(Medieval philosopher and theologian, 1070-1142)))
The first key to wisdom in truth is constant and frequent questioning
Doubt leads to inquiry, and inquiry leads to the truth
Nothing singles Abelard out more clearly among the teachers of his time than his intellectual independence. Most of his contemporaries followed St Anselm’s Credo ut Intelligam and accepted unquestioningly the view that in religious matters faith precedes reason.One might seek to justify one’s faith by reason, but preliminary doubt as to what should be the specific articles of one’s faith was inadmissible. With his critical, questioning mind Abelard found a flaw in this position: on many questions of faith the authorities themselves disagreed. In such cases, he felt, how shall we come to any definite belief unless we first reason it out? He held the view that it is by doubting that we are led to inquiry, and by inquiry that we attain the truth. In matters of truth, constant or frequent questioning is the first key to wisdom.
The new method which Abelard formed for discovering the truth is presented in his most influential and controversial book, Sic et Non, the “Yes and No.” Abelard maintained that truth must be arrived at by carefully weighing all sides of any issue. In those days, theologians tended to prove their points chiefly by quoting statements from the Church Fathers. In his book, Sic et Non, Abélard collected a list of 158 philosophical and theological questions and produced quotations from some Fathers on one side, next to contradictory quotations from other Fathers on the other side. He wanted to point out the foolishness of relying on authorities and showed the most respected theological authorities to be hopelessly at odds with each other.
Dubitando ad veritatem venimus: it is in doubting, wrote Abélard, that we arrive at the truth.
* Abélard, Pierre, Sic et Non, See: Marenbon J. Philosophy of Peter Abelard, Cambridge U.P., 1997
(Contemporary French philosopher)
The paradoxical nature of truth
The paradox is what is opposed to opinion and shocks common sense. One might think that paradox means falsehood. But it is a mistake to confuse paradox with sophism. A paradox is not a false reasoning that wants to pass for true. In fact the paradox implies the coexistence of truth and falsehood. It presupposes the impossibility to discriminate between the true and the false. Thus it seems to point at the non-existence of truth. According to the principle of non-contradiction, we cannot have A and non A at the same time. But in the case of a paradox we have the co-existence of both A and non A. The paradox seems to imply that the true is false and that the false is true. Is this an insoluble problem? For Abiteboul, the paradox does not imply the absence of truth. On the contrary it rather stimulates us to a re-definition of truth. It does not lead to a dead end but to an imperative to a new problematics.
It is mostly in the field of philosophy that truths present themselves as paradoxical. In so many philosophical topics it is possible to affirm one thing and its contrary. One example can be taken from the problem of freedom, as Kant has shown. Every human action is at the same time free and not free, the effect of a free causality and a determined effect of a cause, noumenon and phenomenon. This example illustrates the thesis that truth can be fundamentally paradoxical.
Abiteboul infers from this that one should abandon the idea of an absolute and univocal truth. The principle of identity and non- contradiction should be superseded in favour of contradictory reason orientated to multiplicity. Objectivity is paradoxically warranted by an essential equivocity; the univocity approach to truth leads always to partiality and must be dropped.
* Abiteboul, Olivier, Le Paradoxe Apprivoisé, Paris, Flammarion, 1998
(American philosopher, 1902-2001)
1. Pluralism is tolerable, or even desirable, in all areas that are matters of taste rather than matters of truth. Pluralism has always existed in the field of social manners, cultures, artistic styles, etc. In these areas individuals and communities are free in expressing and acting on preferences and tastes. Such matters belong to the sphere of the voluntary.
But with regard to matters that belong to the sphere of the intellect, that is, matters involving truth, not taste, pluralism is intolerable. One can differ in matters of taste but not in matters of truth. In questions of truth, unity is required and pluralism is out of place. This applies to judgments about questions of value as well as judgments in the sphere of mathematics and empirical sciences. In these areas the principle of non-contradiction is an essential part of the conception of truth. To affirm the unity of truth is to deny that two separate and irreconcilable truths can coexist.
Another way of assigning certain matters to the sphere of truth and certain matters to the sphere of taste is to make the distinction between the “cultural” and the “transcultural”. Anything transcultural is in the sphere of truth: technology, mathematics, science, ethics in which the criteria of truth and falsity apply. On the contrary anything cultural is in the sphere of taste in which the criteria of truth and falsity do not apply. Matters of culture are matters of taste and not of truth. What about philosophy and religion? Are they cultural or transcultural phenomena? Philosophy, at present, is not transcultural but its aim is certainly to become transcultural. Philosophers who search for truth long for the one universal truth and the overcoming of all differences and opinions. As for religion, it is not transcultural and that leaves open the question whether it should be. Indeed if philosophy and religion are only cultural phenomena, if they are considered as “ a way of life”, then neither can claim to be more that a matter of taste and not a matter of truth. However the fact is that most religions – not all – do not see themselves as merely cultural: not matters of taste only but matters of truth.
2. Whereas pluralism is intolerable in the sphere of logical truth, it is tolerable in the sphere of poetical truth. Myths, for example, have poetical, not logical, truth and on account of that no myth excludes another myth. All myths can have maximum of diversity without being incompatible with each other. There can be a plurality of poetical truths.
On the contrary in the realm of discourse where logical and factual truth is to be found, utterances that are contrary or contradictory are incompatible. The truth of one excludes the truth of the other. Pluralism is intolerable. Therefore if the truth of religion wants to be transcultural – that is, if its truth is more than poetical or mythological truth – then the modern view of religious pluralism (advocated mostly by Harvey Cox and Hans Küng) reveals little understanding of the logic of truth. The attempt to think “ecumenically” about the plurality of religions fails to solve the problem of truth in religion. If one agrees to say that all religions are true and so advocates the theory of pluralism of religious truths, the reason is because one fails to define truth correctly and allows oneself to use the word “truth” equivocally. It is only in taking religious truths for “poetical” truths that it makes sense to speak of a pluralism of religious truths. If religion is true in the logical and factual sense, there can be one religious truth and not many.
As for the criteria of truth in religion, the little that can be said about it, is that religious beliefs or articles of faith cannot be established as true by the ordinary use of rational arguments and amassing of evidence. The difference between religious truths and all other kinds of truth is that they are beyond proof by any empirical or rational means. They are a matter of faith, but one thing is sure: they can be disproved or discredited by being shown to be incompatible with the established truths of science and philosophy. Matters of religious faith cannot be proved but they can be disproved if they contradict what is known with certainty in the other areas of knowledge.
3. Adler does not want to restrict the definition of truth to descriptive statements. To counter the modern skepticism about moral knowledge, he extends the concept of truth to normative statements. Moral statements are cognitive, they can be true or false.
Descriptive truth consists in the agreement or conformity of the mind with reality. In sharp contrast prescriptive truth consists in the conformity of our appetites with right desire. The moral judgments we make are true if they conform to the right desire, that is, if they prescribe what we ought to desire.
Philosophy, unlike science, claims to have a hold on truth in two different modes: the descriptive mode of 'is' or 'is not' statements (which it shares with science) and the prescriptive mode of 'ought' or 'ought not' statements. The first mode of truth is the correspondence theory of truth, according to which our thinking about reality is true if it agrees with the way things really are or not. The other mode of truth is prescriptive, and it is expressed in statements that contain the words “ought” or “ought not”. These truths state the categorical moral obligations that govern the conduct of our lives and the institution of our societies. It is clear that no “ought” question can belong to the realm of science. The modern disciplines of economics, politics and sociology avoid all normative considerations and questions of value. They have become purely descriptive like the natural sciences. They restrict themselves to questions how people behave, individually or socially. They describe situations but forego all attemps to say how individuals or or social groups ought in principle to behave. However our common experience of living and acting with the moral responsibility that it entails manifests the importance and even the primacy of prescriptive over descriptive truth. As a result of excluding the prescriptive character of truth, many contemporary moralists dismiss all ethical or value judgments as noncognitive. They consider them as personal opinions and subjective prejudices, not objective knowledge. For them there is no truth in ethics because they mistakenly reduce truth to its descriptive mode.
Adler defines prescriptive truth as conformity with right desire. What is right desire? Right desire is desiring what we ought to desire and that is that which is really good for us. It is a self-evident truth that what we ought to desire is the really good for us. This is the one controlling self-evident principle of all ethical reasoning, the only indispensable categorical imperative. Now the ultimate end of human life is that which leaves nothing else to be rightly desired and that ultimate end is “happiness”. Happpiness functions as the end that ought to control all the right choices we make in the course of living.
* Adler, Mortimer, Truth in Religion, The plurality of religions and the Unity of Truth, USA, 1990, The Four Dimensions of Philosophy, Collier Books, Macmillan, New York, 1993, p.29-42,127-131
(German philosopher and aesthetic theorist, 19O3-1969)
Plato’s notion of art as ‘mimesis’ or semblance regards art as an imitation of that which exists. This idea has endured centuries of philosophical inquiries for its acceptance of reality as the basis for all works of art. Once reality is grounded as the measure of truth, art, which copies it, is deemed as a lie – which indeed was Plato’s view. But to accept art as a lie leaves no value to its content in philosophical aspects. It discards all works of art as mere artifacts which do not serve in any way for the search of truth. But this is contradicted by the fact that there is a certain quality that makes us appreciate works of art above all other artifacts and that quality is a certain truth. But how can this truth be accounted for? Or what is the truth of art? This is Adorno’s problem.
The truth which is sought in art is not the “things-as-they-are” truth concept. The truth which is claimed to be found in art is an enigmatic quality rooted in nature, yet serving as a phenomenon for its own sake and not as a mere copy of nature. Is it the “truth in a lie”, as some (Picasso) have remarked? Adorno resolves this contradiction in terms by exploring the concept of “semblance”(the Platonic mimesis). Adorno wants to overcome the notion of semblance as a lie. He separates art from the truth of its content by claiming that art is autonomous. The autonomy of art achieves the separation of art from the empirical world. Art is a presentation of what is not and thus art becomes an autonomous presentation of this negation of reality, rather than a copy of reality.
Still Adorno does not want to remove the connection of art to the empirical world – otherwise art would have no bearing any longer with the notion of truth. The difference of artworks from the empirical world, the “semblance” character of artworks, is constituted out of the empirical world and in opposition to it. Art is an autonomous presentation, rather than a re-presentation. By presenting a reality that contradicts our own reality, art creates a conflict: the conflict of the existing non-autonomous world (the empirical reality) with the non-existing autonomous world (the world of art).
Artworks bear witness that the world itself should be other than it is. By presenting us with a distorted picture, a negation of what is, or an autonomous reality which is not separated from ours but actually contrasts our reality, precisely by virtue of that conflict, art is able to present us with truth both on an empirical level as well as on a metaphysical level.
1. On the empirical level, art shows us the distinct conflict of our social reality and art’s reality. Our social reality is not free, being consumed by laws and regulations, preoccupied with social recognition and socially accepted behaviour. Art, on the other hand, is free; it has no boundaries, no rules and no restrictions.
2. On the metaphysical level, art presents us what we do not usually see. By its autonomy from the empirical world, art has the privilege of exposing a world that cannot exist by any other means.
The Platonic mimesis or ‘semblance’ is redeemed by granting semblance its proper meaning. Semblance, in Adorno’s meaning, does not claim to be a copy of reality; it is the presentation of another reality. Thus art gains back its truth claim and is restored to the philosophical enquiry. Art is accepted as holding truth within itself and is no longer regarded as a lie.
* Adorno, Theodore, Aesthetic Theory, Minneapolis, University of Minesota press, 1997
(Austrian Leopold Fisher, alias Agehanda Bharati, 1923-1990)
Convictions and beliefs are essential values of every human life. But they are no proofs of anything. They are not even an indication of the possible truth of what is believed, but they are worthwhile even if they do not imply truth. Truth and belief-conviction are quite different kinds of value; they are independent of each other. Many things are good for us to adopt and it is right for us to follow them, though truth has nothing to do with them. Truth does not play an important role in our decision to act like this or like that. What counts solely is what suits us in the long run, what satisfies us. This is the Epicurean principle according to which we act in this way or that way, not because of truth, tradition or custom, but simply because it is delightful to act like that.
Truth about many ‘realities’ such as God or no God, is totally unimportant. The existence of non–existence of such things do not make any difference for me. What is important is that I feel at ease: this is what I call the aesthetic postulate.
* Swami Aghehanda Bharati, The Ochre Robe, garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1970, p.78-82
(Turkish Muslim theologian-philosopher, 870- 950)
All religions are the symbolic expressions of the one universal truth Al-Farabi, one of the first Muslim commentator of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, is known for having subordinated religious revelation to philosophy. He affirmed the primacy of philosophical truth over religion. Contrary to the beliefs of particular religions, philosophical truths for him are universal. He envisaged the ideal of a universal truth or religion of which all the other existing religions would be the symbolic expression.
He considered that existing religions are the cohesive principles of any society, and just as societies may be corrupt and imperfect, so can religions, and both degrade their members. But the “true” Religion is nothing other than the highest philosophy, known to the individual who has perfected his humanity. Since the average person has not attained this lofty end, the religions that proliferate in the world are images, more or less true, of essential religion. As collection of persuasive arguments and metaphors, each particular religion has its imperfections. Many are helpful, though a few are nefarious. Al-Farabi thought that Islam was close to the true religion of philosophical insight and eternal wisdom, but he admitted that there were others. He refused, however, to name them, for he wanted his point to be understood and avoided engaging in sectarian squabbles.
* Al Farabi, The Book of Religion, in lectures of Dr Peter Adamson on Arabic Philosophy (see Internet)
(Islamic mystical theologian, Bagdad, 1058-1111)
In his autobiography, The Deliverance from Error, the Islamic theologian al-Ghazali tells the story of his lifelong quest for truth. He expresses his disappointment with the theological doctrines of Islam, whether in its Sunni or Shiite form. He is even less impressed by the teachings of philosophers. The use of reason by theologians and philosophers leads more to the divergence of opinions then to the unity of truth. He tells us that the light of truth came to him through divine grace. He highlights his skepticism for the capacity of natural knowledge to reach the truth in a book bearing the significant title of The Incoherence of Philosophers. In a way, although for different reasons, he anticipates Hume’s skepticism in his understanding of the non-necessary nature of any causal relationship. According to him nature is understood to have no necessary entailments because the world proceeds solely by the will of God. Through his recourse to the divine will as the explanation of everything he rendered all philosophical investigations redundant.
al Ghazali is the advocate of a mystical theology which alone, he claims, can be the path to certainty. He presents himself as a man devoted to certitude and to reach it he does not hesitate to doubt and question everything: inherited traditions, sense knowledge, reason, imagination. Like Descartes, he wants to reach certainty through universal doubt. The divergences of opinions which he has found among scholars and sects of Islam have deeply shaken his religious convictions. Theology according to him has become the ground of intrigues in which no one is sincerely concerned with the search of truth and every one is prompted by the desire of triumphing over his adversaries through the use of subtle dialectics. He criticizes not only speculative theologians but also philosophers who want to use reason as a criterion of truth. Finally he rejects the view of those who claim to have access to the hidden truth of scriptures through an imäm or a so-called divinely inspired master. Certitude, for al-Ghazali, can only come from the intuitive personal experience of mystical knowledge, obtained through a serious and attentive reading of the Koran.
Later in Muslim Spain Averroes took the opposite course in defending the value of the philosophical search for truth in his writing on The Incoherence of Incoherence, a book directed against al-Ghazali’s fideistic approach.
* al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of Philosophers, in Cambridge Dictionnary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p.21
(Iranian Sufi Master, 858-922)
See SUFISM
(Emile Chartier, French Philosopher, 1868-1951)
1. It is common to consider truth as the correspondence of mind with reality. Now the mind produces concepts, ideas, judgments and theories which are all stable. But reality is ever in a flux; it is on the move and changing. It follows that what we express in words as corresponding to the real is true only for a moment. It is true the moment it is uttered but that moment is already soon past. The concepts and judgments of our language give only stilled photographs which are “true” provided they are dated. Undated stable ideas and judgments are false. Reality changes and evolves, but as soon as we say it, it comes to a standstill and thus what we say is no longer the truth understood as correspondence of mind with reality. In a way such a correspondence is impossible because the mind in stabilising the movement of reality distorts it.
The truth that follows the real is a historical, constantly evolving truth. The so-called stable truth is no longer related to a reality that invariably forges ahead. One should say that that stable truth was related to a reality that is no more. Consider the situation of a commentator at a horse race: he must follow the movement of the event, and if he stops his running commentary for a second he is no longer ‘telling the truth’.
Unfortunately, people like and trust in the still and motionless reality, in theories, traditions and sacred scriptures written once and for all. They prefer customs to truth. They like stones and photographs. They do not like a truth that changes. They do not accept that reality exceeds their ideas. But the wise person is never satisfied with ideas; he(she) remains open to the changing reality. He(she) prefers essays to dogmas. He(she) always searches and never recites.
But scepticism for which there is no truth at all is equally mistaken. In fact there is an abundance of momentary truths. In a way, everything is true! Even an error is true because there must be some reason why someone uttered it - because he is mad, for instance. But it must be added that truths are never true alone. Every truth admits of its contradiction. Property may be just or unjust, freedom may be good or bad, etc. Fanaticism consists in sticking to one truth only. In the name of the so-called love of truth some are ready to kill others for fear that these others are also in the truth. But intellectual charity recognizes the truth in every opinion. Everyone is right and there is truth everywhere. The main task is to accord these truths between each other and find the synthesis that reconciles them.
2. Consequently, rather than taking our ideas, judgments and theories for either true or false, one should consider them as useful instruments to know reality gradually, step by step. They enlighten reality but do not represent it. They are the mechanism of thought; they are never sufficient but never useless as long as one remains aware that their correspondence with reality is only momentary. One should never become the prisoner of ideas but always remain unsatisfied with them. In the name of the so-called love of truth people are often mistaken by precipitation. Truth-seekers are boiling with impatience. They judge too quickly. They stick to their ideas and to the static concept of truth expressed in them. They are embarrassed or too proud to change their mind.
* Alain, Propos, Collection La Pléade, Paris, Plon, 1960, p.504, 711,964, 1225-8
(German philosopher, b.1921)
The central thesis of Albert's "Critical Rationalism" is that there is no field of human activities where one should not be critical. Thus he applied critical rationalism to the social sciences, to economics, politics, jurisprudence, and even religion. He demonstrated the impossibility to prove any certain truth even in the fields of logic and mathematics. In what is called his Munchhausen-Trilemma, he illustrates the hopeless situation to justify all our means to justify any certain truth. Thus Albert considers fallibilism as inevitable, still he does not want to not fall victim to relativism or scepticism.
In his "Münchhausen trilemma" Hans Albert expresses that any attempt to articulate foundations leads "to a situation with three alternatives, all of which appear unacceptable." The trilemma forces one to choose between (1) an infinite regress, because the propositions that serve as a fundament need to be founded themselves; (2) a logical circle that results from the fact that in the process of giving reasons, one has to resort to statements that have already shown themselves to be in need of justification; or (3) breaking off the attempt at a particular point by dogmatically installing a foundation. In this latter case one can stop at self-evidence or common sense or fundamental principles or anything else, but in doing so the intention to install certain justification is abandoned.
Therefore certain justification is impossible at all. Once having given up the classical idea of certain knowing one can stop the process of justification where one wants to stop. Albert's advice is: don't look backwards to the solid basis of your thinking, but look always forward to the consequences. In this way no problem arises to justify this non-justificationalism. However he argues that critical rationalists have to accept that those attempts of rigorous justification are not senseless, since only as long as alternative methods are without success can critical rationalism be called successful. Albert rejects skepticism while he endorses the fallibilist view that does not imply the need to abandon our knowledge - we needn't have logically conclusive justifications for what we know.
Albert admits that because empirical knowledge can be revised by further observation, any of the things we take as knowledge might possibly turn out to be false. Unlike some fallibilists who make an exception for things that are axiomatically true (such as mathematical and logical knowledge), Albert remains fallibilist about these as well, on the basis that, even if these axiomatic systems are in a sense infallible, we are still capable of error when working with these systems.
* Albert Hans, Plädoyer für kritischen Rationalismus, Piper Verlag, München 1971.
(Contemporary American feminist philosopher)
A coherence theory of truth must not be interpreted, as is often done, as necessarily antirealist, idealist and purely epistemic. Those who hold that truth represents a kind of coherence are usually motivated by the legitimate desire to transcend the usual binary division made between world and thought, a corporeal entity and a mental one. In this binary or dualistic picture truth has been located as a bridge spanning the chasm between two ‘worlds’ and the outcome of this view has been labelled “the spectator or bill-board theory of knowledge”. But when human knowledge and world are separated in this way, any taints of human interpretation must be removed from the world side if one wants to obtain the truth.
The fact is that it is impossible for human beings to remove all traces of their engaged concern with the world and to attain some sort of God’s eye view. We are not peering through a peephole at the world but are always already in its midst engaged in it in multiple projects. The coherence theory of truth begins precisely with this metaphysical picture rather than with the binary picture. It offers an ‘immanent’ account of knowledge, against the transcendental account of the binary picture. For coherentism, knowledge is a product of lived (and not purely external) reality. It is not a link to something entirely extrinsic to human existence. Coherentism holds that an understanding of knowledge emerges from immanent relationships in which there is never a clear separation or non-involvement between subject and object, thought and world. Truth for coherentism is immanent to the domain of lived reality, rather than completely transcendent to human practice and content.
The right concept of truth is not a correspondence relation but the achievement of coherence among the multiple and diverse elements involved in the process of knowing practices. When the event of knowing comes together, a harmony is achieved and truth occurs. The experience of truth is the experience of pieces falling into place, or the experience of the pattern of the whole emerging from what had been atoms of disparate beliefs. Falsity is experienced as what is incapable of being sustained because of its incoherence. We find an idea or an explanation true and compelling because it makes sense of other things we already believe we know. Alternatively we cannot accept as true an idea or an explanation that conflicts with the many other things we know.
This coherentist view makes truth both plural and changeable, since it is relative to a context richly conceived. But it does not make truth arbitrary or subjective. The so-called subjective elements of knowledge are never sufficient to establish the truth. Truth becomes apparent when beliefs and practices cohere within and refer to a lived reality. Truth claims take into account the ontological dimension of reality.
Does the coherence theory of truth lead to relativism? The coherence theory must commit one to some degree of relativism since coherence can be realized in more than one way. It implies some sort of conceptual relativism which admits that the variety of possible conceptual models are understood as expressions of the multiple possibilities inherent in the world itself. Ontological absolutism – which claims that there is only one objective way to understand reality - must be rejected. On the contrary the fact of multiple possibilities of interpretations does not entail that one fails to attain the truth. It is only the sign that the truth of the world itself is rich enough to admit of more than one conceptual expression. Ontological pluralism must be substituted to ontological absolutism provided that this view does not commit one to the idealist notion that reality is a construction of the human mind. The world we know admits of more than one ontology, not because we can interpret it in various ways but because we are related to the world in a variety of specific locations, and with a variety of specific projects. There are many ways to look at the world and understand it. Not only one way is the truth about it, there may be many coherent ways.
* Alcoff, L.M., The Case for Coherence, in Lynch, M.P., The Nature of truth, Bradford Books, Cambridge, Massachussets, 2001, p. 159-182
(Contemporary American philosopher)
The distinction between truth and error is as valid in religion as elsewhere in human experience. The view, shared by not a few believers, that all religions are false save one’s own is not worth considering for being too obviously naïve. However it is based on the valuable persuasion that the distinction between truth and falsehood is a vital one. Its mistake lies in supposing that the true and the false in religion are to be identified with particular religions and that in the case of the true the identification is with one’s own religion.
According to Allen one should think of truth and error as present in all religions. They are true in so far as they apprehend the Transcendent aright, false in so far as they fail to do so. Truth is not a matter of exclusive possession, it is always beyond us. Our duty is to serve it without fanaticism, bigotry, or intolerance.
On the other hand it is not possible to place all religions on the same level and to assert that they are all equally true. Many today are tempted to support this view and not without justification. Once we have abandoned the position of arrogant superiority of our own religion over the others, we may be drawn to regard all religions on the same level. But then we would have to give up our basic assumption that truth and error are sharply opposed in religion as elsewhere.
Nothing is this world of space and time is absolute. An absolute religion is a contradiction in terms because all religions are historical phenomena, and as such conditioned and relative. But then how can we reconcile the relativities of historical enquiries with the absolute that faith requires? We have to distinguish between the standpoint of the spectator, the disinterested observer and the standpoint of the committed participant, the believer. To the first corresponds the truth of information and to the other the truth of transformation. For the disinterested scholar there is no absolute knowledge, for the believer the absolute is a matter of personal commitment arising out of personal discernment. For the latter his religion is an “absolute for him”. For a community whose members share a common faith, their religion is an “absolute for them”.
But this concept of ‘polymorphous truth’ (“absolute for me but not for the other’) is highly problematic. How can one devoted to his own truth recognize the existence of truths other than his own? Allen endorses the view suggested by Karl Jaspers (see Jaspers) that there is no theoretical solution to this problem but and existential one. From the standpoint of the observer, there is no solution, he sees only conflicting claims and neither is truth. But on the plane of the participant believer, the truth is that to which he has come under God’s guidance and in respect and love of other people who have made a different experiment with truth.
The problem of ‘polymorphous' truth is never solved by conflict but by communication. Truth can remain true only “in the will of boundless communication”(K. Jaspers’ expression) between the committed participants. The presupposition of communication is that no one party to the debate has the monopoly of the truth. If conflict arises, it will be a conflict waged in love, each seeking victory not for himself but for a truth that will be common to both and will bind them together. The opponent is each case will not be the other person but ignorance, prejudice and self-satisfaction. All participants are supported and united by a common faith in truth. All that can be done at present is to call for this boundless communication. No one can know what will come out of it: no syncretism, no assimilation, no world-faith but something better than these – a growth in mutual understanding.
* E.L. Allen, Christianity among the Religions, Allen & Unwin, London, 1960, p.117- 133, 145-155
(American epistemologist and philosopher of religion, b.1921)
1. Alston has a particular way of advocating a realist concept of truth and he calls it alethic realism “ (from the Greek word aletheia or truth). “A statement is true if and only if what the statement says to be the case actually is the case”. This entails that it is not required that any person or any social group be in the know of what is the case. Truth need not be shown or proved or justified to be the truth. In other words there is no epistemic requirements for the truth of a statement. As long as “Sugar is sweet”, then my statement that” Sugar is sweet” is a true statement. Nothing more is required for its being true. Aristotle had already defined the truth in that way. It has the appearance of an obvious truism. Nevertheless it is frequently denied in recent times, either by the various forms of ‘epistemic’ accounts and by ‘deflationary’ accounts of truth. For the epistemic accounts, the truth of a statement is in its being justified or supported by evidence or coherent with a set of beliefs or bringing satisfaction to the intellect or agreed by all who investigate, etc. Such is the case, for instance, with the coherence and pragmatist theories of truth. For the deflationary accounts truth is not a property of statement, for it is simply redundant and useless. Alston rejects the epistemic and deflationary accounts of truth.
The realist way of thinking of truth is that the truth-maker – the fact, the state of affairs, what is the case - is something that is objective vis-à-vis the truth-bearer – the statement, the proposition. The truth-bearer is what is true and is made true by the truth-maker. The realist concept of truth has to do with what the truth bearer or the assertion is about rather than with some “internal” or “ intrinsic” feature of the truth-bearer such as its place in a sysem of propositions (coherence) or the confidence with which it is held (pragmatism). The common core of all forms of realism is the objectivity of truths, properties and moral standards. A proposition is true when it is related to something that is the case. A state of affairs being the case is what renders the proposition true, and nothing else. Truth is not an ‘epistemic’ concept for it does not dependent of our beliefs and of our ability to learn the truth.
2. However Alston claims that alethic realism differs from metaphysical realism. For it makes no commitment as to the nature or the ontological status of facts, even if it takes facts to be the setting of the extralinguistic, extramental world. It has no precise implications on the ontological character of facts and states of affair.
Alston’s realist account of truth does not require that one holds metaphysical realism rather than metaphysical antirealism. The realist account of truth he advocates is concerned with what it is for a proposition to be true or false, but it is not concerned with what propositions are true or false. Realist and antirealist metaphysical positions – unlike alethic realism - have implications for what propositions are true or false. Alethic realism implies that what makes a particular assertion to be true or false is independent of the assertion itself. It constrains itself only to supporting the view that what confers a truth-value on a statement is something independent of the cognitive-linguistic goings on, independent of our talk and thought and therefore external to the truth-bearer. It rejects the epistemic accounts view of truth and at the same time it is neutral with respect to all the controversies over the metaphysical status of reality.
It is clear that alethic realism does not propose a ‘substantial’ realist account of truth, but only a minimalist one. It states only that some truth-maker, which one calls facts or state of affairs, is what renders statements to be true or false. It could be that the truth-maker, the so-called facts or state of affairs, are not mind-independent (for instance in a Kantian sense) but this does not affect the central claim of alethic realism, which avoids the metaphysical questions concerning the relation and ‘correspondence’ of thought with reality. It holds only that whether what we say is true is determined not by anything we do or think, but by the way things are.
* Alston, William, A Realist Conception of Truth, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1996
(French Marxist philosopher, 1918-1990)
The critique of ideology has played an important part in Marxism. Ideology or “the science of ideas” was opposed to metaphysics. It took on a pejorative sense with Marx and Engels. For them “ideology” refers to a theory that is out of touch with the real process of history. The negative sense of ideology as “ false consciousness” is the most common usage in the Marxist tradition.
Althusser in his main work “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” rejects as oversimplification the concept of ideology as “false consciousness”, or a distorted representation of reality. The oversimplification which he denounces implies an opposition of “false consciousness” to some kind of “true consciousness”. According to Althusser, no subject can transcend ideology. All consciousness is constituted by and necessarily inscribed within ideology. Ideology is as inescapable and indispensable as the air we breathe. There can be no question of true and false ideologies. All that we have are competing versions of “false consciousness”, for all understanding of reality are limited and therefore incomplete, and in that sense false.
The individual subject is faced not with a problem of differentiating the “ideological” from the “real”, the false from the true, but with the problem of choosing between competing ideological versions of the real.
Althusser’s concept of ideology depends on the notion of subject. There is no subject except by and in an ideology and there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects. All individual subjects are constituted in ideological structures. All ideology has the function of enlisting subjects in its belief system. We are born as subjects and to be subjects implies that we are born in specific ideologies, which we inhabit and which we recognize as true or evident. Others’ belief are also ideological, i.e. imaginary/illusory, whereas ours are simply ‘true’. For instance, everybody thinks his/her religion is true and that every one else’s religion is just illusion , or ideology. Althusser explains how every one recognises that his/her beliefs are true and not relative through the notion of “interpellation”. Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects. Interpellation is a hailing, says Althusser. A particular ideology interpellates us and we respond positively to it. A particular ideology seems to address the subject personally and the individual accepts to become a subject within that ideological structure. We believe that these ideas – like commercial ads - are individually addressed to us and we take them to be true. That is why we are ready to behave as the ideology dictates.
* Athusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New Left Books, London, 1971[ii]
(English monk, philosopher and theologian, 1033-1109)
Anselm following Augustine identifies the ‘supreme truth’ with God. God is the source of the immutability and eternity of our participated truths.
In On Truth Anselm begins his examination of the claim that “God is truth” by discussing the truth of statements, since that is the sort of truth with which we are most familiar. The truth of a proposition for him consists in its signifying that what-is is, or – better –in its signifying as it ought to be, and that means that truth consists in rectitude. In all cases the truth of things consists in their being what they ought to be. God is the One Eternal Truth, and thus He is the rectitude that dictates how everything else ought to be. Anselm comes to the definition of truth as “rectitude perceptible only by the mind”. But what then is the difference between truth and justice? Anselm answers that justice is a subcategory of rectitude in that it involves reason and will. Justice requires willing what one ought to will exactly because that is what one ought to will.
Thus Anselm’s originality is that he defines truth by “rectitude”, that is, rightness. When he says that “the truth of things is their rectitude”, he means that each thing realizes the thought of God in such a wise that every being is true through its very essence. This is the ontological truth of things. Logical truth is the rectitude of enunciation in which the words state that which they should. In Holy Scripture one reads that Christ said:” He who does the truth will find the light”. “Does the truth” means “acts with rectitude”. Truth is something that is done. Every action either tells the truth or else lies. The kind of rectitude which is truth is to be understood in term of doing what ought to be done.
Still in the strict sense the word truth should be reserved to the intellectual domain and then Anselm defines it as “the rectitude perceptible by mind alone”. Truth then is the rectitude of being as envisaged by reason. In all cases truth is something that ought to be – that is “rectitude” - in things, in enunciations or in actions, whether perceived by the mind or not.
* Anselm, De Veritate, 7, see Thonnard, History of Philosophy, Desclée, Paris, 1950, p.315 and Campbell R. , Truth and Historicity, Chap.VI passim, Clarendom Press, Oxford, 1992[iii]
(Greek philosopher, 440-370 B.C.)
Antisthenes, the founder of the Cynic school, considered that language is incapable to describe the concrete reality of individual units. He was a thorough-going nominalist, who maintained that the individual alone is real, and that the universal is nothing but a collective name. Ideas do not exist save for the consciousness which thinks them. "A horse," he said, "I can see, but horsehood I cannot see." Following out this view, he held that, as things are quite isolated in their individuality, the only judgements that are true concerning them must be tautological judgements, in which a thing is predicated of itself; for if the predicate differs from the subject, then the judgement must be untrue when it asserts that the subject is the predicate. Hence in strict logic one cannot say that "a man is good" but only that "good is good" and "man is man". Defining a thing by another is impossible. One can only name things without attributing a predicate different than their name. His theory of language rejected both logic and physics.
The sole legitimate part of philosophy for him was ethics, not as speculations and discourses but as the practice of virtues by the individual in total autonomy from all social conventions. Just as in logic the inevitable result of his approach was the purest nominalism, so in ethics he was driven to individualism, to the denial of social and national relations. Each man must take the care of his own life upon himself, shape out his course by his own thought, and regard the State with all its customs and laws as a mere usurpation. In this spirit Antisthenes raised the banner of Nature against Convention, and met every claim of society upon the individual with contempt and derision.
* See "Cynics" in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Charles Scribner, New york, 1972
(German philosopher, b.1922)
Moral truths as inter-subjective consensus, understood as coherence
The heart of Apel's position on truth is that, following Peirce, it identifies truth with what would be agreed upon in the limit of indefinitely continued discussion. He understands truth as inter-subjective consensus, understood as coherence. Together with Habermas, he searches for an ideally unlimited inter-subjectivity of consensus. For him truth is both a presupposition, in a sense that the speaker assumes among the conditions of speaking the truth and truthfulness, as well as the final aim of unlimited communicative action that take places in the community, namely to reach a convergence between all our beliefs.
Apel contends that the fundamental defect of all the past moral theories is that they have all been monological, that is, they have all been the result of the ruminations of the individual, solitary thinker reflecting upon morality. They have all neglected to take cognizance of what is nonetheless an inescapable fact, namely, that their solitary reflections could only have taken place within the context of language and discourse, thus within the linguistic community. All our thoughts and reflections, even those of the solitary philosopher, can only occur in, and through, a communal language. Hence, all our thoughts and reflections are virtually, if not actually, dialogue and argumentation. It is this fundamental forgetfulness of the linguistic conditions of their philosophizing that, for Apel, is the root of the failure of all past moral theoreticians to provide adequate grounding for a universal morality. For Apel, then, it is only on condition that we start from this awareness of the linguistic condition of all our thoughts and meaningful actions that we may finally see the universal conditions and ground of all human theoretical and practical activities, and, thus, of morality.
But then, as critics have raised, it remains the subject of doubt whether the agreement sought for is only inter-subjective and linguistic or objective and real, based upon an effective conformity of being. Another question concerns the extension of the unlimited community of communication. Does it include the transcendental or, in principle, is it primarily limited to the level of the dialogue among humans? It is a risk of the doctrine of truth as inter-subjectivity to identify inter-subjective knowledge with valid knowledge as such.
* Apel, Karl Otto, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.
(American historian, b. 1929))
Appleby (in collaboration with Hunt and Jacob) believes in the possibility of achieving truth and objectivity in human knowledge of the past, even if these truths are not absolute. A democratic practice of history encourages skepticism about dominant views, but at the same time it trusts in the reality of the past and its knowability.
Telling the truth about History is possible provided one refuses to cling to the two extremes of positivism and postmodernism. The positivist view falters in giving a privileged position to value-free science and progress, postmodernist relativism nihilistically denies any effort to seek truth. Instead, Appleby offers a rational middle road, which accepts the demise of intellectual absolutism and yet sustains the belief that objective truth can be produced by deeply subjective people. She argues that, in a democracy that fosters freedom of inquiry and critical exchange, practical realism, healthy skepticism and qualified objectivity can lead to reasonable, if partial, truths.
Her version of objectivity concedes the impossibility of any research being neutral and accepts the fact that knowledge-seeking involves a lively, contentious struggle among diverse groups of truth-seekers. Standards of objectivity recognize at the outset that all knowledge is suject-centered and artificial. Human language cannot be fixed on objects and describe for all time the way the external world is. At the same time Appleby is convinced that no philosopher has ever succeeded in proving that meanings are simply “in our head”. In other words the “facts” need the “conventions” and vice versa.
The ‘practical realism’ advocated by Appleby thwarts the relativists by reminding them that some words and conventions, however socially constructed, reach out to the world and give a reasonable true description of its contents. The study of nature suggests that having knowledge of a thing in the mind does not negate its being outside of the mind behaving there as predicted and that something exists as an image of something’s being in the mind does not in the least diminish its external existence or its knowability through the medium of language. That it could be in both places, out there and in here where words reside, seems only to verify the objective nature of anything under consideration.
However despite their relationship to the natural sciences, the human sciences, such as history, have a distinct set of problems. Any analogy to natural science falters because the historian cannot effectively isolate the objects of enquiry. The most distinctive of historians’ problems is that posed by temporality. For the historian, truth is wrapped up with trying to figure out what went one in time past. The past, in so far as it exists at all, exists in the present, the historian too is stuck in time present, trying to make meaningful statements about time past.
Historical ‘objective truth’ cannot be grounded upon neutral experimentation. The beliefs, values, and interests that defined the researcher as a person cannot simply be brushed aside. Therefore one has to redefine historical objectivity as an interactive relationship between and inquiring subject – the historian - and an external object – the time past.
* Appleby, Hunt & Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, New York, W.W.Norton, 1994
(Ghanaian American philosopher, b. 1954)
“Cosmopolitanism”: rather than aiming at universal truth, one should respect diversity because there are many values worth living by.
Appiah endorses the view of ‘Cosmopolitanism’, i.e. the notion that individuals are “citizens of the world.” The essence of the cosmopolitan ideal is that individuals need to develop habits of coexistence with others at the personal, local, national and international levels. He emphasizes that cosmopolitanism entails an ongoing conversation with both neighbors and strangers. It advances the possibility of achieving mutual understanding between individuals holding different worldviews and adhering to different moral systems. At the same time, cosmopolitanism recognizes the possibility that consensus on a single worldview may not be reached. Such a possibility does not necessarily lead to conflict. Instead, it can result in a cooperative decision to ‘agree to disagree.’
Cosmopolitanism is other than competing universalisms, for it goes beyond talk of truth and tolerance. Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by all of them. So they expect that different people and different societies will embody different values. Cosmopolitanism gives us a power and a means and an inclination to connect. It rejects the ideal of achieving total unity, because that’s a kind of cultural imperialism that must be avoided. It wants to respect diversity, and diversity is more than simply to be tolerated. People will always disagree upon innate and core values. Philosophers have been wrong in seeking false universalisms, false agreement. At the same time Appiah rejects the relativist standpoint that claims that agreement is impossible. He says that what we need instead of false agreement is conversation. The conversation is “getting used to things,” not agreeing. He says practices and not principles are what enable us to live together in peace.
According to him, one must discard the pernicious myth that we are necessarily separated and segregated into groups that are defined by criteria like gender, language, race, religion or some other kind of boundary. It is easy to see that these boundaries are a major cause of conflict. Appiah challenges this kind of separative thinking and that is why he wants to resurrect the ancient philosophy of "cosmopolitanism”, a school of thought that dates back almost 2500 years to the Cynics of Ancient Greece. They first articulated the cosmopolitan ideal that all human beings were citizens of the world.
Appiah laments that so many philosophers and intellectuals have argued, falsely, that we humans can only see the world up to the point of our own contextual "walls." He contends that differences can be accepted without being allowed to become barriers. The reason is simply this: most of us arrive at our values not on the basis of careful reasoning, but by lifelong conditioning and subjective beliefs and attitudes.
*Appiah, Kwame Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.
(Medieval philosopher theologian, 1225-1274)
Aquinas uses the concept of truth in two different ways. The primary sense of truth is the logical truth of judgments, the secondary sense is the ontological truth of being.
A. Truth and Judgment
Aquinas agrees with Aristotle when he writes that in their primary sense the true and the false pertain to the judgment, which is the locus of true and false. “It is in the mind’s judgment that truth is found and not in sensation, nor in the intellectual apprehension of an essence….Sense does not know truth as such. For although sight has the likeness of a visible thing it does not know the correspondence between the thing seen and the perception of it. The mind, however, can know its own conformity with an intelligible thing, not simply by apprehending its essence, but it makes a judgment about the thing….It is that first knows and enunciates truth.” (S.T., Ia, 16,2)
In sensation and simple apprehension by the intellect, sense and intellect come to be informed by the species of things. To form percepts and concepts is a natural and spontaneous operation brought about by the presence of the species in sense and intellect. Truth and error are not involved in these simple apprehensions, but only when the intellect, not content to apprehend passively what it has acquired, makes a judgment. In both, sensation and simple apprehension of the intellect, there is no known truth yet, because there is no judgment. Making judgments always involves combining and separating, as Aristotle had already pointed out. Truth is found in the dividing and composing (judging) intellect. The conformity of intellect with reality becomes known when the intellect makes a judgment. If the judgment combines or separates the essential notions as the facts really show them to be combined or separated, the judgment is true. Veritas est adequatio intellectus cum re. (S.T., 1,16,1).
B. Truth and Being.
According to Aristotle, truth has nothing to do with metaphysics but with logic and epistemology. For him truth in not in things but in the mind. On the contrary, according to Aquinas, truth is not only in the intellect but also in being. But then how are truth and being distinct? Everything is being. But some predicates can be said to add to being as they express a mode of being. They are called by Aquinas the five ‘transcendentals.’ One of them is ‘truth’. It expresses the coming together of things and knowledge. Truth is the conformity of being and intellect and that is what it adds to being.
Hence the formal notion of truth is different from the formal notion of being, that is, they do not mean the same but they do not differ in reality.
In this derivative, not primary, sense of truth, things are said to be true by reason of their conformity with the ideas of the intellect, either divine or human. When we say, “this is true gold”, we use a way of speaking that invites us to take into account another kind of truth than that which is in the mind - we point at the truth of things. This occurs mostly when a thing is related to an intellect as to the cause on which it depends for its existence. Thus, artifacts are said to be true as a result of their conformity with the mind of the artisan. The knowledge of the architect is the cause of the being of the house. He preconceived it and that is why we say that it is a “true” house. Even more one should say that all realities are true beings because they have been preconceived by the divine mind. The truth of beings consists in their conformity with the mind that conceives and creates them, whether human (in some cases) or divine (in all cases) . Being and truth are interchangeable (“convertuntur”) and that is why truth must be dealt with in metaphysics as well as in the science of knowledge.
C. The unity of truth against the Averroists.
For Aquinas the truths of faith and the truths of reason are the same kind of truth. If they happen to come apparently into conflict, the conflict has to be resolved. For him truth is one comprehensive, integral, and coherent whole with many parts differing in the methods by which truth is pursued. For the Latin “Averroists” (Siger of Brabant) whom Aquinas combats, it is impossible to reconcile the truths of religion with the truths of philosophy and science and so it is better to keep them in separate compartments to avoid confrontation. Aquinas implicitly accuses the Latin Averroists to be committed to the theory of double truth. He rejects the claim that a proposition could be true in philosophy and science and at the same time false in religious faith.
On the other hand Thomas was also opposed to the Augustinians, who would make truth a matter of faith. He held that reason and faith constitute two harmonious realms in which the truths of faith complement those of reason: both are gifts of God, but reason has an autonomy of its own.
* Aquinas, De Veritate, q.1, a.2; Summa theol., 1a, q.16, a.2-3. See A.D. Sertillanges, La Philosophie de St Thomas d’Aquin, Tome II, Paris, Aubier, 1942, 157-175
(Greek philosopher, 315-240 BC)
Arcesilas, a sceptic of the New Academy appears to have been influenced by Pyrrho. But while Pyrrho’s brand of scepticism was not posited on account of its speculative interest but because it shows the way to happiness, Arcesilas was an eminent dialectician and controversialist who took delight to argue in utramque partem and balance argument against argument. He took up the position that to know we know is an impossibility, and to seek for absolute truth is an absurdity. His polemic was chiefly directed against the Stoic epistemology (see Stoicism) and its doctrine of the ‘apprehensive presentation’ as the ‘criterion of truth’. Arcesilas maintained that we can assent to no sense-impression as carrying conviction and indubitably true, and that the objective realities are consequently unknowable; we can only suspend judgement about them, unless we content ourselves with fallible opinion instead of true knowledge. False and true presentations are indistinguishable: non-existent objects (dreams, errors, folly, etc.) as much as existent ones produce on us clear and distinct impressions. So no valid criterion exists, we have no guide but opinion, and we can only think, believe, and act in accordance with what seems reasonable or probably right.
*Arcesilas of Pitane, see Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ancient Greek Skepticism
(German-born American political theorist, 1906-1975)
Hannah Arendt’s account of the relation between truth and politics is one of the most interesting one can found on this subject. According to her, to look on politics from the perspective of truth—and by truth she meant “factual truth” —is to stand outside the political realm. She notes that the question of truth has never been counted among the political virtues, because it has little to contribute to that change of the world and of circumstances which is among the most legitimate political activities. Arendt is not recommending lying in politics, but rather trying to explain why the political realm so often seems immune to truthfulness.
Politics, rhetoric and truth have been linked ever since democracy took shape. Hannah Arendt reflects upon the Greek legacy: she makes the point that the Ancient Greek belief in argued speech and deliberation is fundamental to any definition of humankind as political. To share in social life necessitates, at any level and in various grades of expertise, to be able to articulate thoughts into words, and to impart these words in such a way so as to make an impression upon those who are addressed in order to persuade them. In Arendt’s vision, rhetoric lies at the core of being citizens. The “logic” invoked in the political debates is however not that of logicians: citizens are not philosophers, they do not search for universally proven Truth. In fact – and this is a fundamental “political fact” –, they should not. They utter their beliefs, expecting their fellow citizens to do the same, and to listen to each other’s expression of opinions which each speaker may hold to be true.
Arendt argues further that in a democracy truths expressed by citizens must somehow represent the diversity of the citizenry. A democracy is made of diverse individuals and multi-cultural communities. In a democratic setting, truth is transient, fragmented, often community-based, it belongs indeed to the domain of prejudice, opinion and belief. This is why argument and deliberation – “rhetoric” – allow citizens, and their representatives, to articulate such diversity. The anti-democratic peril of ideology consists, conversely, in the attempt to try and impose one single truth onto the citizenry. The difficulty of being a democratic citizen resides indeed in learning to accept that each individual, however passionate he is about “what he believes”, and hold to be “true”, may and will be untrue for another citizen. Thus politics in a democracy is a contest of words about competing truths. No government ought ever to believe that they have “the truth”. The danger for politicians is to fail to realize that “rhetoric” is part and parcel of public debate – unless they wrongly believe that there is a fixed “truth” about living together in a democracy.
Politicians are often branded people without ethics. This argument found its expression in the Ancient Greek debate between the Sophists and Plato. Arendt refuses to accuse the Sophists of not respecting “truth”. For to do so would be at the peril of retrenching from public deliberation and civil life the very nature of democracy, notably the common ability to change one’s opinions and to argue for them either way. A democracy is not a theocracy. The ability to exchange viewpoints with others, and with oneself, is the very stuff of democracy. Democracy is the art of conversation.
* Arendt, Hannah, Essay on Truth and Politics, The New Yorker, 1967, reprinted in Between Past and Future, Penguin Books, 1993
(Greek philosopher, 384-324)
1. “I am the friend of Plato, but I am even more the friend of the truth”. This famous saying of Aristotle well emphasizes that for him the search for truth has little in common with Plato’s approach. Plato had transposed the truth in the transcendent world of ideas. Aristotle, on the contrary, wants to find the truth about wordly realities: matter, life, man himself and his mind. Therefore to make true judgments, one should first observe the world to discover the hidden nature and finality of all things. This search for truth is achieved by the empirical method. Furthermore Aristotle observes the human mind and how it functions. He discovers the science of Logic: how valid conclusions are obtained by deduction from given premisses.
In both cases of inductive and deductive process of knowledge Aristotle manifests his interest not only in true knowledge but in necessary knowledge. The knowledge of truth has much to do with the discovery of the necessary links that pertain to the structures found in forms, natures and essences. Aristotle is a staunch believer in the world order in which causalities, whether material, formal, efficient or final, play a central role. To know the truth about world and man is to discover the underlying network of cause and effect.
2. “To say that what-is is not or that what-is-not is, is false; but to say that what-is is, and what-is-not is not, is true”. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1011). Truth is a characteristic of statements. Truth is located in the judgment. Falsehood and truth have to do with the combination and separation of ideas and concepts used as subject and predicate of judgments. What is not composite can neither be true nor false. Affirmations and negations in the judgment arise only when the terms of the judgement, subject and predicate, are combined.
Every sentence has meaning but not every sentence is a proposition. Only such are propositions as have in them either truth or falsity. A prayer is a sentence but it is neither true nor false. The truth-value is a conceptual constituent of propositions. Every proposition must be either true or false with respect to affirming or denying accidents of substances. The question of truth-value is bound up with the nature of propositions and propositions have always a subject-predicate form.
A statement remains unchangeable even if it is true now and false a little later (that Socrates is sitting now, then no longer later). The statement has not changed but, because of a change in the actual thing, the statement has become false. The true statement is not the cause of the actual thing's existence, but rather the actual thing is the cause for the statement to be true. Truth and falsehood depend on things. The affirmation is true if it states the combinations and separations found in things themselves.
If the truth of a statement is in the mind the cause of such truth is in reality. “The false and the true are not in things but in thought”(Metaphysics, 1027). The truth or falsity of propositions, which is determined by reference to our experience, can be discovered about past and present events. But Aristotle is aware that there is a problem regarding propositions about the future. If a proposition about tomorrow is true (or false) today, then the future event it describes will happen necessarily, which is absurd because fatalism is unacceptable. Aristotle’s solution of this problem is to maintain that the disjunction is necessarily true today even though neither of its disjuncts is. Thus, it is necessary that tomorrow’s event will occur or it will not occur , but it is neither necessary that it will occur nor necessary that it will not occur.
3. Aristotle is aware of the complexity involved in the search for truth. That is why he wrote: “No one is able to attain the truth adequately....but everyone says something true about the nature of things...While individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed.” ( Metaphysics, II, 1, 993 b)
* Aristotle, Metaphysics, 993, 1011, 1027
(Lybian born Alexandrian presbyter, 250-336)
In the Christian Trinity, only the Father is ‘true’ God
Arius argues that there is only one God, who is eternal and completely self-sufficient. The so-called ‘Son of God’, therefore, must be a created thing—a creature. Hence he cannot be God. The Trinitarian God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit - is a misconception for neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit possess the same being or substance as the Father. Arius put his finger on the very core of the question of the Trinity. How can God be one and three? When Arius was asked if Jesus Christ was God, he confronted the problem as a specifically philosophical one that admitted of solution according to his particular categories of thought. His position has as its essential starting point the conviction of the absolute transcendency of God, who is in this case God the Father. There can be no other but one God. The being, substance and essence of the one unique God is absolutely incommunicable. If another being shared the divine nature in any intrinsic sense, there would follow a division of divine Being into several. Thus everything else but this one indivisible God must be a result of God's act of creation. Logically one is brought to the conclusion from these premises that the Son or Word is subordinate to the Father. The Son is a creature, a perfect creature, "the first begotten of all creation," but nonetheless a creature—made out of nothing by the Father. It also follows in this logical system that as a creature the Word must have had a beginning. Of course, he was not in time as we are, but "there was when he was not". Jesus, the Word, is made Son by the Father in grace. He is an adoptive Son. Thus even though one can use the term Trinity and speak of three distinct persons, they remain three utterly different beings, and do not share in any way the same substance or being as each other. Only the Father is true God. The Son and Spirit are "God" in a figurative sense.
* R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, T&T Clark, 1988).
(Australian philosopher, b.1926)
Armstrong is a philosopher who insists on a materialist-naturalist metaphysics: there is one actual spatio-temporal world, and nothing more. He regards beliefs as structures of the mind that represent or map reality on the basis of which we undertake actions. These actions are effective to the extent the map is precise.
He adopts a version of the correspondence theory of truth, that beliefs are true if definite states of affairs in the world correspond to them. According to him not all true beliefs are knowledge. Beliefs that are true only accidentally or by mistake are not knowledge. Only beliefs that constitute a credible sign of the occurrence of the states of affairs they concern are knowledge. The truth of what is believed is determined by correspondence between belief states and reality. Knowledge is a reliable mapping of reality.
A central concept for Armstrong's realism is the concept of truthmaker, which is required by the correspondence theory of truth. The correspondence theory respects "the realistic insight that there is a world that exists independently of our thoughts and statements, making the latter true or false". Armstrong suggests that we may accept the redundancy theory as a true account of the semantics of the truth predicate but that we may simultaneously stick to the correspondence theory, which, 'at a deeper, ontological, level', "tells us that, since truths require a truthmaker, there is something in the world that corresponds to a true proposition".
Armstrong does not just defend truthmaker theory but also truthmaker maximalism: the thesis that every proposition has a truthmaker. He provides us with a maximal theory of truth, namely that all propositions are made true by something in the world, some non-propositional thing or set of things. Every type of proposition, from every area of discourse, must find an adequate truthmaker. He attempts to show this, as he extends the account to contingent truths, modal truths, truths about the past and future and mathematical truths. Armstrong's case rests not only on successfully demonstrating a theory of truthmaking for each of these areas, but also on there being no other significant area of discourse outside his consideration and for which there are no truthmakers.
*Armstrong, David, Truth and Truthmakers, Cambridge University Press, 2004
(English scholar of religions, b.1944)
In her arguments against religious fundamentalism, Armstrong takes stock of the ancient distinction between two forms of truth - as described by the Greeks : mythos and logos. Logos is scientific, rational truth, the basis of modern technological progress. Mythos is a different kind of truth, found in myth, art, and in the beliefs of religion. Armstrong's central thesis is that fundamentalism is essentially the result of confusing one kind of truth with another. Both mythos and logos express truth, but truth of two entirely different and incommensurable kinds, which should not be confused.
Pre-modern peoples, she argues, saw religion as belonging firmly to the realm of mythos. Religion was concerned with stories and concepts not to be taken literally, but used as ways to consider the nature of humanity, our relationship to the spiritual, and our place in the world. But after the Enlightenment, when rationalism became so effective and so much a part of life, there was a gradual change of mood and an increased sense that scientific truth was more important than spiritual or mythic truths. Mythos became sidelined and subsequently discredited as 'only' a myth.
It was, Armstrong argues, in reaction to this mentality that some religious groups, feeling threatened, attempted to reinterpret mythos as logos, taking religious concepts as being literally true. This attitude is the core of the disastrous fundamentalist attitude of many religious people today. Armstrong argues that logos and mythos are like two antithetic chemicals that cannot be mixed up. Logos is useful for science and politics, but it cannot answer the big questions of existence: that is the job of mythos, and the two realms of truth must be kept separate.
Many critics have not accepted Armstrong's idea that pre-modern religion was based on mythos rather than logos. They have pointed out that fundamentalists are not the misguided modernist innovators expressing imaginative religious truth in ways it was never meant to be expressed. In fact the allegorical (mythos) interpretation in Christianity has never been a powerful one, if compared to the very ancient and common literalist (logos) tradition. The "fundamentalist" concept of religious truth - as logos as much and more than mythos - has always existed.
*Armstrong Karen, A History of God, Ballantine Books; first edition, 2001
(American Moral philosopher, b.1941)
Basic moral truths are known without inference
Audi defends ethical intuitionism, objective values and objective reasons for action. He models ethical intuitions on a priori, non-empirically-based intuitions of truths, such as basic truths of mathematics. His ethical intuitionism claims that basic moral truths - whether they are principles (such as don't kill people) or judgments (such as it is wrong to kill people) - are known without inference, and in particular they are known via one's rational intuition. One intuits the truth of basic moral propositions, rather than inferring them.
Audi characterizes moral "intuitions" as a species of belief that are self-evident in that they are justified simply by virtue of one's understanding of the proposition believed.
He argues that one has direct access to one’s moral intuitions. These beliefs are not justified by their relationship with other beliefs, rather they are known without being inferred from other premises. For example, that torturing a child for pleasure is wrong can be known without being inferred from any premises.
However direct awareness of one’s intuitions does not necessitate infallible intuitions. Audi defends a kind of “moderate intuitionism” in distinguishing between hard self-evidence and soft self-evidence. Hard self-evidence is strongly axiomatic, immediate, indefeasibly justified, and compelling, while soft self-evidence has none of these properties, and will always be mediate. This mediation allows the capacity for error within self-evident intuitions.
* Audi Robert, The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004
(African philosopher theologian, 354-430)
1. Some items of man’s rational knowledge are remarkable in that they are truths expressed in necessary, immutable, eternal propositions. Such truths are common to all minds who contemplate them. From where do these propositions derive these characteristics? They do not come from the senses perceiving objects which are mutable. Perhaps the mind draws truth from itself ? In that case truth would depend on the mind like an effect depends on its cause. It is evident that truth is not the effect of reason. Truth is not inferior to reason. We do not pass judgments on intelligible truths; on the contrary, we discover them. We submit to them and by them we judge everything else.
Therefore, truth is independent of the mind it rules. Truth is transcendent to the mind. In discovering the transcendence of truth the mind discovers God’ s existence. In seeing the truth the mind perceives a law above itself and an immutable nature : God himself. God is the eternal subsisting Truth, which is cause of the ontological truth of all creatures.
The Augustinian concept of truth may be seen as a transformed and Christianised Neo-Platonism. Plotinus (see below) had made the Intellect, the second principle, inferior to the One. Whereas the One is simple, this Intellect contains many ideas and truth is one of them. Augustine could not maintain the Plotinian distinction of the One and the Intellect. For him the immutable truth is the Son of God, the Logos, and therefore God himself, rather than a principle inferior to God. Augustine internalized the ideas in God. Hence his argument for God’s existence simply is that “Truth exists, but God is Truth, therefore God exists”.
2. Truth is not only something given to us; it is also something we must choose. Augustine underlines the great influence that the will has upon the judgments of the intellect. A soon as one draws near to God and his mystery, the intellect is prevented from being irresistibly drown by proofs and arguments unless the will adds its command. There is no doubt that Augustine here grants the primacy of the will over the intellect. “The vision of truth is the prerogative of the one who lives well, prays well, and studies well.”, he writes. And elsewhere: ”It is incorrect to wish to see truth that you may purify your soul, which should rather be purified that you may see”. The characteristic of all demonstrations, above all in the field of religion, explains how there is place for free choice. Augustine admitted that he erred before his conversion when he demanded absolutely cogent and almost mathematical proofs, not recognizing that the knowledge of God is always mysterious.
His own life story exemplifies the tragedy of the human will : that one can fail to choose the truth. A teacher can lead us to the truth but his words are not the truth. The truth is inner and even though it is given to us, it is ‘subjectively objective’. Once this is understood we must let ourselves be attracted to it and be open to it. Truth is not just something to be known, for once it is found one must do something about it. It is possible to choose willfully against it and that is the tragedy of man’s lot. Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ is the dramatic account of a human conscience who gradually discovers the truth but wavers and hesitates to commit itself to it. His reluctant will was for a long time the obstacle to welcoming the truth.
Augustine’s view is a major modification of the Platonic concept of truth for which truth is a matter of contemplation only. For Augustine truth is also something to choose and to be done about - a matter of will and praxis.
* See E. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St Agustine, Random House, New York, 1959, p.15-19. See also R. Campbell, ibid., p;85-91; Portalié, Eugène, A Guide to the Thouhgt of St Augustine, London, Burns & Oates, 1960, p. 105-109
(Indian mystic philosopher and guru, 1872-1950)
For Aurobindo, the existence of one and eternal Truth - the object of man's search - is certain. All other truths derive from Truth. In the light of Truth they find their place in the general economy of knowledge. For this reason the one Truth can neither be confined within the limits and particularities of a philosophical system or a unique body of Scriptures, nor enunciated in its totality and once for all by a Master - be he a guru, a prophet or an avatar. We cannot claim to have discovered the Truth if the idea we form about it necessitates the intolerant exclusiveness of truths which form the basis of other conceptions.
This Truth, although one and eternal, expresses itself in time and by way of human knowledge. That is the reason why every Scripture must necessarily include two elements: the first is temporary, perishable, relative to the time and place in which it took shape, and the other is eternal and imperishable, applicable to all times and cultures. Besides, the human intellect undergoes constant modifications; it leaves the old expressions and symbols behind to adopt new ones. It can never be certain to understand an ancient Scripture in the same way it was understood by its contemporaries. What remains invaluable in the Bhagavad Gita and other ancient scriptures is not a doctrinal content that speaks to the intellect, but the vision of a message of life that is atemporal and universal.
Thus it is of little interest to discover in the Bhagavad Gita the exact metaphysical meaning intended by its authors and contemporaries. The divergences between the commentaries written on the Gita during centuries show that this task is futile. Deep disagreement divides the exegetes of the Gita and each commentator interprets the book in the light of his own metaphysical system or his own sectarian religious views.
What is much more valuable is to draw out from the Gita the living truths it contains without bothering about doctrinal contents and metaphysical issues. The Gita imparts a message of life, perfectly adaptable to our present day humanity and capable to satisfy its spiritual need. It is for this purpose that the Gita and other sacred Scriptures have been handed over to us. All the rest are only academic disputes and theological dogma. What are of vital importance to the man of today are Scriptures, religions, philosophies that can constantly be renewed and adapted to the need of the inward spiritual experience of an evolving human world. It is in that sense that they are the expressions of the one and eternal truth. The remnants are monuments of a past, with no vital interest for the future of humanity.
*Aurobindo Ghose, Bhagavad Gita and Its Message, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, 1994
(English Philosopher, Oxford, 1911-1960)
1. Austin is well known for his concept of performatory utterances. Language, he explains, is not only used to make statements that are true or false but for a variety of other purposes: giving orders, asking questions, taking oaths, giving thanks, etc. When sentences are used in these ways it makes no sense to ask if they are true or false. Many of our statements do not aim at being true or false. They are not meant to describe but rather to perform a certain act. He calls them “speech-acts”. Descriptive utterances may be true or false if they fulfil the condition of reference to reality. But this is not the case with performatory utterances which are neither true nor false and still perfectly meaningful. Meaningful sentences can have other purposes than saying what is true or false. The logico-positivist dichotomy between true/false and meaningless is proved to be unfounded. That means that truth and meaning must not be confused; the meaningful need be neither true nor false but simply neutral.
Austin complains that logicians and philosophers of language have had too little to say about the multiplicity of structures and usages in natural languages. Their mistake was to presume that language is preeminently the tool of constative or descriptive assertion, a tool interested in providing statements about the world which are characterisable as either true or false. They had forgotten Aristotle’s wise remark that: “Not all sentences are statements; only such as have in them either truth or falsity; thus a prayer is a sentence, but neither true nor false”. Many utterances are not subject to the truth/false conditions of propositional knowledge. They exist as performatives or acts of welcoming, apologising, advising, etc. Such utterances have felicitous conditions in place of truth values. In them we do not describe a state of affairs in the real world. Rather we bring a state of affairs into existence by virtue of our utterances. The performative is an act and not a representation.
2. What is true or false are statements. But statements are not made in the abstract. Making a statement is a historic event made by a certain speaker to an audience in particular circumstances. It is a matter of describing something and doing it correctly. Austin endorses a form of correspondence theory of truth. Facts and state of affairs in the world are what make true statements to be true.
What kind of correlation is there between words and situations, events or state of affairs? Austin agrees to call that correlation a ‘correspondence’ , but he admits that it is not easy to define it. Nevertheless, he adds, there is no reason to reject the view. At least it should be made clear that the correlation or correspondence is purely conventional, and that means that the words used in making a true statement do not mirror in any way any feature of the situation or event. The statement we make does not reproduce the structure of reality. We must not read back into the world the features of language (as it is done by Russel’s and Wittgenstein’s naive view of the pictorial theory of world and language) (see Russel and Wittgenstein I).
* J.L. Austin, Truth, p.18-31, from Truth, Ed. by G. Pitcher, Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1964
(French philosopher, 1295-1369)
The certainty of truth is based only on experience and logical reasoning
Nicholas of Autrecourt has been called a medieval Hume. He maintained that all certitude is based on and reducible to the immediate evidence of experience and the Principle of Contradiction. But there is no absolute evidence derived from experience that any natural causes operate. Moreover, it is a consequence of the Principle of Contradiction that in every valid inference the consequent simply restates all or part of what was stated in the antecedent. Hence from the fact that one thing is known to exist, it cannot be inferred with the evidence of the Principle of Contradiction that another and different thing exists. From this, it follows that effects cannot be logically inferred from alleged causes nor conversely. Thus, though there may be a probability for causal connection, there can be no certainty that any natural causes exist. Neither experience nor logical reasoning can provide such certainty.
All evident knowledge must be reducible to the first principle, i.e. to the principle of non-contradiction. An inference yields evident knowledge only when the affirmation of its antecedent and the negation of its consequent are contradictory. This means that the antecedent and the consequent, or, more precisely, what is signified by the antecedent and the consequent, must be identical, "because if this were not the case, it would not be immediately evident that the antecedent and the opposite of the consequent cannot stand together without contradiction." It is in the context of this theory that Autrecourt launches an attack on our claim to have certain knowledge of the existence of substances and causal relations. On the basis of this principle, one may not infer knowledge of the existence of effects from knowledge of their causes, nor knowledge of the existence of substances from knowledge of their accidents.
This view runs contrary to the Aristotelian position, according to which causal relations really exist and are discoverable by means of induction, so that the existence of substances can be inferred from the perceptible accidents inhering in them. The upshot of Autrecourt’s view is that we do not have experience of causal relations or substances, nor does logic provide certain knowledge of them. There are no logical reasons to assume that there is an evident relation between a cause and an effect, or between a substance and an accident.
* See Grellard, C., Croire et savoir. Les principes de la connaissance selon Nicolas d'Autrécourt. Paris: Vrin, 2005.
(German philosopher, 1843-1896)
Avenarius' philosophy called Empirio-Criticism is only another name for the philosophy of ‘Pure Experience’. The aim of this philosophy is that, since so much of our experience is now no longer pure, the philosopher must make it his business to purify it. He can only do it by making a clean sweep of all those notions by which our ancestors strove to facilitate thought, but in fact have only encumbered it. All philosophical ideas such as substance, accident, cause, self, etc. are useless: they must be done away with since they are static, whereas experience is essentially a process and a growth. This done, all that will remain will be impressions. 'Being' must be thought as an impression which presupposes nothing beyond what is apparent to the senses. Impressions are the only real content of experience, while change is the form which experience takes.
This is all the truth with which philosophy is concerned. It will be purely descriptive, yet simple, exact, complete. Philosophy is the scientific effort to exclude from knowledge all ideas not included in the given. Quality will be reduced to quantity and laws will treat of quantitative equivalence, not of causal connection or sequence. All values and quantitative relations will be interdependent and mutually deducible one from another. Religion, philosophy and morals also will be characterised by a purely experimental method, and will be regarded from a purely experimental point of view. Predispositions, prejudices and individual differences will have disappeared, and their place will be taken by an indefinite variety of minute impressions, leading to reactions of a simple and invariable type. In short, when the ideal of pure experience has been realised, man will have become a mere machine, so that no matter what particular specimen of humanity you may choose, if you press the same lever you will get the same feeling, the same experience, the same truth.
* Avenariius Richard, Critique of Pure Experience, Kritik der Reinen Erfahrung. Leipzig: Fues (R. Reisland).
(Islamic philosopher, Spain, 1126-1198)
Averroes considered the philosophical system of Aristotle as the supreme truth. Being a Muslim and wanting to avoid being accused of heresy, he had to harmonize his philosophical ideas with Islamic orthodoxy. It is often said that he worked it out in inventing the so-called ‘double truth’ theory. This theory means that a proposition can be true in philosophy and false in theology or vice versa. But Averroes never taught such a thing. He only meant that one and the same truth can be understood in different ways.
He distinguishes three different levels of understanding of the religious revelation contained in the Koran. First, the highest and noblest form of religious understanding is reached through philosophical demonstration. Second, a lower level of theological understanding consists in taking the truth of the Koran for granted and arguing for it dialectically on the basis of undemonstrated assumptions. Third, the lowest form of understanding is the proper of unsophisticated believers and religious fundamentalists who take the poetic analogies and metaphors of the Koran as literal truths.
Thus, according to Averroes, religion (Islam) does not teach any truth that the reason of the philosopher is not able to discover by himself. Even more, the deepest meaning of the Koran is known through philosophy so much so that Averroes seems to attribute an inferior status to the truths of religious faith. In any case he stresses that there can be no conflicts between these different kinds of truth because they belong to different levels of understanding. Truth cannot contradict truth and therefore the Koranic revelation and Aristotle’s philosophy are two different expressions of the same truth.
If Averroes was so eager to show the concordance between the essentials of Islamic religion and philosophical truth, his intention was probably to save religion and making it respectable in that it could be seen as intrinsically rational. To “rationalize” religion, for him, was not to destroy it but rather to enhance it and to demonstrate its truth. If religion were not philosophically true, it would be irrational and unintelligible, the product of pure imagination, an admixture of myths with no truth-value. Averroes’s so-called two-truths (three-truths) theory makes it possible for the philosopher to be a ‘religious’ person in the fullest sense.
* See Averroes in M.J. Charlesworth, Philosophy of Religion: The Historic Approaches, Macmillan, London, 1972, p.23-27
(British logical positivist, 1910-1989)
The so called problem of truth is no problem at all. For truth is neither something real nor a quality nor a relation.
1.There is no ‘truth of reason’ in analytical propositions but only tautologies established by linguistic conventions. The so called truths of reason have no content. They say nothing more than “A is A”, which is certain and necessary because we have decided to adopt such linguistic conventions. These propositions simply record our determination to use words in a certain fashion. They are not only independent of the nature of the external world but also of the nature of the mind (Ayer rejects Kantian idealism). They are “true” by definition. Mathematics, Logic, etc. are nothing more than immense tautologies.
2. There is no empirical truth of reality with which the mind is in correspondence and which language expresses in synthetic propositions. To say that something is true is to say nothing more than affirming it. Truth and falsehood are nothing more than affirmation and negation. There is no need to state or add : ‘is true’ or ‘ is false’. The predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ are redundant and useless. The real and only problem is to show how our propositions are validated. Why do we agree to affirm or negate our propositions?
To that question Ayer answers : we agree to affirm P, not because it is ‘true’, but because P enables us to anticipate experience. If P fulfills that function, it is valid. Past experiences are a guide for us for future actions and commitments. Besides, experiences never give certainty for they are all hypothetical and probable. Through them we are never in contact with the immediately given because experiences are always interpretations. Accordingly they are never absolutely valid but always tentative and provisional. Ayer rejects the possibility of ostensive propositions, that is, propositions that are not just hypotheses but are a direct record of the data of experience, being thereby absolutely certain. He claims that no synthetic empirical propositions can be purely ostensive. One can never simply register a sense-content without describing and interpreting it.
To sum up: there is no problem of ‘truth’ but of validation of propositions. A priori analytical propositions are validated by linguistic conventions and definitions. They are absolutely certain but have nothing to do with reality. Empirical propositions are said to be valid or more valid than others because they enable us to anticipate experience. They are never certain, always probable.
3. As a consequence of Ayer’s claim that “All truth claims are either empirical or analytic”, all objective accounts of ethics and theology must be rejected.
Moral judgements are neither empirical nor analytic, therefore no truth claims can be made about them. Moral judgements are expressions of feelings. “This is good”: such a statement cannot make a genuine truth claim. Moral judgments function as exclamations. To assert “Peace is good” amounts to the expression of a feeling “Hurrah for peace!” and nothing more. Another person may declare “War is good” and he means “Hurrah for war!” Values and disvalues are not a matter of true or false, but of likes and dislikes of individuals and societies. Ayer favours an ethics of ‘emotionalism’.
Belief in God is to assent to a reality that transcends sense experience. Such a belief is neither empirical nor analytic, hence it is non-sensical. It is neither true nor false. Belief in God expresses the ‘feeling’ of the believer, but it is not a genuine intellectual issue.
*A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, McMillan, London, 1936 , chap.IV & V