In item 25
of this blog, I discussed static notions of truth. The dominant notion was that
of correspondence of ideas and knowledge with reality, on the basis of
objective sense data. A second notion is the view of truth as coherence
with a relevant body of knowledge, including accepted facts and logic, or
in other words plausibility. A third is the pragmatic view, where
something is true if it is fruitful, i.e. contributes to successful
practice.
I combine
the coherence and pragmatic views into the notion of warranted
assertability. This includes both practical success in action and
consistency with accepted facts, related knowledge and logic. It is a matter of
debate what the relevant existing knowledge, logic, and accepted facts are.
A different
notion of truth concerns truth to form or fidelity to some ideal,
in ethical and aesthetic truth, as in ‘he is a true friend’ and ‘that is a true
work of art’.
I adopt a
wider notion that includes both warranted assertability and fidelity to ethical
and aesthetic ideals, which I call adequacy. This re-establishes the
ancient idea of bringing together the true, the good and the beautiful.
Truth in a dynamic sense lies in a process of trying to achieve truth in a static sense.
The most
notorious dynamic notion of truth lies in the philosophy of Friedrich Hegel. In
his view, absolute truth, in an absolute spirit, manifests, realizes itself
step by step in the course of history. This notion was adopted in the
historical materialism of Marx.
An ominous
result was that an appeal could be made to people to submit to suffering as a
sacrifice to progress towards a horizon of truth and justice. And what is to be
sacrificed is up to the ideologues, the Politbureau or the apparatchiks, to
decide, as the visionaries of historical necessity.
Nietzsche’s
view is closer to my heart: what matters is the ongoing search for truth, not
the illusory claim to have reached it.
Final truth
cannot humanly be achieved. In this blog I argue that adequacy is imperfection
on the move. Things will come to be seen as truths that now seem absurd,
unthinkable.
Can the
static and dynamic notions of truth be reconciled? I propose two ways for this.
The first
way is this. My ideal, my view of the good life, a flourishing life, is to
utilize one’s talents in a creative contribution to the hereafter that one
leaves behind, in a dialogic fashion, in debate and collaboration with others.
Then, truth
in the form of fidelity to that ideal yields a dynamic notion of truth, in the
ongoing striving for truth in the form of adequacy, defined above, combining
warranted assertability with fidelity to ideals of ethics and aesthetics.
For the
second way to reconcile the static and dynamic views I use the notion of the regulative
vs. the constitutive. This is related to a distinction made in the
philosophy of science between the context of justification and the context
of discovery. The regulative, in justification, lies in criteria for good
argument, such as factuality, logic, and coherence with what we know, and
fidelity to ideals. The constitutive, in discovery, lies in the process of achieving
such adequacy. How that may work is a different story (see item 31 in this
blog).
The first
and second ways of reconciling the static and dynamic views of truth amount to
the same.
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