about individual intellectual rigor. It was intensely social. He was deeply concerned about the, quote, dire consequences of the social habit of irrational conviction. The famous ship owner example comes in here, right? Exactly. The ship owner who basically out of laziness or wishful thinking just wills himself to believe his ship is seaworthy, even though he hasn't really checked. He doesn't have the evidence. And then the ship sinks. And the ship sinks. Clifford says the owner is morally culpable, not just because he was wrong, but because the cost of his convenient, unverified belief was paid by society, by the sailors and their families who died. For Clifford, the public cost of widespread irrationality always outweighs any private comfort or benefit. That makes a lot of sense. It feels very responsible. But then William James, the pragmatist, he offered a critique that still resonates really deeply today, doesn't it? It does. He argued that this feeling of duty about either truth or error, as he put it, is really just an expression of our passional life, our desires, our hopes, our fears. So it's not about objective duty. It's about what we want to be true. In certain situations, yes. Jim's believed that, especially in situations where rational evidence is totally lacking, he was thinking particularly about religious hypotheses, we shouldn't be prevented from acting on a hypothesis that might lead to the blessings of real knowledge.
Like sometimes the belief itself can create the fact. That was his controversial idea. His famous phrase was that our will must sometimes choose even when the intellect cannot provide certainty. OK, but the sources we're looking at, they point out that James's rhetoric, while it sounds inspiring, has some pretty significant flaws when you really pick it apart. Doesn't his argument basically rely on making belief a purely private affair? Exactly. That's the core critique. James completely privatizes the costs and benefits. He seems to ignore Clifford's central concern. the social consequences. If every shimoner is encouraged to just leap to convenient conclusions. The whole social fabric of trust just collapses, doesn't it? Furthermore, James often seems to imply that all these different religious or faith hypotheses are somehow equally probable, which is usually a massive, unwarranted assumption. So the critique is that James is essentially using the language of duty just to justify believing whatever he already wants to believe, regardless of evidence or social cost. That's the essence of the counter -argument, yes. It suggests his framework doesn't adequately account for the broader impact of belief. Okay, so if we step away from faith for a moment and look purely at how language itself functions, maybe we can find a nondescriptive way for statements to still hold power. This is where we bring in Hume's insight on performative language, maybe filtered through Wittgenstein.
Right, we first have to acknowledge a bit of a puzzle here. Why do religious practitioners, for instance, use language that sounds told so like a recital of plain truth, language that seems explicitly descriptive if they aren't actually, in the philosophical sense, describing the world. They say God exists, not it would be useful for society if we acted as if God existed. Exactly. It sounds like a straightforward factual claim. Wittgenstein's suggestion here is incredibly helpful. He proposed that perhaps there is simply no better kind of language to use to accomplish the nondescriptive function they intend. What kind of function? Maybe expressing allegiance, creating community solidarity, guiding ethical practice, evoking certain feelings. The point is they might be using descriptive sounding language, but the job of that language is something else entirely. And this is where Hume's example comes in, the public performance idea. Yes, it illustrates this powerfully. Think about the words. I promise to pay you back tomorrow. or in a legal setting, I hereby transfer ownership of this property.
Right. Those words, once you say them in the right context, they instantly create real world civil and moral consequences. How does that work? Hume suggests this power comes entirely from utility in public convention. Society has agreed these words perform these actions. And here's the crucial philosophical insight. The secret direction of a person's internal intention is not crucial to the validity of the public act. So even if I cross my fingers behind my back when I say I promise and I secretly have absolutely no intention of keeping that promise, I'm still bound by the public utterance. Precisely. Your mental reservation doesn't nullify the promise in the eyes of society or often the law. Why not? Because the action is binding. Because society has effectively agreed. based on sheer utility, that this public performance constitutes a legally and morally binding act. It has to work that way for promises, contracts, etc. to function.
That's a really profound contrast to certain religious doctrines or even the legal systems that put heavy emphasis on the hidden, internal, true intention of the person performing the act. Exactly. This idea that... the public utility and function of language can sometimes override hidden internal belief or intention is really key to understanding how some statements that aren't strictly descriptive still function so powerfully in our social world. OK, so we've established that this duty to truth or maybe the function of belief has these profound social implications. But now let's circle back to the raw logic of relativity itself. We need to zoom in on the well, the ancient source of so much skepticism. The sophist Protagoras. Ah, yes, Protagoras, who famously declared, man is the measure of all things. Which sounds democratic, empowering. It sounds like the ultimate expression of radical subjectivity, yeah. It basically strips external objective reality of all its authority and places the ultimate authority for what counts as true squarely with the individual. Or, by extension, maybe the local culture work. So, if I feel the wind is cold, then the wind is cold for me. If a society thinks an action is moral, then that action is moral for them. End of story. That's the core idea. It seems wondrously freeing, perhaps. But Protagoras, in making this claim, set himself a kind of lethological trap.
It's called the ancient recoil argument. And it was famously weaponized against him by Socrates and Plato. The recoil argument. Okay, how does that work? Well, it works like this. If Protagoras wants to argue for his position, if he wants to convince us that man is the measure, is correct. He has to use reason, right? He has to appeal to some shared principles of logic or observation. Exactly. He has to present his statement, man is the measure of all things, as something that ought to be accepted, presumably universally, because it is true in the traditional fixed sense he's trying to deny. Ah, so he's trying to deny universal standards of reasoning while at the same time relying on those very standards to make his case. Precisely. He's arguing for the denial of objective reason by using objective reason. It's a kind of intellectual self -contradiction.
It recoils back on itself. Okay, and this argument gets updated in modern philosophy too, doesn't it? It becomes even sharper. It does. It becomes the modern self -refutation charge. Let's try and walk through that. Assume the relativist sentence, man is the measure, is indeed true. Okay, let's assume it's true. If it's true, then according to its own rules, its truth depends on whether it's assertible by the prevailing cultural norms. So... we must consider its assertibility by modern cultural norms, the norms of our current society. And our current norms, generally speaking, accept the importance of objective fact, especially in science and things like that. We don't generally operate as if man is the measure, is the final word on truth. Right. So if the relativist's core premise is that truth depends only on the cultural norms asserting it, and our current cultural norms don't actually assert this premise as a universal truth. Then the premise refutes itself. If the sentence is true, then by its own definition, because it's not universally assertible by us, it is not true. Exactly. Therefore, the conclusion seems unavoidable. It simply cannot be true in the way the relativist wants it to be. It collapses under its own logic. It's like a conceptual impossibility, a kind of logical black hole for anyone trying to claim that radical relativism is fundamentally true. Okay, that seems pretty devastating logically. So this forces the relativist into a corner, right? They often try to escape by saying something like, wait, wait, I'm not holding this as some kind of universal truth. I'm just voicing it as my interpretation, as my measure. Yes, that's a common move. But then they crash straight into another problem, the problem of action and success. Okay, what's that? If you claim this doctrine, man is the measure, as some kind of profound insight or a true representation of how things really stand.
Well, you are implicitly holding yourself to some fixed standards of intellectual success. You believe you've actually achieved something intellectually significant by realizing this. It's like aiming for a target. If you truly believe in the insight of your relativist doctrine, you think you've hit some kind of intellectual bullseye. Right. But if truth really is relative in the way Protagoras suggests, then the bullseye is effectively placed wherever his arrow falls. If there's no external standard, no objective notion of intellectual failure or hitting wide of the mark, how can you possibly claim you've achieved genuine success or insight? So you can't have it both ways. You can't say there's no target and also I hit the target. That's the core dilemma, exactly. The relativist seemingly cannot both understand himself. only to have hit a bullseye that is placed wherever his arrow falls, and as having achieved an insight or understanding, a true representation of how things stand. Things you have to choose. Which seems to strip away any real intellectual weight from the relativist position. If they succeed, well, great, that's true for them. If they fail, well, that failure is also true for them. It doesn't seem to get us anywhere. And this translates directly into the practical effect, or maybe the function, of the relativist stance when it appears in actual conversation. Which, arguably, is often its real -world purpose. Okay, let's go back to that moral argument example. Tolerating historical figures, say Genghis Khan. Right. You have two people arguing. One says Genghis Khan's actions were objectively morally bad. The other says, no, hold on. Given the norms of his society, his actions were understandable, maybe even seen as good. It's a real debate about moral standards.
Okay. Standard clash of views. Now, a relativist steps in. Let's call her Rosie again. And Rosie says, OK, look, tolerating Genghis is good is true for you and thinking he's bad is true for you. What has Rosie actually contributed to the substance of the moral debate? Nothing. She hasn't really engaged with the moral question at all, has she? She's just sort of stepped sideways. Exactly. She has effectively bowed out of the actual conversation. Her comment hasn't made Genghis Khan look one bit more or less likable or his actions one bit more or less devastating.
She hasn't helped resolve the conflict about moral standards. So she's used a conceptual trick relativity to avoid engaging with the core moral claim being disputed. That's how Blackburn puts it. Her intervention is merely a distraction, a conversation stopper. It leaves the original argument about Genghis Khan exactly where it started. Whereas the absolutist, by contrast. The absolutist, rightly or wrongly, maintains that the person holding the opposing view is somehow out of touch or misled. or thinking wishfully or badly placed to judge. The absolutist believes they have latched on to a stable, objective moral standard that the other person has somehow missed.
And that difference in attitude really highlights why the extreme relativist position is often seen as, well, potentially corrosive to genuine public debate and the search for shared understanding. It makes real argument seem pointless, doesn't it? Everyone's just measuring by their own ruler. OK, so the difficulty of actually defining truth, it's either circular, like Voltaire's attempt, or it gets tangled in these logical traps like the recoil argument for relativism. This difficulty has driven some philosophers towards a pretty radical conclusion, almost like an acceptance of defeat. Yeah, instead of endlessly trying to define the fundamental nature of truth, they suggest maybe we should just stop talking about it in that grand philosophical way. This is often called the quietist turn. Quietism, leaving truth alone. Exactly. Quietism, or sometimes minimalism, it's this impulse to just leave truth alone.
It fundamentally denies that we even need a big philosophical conception of truth. So truth isn't some deep metaphysical concept requiring layers of metatheory. That's the claim. The Quietist argues it's more like a logical tool, a useful feature of language, but not some profound property of reality we need to analyze endlessly. Okay, so if you ask a philosopher in this camp, what makes these two completely different true statements, like, say, the price of petrol is rising and Tony Blair is a fantasist, what makes them both true? What do they have in common? The Quietist gives an answer that can feel... Well, a bit unsatisfying at first. They basically replied that there might be no single universal property they share beyond the mere fact that they are individually true. The explanation for why the petrol statement is true is probably empirical economic data. The explanation for why the Blair statement is true might be based on testimony, political analysis, interpretation of actions.
So the reason why each is true is completely different. There's no shared essence of trueness. That's the minimalist idea. There's no single deep explanation for truth in general. There are just explanations for individual truths. It's a bit like asking, why is everyone using the Internet today? Because specific reasons, one person is working, another is socializing, someone else is watching cat videos, are vastly different. There's no single grand reason for Internet use. That's a good analogy. And this view hinges on a concept they call transparency.
Transparency. Yeah. The idea is that... If a property of a sentence were robust or substantial, if it introduced some new metaphysical content beyond the sentence itself, it would create a new topic, a sort of second -order comment. For example, if I say P is a justified belief, I've definitely started a new discussion about the nature and standards of justification. Okay, that makes sense. Justification adds something. But the quietest, or minimalist, says truth is different. They argue that to say P is true is to introduce no new topic beyond simply asserting P itself. The concept of true is, in this sense, philosophically transparent. It doesn't add content.
It's merely a mechanism we use to assert or endorse the original statement, Pete. Okay, so it's like pointing back at the original statement rather than adding a new layer. Exactly. And this idea of transparency is what underpins deflationism, which is probably the most famous, quietest position. The earliest form was Frank Ramsey's redundancy theory. Redundancy theory. Yeah. Ramsey suggested way back that the word true is often just used for emphasis or maybe stylistic reasons, saying, It is true that Caesar was murdered means exactly the same thing, carries the same information as simply saying Caesar was murdered. So the phrase, it is true that, is redundant. That was Ramsey's initial idea. It adds nothing to the factual content. Hmm. But if it's completely redundant, why do we even use the word true at all? It seems useful sometimes. This is where the more refined version comes in, right? Paul Horridge's minimal theory. Exactly. Horridge refined this idea. He claims that the essential facts about truth, everything important we need to know about it, are entirely exhausted by a single, surprisingly simple logical tool. It's called the equivalent schema, often abbreviated as ES. The equivalent schema. OK, what does that say? The schema states the proposition that P is true if P. OK, that sounds incredibly dry and logical. Let's break that down. If. Means if and only if, right? So the two sides are logically equivalent. Precisely. It means the two halves of that statement are logically interchangeable.
If I state the proposition, the proposition that snow is white is true, that statement is logically equivalent in every way to simply stating the proposition snow is white. And this equivalence holds for every possible proposition P. That's the claim of the minimal theory. And Horwich argues that this relationship, this simple, almost trivial seeming equivalence, is all there is to understand about the concept of truth. Truth isn't a deep property. It's just this logical device captured by the schema. It's an insubstantial or thin property. So truth is basically just a way to endorse or assert a proposition without having to repeat the whole proposition. That's a good way to put it. It's primarily a logical device used for assertion and generalization.
Ah, generalization. OK, if that's all truth is, this thin logical device, how do deflationists handle generalizations? Because we commonly use true to talk about vast sets of claims like everything the pope says is true or all theorems of arithmetic are true. I'm clearly not listing every single papal utterance or every theorem and asserting each one individually using the schema. How does the minimalist account for that kind of generalization without invoking some kind of substantial shared property of truth? That's a really important objection. And the minimalist response is actually quite elegant, proponents would say. They rely on the idea that we already possess the logical disposition to accept each individual instance of the equivalent schema for any given proposition.
So I'm disposed to accept snow is white is true if snow is white and grass is green is true if grass is green and so on for everything. Right. And our allegiance to the overall claim like all theorems of arithmetic are true is explained by combining that fundamental disposition to accept individual instances of. Yes, with the normal rules of logical generalization that we use all the time. So the word true isn't some deep philosophical property uniting all those theorems. It's more like a piece of linguistic machinery. It's a tool that lets us efficiently group and assert potentially infinite numbers of statements without having to say them all out loud. It enhances our expressive power, but doesn't really deepen our metaphysical understanding of truth itself. That's the distillationist picture, precisely. It's about expressive convenience, not metaphysical depth. Okay. Yet, despite this really powerful simplification, the sources note that many philosophers, maybe even intuitively, still remain realists au fond. Deep down, there's still realists about truth. There's this enduring stickiness to the idea that truth has some real weight, some substance. Absolutely. That intuition is hard to shake. Why does it persist so strongly?
Why doesn't deflationism just win the day? Well, it often comes back to the correspondence counter -argument, or at least the intuition behind it. There's this incredibly powerful, enduring feeling that a statement is true only if there is something in the world in virtue of which it is true. Right. There has to be something out there, a fact, a state of affairs, reality itself, that makes the statement true. The truthmakers. Exactly. These truthmaking elements are what the intuition latches onto. And even if we abandon the old, often cumbersome traditional correspondence theory of truth with all its problems, many people still feel that external reality must somehow ground truth. And deflationists, by denying truth any real metaphysical substance beyond that logical schema, Yes. They seem to actively reject these truth -making elements. They say the schema is all there is. And that rejection, that denial of a grounding in reality, just feels deeply unsatisfying, even wrong to someone with strong realist intuitions. They feel something crucial is being left out. All right. So if defining truth has proven maybe impossible for some, like the quietists, and if simply asserting it without grounding leads to logical traps, like for the relativists, then perhaps the focus needs to shift. Maybe we should stop looking at truth as just a static property of statements and look instead at how we actually acquire knowledge, how we form beliefs. Exactly. And this brings us to a major historical turning point in philosophy, what Blackburn calls the crisis of foundationalism, or maybe paradise lost. Paradise lost. Sounds dramatic. Well, it was a big shift for centuries, going back to thinkers like John Locke and Descartes.
The big philosophical ambition was to build this perfectly rational hierarchy of belief, a solid foundational structure anchored by absolute certainty at the base. Like building a house on solid rock. Precisely. And this intellectual paradise, this foundationalist dream, had about four main hopes or pillars holding it up. Okay. What were those four anchors they were hoping for? They hoped for one. Proper use of senses, believing our senses could provide raw, uninterpreted data directly from the world. Two, canonical methods, universally agreed upon methods for evaluating theories, almost like a perfect scientific method for all knowledge. Okay, senses and method. Three, foundational logic relying on self -evident axioms and unbreakable rules of inference. And four, fixed meanings for our words, ensuring stable, unambiguous communication over time. Right. That really does sound like an intellectual paradise.
Solid senses, clear methods, perfect logic, stable language. But you said it collapsed. What broke that foundation? Two major developments in 20th century philosophy were pretty fatal to this specific dream. First, the eventual demise of what philosophers call the myth of the given. The myth of the given. Yeah. This is the realization spearheaded by thinkers like Wilford Sellers. That experience does not actually provide us with pure, uninterpreted foundational data. Every perception, every sensation is already theory -laden. Our existing concepts, our language, our expectations, they shape what we perceive from the very start. There is no raw, unblemished input from the senses that we just passively receive. So the idea that my eyes just give me an objective picture of the world and my mind simply registers it like a camera? That's wrong.
I'm already interpreting, filtering it through my existing knowledge and language, even at the most basic level. That's the core insight, yes. Perception is an active process, already structured by our conceptual scheme. The given is a myth. Okay, what was the second blow? The second major blow came from the widespread acceptance of holism, particularly associated with W .V .O. Quine. Holism is the idea, often summarized by Quine's phrase, that what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. Meaning we don't just test or revise our beliefs one by one in isolation. Exactly. We believe things in interconnected networks. When faced with conflicting evidence, we don't just discard one belief. Adjustments ripple through the whole system. As Quine famously put it, our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually, but only as a corporate body. So the collapse of the myth of the given no, pure input combined with wholism beliefs, form an interconnected web leaves that whole foundationalist project, that dream of a secure hierarchy built on certainty. In what Blackburn describes quite vividly as a disorderly muddle, the clean hierarchical structure is gone, replaced by a complex, interconnected, constantly adjusting web of belief. paradise was lost. Wow.
Okay, so when that solid foundation crumbles, skepticism naturally starts to flourish, right? This sounds like the kind of environment that spawned someone like Richard Rorty and his famous critique of traditional philosophy. Absolutely. Rorty argued very forcefully that this whole traditional ambition to anchor our beliefs in some external certainty requires us to do the impossible. To somehow stand outside our own skin, outside our own language, history, and culture. To find that mythical Archimedean point or a view from nowhere. Precisely. He argued that since seeking such a God's eye view was logically impossible for creatures like us, we must simply abandon the whole quest for objective truth with a capital T. So what should we do instead, according to Rorty? Rorty suggested we should stop focusing on discovery. finding the one true way things are, and start prioritizing invention in solidarity. He often used the example of literary criticism. How does that work? Well, he argued that literary criticism moved away from searching for the one right reading of a text like the author's true intended meaning, the discovery model. Instead, it embraced having a plurality of voices, multiple interesting interpretations.
So the goal isn't finding the single truth of the text anymore. No. For Rorty, in this model, the aim is an objective truth. It's achieving solidarity. It's about persuading your fellow critics, your community, to adopt your interpretation because it's useful or interesting or compelling within that specific conversation. It's about fertile invention, not discovery of a pre -existing fact. OK, but doesn't that just slide straight back into a kind of uncontrolled relativism where the external world, you know, reality seems to have zero input or constraint on what we believe if it's all just about persuading my buddies?
That's the worry. And Blackburn argues Rorty makes a critical mistake here. Blackburn suggests Rorty confuses the rightly discarded myth of the given, the idea of pure, uninterpreted input from the senses, with something else, something necessary, which Blackburn calls the myth of the giving. The giving. OK, what's the difference? What is the giving? The giving for Blackburn. represents the necessary causal interaction with the world that constantly brings about and shapes our beliefs. We must acknowledge this continuous environmental input. We can't just ignore the world bombarding us with signals. Right. If you completely ignore this constant causal interaction, you are prone to disaster or, philosophically speaking, you drift into delusion. If I believe there's butter in the fridge, but there's absolutely no environmental input supporting that, no past memory of buying it, no visual evidence now, no testimony from anyone, then that belief is fundamentally detached from reality. It's ungrounded.
So we have to account for the world giving us input, even if we accept that input isn't pure or given in the old foundationalist sense. Exactly. And Blackburn points out that the simple fact that representation itself is not mythical is illustrated by something as mundane as a map. A map, how does that help? Well, a map isn't some perfect philosophical foundation, obviously. But a good map clearly displays non -hidden objective virtues. Things like accuracy, care in its creation, the labor involved. These virtues are entirely relevant to whether the map is true or reliable.
And if you just treat a map as merely a social construct with no connection to the actual territory... You're going to get lost. The map's connection to reality, its representational quality, matters profoundly. So representation itself isn't the myth we need to discard. Okay, so that whole... Crisis of foundationalism, the collapse of the old certainties. It created the perfect fertile soil for pragmatism to really take root, didn't it? Because pragmatism shifts the entire focus. It really does. It moves away from asking about static correspondence. Is this statement true right now? Does it match reality? And shifts towards dynamic inquiry. What are the practical consequences of believing this? Does it work?
And the classical version of this comes from Charles Sanders Pierce, right? Yes, Pierce. He offered a definition of truth that wasn't about an instantaneous state, but about a future prediction, an endpoint of inquiry. For Pierce, truth is the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed by all who investigate. Fated. So the idea is that scientific inquiry, if pursued correctly and indefinitely, will inevitably converge on a single stable set of beliefs. That convergence is truth. That was Pierce's view. The goal, the very definition of truth. is rooted in this idealized, inescapable scientific consensus at the end of inquiry. Then William James offered a different flavor of pragmatism, more immediate, maybe more psychological. Yeah, James's version was much more focused on the individual and the present.
For him, truth means an idea works. It leads to no frustration or contradiction in our experience. It helps us navigate the world successfully. And he famously claimed our obligation to seek truth is just part of our general obligation to do what pays. Like, true ideas bring intellectual or practical payoffs, and that's the sole reason we value and pursue them. That was his rather controversial take, yes. It ties truth very closely to usefulness and satisfaction. But the big problem with James's version, as you noted earlier when we discussed Clifford, is that it seems to risk opening the door right back to individual relativism.
If what pays or works is purely subjective for each person. Then truth becomes subjective, too. And that's a conclusion many philosophers, even pragmatists, want to avoid. This is why contemporary pragmatists have had to refine the concept quite a bit to try and retain some notion of objectivity while still grounding truth in inquiry. Like Cheryl Misak's approach, using the subjunctive conditional. Exactly. That's a key move in modern pragmatism. It's an attempt to define truth in a way that makes it stable and objective, but still fundamentally rooted in the process of inquiry, rather than some static correspondence to facts out there. Okay, so how does that subjunctive conditional definition actually work? What does it state? It states that a belief is true if it would survive the process of ideal inquiry.
Specifically, if it would fit coherently with all the evidence and our best epistemic standards, were inquiry pursued indefinitely, so far that no future evidence or reasoning would ever force us to revise that belief. So it's not about whether we will actually reach that state, but about whether the belief would withstand that idealized endless process of investigation and revision. Precisely. It maintains that there is a right answer, an objective truth of the matter, But that right answer is defined by its resilience within the process of idealized, endless, perfectly rational, self -correcting human investigation.
So it tries to keep the objectivity, the idea that truth is stable and non -negotiable in the end, while rooting it firmly in the process of inquiry itself rather than in a potentially inaccessible external reality. That's the goal, yes. To find a middle ground between naive correspondence and potentially slippery subjectivism. Okay, so having surveyed all these different attempts, correspondence trying to match reality, deflationism saying truth is just a logical tool, pragmatism focusing on inquiry and consequences, many contemporary thinkers have looked at this landscape and basically concluded that the search for one single monolithic definition of truth might just be doomed from the start. Because none of them seem to work perfectly for everything we call true. Exactly.
This leads us fairly naturally to the idea of truth pluralism. Pluralism. Meaning more than one kind of truth. That's the central idea, yes. Pluralism suggests that different kinds of propositions, different types of statements, are actually true by virtue of fundamentally distinct properties. There's no single one -size -fits -all definition of truth that covers every domain. Okay, can you give an example? Sure. A simple empirical fact, like snow is white, might be true by virtue of correspondence. It matches a fact about the external world. But a statement about, say, ethics or mathematics, something like stealing is wrong or 2 plus 2, 4, might be true by a completely different mechanism. Perhaps something like Super assertibility. Super assertibility. OK, that's a dense philosophical term we encountered earlier.
Can you unpack that again in plain language? What does that really mean? Right. So super assertibility means roughly that the belief is not just currently warranted by our evidence and reasoning, but that it would remain warranted without ever being defeated or need in revision at every single successive stage of inquiry, no matter how much more information or reasoning we applied. So it's like truth based on perfect. unshakable coherence and stability within an idealized system of knowledge. It's the kind of belief you would never have reason to revise, even if you can investigate it forever. That's the basic idea.
Its truth is ultimate rational stability within inquiry rather than correspondence to an external fact. Okay, so the motivation for pluralism is pretty clear, though. Monist theories, those insisting on a single definition for all truths, seem to fail. Correspondence works well for empirical facts. Snow is white. But really struggles with normative claims. Stealing is wrong. Or mathematical necessities. Two plus two equals four. Where's the fact in the world that makes two plus two equals true? Exactly. And conversely, epistemic theories like coherence or maybe super assertibility handle math and ethics better. But they struggle to explain how the mere coherence of our beliefs proves anything exists out there in the physical world. How does coherence guarantee correspondence?
So pluralism seems like a neat solution. Just let truth wear different hats depending on the subject matter. Use correspondence for science, maybe supersortability for math and morals. It seems very appealing initially. It looks like it covers all the bases by allowing truth to have different natures and different domains. But there's a big challenge. Ah, there's always a but in philosophy, isn't there? What's the challenge for pluralists? The challenge becomes immediate and potentially devastating when you consider complex sentences. Especially conjunctions that mix different domains. Conjunctions meaning and statements, like? Like. Take the statement, waterboarding is painful and waterboarding is wrong. Okay, so the first part, waterboarding is painful. That seems like a straightforward empirical claim. Probably true by correspondence to physiological facts. Right. But the second part, waterboarding is wrong. That's a normative moral claim. A pluralist might say that's true by supersertability or some other non -correspondence property. Okay, so one part true by correspondence, the other part true by super -assertibility.
What's the problem? The problem is, what single property makes the entire conjunction, the whole and statement, true? If the two parts are true in fundamentally different ways, by virtue of different properties, the conjunction itself doesn't seem to inherit any single unified truth property. How do these different truth properties combine? Ah, I see. If truth itself isn't one thing, how can a sentence combining different kinds of truth be true in a single way? Exactly. This difficulty, the problem of mixed conjunctions and other complex logical constructions, forces many philosophers to either abandon pluralism and go back to searching for a single global truth property after all, or perhaps to take an even more radical deflationary stance and deny that true propositions even form a genuine philosophical kind worth analyzing. So it seems we're kind of back where we started, facing these fundamental philosophical responses to an apparently intractable problem. We have the realist who still wants to stand on real facts and objective knowledge, maybe via correspondence. Right. Then we have the quietest minimalist who wants to deflate the whole problem and just use truth as a thin, logical tool without any deep metaphysical baggage. And then you mentioned the quasi -realist earlier. How do they fit in again? The quasi -realist, often associated with Simon Blackburn himself actually, takes an interesting approach.
It's a form of constructivism, particularly focused on the function of language. The quasi -realist might accept that some areas of discourse, like ethics perhaps, aren't strictly descriptive of objective facts in the way science is. Okay, so they agree ethical statements don't just describe the world. They might concede that. But then they work backward to try and explain why we still use language that makes them sound like objective, factual claims. Why do we say stealing is wrong instead of I disapprove of stealing? They want a theory that successfully explains the practical function and the realistic grammar of that language. Even if they deny the traditional realist's underlying metaphysics, they still think a theory is needed, just not the realist's one. Okay, that's subtle. Finally, then, let's briefly touch on the ultimate conceptual mess that truth seems to generate, the paradoxes.
Ah, the paradoxes. The most famous, of course, is the liar paradox, the sentence. This sentence is not true. Right. If you assume it's true, then what it says must be the case, meaning it's not true. But if you assume it's not true, then what it says is the case, which makes it true. Exactly. It leads to outright contradiction. True if and only if it's not true. Boom. And this kind of contradiction has fueled a very modern, quite radical movement in philosophy called conceptual engineering. That's right. Philosophers like J .C. Beale, Kevin Sharp, and others look at paradoxes like the liar and argue that they demonstrate something profound. Our ordinary, everyday concept of truth is actually defective. It's fundamentally inconsistent because it inevitably leads to these contradictions when pushed. Defective, like a faulty tool or a badly designed bridge. That's the analogy, yes. And if a concept is fundamentally defective, they argue we shouldn't keep using it for serious theoretical purposes, like in logic or semantics or metaphysics. So what should we do? Just throw out the concept of truth? Not exactly throw it out, but replace it. They argue we should engage in conceptual engineering, consciously design and adopt revised, consistent concepts of truth to replace our ordinary, messy, inconsistent one. Perhaps something like the specialized, carefully layered, unparadoxical truth predicates that the logician Alfred Tarski developed for formal languages. Use the engineered, clean concepts for theory, even if they're different from everyday truth. That's the core idea. For serious theoretical work, a demonstrably inconsistent concept shouldn't be used. We need better tools. Okay, but hang on. Can we really just redesign basic concepts in our language to fit the demands of formal logic? Isn't there a defense for keeping our messy, familiar, ordinary concept of truth even with its paradoxes? There is indeed, and it's sometimes called retentionism. Other thinkers push back against conceptual engineering here.
They argue that complex, evolved, incredibly useful concepts like our ordinary notion of truth shouldn't necessarily be discarded simply because they lack perfectly clear foundational definitions or because they sometimes lead to paradoxes in abstract scenarios. What's their argument for keeping the potentially inconsistent concept? Well, they might argue that Tarski's proposed solution, for example, which required establishing this rigid hierarchy of languages, object language, meta -language, meta -meta -language, etc., to avoid paradox, is just conceptually far too complex and artificial for ordinary people to actually use in everyday communication. So the fixed version might be logically pure but practically useless for most purposes. That's the worry. They might argue that our ordinary, perhaps technically inconsistent notion of truth may still be indispensable and perfectly functional for general human communication, for our legal systems, for moral discourse, and just for navigating everyday life, despite its occasional logical flaws when examined under a microscope. The sheer utility of the familiar concept even with its potential defects, might outweigh the intellectual elegance of replacing it with a logically perfect but perhaps unusable engineered substitute. Wow. Okay, so this deep dive into the philosophy of truth, drawing heavily on Blackburn but ranging much wider, it really reveals that the debate is fundamentally about, well, maybe two intertwined things, logic and power. That sounds right. It focuses less and less on finding one simple definition of what truth is in the abstract and much more on how the concept functions in all these different domains we've talked about, in scientific inquiry, in social practice, in the structure of our language, and maybe crucially in its role in determining whose standards get to count as authoritative in society. So the key insight, perhaps, for you, the listener, wrestling with all this, is to recognize that truth isn't necessarily this single, monolithic, easily pinned down property.
It's actual nature. might really determine by the context, by the domain you're talking about. Yeah. Do you define it through correspondence with some external reality like the realists often want? Or through coherence within a system of beliefs? Or maybe, like the pragmatists suggest, through his role in guiding successful action or its place in an idealized endpoint of human inquiry? The answer might depend on what you're trying to do with the concept. And it's crystal clear from our discussion and from Blackburn's book that the philosophical temperature surrounding this whole topic remains extremely high. It continues to drive both intense academic rigor and, unfortunately, sometimes bitter cultural conflict. Indeed. And thinking back to pragmatism, we saw the pragmatist view. particularly someone like Charles Sanders, Pierce's definition, defines reality itself as the object represented by that opinion, which is fated to be ultimately agreed upon by all who investigate. Truth is the end point of inquiry.
Right. So here is the provocative final thought we want to leave you with, kind of combining Pierce's long -run vision with a dose of modern scientific skepticism. Okay. If we accept the pessimistic meta -induction, that's the compelling historical observation that even our most cherished and sophisticated scientific theories seem inevitably destined to be superseded, to be proven at least partially false by future science. Well, If that's true, does that mean that today's scientific reality, what we currently take to be the objective facts discovered by science, is itself merely tomorrow's superseded consensus? And therefore, is reality itself, as defined by inquiry, inherently unstable? In other words, if inquiry is truly endless and our current best theories will always be overturned, does ultimate truth, the final opinion. perpetually received just beyond our grasp? Yeah. Is the end of inquiry always just over the horizon? Exactly. Something to think about as you continue your own investigations into what you choose to believe and why.