(French philosopher of science, 1884-1962)
Bachelard is a philosopher of science. Science grows through a series of discontinuous changes, which he callls ‘epistemological breaks’ because they overcome epistemological obstacles. The path of enquiry is obstructed by a fixation on methodological and conceptual features inherited from common sense and outdated scientific ideas and theories. The major contribution of Bachelard to the philosophy of science has been his analysis of these epistemological obstacles, internal to thought itself in the unconscious, often cultural, depth of psychism. He upholds that scientific progress takes place by leaps and bounds in a discontinuous fashion. His ideas on scientific development anticipates Kuhn’s concept of revolutionary ‘paradigm’ (see Kuhn). Both defend the view that each new scientific framework rejects its predecessors as fundamentally erroneous.
Bachelard denounces the common idea that it is enough for us to start from an ‘object’ to think that we are ‘objective’. We marvel in front of the object and elaborate hypotheses and theories upon it. We form convictions which have the appearance of knowledge. Bachelard maintains that the initial source, the evidence of the object is not a fundamental truth. Scientific objectivity is possible only if we break away from the immediately given, if we refuse to be seduced by the first observation. Genuine objectivity gives the lie to the first contact with the object. It is its duty to first criticize everything: sensation, common sense, linguistic lure.
True knowledge is not the passive witness of things and events, it is creative of its relations to the world. Scientific knowledge manifests the life of the spirit; it shows that reason is initiative, that it is the result of a conquest over errors because our mind has a natural inclination towards the truth. We have to fight against our opinions, our subjectivity and common prejudices; we must criticize everything, formulate hypotheses, question nature, recreate a world in rejecting the first images. This task is achieved by imagination – which is not the faculty to form images of reality – but the faculty to distort images, that is, to form images that transcend realities. Creative imagination is an experience of openness through which one never ceases to overcome the acquired concepts.
No wonder that Bachelard rejects Descartes’s foundationalist claim that knowledge is founded on the infallible intuitions of first truths (see Descartes). All truth-claims are subject to revision in the light of further evidence. Reason in its conquest of truth remains always open to the future. It is always capable to question the principles on which it had been too readily leaning hitherto. Bachelard denounces the rigid and stiffened concept of reason in favour of a dialectical concept of knowledge in which imagination opens to way for creative liberty in scientific research. Rational knowledge is not the acknowledgment of fixed objectivities but a process that is constantly on the move and in need of being rectified at every stage of development. Error is not something negative to be eliminated, rather, it is an unavoidable element of growing knowledge.
* Bachelard, Gaston, The New Scientific Spirit, 1934. See The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, R.Audi ed., Cambridge University Press, 1999, p.67
(English philosopher, 1561-1626)
Francis Bacon is regarded as the champion of the inductive method for the discovery of natural laws. His aim was the separation of truth from error, reality from fiction. He considered that though the affirmations of Schoolmen might be true in the metaphysical sphere, their deductions in the region of ‘things’ were false. Bacon was concerned to insist that Truth is twofold: the truth of religion-metaphysics and the truth of science. These different kinds of truth must be separated, in order that the two kinds may not contaminate each other. “Sacred theology must be drawn from the word and oracles of God, not from the light of nature or the dictates of reason”. “From the absurd mixture of matters divine and human, proceed heresies and ‘fantastical philosophy’”. Bacon saw no problem provided that two realms of reason and revelation are kept separate. He was thus an advocate of “double truth”, that of reason and that of revelation.
Bacon denounces a double fallacy: first, to try to confirm the truths of religion by the principles of science, second, to try extract scientific truths out of the Scriptures, like some who “have endeavoured to build a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis”. His concern seems to have been to separate religious truth and scientific truth in the interest of science, not of religion. He wished to keep science pure from religion and was probably far less interested in keeping religion pure from science. He was pleading for science in an age dominated by religion. Religious truth must be placed far out of reach, not in order that so it may be more devoutedly appproached, but in order to keep it out of mischief. In urging the separation of religion and science, he made sure that the new knowledge of natural laws through experimentation may be safely embraced without fear of endangering any religious beliefs.
* Bacon, Francis, Novum Organum, De Augmentis, quoted in Wiley, Basil, The Seventeenth Century Background, Chatto & Windus, London, 1946, p.26-31
(English medieval philosopher, 1214-1293)
For Roger Bacon the road to truth can be long and difficult; and, to be sure, it is never ending. But there are rules helping to denounce the four very significant stumbling blocks on the way of truth. He devotes the first part of his Opus Majus to the consideration of the four offendicula or causes of error: blind faith in a false authority, habit which keeps on what is false, prejudices of the ignorant crowd, false knowledge hidden behind ignorance. He reproaches the philosophy and theology of his time to work with unscientific methods and to deal with false problems.
1.Experiment, which is self-conscious and purposive experience, can validate the claims of genuine authority but external authority cannot supply the fruits of experiment.
2. Custom is often anchored in social expediency, but real knowledge cannot be rooted in ad hoc and peremptory speculations.
3. Experimentation needs the patient development of true skill in meditation and perception, for the senses alone will mislead the uncultivated and disordered mind.
4. Most dangerous of all, however, is the deliberate cloaking of ignorance behind pretended knowledge, the pathetic consolidation of errors arising from fragmentation of consciousness.
When these offendicula are purged, one may readily perceive the unity of science and recognize the need for an encyclopaedic approach to Nature.
* Robert Belle Burke, Bacon Roger Opus Majus, New York, Russel & Russel, 1962
(Moroccan born French philosopher, b.1937)
Truth for Badiou is not a matter of theory, but a "practical question", something that happens. It is not the adequacy or correspondence of something known to its object, but a process from which emerges something new. This notion of truth has nothing to do with what can be proved or demonstrated. Truth is not recognition or contemplation, it is a matter of active intervention by a subject.
In fact Badiou invents his own radical concept of truth : truth is what disturbs or destroys or interrupts the order of knowledge. What is true is a realization that rips apart our categories of understanding and forces us to commit ourselves to some new idea or new world of ideas. He says: "I will start with the following idea: a truth is, first of all, something new. What transmits, what repeats, I shall call knowledge." For Badiou distinguishing truth from knowledge is essential. Knowledge as such only gives us repetition, it is concerned only with what already is. All truth, for him, is something new, hence it must be submitted to thought not as judgment or proposition but as a process in the real. Truth is a process that begins and for the process of truth to begin, something must happen. Truth introduces a transformative innovation in any situation. Every such innovation can only begin with some sort of exceptional break with the status quo, an 'event'. Truth is always a challenge to what we already know. Truth is both a commitment and an openness. It is something that to which we commit ourselves, but that at the same time we must always remain open, because a new truth may strike at any time.
Thus for Badiou dealing with truth is not only an epistemological matter but also an ethical one, as he identifies evil as the attempt to create and live within a closed system of knowledge. Evil is the impulse to monopolize or determine or force all truths: it is something that one could call totalitarianism or fundamentalism. Human goodness is, for Badiou, a deep or even total openness to a belief that is not yet knowledge. Truth hence arrives as a disturbance of consensus and convention, as something that cannot be assimilated into the current state of knowledge, and it arrives because someone has the resoluteness to face it and hold to it, even alone.
* Badiou, Alain, Théorie du Sujet, Le Seuil, Paris, 1982. 352 p., L'être et l'événement , Le Seuil, Paris, 1988. 564 p.
(Founder of the Baha’i faith, 1817-1892)
1. All religions are from God. They differ only on account of time and culture. One should treat members of all religions as they are of our own. If religions are the cause of disunity, it is better to be without religion. God is one Being therefore truth must be one. Still truth is relative to the circumstances in which it is being applied. Religious truth is relative to the capacity, needs and understanding of people and culture.
Differences have been created by God. No two humans are the same. These differences do not diminish men and women’s spiritual equality: all human beings are the fruits of one tree. No one should exalt him/herself over another, no religion over another. Diversity of individuals and societies must be protected: it is a strength, not a weakness.
No human being is infallible. No one has the right to compel another to believe and think in the same way as he does. Conflict and contention are forbidden. Since individuals were created differently by God it is only out of the meeting of differing opinions that truth can be made known. Only if we respect and tolerate each other, can the truth be made evident, otherwise it remains obscure.
2. Baha’u’llah emphasizes the fundamental obligation of human beings to acquire knowledge with their “own eyes and not through the eyes of others”. One of the main sources of conflict in the world is the fact that many people blindly and uncritically follow various traditions, movements and opinions. God has given each human being a mind and the capacity to differentiate truth from falsehood. If individuals fail to use their reasoning capacities and choose instead to accept without question certain opinions and ideas, either out of admiration for or fear of those who hold them, then they are neglecting their basic moral responsibility as human beings. Moreover when people act in this way, they often become attached to some particular ideology or tradition and thus become intolerant of those who do not share it. Such attachments lead to conflicts.
Baha’u’llah believes that, if only people would search out truth, they would find themselves united. The fact that many imagine themselves to be right and everybody else wrong is the greatest of all obstacles in the path towards unity. Unity is necessary if we want to reach truth, for truth is one.
* See Abdu’l-Baha, Paris Talks, London Baha’I Publishing trust, 1969
(Russian Philosopher, 1895-1975)
Bakhtin’s philosophy allows for one absolute, which he calls dialogue. Dialogue in his view is not merely a form of communication, but the most fundamental human relation. “ ‘To be’ means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. All else is the means; dialogue is the end. A single voice ends nothing and resolves nothing”. No statement can claim truth without interaction with other, contradictory statements. Single statements and lonely voices have no significance. On the other hand no existing statement is refused to enter the big dialogue, or the polyphonic truth.
Truth for Bakhtin requires a multiplicity of bearers. It simply cannot be uttered by a single mouth. Truth does not consist in a statement, but in a multitude of simultaneous and contradictory statements. Authentic voices are those that are parts of a chorus. The fictive voices are those expressed outside a genuine dialogue. Truth is not ‘being in touch with one’s inner feelings’ but being in touch with the world of other human beings. The authentic self does not belong to the individual. There is no true self without other selves. Authenticity requires being different in different situations and with different people. Dialogue which constitutes the truth is a non-teleological concept. Dialogue cannot be used for some further end, but is an end in itself.
But if truth is polyphonic, how does one distinguish polyphony from cacophony, when all the different voices coexist but never touch each other? The multitude of representations by itself is not enough to constitute the truth. Bakhtin’s answer to this objection is first that the different representations constitute a dialogical whole only when they are part of the same conversation, even though they have differing opinions on the subject. The other requirement of the ‘polyphonic truth’ is what Bakhtin calls “inclusion”. The truth is in essence everything every one has to say on a subject, whether right or wrong notions. Truth is all inclusive. Neither the statements of the minority group nor the statements of the majority group represent the truth. The truth is there when real living people engage in dialogue around two (or many) sets of statements, even if apparently contradictory.
Bakhtin rejects the idea of ‘absolute’ truth because of its internal structure, namely, that it speaks in a single voice. No individual discourse is capable of producing truth on its own, just because no single voice has enough capacity to generate the truth. Bakhtin thinks of truth as a number of simultaneous statements about the same topic without trying to reconcile or “average” them.
* Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981
(Swiss theologian, 1905-1988)
Truth is hardly knowable without love. Beauty leads to goodness and goodness leads to truth
1. In the Truth of the World Balthasar begins by reflecting on the coinherence of truth, goodness, and beauty. For him the reduction of a knowledge of the truth to a purely theoretical kind of evidence from which all living, personal, and ethical decisions have been excluded entails such a palpable narrowing of the field of truth that it is already robbed of its universality and thus of its own proper essence. Truth and goodness are both transcendental properties of being, therefore both must interpenetrate each other. Correspondingly, the same also goes for the last transcendental property of being, that of beauty; she too makes a claim staked on her universal validity; she too can never be separated from her two sisters. Only a constant, living unity of theoretical (truth), ethical (goodness), and aesthetic (beauty) attitudes can mediate true knowledge of being.
The recognition of the true requires a commitment to the true and so what is recognized as truly good must be lived as well. But the perception of the true is also the unveiling of beauty. In fact, for Balthasar, truth is what happens when beauty is unveiled.
The meaning of being lies in love, and knowledge is only explainable through love and for love. From this follows the insight that love is never separable from the truth. Just as little as there could be knowledge without the will, so also truth is hardly knowable without love
2. Thus Balthasar argues that there can be no reflection on the truth of Christian revelation until it is lived out in committed action, which a Christian will never feel called to do without having first perceived revelation in all its inherent beauty. The fundamental property of beauty elicits a response; and for Balthasar, revelation is primarily a disclosure of the beauty of the Lord. Beauty compels, and a Christianity without beauty has lost its ability to compel.
Christianity, for Balthasar, has no need of apologetics of the conventional sort. The Church should instead endeavor to make her Lord visible. Christians must take up the endeavor to "shine through". Balthasar makes the "apology of holiness." He argues that the 'perfect' Christian is also the perfect proof of Christianity: in the Christian's existential transparency, Christianity becomes comprehensible both in itself and to the world and itself exhibits a spiritual transparency. The saint is the apology for the Christian religion. It is through living a holy life that a person can convince him/herself that the Christian faith is true, and that the God which is believed in is a real God.
* Balthasar, Hans Urs von, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory : The Truth of the World, Ignatius Press, 2001
(American scholar on science and religion, b.1923)
There are four criteria for assessing the value or theories in normal scientific research:
* Agreement with data. This is the most important criterion, though it never provides proof that a theory is true. For other theories not yet developed may fit the data as well or better. Theories are always undetermined by data. However agreement with data constitute impressive supports for a theory.
* Coherence. A theory should be consistent with other accepted theories and, if possible, conceptually interconnected with them.
* Scope. Theories can be judged by their comprehensiveness or generality. A theory is valued if it unifies previously disparate domains.
* Fertility. A theory is evaluated not just by its past accomplishment but by its current ability and future promise in providing the framework for an ongoing research program.
In Western thought three main views of truth have been elaborated and each emphasises particular criteria from the list above. For the correspondence view, a proposition is true if it corresponds to reality. This is the common-sense understanding of truth. It is the position adopted by classical realism. It seems to fit with the empirical side of science according to which theories must agree with the data. But we have seen that there are no theory-free data with which a theory can be compared.
The coherence theory says that a set of propositions is true if it is internally coherent. This view has been adopted by rationalists and philosophical idealists, and it seems to fit with the theoretical side of science. No scientific theory can be evaluated in isolation. But this also problematic because there can be more than one internally coherent set of theories.
The pragmatic view says that a proposition is true if it works in practice. We should judge by the consequences. Scientific enquiry is indeed problem-solving and that is the fourth criteria mentioned above: fertility. But taken alone that criterion is inadequate. It is too vague to say that an idea “works” or is “useful” unless these concepts are further specified by other criteria.
Barbour’s conclusion is that the meaning of truth is correspondence with reality. But because reality is inaccessible to us, the criteria of truth must include all the four of the criteria mentioned above. The criteria taken together include the valid insights in all these views of truth. One or another of the criteria may be more important at a particular stage of scientific enquiry. Because correspondence is taken as the definition of truth, this is a form of realism, but it is a critical realism because a combination of criteria is used. In any case science does not lead to certainty. Its conclusions are always tentative, incomplete, and subject to revision. Theories change in time, and we should expect them to be modified or overthrown, as previous ones have been.
* Barbour, Ian, Religion in an Age of Science, SCM Press, London, 1990, p 34-37
(Contemporary Canadian philosophers)
The role of belief as a way of coming to truth in collaboration
1. Belief is not the same as knowledge. The knower is the person who examines the relevant facts, rightly understands and intelligently concludes with true judgment, as is the case, for instance, with the weatherman who has at his disposal all the required instruments. For TV viewers and newspaper readers, this is not the case: they are believers rather than knowers. Knowledge is immanently generated, while belief is the acceptance of reliably communicated knowledge. The weatherman knows, the listener believes. There is a clear difference between knowledge and belief. 2. Belief meets a real need in scientific activity as much as in daily life. It is part of successful human collaboration , and collaboration is essential to human progress. We need to rely on the knowledge of others. No person alone can know everything about everything. Collaboration involves belief.
3. Therefore not only knowledge but also belief are ways of coming to the truth. We rely on our own direct understanding ( knowledge) of things and situations and also on the understanding of others (belief). In practice knowledge and belief – though distinct – are woven together inextricably. Belief, the second way of coming to the truth, is basically possible because of the first way of direct knowledge. It is also possible because the truth reached by direct knowledge has an objective character, independent of the subject. The knower can communicate the truth to another who accepts it. In most cases – albeit not in all - the truth of knowledge is communicable. 4. Coming to believe a given truth involves a complex of personal judgments prior to the act of belief. First, we act on the conviction that belief in general is of value and that to communicate to others the knowledge we have and accept the same from others is possible and well-founded. Second, we must ascertain the accuracy of the communication from the orginal source of truth and the reliability of the source itself. Indeed a belief is always a secondary way to possess the truth. The proposition believed has to be knowledge for some one. Third, the ‘reliability of the source’ does not mean that we are looking for evidence of the truth of the particular proposition but for evidence of belief in that proposition. There is no general rule here to follow and no alternative to the intelligent and critical reflection on the sufficiency of accumulated evidence for the belief.
* G. Barden & P. McShane, Towards Self-meaning, Gill and McMillan, Dublin, 1969, p.63-78
(Swiss protestant theologian, 1886-1968)
Truth can only come from Truth, i.e. from God. Religions are human fabrications and therefore they are false. Like Feuerbach, Barth regards man’s ideas of God as projections of man’s own wishes. If the coming of the truth to humanity is possible, it is only through divine revelation. Of himself man is not in a position to apprehend the truth. He ought to renounce even all attempts to try to apprehend the truth. The man who thinks that the truth comes from himself or humanity does not listen, he is not ready to believe. In ‘religions’ man endeavours to grasp God by his own power. Hence religions are the major obstacle for welcoming the divine revelation. In religions people bolt themselves against revelation by providing substitutes : they take away in advance that which can be given only by God himself. The ‘human’ God reached by religions, philosophies and natural theologies is a complete fiction which has no relation to the true God. It is an anti-God which has to be discarded in order that Truth may reveal itself. The Truth can come only to human beings who have emptied themselves of all claims to reach the divine. Divine revelation is the truth besides which there is no other truth. Truth is totally transcendent and there is no immanent human truth. Truth is sheer ‘grace’, the free and unmerited favour of God. Revelation does not link up with human religion which is already present and practised. On the contrary it contradicts it. There can be no question of a harmonious co-operating of man with the revelation of God, as if religion were a kind of outstretched hand which is filled by God in his revelation. There is no continuity and compatibility but only contradiction between religion and revelation, between unbelief and belief, between falsehood and truth.
Religion is never true in itself and as such. The revelation of God denies that any religion or any philosophy is true. Revelation is the truth besides which there is no other truth, over which there is only lying and wrong. No religion is true, for all religions are human products and truth can only come from without. If nonetheless we want to speak of “true religion”, it means that such a religion is the creature of grace. And grace is the revelation of God. In this sense Barth has no hesitation to say that only Christianity is “true” because it alone is the locus of divine revelation.
* K. Barth, The Revelation of God as the abolition of religion, in Christianity and other Religions, Ed. by J. Hick and B. Hebblewaithe, Collins, 1980, p.36-50
( American philosopher,1934-1990)
Truth: neither dogmatism nor relativism but ‘critical preference’
Bartley rejects the dogmatic 'true belief' framework of Western thought, which prevents problem solving and imaginative criticism. This framework, he contends, generates on the one hand true believers who insist that they have the truth in their grasp, on the other hand relativists and nihilists who think that truth and falsehood are indistinguishable. Bartley’s insight into the authoritarian tradition inspired him to pursue a fundamental critique of the quest for positively justified beliefs, an error, which he labeled "justificationism". The target of his critique is the dogmatic or 'true belief' theory of rationality which demands positive justification as the criterion of rationality. This demand is summed up in the formula: beliefs must be justified by an appeal to an authority of some kind, generally the source of the belief in question, and this justification makes the belief either rational, or if not rational at least valid for the person who holds it.
In the Anglo Saxon tradition of Empiricism the authority of sense experience was adopted. In the Continental Rationalist tradition, following Descartes, the locus of authority resides with the intellectual intuition. Both Empiricism and Rationalism did not challenge the deep-seated theory of justificationism, which provided the common framework of thought in which the rival schools waged their battles for intellectual, moral and political authority.
The “justificationist” position has given rise to either relativism or fideism. On the one hand relativists tend to be disappointed dogmatists who realize that positive confirmation cannot be achieved. From this correct premise they proceed to the false conclusion that all positions are pretty much the same and none can really claim to be better than any other. There is no such thing as the truth, no way to get nearer to the truth and there is no such thing as a rational position. On the other hand fideists are people who believe that knowledge is based on an act of faith. Consequently they embrace whatever they want to regard as the truth. If they stop to think about it they may accept that there is no logical way to establish a positive justification for their beliefs or any others, so they insist that we make our choice regardless of reason: 'Here I stand!'. Most forms of rationalism up to date have, at rock bottom, shared this attitude with the irrationalists and other fundamentalists because they share the same 'true belief' structure of thought.
The solution suggested by Bartley is to abandon the quest for positive justification and instead to settle for a critical preference for one option rather than others, in the light of critical arguments and evidence offered to that point. A preference may (or may not) be revised in the light of new evidence and arguments. This is a simple, commonsense position but it defies the dominant traditions of Western thought which have almost all taught that some authority provides (or ought to provide) grounds for positively justified beliefs.
According to Bartley’s stance of critical preference no position can be positively justified but it is quite likely that one, (or some) will turn out to be better than others are in the light of critical discussion and tests. This type of rationality holds all its positions and propositions open to criticism. A standard objection to this stance is that it is empty; just holding our positions open to criticism provides no guidance as to what position we should adopt in any particular situation. But for Bartley this criticism misses its mark for two reasons. First, the stance of critical preference is not a position, it is a metacontext and as such it is not directed at solving the kind of problems that are solved by adopting a position on some issue or other. It is concerned with the way that such positions are adopted, criticized, defended and relinquished. Second, Bartley does provide guidance on adopting positions; we may adopt the position that to this moment has stood up to criticism most effectively. Of course this is no help for dogmatists who seek stronger reasons for belief, but that is a problem for them, not for exponents of critical preference
* Bartley William Warren, The Retreat from Commitment, Knopf, New York, 1962
(French social and literary critic, 1915-1980)
Words and thoughts never reach the truth
Bataille took Nietzsche’s epistemological skepticism to its extreme. He dared to profess what the implications of Nietzsche´s philosophy were. For it not only implied the death of God, but the death of his own humanity, of philosophy, also. If there is no permanent and absolute meaning to be found in the inner and outer world, then all philosophical statements are ´false´ in as far as they are provisional. All the constructions we make, be they material, mental, emotional or spiritual, are nothing but empty epiphenomena on an ever receding world of darkness that can never be grasped by the limitations of our thinking. We think we know something but this is only what Bataille used to call ´escape´. We are lured away from the fundamental unknowability of the world into thinking that somewhere there must be an epistemological anchor that connects us to the true reality that we are and where we live in.
Bataille’s radical views about thought and meaning have their bearings upon all his writings. He never seems to make a claim. His sentences are never propositional, but always tentative and probing. He is hard to pin down to definite philosophical views and statements. He seems to suggest that he wants to avoid presenting a philosophy of his own, because in that case he would have succumbed to ´the escape´.
For Bataille the poet and the philosopher of the inner experience have this in common that they both use the known the reach the unknown. They want to take the reader to the very limits of the possible, into ´the impossible´. This made Bataille very uneasy and also bored with philosophical discourse because the only result discursive thought could offer was to ´chop up´ the world in digestible fragments. But it never reached the inner experience of the world. But neither did poetry. Because poetry was still dependent upon words. So we find sentences in Bataille like ´I could have said.... but that bores me´ where he warns us that words have a tendency to become authoritative, despite the fact that they never reach the truth. The factuality of words and thoughts give the impression that they have reality and must be true for that reason.
According to Bataille the greatest philosophical misconception rampant in the world is the idea that being can be isolated, autonomous. The obvious fact that being is always ´being in context´, ´being in communion´, escapes us the most. We ignorantly perceive ourselves to be beings on our own, ´ipse-beings´, who are in combat with the world we live in. We want this isolation to end, because subconsciously we feel that it is unnatural for a being to be a ipse-being. The ipse-being is contra naturam. To annihilate this unnatural isolation we strive with the power and the exploitation of our knowledge to be the all and everything. But this is exactly what makes us so tragic. Because an ipse-being can never be the all. Finally man has to concede that he cannot be the all and that his attempts at knowing the all are futile. Fear rises because he has to admit that he knows nothing.
* Bataille George, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall, 2004, University of Minnesota Press.
(British social scientist and anthroplogist, 1904-1980)
Bateson stated that the individual can never encounter the world as it actually is. We do not have access to the territory, as such, but only to maps of the territory and our descriptions are part of that map. There are innumerable characteristics or data contained in any event or entity. We can never choose all the distinctions to put on a map or to include in our research. In our daily lives, we systematically select certain differences from a vast array of sights, smells, and sounds to enter into the circuit of transformation and become information. In research, we also strive to bring some order and meaning to a large collection of data in order to make sense of it. This search for meaning generates structure, patterns, and categories. Every image we encounter requires coding and mapping. There is no such thing as true knowledge or a real picture of the world that is independent of any knower. There is always a blend of the phenomena and the way in which one distinguishes it. One doesn't cause the other to have meaning. They have meaning together, in relationship to each other. Differences are not present in things without the presence of a living organism to recognize that difference. Bateson stressed the idea that data are not events or objects but are always records of descriptions or memories of events or objects. "Always there is a transformation or recording of the raw event which intervenes between the scientist and the object. In a strict sense, therefore, no data are truly "raw," and every record has been somehow subjected to editing and transformation. There is an infinite line of separation between a moment or event and one's perception of that event. We can never capture or possess a moment. Reality is not palpable. It is impossible for language to be adequate to the phenomena. We can only scan it and attempt to convey its vitality. What we have is the facsimile of expression or a representation of reality. Something is lost and gained in every representation.
Bateson did not believe that things could be objectively observed and measured because observations demands involvement. Information is not a material thing. Information is relative to how I operate on what is out there. It is the researcher who must supply the thought and energy that is needed to decipher any information. Bateson concluded that in the world of mental process, there are not real things, only messages carried by things.
Research plans and methods are primarily determined by the researcher's opinions and assumptions about what sort of thing he is dealing with, so it follows that part of research should be to study the nature and process of research itself. If it is me as the researcher who is the primary instrument, it is important for me to examine how I participate in the observed since my own frame of reference will heavily guide what I choose to present as significant. Since I cannot analyze data as representing some objective state of events, research becomes a task of examining what I am doing to construct a particular representation of reality. My methodology becomes a reflection or discussion about my own epistemology or way of knowing, and what I as a researcher believe can be known, as well as who can be a knower. Thus Bateson was interested in how the observer observes and how we are able to make distinctions and distinguish between our distinctions. He believed in enlarging the view of science as a dialogical paradigm in which the observer is revealed in his descriptions.
* Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. University Of Chicago Press. 1972
(Postmodern French social critic and philosopher,1929-2007)
We live in an illusory world in which the idol of truth has no place According to Baudrillard we are living in a world dominated by mass media, images, signs, any other simulacra. It is a realm of ‘hyperreality’ and simulations where truths no longer exist. We live in a Disneyworld in which illusion has become reality, a fantasy world - ‘a simulacrum’ – which is the duplicate of nothing because the real world has disappeared. We live in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. The belief in truth is part of the elementary forms of religious life. It is the last stronghold for the supporters of morality and rationality for which the reality principle cannot be questioned. These defenders of realism reduce their own life to an accumulation of facts and proofs, of causes and effects.
According to Baudrillard there is an insoluble relationship between thought and the real. Thought in the past had always been the accomplice of the real. It took for granted that thought refers to reality. But Baudrillard’s “radical” thought is ex-centric to reality and is incompatible with it. The happy conjunction of thought and reality affirmed by the Enlightenment and modernity is now over. In contrast to the discourse of reality, rationality and meaning which preserves the notion of an objective truth and a decipherable world, radical thought opts for the illusion of the world, the non-veracity of facts, the meaninglessness of the world, nothingness rather something.
We live in an illusory world, but for an illusion to take place, there needs to be a real – and there is no real. There is no real to be recaptured beyond the illusion – it is all illusion with no real to be its opposite and therefore no illusion either since illusion is definable by the existence of the real, as its opposite. The problem is that people go on speaking as if there is a real, and therefore an illusion or vice versa. In fact everything is a “simulacra”, that is a fake of the real that isn’t there. There no value, no truth, no reality that is recoverable. It is all simulation without anchor. Baudrillard calls it “hyperreality”.
The real world has become a myth, a simulacrum and that entails the death of truth, knowledge and philosophy itself. This situation that defines postmodernity is the outcome of the Nietzschean program of denunciation of those “free spirits who still have faith in truth, science and knowledge”. For Baudrillard it is the idol of truth itself, that had replaced the idol of God, that must be demolished.
* Baudrillard Jean, Simulacra and Simulation and Radical Thought, in Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, Stanford University press, 1988
(French philosopher, 1647-1706)
Bayle emphasizes the weakness of reason and the impossibility of answering inescapable philosophical questions on fundamental issues. But Bayle’s doubt about many things is not enough to call him a sceptic in the classical sense of the term. Bayle did not advocate the practice of suspense of judgement like the ancient Academic sceptics. Neither did he follow the Pyrrhonian sceptics who came to accept suspense of judgement in order to achieve peace of mind. For both schools of ancient scepticism, nothing being certain, philosophical thinking is pointless. Bayle was not a sceptic of this type. Undoubtedly he had a sharp eye for bad argument, a good memory for alleged fact, a settled habit of testing every theory or assertion on any subject, a great inventiveness in devising objections and an urge to upset the complacency of people who think they know. He was more a kind of latter-day Socrates who wanted to show that on many matters certainty is not attainable. The goal of knowledge for him was neither suspense of judgement nor peace of mind. Rather, he was a disappointed and not very hopeful truth-seeker. His unsparing criticism of theories and historical assertions had the purpose to eliminate error masquerading as truth but he had no intention to show like the sceptics that thought is futile.
In fact human reason is better adapted for the detection of errors than for the positive discovery of truth. This is surely the case for theological controversies. Bayle considered them confused and pointless. Most controversies depend for their life on lack of proper judgement and prejudices. Bayle extends his scepticism to the field of metaphysics. The problem of evil, for instance, has never found a satisfactory solution. No proof has ever been given that the human soul is immortal. This does not mean that this doctrine is false, only that it is incapable of rational proof. As for the so-called truths of religion they belong to the sphere of the non-rational and that is why it is futile to indulge in theological argument and controversy. Religious truths for Bayle contain much that is repugnant to reason. He placed faith outside the field of reason and thus totally separated the truths of religion and the truths of reason.
* See Copleston, F., A History of Philosophy, Vol. VI, London, Burns Oates, 1960, p. 6-8; also Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Pierre Bayle’s Skepticism.
(Scottish poet and essayist, 1735-1803)
Beattie's Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth is an attempt to expose scepticism's absurdities and dangers. Inspired by Thomas Reid, he feels that God implanted several common sense intuitions within human nature, particularly beliefs about the integrity of reason, sense perceptions, and moral virtue. According to him common sense not only guides us towards truth, but it defines and is the criterion of truth. In his words, "that to us is truth which we feel that we must believe; and that to us is falsehood which we feel that we must disbelieve." In contemporary terminology, he is offering a theory of truth that radically differs from the familiar correspondence theory.
Beattie's doctrine is that all genuine reasoning does ultimately terminate in certain principles, which it is impossible to disbelieve, and also impossible to prove: that therefore the ultimate standard of truth to us is common sense, or that instinctive conviction into which all true reasoning does resolve itself. Therefore what contradicts common sense is in itself absurd, however subtle the arguments which support it.
Beattie's point is that we cannot judge truth and falsehood by inspecting reality itself since that is beyond what we can know. Second, he makes clear that common sense is the "standard" of truth, and not simply a guide or indicator of truth. Few people would object to the modest claim that common sense is a basic guide for recognizing the truth of at least some contentions. For example, our common sense inclines us to believe that the tree in front of us physically exists and, so, it is plausible for us to judge that this belief is true. However, Beattie goes much further in suggesting that "X is true" means that X is grounded in an instinctive common sense conviction. It is in this sense that he is offering a definition of truth to be placed for consideration along side other theories of truth.
Beattie's views on the nature of truth was attacked by several critics, notably J.B. Priestley. The upshot of the critique was that common sense is notoriously variable from person to person, and Beattie's attempt to ground truth in common sense was in fact entirely subversive of all truth. Priestley argued that all that we can ever say is, that certain maxims and propositions appear to be true with respect to ourselves, but we cannot tell how they may appear to others. We cannot know the instinctive beliefs of others. It is absurd to argue that our private instinctive beliefs form the basis of truth. Common sense is too variable to function as an adequate criterion of truth.
* Beattie, Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, ed. James Fieser, Vol. 2 of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000.
( British social philosopher, 1748-1832)
Bentham, the founder of "utilitarianism" investigated human actions through the pleasure and pain that they entail. He founded all his reasonings on these observations and concluded that truth and utility 'walk together'. He claimed that the investigator who discovers what is useful is not far from the truth. It is easier to reach the truth through the search of utility than to find the truth without having the useful as guide. What is useful belongs to the field of experience while the domain of truth is a matter of mere conjectures.
For Bentham, the value of an action is based solely on its consequences, namely, the pleasure generated or the pain avoided. There is no intrinsic nature of an action nor is the value based on the intentions of the actor. If telling a lie creates more pleasure than pain, then it is a good act. If telling the truth creates more pain than pleasure, then it is a "bad" act.
This means that for Bentham truth is not a primary value for it cannot play its role unless subordinated to other values, especially the most fundamental value of "the greatest happiness for the largest number of people".
According to Bentham's Utilitarianism the final arbiter of "truth" and "significance" is the utility, the usefulness, or the practical workability for the person or groups of persons affirming "truth" and "significance". It presumes that the consequences of an action are the only measure of value.
* Bentham Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, London: The Athlone Press, 1970.
(Russian existentialist philosopher, 1874-1948)
1. Truth is not something in knowledge that corresponds to a reality outside man. It is not the intellectual submissiveness of the part of the cognitive mind to a reality presented to it from outside. To know the truth is not to recognize reality ‘as it is’. Reality or Being is all darkness. Human knowledge operates a breakthrough, a victory of light over darkness. The subject illumines the darkness of the world in giving meaning to it. Truth is the creative transforming of reality, it is the meaning of reality, the value of reality, not reality ‘as it is’. Truth is above reality. It is the process of instilling spirit into the material objective reality. Truth is the light breaking through reality and transfiguring it. It is the introduction into the world of a quality that the world did not possess before truth was revealed. It is the letting-in of light in the world.
Hence truth is not passive submission or obedience to reality. It is not the repetition of reality in the knower. It is not slavery to the real. Truth is a conquest, which is achieved by the subject’s creative act. It is the creative transforming of reality, the creative light that gives meaning to a meaningless world. Truth liberates being from darkness. Truth is the transfiguration of reality. It is the light breaking through reality; it is the letting-in of light in the world to transfigure it.
Berdiaev praises Nietzsche for having said that Truth is a value that is created by man – and not a merely passive reflection of reality in the knower. This dynamic understanding of truth was a breakthrough against the old static interpretation of it.
Truth is the victory of spirit over matter, it is the voice of eternity in time, a ray of light in the world. It judges the world. It even judges revelation. No religion is higher than truth. Religious revelations must be the revelation of the truth. Truth is the supreme value.
2. Truth is existential, subjective, ‘aristocratic’ and ‘prophetic’.
Truth is existential. It is the creative act of the whole person, intellect and will. When truth is made a matter of intellect and reason only, it is objectified. This is the case with the partial truths which are worked out by the various sciences: they refer to the objectified world. But Truth with a capital T is subjective and individual even though universal in its individuality. It is a quality and therefore it is ‘aristocratic’, not imposed on all, but revealed to some persons under certain conditions and rejected by others. It depends on the degree of consciousness of each subject. It is the object of a personal discovery, conquered by a creative act. Truth is ‘prophetic’ and the prophet often stands alone. Even if it is meant for all and is communal, still it can never be imposed by authoritarian collectivism. The socialisation of the truth is a great danger.
It follows that there are no criteria of truth outside itself and no objective standards of truth. The Spirit implies risk and it has to be so. There is no standard of truth outside the witness of truth itself. The search for an absolute guarantee is a false track. It is only in the acceptance of things visible, the so-called partial truths of the visible world in science, that there is no risk.
* N. Berdiaev, The Beginning and the End, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1952, p. 42-54; The Meaning of the Creative Act, Collier Books, N.Y., 1962, p.33-44; Truth and Revelation, London, Geoffrey Bles, 1953
(American sociologist, b. 1929)
Berger’s interest is in the sociological analysis of truth in the modern world.
1. In the stable societies of ancient civilisations and religions, answers to the problem of life could be given in a tone of great assurance. The socially defined reality had a very high degree of objectivity. The typical condition of pre-modern human beings was one of absolute certainty about all the perennial questions of existence and its meaning and value. Berger calls the pre-modern world a ‘world of fate’, inhabited by uncritically accepted traditions. Truth was defined once for all and it never came to the mind of any one to question it, except for a few ‘heretics’ who were soon silenced and ostracised.
2. Whereas formerly truth was imposed and uncritically accepted by all, in modern times the situation in regard to the truth has undergone a radical transformation. Today it has become ‘imperative’ to choose the truth in questioning all the traditions received from the past. Each individual today is compelled to assume the attitude of a ‘heretic’, i.e. some one who chooses (airein, in Greek) after critical examination. To the old world of Fate is substituted the world of Choice. Even more, one should say that modern man is condemned to the freedom of choice concerning the truths of life. There is a ‘market-place’ of ideologies and visions of life in the face of which every thinking person is called to make his/her own choice. The tension that the new situation provokes is mostly felt in the domain of religion. If the typical condition of pre-modern man was one of religious certainty, that of modern man is that of religious doubt.
3. This new situation provokes two main reactions: one of liberation and one of deep anxiety. Liberation, because truth and freedom are found side by side and no longer antagonized, but anxiety too because human beings are left alone to give meaning to life and find the truth without social support. The old feeling of certainty disappears and doubt creeps in. The transition from fate to free-choice is a welcome but also a painful experience. Now every individual is called to think by himself and take his responsibility. He is left alone to make his options with the disappearance of the official truth of the world of Fate.
* P. Berger, The Heretical Imperative, Anchor Books, New York, 1979
(French philosopher, 1859-1941)
1. Philosophical questions cannot be treated by the usual means of common parlance and scientific rationality. Genuine thinking that aims at truth is a spiritual exercise which has nothing to do with objective knowledge, but with the interior life of conscience that alone reaches the source of reality. Bergson’s ‘ontological’ revolution is that being is becoming, movement, evolution, elan vital. Temporality or, better, ‘duration’ is the essence of reality and the self. Science does not understand time because it begins by measuring it, that is, by transforming it into space. For Bergson duration is a metaphysical, almost mystical experience, something else than the scientific time.
2. A cental theme of Bergsonian philosophy is the opposition between intelligence and intuition. Our intelligence is radically inadapted to understand life-duration. It only thinks the motionless, the quantitative and the spatial. Intelligence analyses reality, classifies it, fragments it, reduces it to stable states through conceptualisation. Concepts being abstract and general define things by what they are not. Moreover intelligence expresses itself in language. No words can correspond to what is intimately lived; they betray life in transforming the real into labels and preventing us to see the world as it is. Intelligence which is turned to the static and the material is useful in science and for action but not for the knowledge of reality.
Intuition only is that by which the truth of reality is apprehended. It is the immediate perception of life by the spirit just as sensation is the perception of reality by the body. Whereas intelligence is the instrument of science, intuition is the instrument of philosophy. Science and philosophy do not have the same object and the same finality. Science studies matter and is at the service of action. Philosophy (metaphysics) deals with spirit and aims at knowing the truth through the use of intuition. Unlike other areas of study that resort to the mediation of language, concepts and theories, metaphysics does not represent reality by forms, symbols or viewpoints. It relies on intuition that brings about the fusion and coincidence of conscience with reality by “sympathy”.The absence of go-between in intuition justifies the claim of metaphysics that it reaches absolute knowledge in which reality is pure presence to conscience.
3. Bergson is not the enemy of science but of positivism. Human language is naturally positivist. Bergson reacts against the basic prejudice: that true knowledge has to be primarily objective, whereas, belonging to conscience, it is by nature subjective. Man’s inclination tends to petrify the living and objectify it in order to manipulate it. This positivist turning of subjectivity into objectivity is a fatal betrayal of reality. In his search of true knowledge, Bergson has chosen interiority against the values of objectivity and exteriority. Human existence is the field of subjective interiority. Therefore it is essential to recognize its primacy over objective exteriority. This view changes the philosophical scenery. The essential truth about reality is always something lived outside the reach of analysis and rationalisation. It can only be reached by intuition.
* Bergson, Henri, Les données immédiates de la conscience, Paris, PUF, 1889 ; See : Puech, Michel, La Philosophie en clair, Paris, Ellipses, 1999, p.96-108
(Irish philosopher. 1685-1753)
Reality is purely mental: hence truth is not a matter of correspondence but coherence between ideas
Berkeley’s famous immaterialist thesis, Esse est percipi, postulated that there was no such thing as an unperceived material reality. His world view was based on the marriage of two truths that he considered were self evident: - that the things which are immediately perceived are real things, and - that the things that are immediately perceived are ideas which exist only in the mind. This means that minds and ideas, which can be empirically verified, are the only realities and that reality is identical with appearance. Hence no place in his system for a correspondence theory of truth.
He argues that if the only evidence for an object's existence is its being perceived, then the conclusion is that existence consists entirely in being perceived or perceiving and that minds and their ideas constitute reality. Because we can never know anything outside of our own minds, we must conclude that there is no such thing as a real (material) world. Instead of saying that we often perceive what really exists, Berkeley argues that what really exists is what we or some other minds (God included!) perceive.
Berkeley held that the representationalist epistemologies led directly to skepticism. This is because it placed truth on a foundation of correspondence between our ideas and that which they represent. If there is no way to compare our representations with the reality that they are supposed to represent, then one really ought to be skeptical about whether there is any correspondence at all. If, instead, one embraces Berkeley’s idealism, this skeptical problem seems to disappear. Our knowledge of the “external world”—that is, our knowledge of the objects and events that make up ordinary experience—does not depend on a relation between our ideas of those things and some hidden reality that is said to be their cause. Instead, our empirical knowledge is trustworthy because of its internal coherence. Truth is not a matter of correspondence but of coherence between ideas. We never find that an idea is false or illusory by comparing it with “reality,” but only by comparing it with other ideas.
* Berkeley George, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
(British philosopher and political theorist, 1909-1997)
“Value pluralism” that Berlin espouses can perhaps be better understood by contrasting it with its antithesis, that is, the idea of monism. Monism is the idea, dating back to Plato, but also underlying much of modern Western philosophy, that, even though we may not always be able to see it, there is an underlying harmony in human values and that conflicts among them can be resolved by appeal to some higher principle or standard. The assumption is that behind the phenomenon of life, there is a timeless and eternal model to be uncovered. This kind of Monism is the idea that all truly good things are linked to one another in a single, perfect whole and that the realization of the pattern formed by them is the one true end of all rational activity, both public and private. Monism entails the notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist.
But Berlin rejects the seductive Western idea of monism in favour of pluralism and his most cogent answer is that, from our own ordinary experience of the world, we know that our values often do conflict with one another in irreconcilable ways and that, in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there seems little reason to reject the reality of this experience.
His idea of “value pluralism” is that many of the values or ends that we hold dear are incompatible and cannot be reconciled with one another. It is the idea that there might exist ends which are equally ultimate, but incompatible with one another, that there might exist no single universal standard that would enable human beings to choose rationally between them. Hence according to ‘value incompatibility’, the pursuit of certain values must inevitably compromise or limit our ability to pursue certain other values. The more we seek to attain some of these values, the less able we are to attain the others.
Now the conflicts between incompatible values can occur at different levels. Values can not only clash within the conscience of a single individual, but they can also be incompatible between cultures, or groups in the same culture, or between one person and another. In other words, value conflicts can make themselves known at personal, interpersonal, inter-group, and inter-cultural levels. This multi-faceted character of value conflict is important, because it means that value conflict presents individuals or groups with not simply a moral problem, but also a political problem.
The anthropological key concept of Berlin’s work is his idea that man is a fallible, complex combination of opposites, some reconcilable, others incapable of being resolved or harmonized, unable to cease from his search for truth and happiness and with no guarantee, theological or logical or scientific, of being able to attain them. He maintains that the old perennial belief in the possibility of realizing ultimate harmony is nothing but a fallacy. Moreover, the truth is something which we may never attain: it depends upon too many circumstances over which we have no power.
For Berlin, the idea of a perfectly happy world, a world with no error or evil, a world of one truth and a single set of values, is not so much unrealistic as incoherent. According to Berlin, political philosophy exists because it presupposes a world where one goal looses against other goals when they collide in a pluralistic environment. Therefore, in a society where there is no one truth and one answer to all social and political problems, any process of choice-making is at the same time a process of accepting other men’s choices as a result of a democratic agreement. Berlin’s thought reminds us that toleration and moderation are possible or even necessary because the values we hold are mere preferences rather than absolute truths. This is a warning against the optimism of fanatics who believe in the existence of a perfect world and a single truth. It is reasonable to assume, as Berlin does, that without tolerance the conditions for rational discussion are destroyed.
The necessity of choice and conflict between absolute truth claims is an inescapable characteristic of human condition.
* Isaiah Berlin, John Gray, London, Harper Collins, 1995
(Contemporary German theologian)
Fundamentalism and the claim of absolute truth in religion
1. The absolutist attitude about truth is at the heart of fundamentalism. One’s own religion has sole, exclusive and complete possession of the truth, elevated to the status of eternal and unchangeable validity, protected against criticism and progress of knowledge. The resistance to the free quest for truth derives from an overwhelming ‘desire for certainty’ that submerges the ‘desire to know reality’. This is the fundamentalist attitude which begins where convictions are absolutised i.e. derived from “ultimate truths” which are held to be absolutely valid and behind which it is impossible to investigate. What is required of believers is not insight but submission. Critical thought must stop at these ultimate truths and intellectual freedom must surrender. What is demanded is a naively realistic understanding of truth, and that is, correct information and literal understanding about things on earth and heaven as disclosed by sacred scriptures. For fundamentalism the epistemological and hermeneutical problems do not exist.
In addition there is a claim to universal validity, a totalitarian claim about the interpretation of reality and the aims of life for all people at all times. Truth is one and therefore there can be no pluralism of different perspectives on the truth. Anything that contradicts revealed objective truth can only be untruth. The absolutist attitude is characterised by dualism. Reality and the knowledge of reality are either white or black. People are classified as either believers or pagans, either saved or lost, either living in light or in darkness. Any one not on the side of the truth must be opposed. Open communication with the other side is impossible. Nothing is done to understand the other, on the contrary a compulsion towards hostility prevails.
2. However the claim of absoluteness in religion has acquired some justification and legitimacy from several renown modern philosopher-theologians.. At the centre of their positive approach to the problem, lies the distinction between natural (or intuitive, pre-reflective) and artificial absoluteness.
- Troeltsch sees the source of any claim to absolute truth in religion in the encounter with the Absolute itself, in the experience of God. In that experience there is the feeling of compelling certainty to have met the final and absolute truth. But when this original experience of certainty is intellectualised and channelled into apologetic and dogmatic principles, an artificial claim to absoluteness arises. The claim to absoluteness is now fossilised in theological notions and doctrines for which an unconditional claim to validity is made.
- Jaspers (see Jaspers) takes a similar direction through his distinction between existential and rational truth. The truths of faith are existential, not rational. Rational truths are universally valid; their correctness can be proved, but they are not absolute and unconditional. On the contrary existential truths are unconditional and absolute but not universal in their objective expressibility. The religious claim to universality arises when there is a narrowing down of existential truth to rational correctness.
- G. Mensching (1901-1976) makes the distinction between intensive experience and extensive assertion. In the highly personal “intensive” experience of God, there is a legimate claim to absoluteness, but no universality because it is personal. But when this personal certainty becomes a claim binding all believers universally, the legitimate intensive experience becomes an extensive claim to absoluteness. An inappropriate generalisation takes place through the transference from the personal to the universal.
Bernhardt sums up the critical approach of these three authors as follows: it is directed against the generalisation of certainties which cannot be generalised. The unconditional existential truth can only be relational, i.e. related to the person who experiences it. In other words, it is absolute without being universal.
* Bernhardt, Reinhold, Christianity Without Absolutes, SCM Press, London, 1994, p. 22-26,98-100
(Austrian born biologist, 1901-1972)
Humans create their own reality, not because objective reality does not exist but because human knowledge depends on what humans are able and willing to perceive. Hence no world view and general systems are ultimately truth about reality. Each is a perspective or an aspect, owing to man’s natural and cultural limitations. No one can jump over his own shadow. Bertalanffy’s “General Systems Theory” is perspectivist, not a “nothing-but” philosophy but a view that is tolerant of other views and experiences. The world is rich with the truth of many perspectives. Every human accomplishment is always the outcome of human modelling: there is always something missing, something distorted or even wrong, because everything in modelling is dependent on the perspective it has created.
Such a view helps to comprehend the fallacy of absolutism in the name of which fanatical believers, all through mankind’s history, have perpetrated horrible crimes. Perspectivism is in line with Socrates’ maxim that the wise person is some one who is aware of his/her ignorance. Indeed the human mind needs to maintain continuously open his mind to valuable new ideas, those generated by other than him/herself and his/her community.
Bertalanffian perspectivism is a way of getting closer and closer diversely to the ‘absolute truth’ of every aspect of the whole reality. Obviously all the perspectives, as views explicitly expressed of a certain aspect of reality, are valid. At the same time none of them is more authentic than the other. This perspectivism is the proper alternative between nihilism – the rejection to make an effort towards the absolute truth because it is something impossible to reach –and absolutism – the dogmatism that has generated the scientism which assigns value to nothing but science itself.
* Bertalanffy Von, Perspectives on General Systems Theory, E. Taschedjian ed., New York, 1975
(British philosopher, b.1944)
“Truth Tetrapolity”: the four aspects of truth
1. Bhaskar’s critical realism denounces what he calls the epistemic fallacy. It argues that it is a mistake to focus exclusively on epistemology, the study of knowledge, and thus to neglect ontology, the study of what can be known. In reducing reality to what is known, one denies the reality of that which exists in the first place.
According to him, for science to happen there must be a reality independent of our knowledge of it. Of this reality, Bhaskar makes a useful analytical distinction between the intransitive and transitive objects of knowledge. Intransitive objects are the world of things and structures that are independent of our knowledge of them. These are the “brute facts”, that are ‘objective’ “in the sense that they are not a matter of your or my preferences, evaluations or moral attitudes”. The transitive objects are the “raw materials of human knowledge – the artificial objects fashioned into items of knowledge by the science of the day”. Thus, while our knowledge of the world (transitive) constitutes a part of the world (intransitive), the existence of the world is not dependent upon this knowledge. This distinction allows for the combination of ontological realism with epistemological relativism – aptly called critical realism. The intransitive dimension in the philosophy of science corresponds roughly to ontology and the transitive dimension roughly to epistemology. Knowledge exists as a real social object in the transitive dimension and is about real objects in the intransitive dimension, which exists independently of mental activity.
2. This brings Bhaskar to consider the notion of truth as a many-layered phenomenon. He distinguishes four types of truth and calls it "Truth Tetrapolity". - 1. First, the fiduciary notion of truth: to say that something is true is to say 'trust me, act on it'. We have to have a workable notion of truth to enable us to get around in a world we have only a limited grasp of. This is a pragmatic necessity. - 2. The second aspect of truth is truth as warrantedly assertable. This is the truth as epistemological, as relative to our knowledge, in the transitive dimension - 3. The notion that lies behind the first two notions is the idea of truth as absolute. To say something is true is to say this is the way reality is. This is absolutely indispensable for any notion of intentional action and hence for any notion we as human beings can have. This is our commitment to beliefs as expressive of reality. - 4. What lies behind the truth of a well attested scientific or moral proposition is a higher order proposition, the truth of that truth : the reality that generates it. It is a proposition at a higher level, and it is truth as ontological, no longer tied to language-use as such and in this sense objective, situated in the intransitive dimension.
* See Collier, A., Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy, London, 1996
(British philosopher, b.1944)
The truth-war rages between what Blackburn identifies as absolutist and relativist camps. The absolutist view of truth holds that there are mind-independent facts (truth-makers) that confirm or deny the content of a proposition p. The absolutist believes that there is a stamp of truth, independent of us, and independent of our wishes, emotions and desires. True propositions have authority, since true propositions are the instruments through which one gains knowledge about the world.
On the other hand the relativist doctrine advances the idea that individual feelings and desires are the gauge of truth. There are no universal norms or standards against which our propositions, ideas, or values might be measured. The sole measure is the individual human and his or her basic desires. The relativist holds that truth has only particular authority, extending only to the individual, and that this is based on her attitude or desires. The casual observer will notice the unflinching, dogged persistence that either camp displays, for the battle appears to be at an impasse. This is what Blackburn terms the "truth war".
According to him both the absolutist and the relativist are guilty of a shared misunderstanding about the nature of truth. The dispute over authority - which mobilizes the absolutist against the relativist - is energy misdirected. The "truce" Blackburn proposes comes in the form of a minimalist view of truth. This view recommends, "you tell me what the issue is, and I will tell you what the truth about the issue consists in". The minimalist view limits the scope of truth, not to a grand story (the Truth with a capital T) or individually pursued ends (the truth for me or for you), but rather to a particular issue or proposition. Blackburn contends that in real conversation, "we do not raise the temperature by talking of truth". Rather, one simply agrees with a proposition, disagrees with it, or suspends judgment. The minimalist view is advanced for its empirical value, analyzing particular claims qua particular claims and not as examples of more general or theoretical ideas. The implication is that minimalism makes truth available to everyone. If one can easily identify the problem in the proposition (i.e., "the price of petrol is rising,"), then one knows enough to know the truth for oneself.
Minimalism can produce widespread agreement on questions most of us view as straightforward and factual, but it stands mute before huge metaphysical questions. It can do nothing, according to Blackburn, to diminish the chance of conflict over grand philosophical issues where minimalism leads to disagreement rather than consensus. But to Blackburn, this is entirely healthy.
* Blackburn Simon, Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed, 210pp, Allen Lane
(English psychologist, b. 1951)
Blackmore is interested in what is called “memetics”, the theory that studies the replication, spread and evolution of “memes”. Just as genes are units of biological information, so "memes" are units of cultural information. Memes are cognitive or behavioral patterns that can be transmitted from one individual to another one.
Blackmore looks at how memetics can illuminate sociobiology, in relation to sex, altruism, science and religions. She is not afraid to make clear where her own preferences lie: she holds that science is, in a sense, superior to religion, even though both are masses of ‘memeplexes’. Science does not offer us Ultimate Truth but a set of methods for trying to distinguish true memes from false ones. Religions, in contrast, are hostile to the testing of their theories about the world.
The truth trickery is liberally used in religions, she claims. In most of them, God and Truth are virtually synonymous. Rejecting the faith means turning away from Truth; converting others means giving them the gift of the true faith. This may seem odd when so many religious claims are clearly false, but there are many reasons why it works. For Blackmore memetics has the answer. For example, people who have a profound experience in a religious context are inclined to take on the memes of that religion; people who like and admire someone may believe their truth claims without question. The core features a religion must have in order to achieve successful memetic duplication or adherence is almost the same as those that allow chain letters to survive: desire and fear. In religion, however, desire can be dressed up in some fancy garb like "heaven," "nirvana, "happy hunting grounds." Fear, likewise, can take on a much more scary face like, "hell," damnation," “samsara", "hades," and so on. Couple desire and fear with a meme that says it is your duty to "spread" the message vigorously and you have a potential "winning" religion. Popular religions appeal to fundamental human needs in order to succeed. But, more importantly, those appeals don't have to be necessarily true, provided that they "appear" viable.The key point in all of this is propagation and successful duplication.
Religious belief systems arose thousands of years ago to respond to human needs, mostly our questions about the universe. Today we have a new tool for answering our questions about the world: science. No doubt science is also a memeplex, but it is one that uses a process of observation and experimentation to distinguish false memes from true ones. This makes science a much more superior tool for investigating the world. While false theories can thrive within science for the same reason that certain ideas are popular within religion, science is a self-correcting process that eventually eliminates them by demanding they be proven.
In spite of it all religion remains, simply because it can. It is a memeplex, a mass of ideas reproducing themselves. Any thing that can replicate will replicate. The ideas they offer are far more pleasing to many people than the cold truths offered by science. Religion still fulfills its original role for many people. It provides answers to tough questions. It offers comforting ideas about justice and life after death. Religion remains an important part of human society.
* Blackmore, Susan, The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press, 1999
(American philosopher, 1892-1987)
1. According to Blanshard, coherence is not only the sole criterion of truth, but also a theory of truth, that defines the nature of truth. Our beliefs are true when they cohere with the whole. Coherence with the total system is the evidence of their truth. Even more coherence is truth. Blanshard’s presupposition is that Reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible. Therefore the degree of truth of any proposition is accounted for by its coherence with the whole. Coherence is a relationship of mutual dependence between the part and the whole. A proposition is true only if it coheres with the rest of the system. Reality as a whole is the Absolute, the integral Truth. Anything less is only partially coherent and therefore partially true, being true to the degree that it expresses the whole. Blanshard’s idealist metaphysics conceives the universe as a totally interconnected whole, which is ideal in character.
2. According to Blanshard the realist theory of truth as correspondence is meaningless. There can be no correspondence between statements and facts because cognition can never get outside of itself. He argues that the fact that corresponds to our judgment is a “pure fiction”. There are no unadulterated brute fact given directly to our senses and providing a solid reality to which our thought is to correspond. The brute-fact view of perception is mistaken because perception essentially involves judgment. There can be no pre-judgmental sense perception of anything and no sensory consciousness of a fact without judgment. Thus when we try to get at a fact to see whether it ‘corresponds’ with a judgment, we only succeed in getting a different judgment. We do not compare a judgment with a fact, but a judgment with another judgment.
3. Moreover Blanshard argues that the correspondence theory of truth according to which one has access to the world of fact beyond thought and language makes it impossible for perception to be mistaken. He pins the correspondence theory to the requirement that our cognition be infallible and indubitable and infers from this that the brute-fact view of perception, unmediated by conceptualisation and judgment, is unacceptable because of the evidence that our perception can be mistaken and that error is possible. If we simply passively receive the fact itself, nothing can go wrong. But we know too well that our cognitions are not immune from doubt and error. This is enough to show that our apprehension of facts is achieved through our judgments and that our role is not confined to receiving what is given to us. Our judgmental, interpretative activity is involved and makes doubt and error possible.
4. Some reputable philosophers, says Blanshard, have held the the test of truth is coherence, while holding that the nature of truth is correspondence. But the result of such a claim is itself incoherent. For if we accept coherence as our test, we must use it everywhere. We must use it to test the suggestion that truth is other than coherence. But if we do, we shall find that we must reject the suggestion as leading to incoherence. Indeed if one holds that truth is correspondence, one cannot intelligibly hold either that it is tested by coherence or that there is any other dependable test at all. If you place the nature of truth in one sort of character and its test in something quite different, the two will fall apart. It is impossible to argue from a high degree of coherence within experience to its correspondence with anything outside it. Blanshard concludes: assume coherence as the test only, and you will be driven by the incoherence of your alternatives to the conclusion that it is also the nature of truth.
* Blanshard B. Coherence as the Nature of Truth, in The Nature of Truth, Ed. by M.P. Lynch, A Bradford Book, Cambridge, Massachussets, 2001, p 103-121; See Alston, W. A Realist Conception of Truth, Cornell University press, Ithaca, 1996, p. 87-102
(German Marxist philosopher, 1885-1977)
Bloch develops a philosophy of hope and the future, a dreaming forward, a projection of a vision of a future kingdom of freedom. It is his conviction that only when we project our future in the light of what is, what has been, and what could be, can we engage in the creative practice that will produce a world in which we are at home and realize humanities deepest dreams.
He rejects what he calls the 'half-enlightenment' of classical Marxist philosophy because it deludes itself by thinking that truth and enlightenment can be obtained solely by eliminating error rather than offering something positive and attractive. Genuine enlightenment, for Bloch, goes further than just criticizing any distortions in an ideological product: it goes on to read it closely for any critical or emancipatory potential. He argues that genuine ideology does not consist in merely unmasking or de-mystification, but also in uncovering and discovery: revelations of unrealized dreams, lost possibilities, abortive hopes - that can be resurrected and enlivened and realized in our current situation. Bloch's cultural criticism thus accentuates the positive, the utopian-emancipatory possibilities, the testimony to hopes for a better world.
For Bloch the world, and humanity in it, are unfinished. Humanity's only authentic task is the completion of the world and therefore ourselves: "the world is untrue, but it wants to return home through man and through truth". As we shape the world through our work so we come to a condition of self-possession. Bloch's conception of authenticity is as a coming-to-ourselves, in which we have reclaimed our human capacities from our alienation, manifest in the worship of false gods and masters.
Hope is the moral conditioner of Bloch's project: "Only hope understands and also completes the past, opens the long, common highway". Hope is both goal and always sought for.
* See Münster, Arno, L'utopie concrète d'Ernst Bloch, Kimé, Paris, 2001
(French philosopher, 1861-1949)
Philosophy must not be treated as a self-contained system, in which the revealed truth could appear as a mere intruder. The world of reason and experience is not a self-sufficient world. The supernatural order is sometimes treated as an unnecessary superstructure over and above the truths of reason and experience. This view that Blondel calls “extrinsicism” must be rejected. A philosophy that operates without any reference to faith inevitably becomes aware of its own limits. It discovers within the human person a dynamism toward a goal that nature cannot reach and toward a truth that reason cannot discover. Though Blondel rejects the idea of a philosophy that would be Christian on account of being based on revelation, he holds that all sound philosophy leads to the threshold of revealed truth. In other words philosophy is affected by the natural desire for the supernatural: it is oriented toward revelation as its own completion. Thus philosophy cannot be a closed system of rational knowledge. An autonomous philosophy cannot be self-sufficient. The journey of philosophy cannot be completed without faith.
Blondel’s position that the human spirit has an inbuilt restlessness toward the divine, an inner exigency for the supernatural message of salvation is basically an Augustinian position. It differs from the traditional medieval scholastic approach that treats Christian truth as a content to be imposed on the inquirer from the outside and through arguments abstract from the demand of life. Blondel wants to distance himself from this ‘extrincist’ approach in favour of the ‘method of immanence’. He defends it against scholastic philosophers who object that this method undermines the old justification of Christian beliefs in opening the way to subjectivism and relativism. The weakness of the traditional doctrine, Blondel argues, is its excessive objectivism, which has lost sight of the subject. The rationalistic cast of this approach neglects the role of the will. Indeed faith is not principally directed to objective truths. Faith is a knowledge by connaturality which is given in a spiritual experience where all the personality, intelligence, will and sentiment, is engaged.
Faith, he writes, appears as the encounter of two loves and not as the liaison of two ideas: it is not an abstract conclusion, it is a living action. The objective proofs of the revealed truths are not efficacious if the subject is not prepared interiorly by grace and personal disposition. Adherence to the truths of faith is not a matter of understanding without the involvement of the whole personality. The will and the heart help to see.
* Blondel, Maurice, Les Exigences Philosophiques du Christianisme, Paris , 1950
(Contemporary Scottish Sociologist of scientific knowledge)
Truth is a matter of social convention
According to Bloor the notion of truth as correspondence is untenable because at no point do we ever have independent access to reality that would allow us to see that our theories correspond to it. In fact the evaluation of scientific theories takes place entirely "internally" to our theories, standards, interests, problems, etc. Therefore we could say that our theories are simply "conventional instruments" for coping with our environment.
However the idea of truth for him plays a double function:
1. a discriminatory function, when we use the words "true" and "false" to distinguish those ideas that work from those that do not or when we use terms like "true" and "false" in argument, criticism, and persuasion.
2. a materialist (realist) function, when all of our thinking rests on the assumption of the existence of an external world with a determinate structure, that is, when we use the word "true" to mean exactly how we think that this world is. This may vary from culture to culture, yet Bloor calls it "materialist" because of its common core of people, objects, and natural processes.
Bloor appeals to this second function of the notion of truth to meet the objection that his analysis his entirely circular: on his account, affirmation precedes and explains truth, rather than the other way around. To this Bloor replies that to explain affirmation, all we need to appeal to is the fact that people make the materialist assumption that the world is some determinate way.
To the objections to the idea that scientific theories, methods and results are only social conventions, Bloor replies that, though it is often thought that conventions are arbitrary, not anything can be accepted as a convention and that conventions must be credible and useful. The acceptance of a theory by a group does not make it true. But if the question is whether the acceptance of an idea by a group makes it knowledge for them, the answer is yes.
As knowledge rests on social convention, it seems that critical thinking is not possible. However Bloor’s theory shows that critical thinking is possible, but only under certain conditions: that there are more than one set of standards, conventions, or definitions of reality and that there is some motive for appealing to these alternatives.
*Bloor David, Knowledge and Social Imagery, Routledge, 1976; 2nd edition Chicago University Press, 1991)
(American quantum physicist, 1917-1994)
According to the quantum physicist David Bohm, the subatomic particles are thoroughly interconnected with each other. Such an interconnection indicates that the universe viewed as composed of “parts” is in fact organized by a basic wholeness. Bohm arrives at the conclusion that “the universe is a giant hologram”.
All of existence is one undivided, interconnected whole. We, however, see ourselves as separate individuals. In reality, we are all part of one whole but seeing from different perspectives, with different paradigms, seeing different realities. Any form of thought, concept, idea which becomes crystalised as the “whole truth and nothing but the truth” interferes with the natural flow of reality which is ever changing and never static, and this includes ideas as well which are insights about this flow.
We debate our various views, trying to convince others that what we see is correct. However, we are all merely seeing incoherent fragments, of which, none are completely correct. Only by synthesizing all of our various, fragmented perspectives together do we stand a chance of understanding the synthesized whole.
We must be able to think together through dialogue and common consciousness. People will, however, come to a group with different interests and assumptions. In dialogue they should be ready to suspend carrying out their impulses, suspend their assumptions and look at them, then they could all stand in the same state of consciousness. In dialogue the whole structure of defensiveness and opinions and division can collapse; and suddenly the feeling can change to one of fellowship, participation and sharing. It isn't necessary that everybody be convinced to have the same view. This sharing of mind, of consciousness, is more important than the content of the opinions. Truth does not emerge from opinions; it must emerge from something else.
Besides, dialogue may not be concerned directly with truth—it may arrive at truth, but it is concerned with meaning. If the meaning is incoherent you will never arrive at truth. You may think, "My meaning is coherent and somebody else's isn't," but then we'll never have meaning shared. And if some of us come to the "truth", while a lot of people are left out, it's not going to solve the problem. You will have the "truth" for yourself and for your own group, whatever consolation that is. But we will continue to have conflict. Therefore it is necessary to share meaning.
In a dialogue, unlike in discussion with people batting their ideas back and forth in order to win the game, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make one’s particular view prevail. It is more a common participation, in which people are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.
*Bohm, David, On Dialogue. Ed. Lee Nichol. London: Routledge, 1996
(Danish physicist, 1885-1962)
Bohr, one of the founder of quantum physics, discovered that nature at the subatomic level apparently does not conform to normal logic. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, Western logic, through Aristotle's law of excluded middle, has demanded an "either-or" in our relationship with the universe. For instance, either light is a particle or it is not a particle; either light is a wave or it is not a wave. It was assumed that views about the cosmos should be consistent with common sense and every day's experience, namely the perception of a world undisturbed by human thoughts, wishes and desires, full of things, spatially separated from each other, and interacting with each other through distinct recognizable forces. Within that perspective it would be natural today to think of electrons or photons as some sort of independent things, showing signs of being particles independent of our observations of them. They would be taken for distinct realities that we discover with our thinking, not something that we create with our thinking.
But then Niels Bohr and some other philosophically minded physicists realised that nature at the subatomic level was trying to tell us something very different than common sense. They established that electrons showed signs of being waves, and that means that electrons are waves and particles at the same time. The wave-particle duality seems to be nature's way of informing us that we cannot impose our human concepts on the subatomic level. Just as Einstein had discovered that we cannot impose our normal assumptions of space and time to all levels of reality, so quantum physics reveals that we have no empirical justification to impose our most basic thoughts about the nature of reality on the subatomic realm. According to Bohr, nature empirically reveals this understanding to us by showing that we can have only complementary (contradictory?) views of reality. If we set up an experimental arrangement that allows for a wave manifestation of subatomic phenomena, wave effects will be observed. If we set up an experimental arrangement to view subatomic phenomena as particles, particle effects will be observed. Thus it seems that what we observe in our experiments is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning nature. In short, an electron is not a thing until we observe it.
For Bohr this was a momentous epistemological discovery about ourselves and the nature of science. The complementary view of reality (the wave-particle dualism) rather than only one unified view, is as important as Einstein's discovery that the reference frame of an observer is crucial for measuring space and time.
The question of whether this epistemological discovery is also an ontological one came to the fore in the famous Bohr-Einstein confrontation. Einstein could not agree with Bohr's interpretation, according to which, if an electron is not a thing until it is observed by some instrument, we are bound to say that reality depends on our observations and the thoughts we use to frame the world. Einstein, being a realist, rejected the view that reality is created by human thoughts.
But Bohr's advice was that physicists should be interested primarily in being able to predict experimental results and not in the question of what is real. The question of what is real is primarily an unanswerable philosophical question. He simply argued that the results of quantum experiments provide empirical evidence that nature does not have a hidden true self that can be pictured with human concepts. Einstein failed, according to Bohr, to understand that the empirical evidence demonstrates that the faith in a hidden, objective reality is but faith in a dogma.
* Bohr, Niels, Discussion with Albert Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics, See Internet
(German philosopher, 1903-1991)
Objectivity is the common mark distinguishing scientific views from unscientific views. It means the exclusion of all forms of subjective bias, such as prejudices and vested interests. It is thanks to its method of objectivity that science has been highly successful. But to preserve objectivity it seems that the price to pay is the exclusion of the personal, subjective and existential dimension. If this is the case, it appears that only the natural sciences can be regarded as objective whereas the human sciences are unqualified to the claim of objectivity.
However it is a mistaken view to think that the criterion of objectivity in the human sciences has to be identical to the criterion of objectivity in the natural sciences.
1. The criterion of objectivity in the natural sciences is universal validity. The personal , the subjective, the existential are eliminated. The guarantee of universal validity rests on two facts: first that any experiment can be repeated at will so that the findings of one scientist can be checked by another; second, that all phenomena investigated are reduced to their measurable, quantitative aspects. All the non-checkable observations are eliminated.
2. The criterion of objectivity in human sciences (history, psychology, sociology, etc.) cannot consist in the same ideal of reaching ‘universal validity’. The human sciences are also ‘subjective’ and dependent on the knower. If they have a claim to be objective, it has to be in a different sense than the objectivity of universal validity. It has to be an objectivity that includes the subjective element.
We must show that the necessarily subjective approach of the human sciences does not exclude ‘objectivity’. It all depends of our understanding of ‘subjectivity’. It is not the ‘bad’ subjectivity of prejudices and vested interests, but the positive subjectivity which is an integral part of any process of knowledge in which the subject encounters the object. Thus it is possible to give a new definition of ‘objectivity’ for the human sciences: not universal validity but the relation to and the reaching of the object in the best possible adequate way. Objectivity and subjectivity are not viewed as opposed but as complementary. One acknowledges that some truths are not accessible in a universally valid way and still they are truths.
3. Once this point is admitted, the question remains: if the criteria of truth and objectivity in human sciences are not universal validity, what are the new criteria of truth, specific to these sciences?
Three conditions must be fulfilled to satisfy the requirement of criteria of truth in the human sciences. These criteria are found in the knower. What is it in the knower that is the mark of genuine truth? What are the criteria of ‘subjective’ truth?
- First condition: the resistance of things, objects and facts. The scholar has to face the reality, how painful it may be. He must bend to the facts and not indulge in subjective projections, ingenious constructions, theories and ideologies. Hence the analytic attitude is to be preferred to too quick synthetic views.
- Second condition: the inter-subjectivity (or super-subjectivity) of the truth. Truth must be open for other people. One must be able to come to an understanding of the facts with others. There is no truth that holds only for one individual. This is different from ‘universal validity’ of the natural sciences. Truth-searchers in the human sciences are not necessarily of the same opinion. There must be dialogue with complete openness, not to reach agreement but to seek the truth together. Openness to dialogue is the criterion of super-subjectivity. There is no esoteric truth; truth is openness.
- Third condition: the truthfulness of the knower. This is an ethical requirement of honesty and transparency to oneself.
* Bollnow, O.F.,The Objectivity of the Human Sciences and the Nature of Truth, Philosophy Today, Spring 1963, p.39-51
(Austrian-Czech philosopher, 1781-1848)
It is mainly in order to combat radical skepticism that Bolzano found it necessary to affirm the existence of truth-in-themselves, prior to and independent of language and man. These truths he carefully distinguished from truths expressed in words and conceived truths.
Bolzano develops a theory of the ‘proposition in itself’. He draws a distinction between the ‘proposition in itself ‘and the judgement or proposition that is thought, expressed, or uttered. The former is an abstract entity belonging to a special logical realm beyond the realm of what exists in space and time; the latter belongs to the concrete realm of speech and language. The primary element in a proposition is its objective content or meaning, irrespective of whether anyone has ever formulated it in words, or even irrespective of whether it has ever been present in any mind as a thought. Now, if there are propositions in themselves, there must be also truths in themselves, namely those propositions that are in fact true. Their truth does not depend in any way on their being expressed or affirmed in judgements by thinking subjects. This holds good not only of finite subjects but also of God. Truths in themselves are true not because God posits them; God thinks them because they are true. Bolzano arrives at that conclusion because he looks on the matter from the logician’s viewpoint. The truth of a mathematical proposition depends on the meaning of the terms, not on whether it is thought and expressed by a mathematician, human or divine. The mind of Bolzano is clear: he wants to de-psychologize logic, to formalize it and set it free from any intrinsic connection with subjective factors.
Bolzano’s theory like Platonistic theories in general, is designed to serve as basis for a defence of the objectivity and eternity of truth. Every truth is mind-independent in the sense that it obtains independently of whether it is ever thought or recognised. Every truth is absolute and eternal in the sense that it does not depend on the context in which it is judged or asserted.
* Bolzano, The Theory of Science, Blackwell, Oxford, 1972 ; See Copleston, F., History of Philosoph,
(Medieval theologian and philosopher, 1221-1274)
Like Plato and Augustine, Bonaventure found two conditions necessary for truth and certitude: immutability of the object and i