(Contemporary American theologian)
Traditional theology is the “house of authority”. The way of authority obscures the question of truth. Theological authorities are mostly scripture, dogma and Church magisterium. The method of such theology has never been one of actual enquiry, but rather of citation and exposition of the authoritative “deposits of truth”. Truth is not the result of an open process of enquiry. Theology is knowledge without enquiry. The hidden agenda of this method is to make the house impregnable and immune to criticism.
This classical criteriology is incompatible with modern historical consciousness. Besides the way of authority adopted by historic Christianity does not pertain to the a priori structure of Christian religion. It is contingent, and therefore there are no reasons why theology cannot develop outside the “house of authority”. A post-authoritarian genre of theology is not only possible but necessary. It is not longer “citation” which presupposes the authoritative absolute of scripture, dogma and magisterium. The genre of the new theological knowledge is enquiry. Scripture and tradition are retained but not in the mode of absolute pre-given truth, but in the mode of a field of enquiry for theological reflection. The reference to scripture and tradition is necessary for it defines theology from philosophy and metaphysics. What makes an enquiry theological is that reference to scripture and tradition. The problem is to retain them as a field of evidence without lapsing in the way of authority.
* Farley, Edward, Ecclesial Reflection: an Anatomy of Theological Method, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1982
(French philosopher, 1951 )
The contemporary world is disenchanted by all forms of ‘heteronomy’, that is, all forms of ideologies imposed on it from the outside. Modern man rejects the argument of authority. An irreversible movement of ‘humanization’ is going on. Even Christians ‘humanize’ more and more the content of ‘revelation’ in interiorizing the message that comes from an external source. It is within humanity itself that the transcendent and the sacred are recognized. The heteronomy of truth is replaced by the autonomy of truth. Truth is immanent to man. This does not lead to the rejection of transcendance but to the recognition of transcendance within immanence, the discovery of the divine within humanity.
Truth and values are no longer imposed from the outside, no longer a matter of ‘external’ revelation. The so-called revealed truths are not needed as the foundation of moral values. Humanistic ethics recognizes that transcendence is in the heart of man. The search of truth in religion has all to gain from this process of interiorisation and the abandonment of the concept of externally imposed revealed truths.
The transcendence which gives meaning to human life is not external but internal. It is an immanent transcendence. Truth and values do not come from ‘above’, but neither are they man’s creation. Man recognizes them within himself, as the presence of transcendence. There is no need of God to understand truth, love and justice. The reference to the divine does not come before the acknowledgment of values.
The movement in religions from God to man has become the movement of humanity to its own inner transcendence. The truth imposed from ‘above’ has become the truth recognized within. Truth is no longer the product of the autoritarianism of so-called revealed religions. The ‘divine’ truth that gives meaning to life is discovered in the heart of human beings.
* Ferry, Luc, L’Homme-Dieu ou the Sens de la Vie, Paris, Grasset, 1996
(German philosopher, 1804-1872)
According to Feuerbach truth is what really exists. Existence is the criterion of truth. The only question is: what really exists? It is not thought and what is thought. Through thought one cannot never go beyond the abstract. In reaction against Hegelian Idealism, Feuerbach attributes to the senses the capacity to have access to philosophical truths. The reality of thought is something different than thought: it is non-thought. Reality is the sensuous. As reality is the truth of the idea, sensuousness is the truth of the idea. An idea ceases to be true when it is not real, that is, sensuous.
The real is the object of the senses. Truth, reality and sensuousness are one and the same thing. Only a sensuous being is a true and real being. Only through the sense is an object given in the true sense, not through thought for itself. Indubitable and immediately certain is only that which is the object of the senses, of perception and feeling. Truth is only that which requires no proof, that which is certain immediately through itself, that which is purely and simply indubitable. Something is true when it is not mediated. The immediate knowledge is sensuousness. Hence the sense are the organ of the absolute.
Sensuous being, the being involved in sense perception, feeling and love, alone deserves the name of being. In sense perception, feeling and love alone resides the truth and reality of the infinite. The Gods of religions are only abstractions and images of human feelings and love. The secret of being is revealed not in such abstract ideas but in human feelings, passion and love. Human feelings have an ontological significance, they contain the highest and deepest truths.
Feuerbach’s philosophy bases itself on the truth of love, on the truth of feeling. Love is not only objectively but also subjectively the criterion of being, the criterion of truth and reality. Where there is no love, there is no truth. To be nothing and to love nothing is one and the same thing.
The sensualist approach leads Feuerbach to give importance to the human relationships of love and sex. The real self is either male or female, a being complementary of another, never an autonomous self. Past philosophies have never underlined that the true principle of being is the union of I and you, male and female. Social life is entirely based on this original union. The essence of ‘being human’ is contained in the community, the individual self derives its meaning from humanity as a whole, a unity however that is not an abstraction but that rests on the reality of the distinction between “I” and “You”.
The existence of others is indispensable to any knowledge. The individual searches for truth in terms of the community of which he/she is a part. It is not the individual but the species that is the first criterion of truth. That in which another agrees with me is the truth. Feuerbach writes: “I doubt of what I see alone, I am sure of what the other sees as well”.
* Feuerbach, L. Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Part III, p.31-65
(Austrian born philosopher, 1924-1994)
The prestige of scientists is based on a false claim to objective truth.
Feyerabend, the “anti-science philosopher”, asserted that scientists have no particular claims on truth. He held that the rationality of science did not really exist and that the special status and prestige of scientists are based on their own claims to objective truth. Science is not the royal road to the truth. Science is more of an ideology than a methodology, it is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits.
In Feyerabend's view, science is a religion, for it rests on certain dogmas that cannot be rationally justified. Thus, accepting it requires a leap of faith.
He thought that the superiority of the modern scientific method should not be assumed. He argued for an anarchist approach to knowledge: we cannot predict what shape future knowledge will have, so we should not confine ourselves to one universal method of gaining knowledge. Feyerabend agrees with Kuhn that the history of science is the history of different viewpoints, and for Feyerabend this means that what counts as 'knowledge' in the future may have paradigms we cannot yet know. As we cannot yet know them, we should not attempt to forbid future intellectual enterprise by attempting to define one narrow dominant paradigm of knowledge using the model of physics.
He believes that truth, especially scientific truth, is very distorted in today’s life because we view truth as unfaultable and absolute. He is against all ‘systems of thoughts’ for many reasons. One of his most important reasons is that systems of thought inhibits human kind from what makes it so great, creativity. Systems of thoughts use truth as an alliance to an ideology making the believer a kind of slave. He believes science should be seen as something created and not discovered.
His goal is to overthrow the tyrant of science which has ruled as “fact”, unchecked for centuries. He argued that science should have been only a stage in the development of society, a tool to overthrow other ideologies, then itself be overthrown (or at least questioned) by a new system. Instead, science today is taught as incontrovertible fact not unlike the religious facts taught earlier during the then-dominant religious ideologies.
*Feyerabend Paul,"Against Method: Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge,. Humanities Press,1975
(American physicist, 1918-1988)
The duty to always doubt what we believe to be true
Feynman was a man of science who believed the world had an order that could be ascertained through experiment and observation. At the same time, he was a man who had faith in doubt. He upheld the idea that all knowledge is tentative. He found it of paramount importance that in order to progress one must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
According to Feynman, all knowledge grasped by the human mind is inherently uncertain, that is to say, in other words, ultimate truth is unknowable. Furthermore, it is more or less irrelevant to human life. He repeatedly said that we must reject the mirage of "certainty"; we must always doubt, because it is only through doubting what we believe to be true that we make any kind of progress. After all, we only bother to investigate what we don't know.
Scientists are never certain. All their statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty. When a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false. One must discuss each question within the uncertainties that are allowed. And as evidence grows it increases the probability perhaps that some idea is right, or decreases it. But it never makes absolutely certain one way or the other. This is of paramount importance in order to progress. We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And the question requires doubt. “People search for certainty. But there is no certainty." One must be able to live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. It is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. We may have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but we can never be not absolutely sure of anything . We should not feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe. Feinman wrote: “I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.”
*Feynman Richard, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out : The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman, edited by Jeffery Robbins,1999, ISBN 0-14-029034-6
(German idealist philosopher, 1765-1814)
1. Fichte's philosophy is a synthesis, unique in its kind: monism and liberty. Identity of the ethical principle and the metaphysical principle is the fundamental dogma of his system. The real reality is, according to Fichte, active Reason, pure Will, the moral Ego. What the common mind regards as real and true is nothing but a phenomenon, a manifestation, a faithful or imperfect translation, a portrait or a caricature. The ultimate and highest principle from which we come and towards which we strive is not being but duty; it is an ideal which is not, but which ought to be. Being as such has no value, and does not, strictly speaking, exist. The stability or immobility of what we call substance, substratum, or matter, is a mere appearance . The true reality is all movement, tendency, and will. The universe is the manifestation of pure Will, the symbol of the moral Idea, which is the real thing-in-itself, the real absolute truth. To philosophize is to accept the truth that being is nothing, that duty is everything; it is to recognize the inanity of the phenomenal world apart from its intelligible essence; it is to regard the objective world, not as the effect of causes foreign to our practical reason, but as the product of the ego. There is no science except the science of the ego or consciousness. Knowledge is the exclusive work, the creation, of the ego. There is no philosophy but idealism, no method but the a priori method. Philosophy does not discover ready-made truths, or establish facts that already exist. To philosophize, or to know, is to produce such facts, to create such truths.
Still the limitation of the ego, the objective world, exists, but it owes its existence to the activity of the subject. Suppress the EGO, and you suppress the world. Creation is reason limiting itself; it is the will or pure thought, limiting, determining, or making a person of itself.
Freedom is the highest principle, the essence of things. It is even superior to truth, considered from the purely theoretical standpoint, or rather, it is the highest Truth. For that very reason it is not an abstraction, but the supreme reality. But this reality, the source of all other realities, precisely because it is freedom, cannot be an empirical datum, an immediate, brutal fact. True freedom is the freedom which creates itself, or realizes itself.
2. What sort of philosophy one chooses depends, for Fichte, on what sort of man one is. Realists choose realism because of the kinds of people they are. Idealists do the same. Fichte's primary criticism of realists is not so much that they have made some mistake, but that they are the kinds of people who chose realism.
Fichte says that there are two theoretical systems: dogmatism - in which the I is determined by the objects; and idealism - in which the objects are determined by the I. In his opinion both are possible world-views. Both are capable of being built up into a consistent system. But the adherents of dogmatism must renounce the independence of the I and make it dependent on the "thing-in-itself". For the adherents of idealism, the opposite is the case. Which of the two systems a philosopher is to choose, which is the truer? Fichte argues that, if one wishes the I to retain its independence, then one will cease to believe in external things and devote oneself to idealism.
* Fichte, Outline of the Doctrine of Knowledge (1810). From The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, translated by William Smith, Pub: Trubner and Co., 1889.
(Florentine neo-platonist philosopher, 1433-1499)
Truth is eternal and unmoving
Marsilio Ficino maintained that the Platonic doctrine was providentially made to harmonize with Christianity, in order that by its means speculative intellects might be led to Christ. He expressed his view on truth in a letter to his nephew:
“I consider that which does not vary to be nothing other than truth. Indeed, truth itself is so totally unmoving that the truth even of movement is unmoving. For what is the truth of movement except its own unchanging law that is comprehended in the true definition of truth? Truth is such that it can never be other than itself. Consequently, truth is eternally present and neither passes from the past into the present nor flows from the present into the future. Truth is so present that the truth even of the future and of the past is present. For by that same truth by which it was true from the beginning of time that this or that would at some time be, and by which it is true in the present that this or that is, or was or will be.
Truth is so eternal that even if it is said to have had a beginning at some time, it would certainly have been true before the beginning of time, and it would not have been true except through the same truth, that truth itself would at some time be. And even if truth should be thought ever to cease, then it would be true for all time, yet only through truth itself would it be true, that truth once was. If truth is unmoving in movement, if it is present in past and future, if it is in the beginning without a beginning, if likewise in the end without an end, it is certainly nothing other than the eternal unmoving itself.
The mind therefore, with its natural capacity for truth, partakes of this eternal unmoving. The will, also by its nature longing for truth, can be granted its desire beyond movement and beyond time. Only a life dedicated by choice to the study and cultivation of truth is lived in the fullness of bliss beyond movement and beyond time. Be sure that those who unlawfully and willfully depart from truth, the fount of true happiness, thereupon fall in misery from the bliss of eternity. But those who with all their might draw near to truth, the source of true happiness, at once rise again in bliss to that blessed eternity.”
*Marsilio Ficino, "The study of truth"
Letter to his nephew,
Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino,
Inner Traditions International, Rochester, Vermont, 1996
(American philosopher, b. 1946)
Mathematics does not have to be true to be good
Hartry Field is known for his fictionalist view of mathematics: the view that a serious intellectual inquiry need not aim at truth. Mathematics, he argues, does not have to be true to be good. He suggests that the acceptance of a mathematical or scientific theory need not involve belief in its content. Thus the distinctive commitment of fictionalism is that acceptance in a given domain of inquiry need not be truth-normed.
His view of mathematics is that, even if mathematical objects are fictions, mathematics is useful and indispensable because of the simplicity that it provides in making quantitative statements about the world rather than providing any access to transcendental truth. Hartry Field's programme is an attempt to accomplish enough of an eliminativist project to avoid an ontological "commitment" to mathematical entities. The goal is to show that science can be done without mathematics, but not necessarily that science can be done just as well that way. As Field sees it, the role of mathematics is to facilitate inferences from physical premises to physical conclusions, what may be called "nominalistic arguments". Field's claim is that mathematics is conservative over science, in the sense that any nominalistic argument that can be derived with the help of intermediate mathematical statements is itself logically valid. Thus, the role of mathematics in science is to facilitate the logic. Field points out that conservativeness is not the same thing as truth. So if the fictionalist programme succeeds, there is no need to regard the mathematics as literally true. Since in principle mathematics is dispensable, its assertions may be regarded as statements about fictional entities, much like what we read in novels. Because Hartry Field does not accept the existence of mathematical objects, he does not accept that arithmetic contains any truths - just as someone who denies the existence of David would deny that 'David is a small man' can express a truth. Yet he hopes to explain how arithmetic can be useful in its applications, in terms of its consistency. In Field's view mathematical statements might have been true (had there existed any numbers), although they do not happen to be so; and this is claimed to be sufficient to explain the practical usefulness of such statements.
* Field Hartry,Science without Numbers: A Defence of Nominalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
(American philosopher of science , b. 1937)
Science does not need the realist or antirealist perspectives, for it does not need a sophisticated theory of truth: science must be taken on its own terms.
Fine argues that we should abandon the positions in the philosophy of science known respectively as ‘realism’ and ‘antirealism.’ As theoretical postulates concerning the status of our scientific theories, Fine contends, these positions are misleading at best. In effect, to advocate either position is to add theoretically ungrounded assertion to what we all already accept. By refusing to theorize about our theories, and by moreover sticking to what Fine calls a ‘core position’ of truisms, we can move beyond realism and antirealism. Fine’s natural ontological attitude (NOA) is just such a refusal. As Fine puts it: “NOA helps us to see that realism differs from various antirealisms in this way: realism adds an outer direction to NOA, that is, the external world and the correspondence relation of approximate truth; antirealisms (typically) add an inner direction, that is, human-oriented reductions of truth, or concepts, or explanations.”
Fine holds the core position which he calls “the natural ontological attitude”(NOA) which he finds the best view one can have toward science. NOA tells us to accept the result of science as true. Truth here is meant in the “normal referential way”. The core position of NOA does not need 1) to adopt the realist view of a correspondence theory of truth 2) to adopt the antirealist pragmatic, instrumental, or conventional analysis of truth. Science does not need the realist or antirealist perspectives, for it does not need a sophisticated theory of truth, or an explanation of its success. Science must be taken on its own terms.
The attitude that marks NOA is just this: do not try to read things into science. If one adopts this attitude, then the global interpretations, the ‘isms’ of ‘scientific philosophies’, appear as idle overlays to science: not necessary, not warranted and, in the end, probably not even intelligible.
Moreover, “the quickest way to get a feel for NOA is to understand it as undoing the idea of interpretation. Thus, NOA is a way of stepping around the dispute between realists and antirealists—a way of getting us to see that we need not disagree here. Our disagreements stem from an incessant need to characterize our characterizations—to offer second-order theories of our scientific practices. Our compulsion to determine the significance of science by interpreting it tells us more about our own insecurities than it will ever tell us about science. As Fine suggests, in a delightfully Wittgensteinian key, the realism/antirealism dispute does not demand resolution: it demands therapy.
Realism and antirealism alike see science as susceptible to being set in context, provided with a goal, and being made sense of. What binds realism and antirealism together is this: they see science as a set of practices in need of an interpretation, and they see themselves as providing just the right interpretation.
To advocate NOA is to advocate the core position—and no more. It is to advocate the truism that scientific investigation picks out real things in the world. Fine insists that we do not go beyond NOA—that we give up trying to theoretically characterize our acceptance of a basic ontology. Such attempts at theorizing lead us to misrepresent the phenomena in question.
Fine objects to both realists and antirealists because they are both "inflationists". Inflationism is an interpretation of science "in accordance with a set of prior, extra-scientific commitments". There is no ground for such extra-scientific commitments. Realism is an inflationism because of its commitment to the truth of scientific theories. Antirealist instrumentalism is inflationism because it introduces the notion of instrumental reliability as a sole criterion of theory choice without having any argument for it.
Fine sums up this argument as follows: "it is possible to accept the evidence of one's senses and to accept, in the same way, the confirmed results of science only for a realist; hence, I should be one”. This acceptance of scientific truth involves the attitude "to take them into one's life as true, with all that implies concerning adjusting one's behavior, practical and theoretical, to accommodate these truths"
*Fine Arthur, Shaky game, University of Chicago Press, 1996
(American literary theorist, b. 1938)
The truth claims of religions are necessary: it belongs to their identity
In Religion without Truth Stanley Fish makes an important argument. He is responding to those who are promoting the study the Bible as a piece of literature and nothing more than that. Fish’s view is that bracketing the question of truth is a strange way to know the Bible. One cannot do away with the essential point that the Bible is making claims to belief. It is reductionistic and unnatural to study the Bible as mere literature. It has to be studied as the Word of God. Fish's thought is that the truth claims of a religion -- at least of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity. Take the religions’ truth claims away and all you have is an empty shell. The Bible is making claims to truth and demands belief. It was not given to us for its literary merits, but for our salvation. Fish may not be a believer, but he understands this aspect of the Bible better than many who are. Studying the Bible merely as an artifact of literary merit may be an attractive idea to sell to school boards, but it is hard to see why Christians should get very excited about the idea.
* Fish Stanley, "Religion Without Truth," 2007 ," the March 31, 2007 edition of The New York Times
(American logician, 1908-1987)
Not only are some truths not known, but some truths are not knowable
According to the realist conception, truth is a radically non-epistemic notion: there is no absurdity in the idea of a proposition being true although we may lack any capacity to verify it or to gather evidence in its favour. A proposition that is graspable by the mind may be true without being knowable. For the anti-realist (or verificationist), in contrast, the notion of truth is epistemically constrained. Although there are many true propositions that in fact are never known, the anti-realist finds the idea of an unknowable proposition unintelligible. That is, the anti-realist accepts the following principle: any true proposition is knowable.
Fitch's knowability paradox, however, demonstrates that the verificationist claim (all truths are knowable) is unsustainable. He shows that if we are not omniscient, then not only are some truths not known, but there are some truths that are not knowable.
Evidently there are plenty of truths that are not in fact known; but are there any truths that are not in principle knowable? Fitch’s argument begins by supposing that the verificationist is correct: any truth could in principle be known. Because not every truth is in fact known, the argument continues, there are truths of the form ‘p and it’s not known that p’. Since the verificationist thinks that any truth could be known, he is committed to thinking that truths of this conjunctive form ( ‘p and it is not known that p’) could be known. But such truths couldn’t be known, since knowing one would require knowing both of its conjuncts, which is impossible. For one could know the second conjunct only if it is true; the second conjunct is true only if the first conjunct is unknown; and so one could know the second conjunct only if one didn’t know the first. So the verificationist claim that any truth could in principle be known has apparently been refuted, given the existence of some truths that are in fact unknown.
In other words Fitch claims that if there is an unknown truth then that it is an unknown truth is itself unknowable. This conclusion threatens any theory that entails the principle of knowability, which claims all truths are knowable.
* Frederic Fitch, A Logical Analysis of Some Value Concept, 1953
(American moral philosopher,1903-1991)
Truth is relative: love is the only absolute. No legalism but personalism.
Joseph Fletcher, developed ‘situation ethics’ in the 1960s after criticising legalism and antinomianism. Legalism is the belief that there are fixed moral laws that must always be obeyed. Antinomianism is the belief that there are no fixed moral principles and that ethics should be spontaneous. Fletcher believed that neither legalism nor antinomianism provided a sound basis for ethics and advocated "situationism" as a compromise. According to him, decision-making should be based on the circumstances of a particular situation, and not on fixed law. He believed that truth is relative and that love is the only absolute. Thus, he believed that as long as love is the intention, the end justifies the means.
He thinks that all norms have to be evaluated by the individual in each situation. His situation ethics are built on the idea that “our obligation is relative to the situation.” He says that love is the only absolute; all other moral commands are relative to this. The only way to judge right and wrong is to look at the results. What “works” or “satisfies” is right. Values, then, are made neither by God nor society, but by the individual, who must decide what is right for him in a given situation. This, he believes, eliminates the ‘cruelty’ of legalism by focusing on persons rather than precepts.
In essence, a person discerningly uses love – the “one and only law”–as the basis on which to make a decision in a given situation. Fletcher leaves room for principles, but only as “illuminators,” not “directors” of conduct. Situation Ethics allows for relativistic compromise of absolute standards based on subjective personal judgment. So, for Fletcher, situation governs principle, not vice versa.
The core propositions of situationism are: "Only one thing is intrinsically good, namely, love"; "only the end justifies the means"; and "decisions ought to be made situationally, not prescriptively.'' Ethical decisions are to be made out of "love" - and the achievement of a loving end justifies any means to bring it about. Love is the only moral truth, the only viable standard for determining right from wrong.
* Fletcher Joseph, Situation Ethics: The New Morality, Philadelphia: Westminster Press. 1966
(British philosopher, b. 1923)
What is not empirically falsifiable is meaningless
There can be no assertion of truth or falsehood about any reality that is not empirically accessible.
Believers in God, faced with the problem of evil, make qualification after qualification to explain how a perfectly good and powerful God might yet allow suffering and evil in the world. For them no arguments whatsoever can disprove the existence of God. They will always find some justification for their beliefs in spite of any state of affairs. But, says Flew, if an assertion is in no way falsifiable, that assertion is empty. It is not an assertion – liable to be true or false - but a mere belief which has nothing to do with truth and falsehood and is therefore meaningless.
The assumption of Flew’s argument is that the only allowable proof of any truth is empirical. What counts for him is empirical evidence only, a kind of argumentation that is not found anywhere in the history of philosophical and theological theism. For theists to suggest that the truth of God’s existence is empirically discernible would be close to idolatry. Flew demands from the believer as positive evidence what the believer would regard as negative evidence.
* Flew, Anthony, “Theology and Falsification” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, SCM Press, London, 1955, p. 96-99
According to James Fodor one must reject the ‘pernicious’ Cartesian gap between the mind and an external world independent of the mind. Mind and physical reality cannot be separated. An understanding of truth must take into account that self, language and world coexist in relations of mutual implication. The primary bearers of truth are linguistic. They do not necessitate the existence of truth-makers. There is no need of ontological confirmation because the existence of the world and the existence of language are interdependent and mutually entailing. "Language exists" is equivalent to "the world exists".
Fodor whose project is to work out “a theory of truth from the Christian point of view” endorses the Wittgensteinian view of religious language. The existence of truth depends on our linguistic activities. It is wrong to claim that our religious assertions (for instance: "Jesus is risen") are true by virtue of the way things really are. Truth is not correspondence to facts. Truth has no externally imposed criteria.
But then what is truth for Fodor? He pleads in favour of what he calls a transformational conception of truth, which he presents as a uniquely Christian vision of truth. A theological claim is true, he says, if the believer is transformed by it. By “transformed", Fodor means "altered", "moved", "touched". Transformation is the necessary and sufficient condition for truth. This means that for him our response to the truth is included in the very concept of truth itself. The existence of theological truth becomes dependent on the subjective responses of human beings to particular theological claims.
Fodor's vision is thus thoroughly relativistic. Indeed, for some one who is transformed by "Jesus is risen", the theological claim is true. For some one not transformed by the same, the theological claim is false. But Fodor is not deterred by the objection of relativism, because he adopts the Wittgensteinian theory of language game in religion. That means that for him the Christian truth is unique and therefore not measurable against anything outside it. Christian truths are determined wholly from within the language game. No outsider has the right to pass judgment on a particular use of language.
* Fodor, James, Christian Hermeneutics, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995; see Richard Davis, HeyJ (2000), p.436-448
( Contemporary American philosopher)
1. Fontinell adopts a resolutely pragmatist world-view. The concept of an immutable reality is rejected in favour of an open, unfinished world of novelties, possibilities, choices and ever new hypotheses. In this processive world-view human experience is the field of transaction between organism and environment, which are completely interdependent.
2. There are several modes of experience. Knowledge is a particular mode of experience, but it is not the only way to have access to reality, for experience precedes knowing. It is through experience that one comes to the truths of life, not through knowledge only. Fontinell rejects the exclusively intellectual concept of truth. Truth is richer and more varied than knowledge. Truth is also existential and personal.
3. Truth refers to personal experience insofar as the relations constituting the experience are satisfactory, that is, conducive to the development of the life of the person. Truth may be abstract and representative (in science) but it is also existential and participational. Knowing is only one of the ways that contribute to the development of the person. Art, litterature, religion, etc. - any experience - must be called true if they improve the human condition. Man indeed is conveniently described as a believing-knowing-feeling-loving being. These are the various functions at the service of life, according to the well known pragmatist principle. All four are separate modes of experience. All are true insofar as conducive to life’s betterment. Art is true, love is true, religion is true, knowledge is true, provided they fulfil that condition.
4. Religious truth is characterised by faith and faith is not knowledge but a unique mode of experience, which is worth ( and thus ‘true’) if it contributes to the betterment of human life. To make faith a mode of knowledge is as mistaken as making love and art modes of knowledge and regarding knowledge as a value exclusive of all others. If truths were only intellectual and cognitive, there would be no religious truths. Creeds, dogmas and sacred scriptures do not give more knowledge but invite the believer to a participative experience. It follows that in the field of religious faith there can never be the kind of verification which characterizes knowledge. This implies that the believer is never protected from existential doubt.
Religions should surrender their knowledge-claims to science, metaphysics or ethics. Whatever is accessible in all spheres of knowing belong to all human beings and not just to the adherents of a particular religion. Religion has a distinctive contribution to make in the expansion of human life, but not in the area of cognitive truth.
* Fontinell, Eugen, Religious truth in a relational and processive world, Cross Currents, Summer 1967, p.283-315
(French philosopher and social critic, 1926-1984)
1. Each society has its regime of truth, its general politics of truth, that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes it function as true. This truth has been imposed by man’s will to power. It is the turn-out of ideologies ( whether political or religious) and “systems of truth”. Such truth is the product of devious and partisan historical forces; it is never “innocent of power”. The human mind is enslaved by the imposition of orderly similitude, patterns, structures and systems offered to them as the universal truth.
2. We need another notion of truth, no longer the universal immutable truth invented and imposed by ideologies to exercise power and enslave the human mind. We need to re-think the truth and for that we need to rethink thinking. By ‘thinking’ and ‘understanding’, traditional epistemology means the operations of conceptualizing, identifying classes of objects, comparing them and finally universalizing. It identifies truth with the universal, the immutable, the “same”. But this universal is not given in reality, it is imposed by the will to power which tries to enforce the order of things with the hope of securing the docile obedience of all to the ‘timeless’ truth.
3. But why should one search for such a truth, which is outside reality, outside the singular, unique, unclassifiable events of which reality is made? Why not search rather for the untruth, as Nietzsche said? Why should one bind thinking to the quests of patterns, categories, structures and systems? After centuries of imposition of the universal and same truth, it is time to give thought to the truth as event, to the truth in its singularity and uniqueness, emptied of all rationality. The event is absolute contingency, the irrational singular, the ephemeral, the fleeting that cannot be conceptualized and universalized. It is never the same but always the radically different.
4. However the question for Foucault is less to overturn all ‘systems of truth’, than to keep them off balance. No system of truth should be allowed to triumph. There is not so much to do as to undo. It is time to pay attention to why truth has been entangled with powers to make it ‘timeless and universal'. We must all the time remain able to question the authority of orthodox thinking so as never to loose sight of the possibilities of new thoughts. The sin of the Platonic concept of timeless truth has for too long eliminated the possibility of creative thinking. The remedy lies in ‘deconstruction’, that is, the dismantling of our mental categories to allow the discovery of the truth of the singular events that constitute the flux of life. All orthodoxies must be challenged. Categorial thinking must be disregarded for life to be perceived in its truth and beauty. “Do not classify this flower, contemplate it in its unique singularity”.
* Foucault, Michel, see Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Edited by Garry Gutteng, Cambridge Un. Press, Cambridge, 1994, p.166-183
(American liberal theologian, b.1940)
The truth of ‘original blessing’ and the falsity of ‘original sin’
Matthew Fox, the founder of ‘Creation Spirituality’, coins ‘Original Blessing’ as a counter to the traditional Christian idea of Original Sin, and he sees it as an antithesis and antidote to what he calls a ‘Fall-Redemption’ view. "There are two Christianities in our midst," Fox argues. As he explains, one vision of Christianity "worships a Punitive Father and teaches the doctrine of Original Sin." The "other Christianity" rejects any notion of a God who will punish sin, and the very notion of sin itself. Instead, this rival to historic Christianity "recognizes the Original Blessing from which all being derives. It recognizes awe rather than sin and guilt, as the starting point of true religion. It prefers trust over fear and an understanding of a divinity who is source of all things, as much mother as father, as much female as male."
According to Fox, true spirituality is ‘Creation Spirituality’ which starts with original blessing, rather than with original sin. It regains the understanding that our original and true nature, the original and true nature of all things, is basically good, and not in need of salvation or redemption. The Fall-Redemption view of
God's primary relationship with God's human creatures – Augustine's main thesis about the human race - is deeply flawed.
Humans are primarily loved creatures, made in God's image. Augustine -
and from him the whole Western church, Catholic and Protestant - got it
wrong.
God the Punitive Father is not a God worth honoring but a false god. Moreover Fox argues that
theism - the idea that God is ‘out there’ or above and beyond the universe - is false. He advocates panentheism according to which all things are in God and God is in all things.
Fox’s ‘Creation Spirituality’, religion is not necessary but spirituality is.
*Fox Matthew, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth (1991), Harper, San Francisco
(Austrian-born logical positivist philosopher, 1884-1966)
The scientific concept of truth cannot consist in the “agreement of thought with their objects”, as traditional (“school”) philosophy requires. Indeed science never encounters objects , but only experiences. The scientist compares one experience with another. The test of truth for him is the agreement between experiences. While traditional philosophy recognizes metaphysical realities (objects), the scientific world conception uses only constructions based on concrete experiences.
But then it looks as if the conflict between science and school philosophy on this point could be resolved by a kind of doctrine of double truth. One could say :” We, scientists, speak only of time measurements and relative time, whereas philosophers speak of real time”. The school philosopher would say that philosophy is concerned with cognitions of reality, while scientists deal only with experiments. He would hold the view that there are boundaries between philosophy and science and that philosophical truth stands over and above scientific truth.
However Frank rejects this double theory of truth, which, he says, has created a lot of confusion throughout the ages. It has never been so clearly dramatized as in the case of Copernicus’ revolution. In overthrowing the obsolete philosophical doctrines of Aristotle and Ptolemy, Copernicus scored a victory of experience over pure speculations. The paradox is that the people of the time pronounced the verdict that the Copernican theory was “astronomically or mathematically true” but “philosophically absurd and false”. They wanted to maintain the distinction between “scientific truth” and “ philosophic truth”. The new physical theories were true because checked by experiments, but they were false because incompatible with established philosophical principles. The history of scientific discoveries provides many instances of new theories labelled ‘scientifically true’ but ‘philosophically false’. But such contradictory claims are evidently absurd.
Frank’s thesis is that the so-called established philosophical principles (the philosophical truth) are nothing else than scientific hypotheses in a state of petrifaction. Scientific theories can be changed and they do. On the contrary philosophical principles derived from pure reason are supposed to be stable and permanent. But then one should be aware of the origin of these so called eternally valid philosophical principles. They are nothing more than the outcome of the petrifaction of former theories and hypotheses. The transformation of a physical hypothesis into a philosophical principle is a petrifaction of that hypothesis. Old theories disguised as philosophical principles with pretensions of eternal validity were a good and useful description of the facts known at a certain time in history but nothing more. Soon these theories became obsolete.
Philosophers and scientists often disagree on the merit of a new theory. Philosophers are responsible for such misunderstandings; they reject the new theory on account of its being in contradiction to ‘established’ philosophical principles. But then they should know that these so-called established principles are mostly petrifactions of physical theories that are no longer appropriate to embrace the facts of actual physical experience.
* Frank, Philip, Modern Science and its Philosophy, Collier, New Yord, 1961
(Contemporary American moral philosopher)
'Bullshit' is a greater enemy of truth than lies
Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. In order to invent a lie at all, the liar must think he knows what is true. He is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying presupposes that there is a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference.
Frankfurt's central thesis is that what he calls 'bullshitting' is quite another type of activity than lying. What the bullshitter and the liar have in common is that both represent themselves falsely as endeavouring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality. On the other hand, the fact about himself that the bullshitter hides is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. The motive guiding and controlling his speech is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.
When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are; he just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, he does not oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Frankfurt deplores the contemporary proliferation of bullshit. Why is there so much bullshiting rather than truth telling? He contends that bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. No wonder that the realms of advertising and of public relations are replete with instances of bullshit to the point that the bullshitting activity has become a form of professional expertise.
Frankfurt finds an even deeper source of bullshit in the various contemporary forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry.
*Frankfurt, Harry, On Bullshit , Princeton University Press, NJ, 2005
(Austrian psychotherapist, founder of logotherapy, 1905-1997)
The truth of human life is in the will to meaning: ‘logotherapy’
Frankl imparts on his patients the philosophy of a “will to meaning.” This is to say that he believed a person’s struggle to find meaning, their will to meaning, is implicit in the very existence of that meaning. To put it another way: if life is always meaningful, than a person who truly believed their life was meaningless would simply not be alive. Every treatment offered by Frankl rested fundamentally on this belief: that life is always endowed with meaning, no matter what, and that each of us is faced with the task of discovering what form our meaningfulness takes regardless of our circumstances.
Frankl uses the analogy of the Painter vs. the Opthomologist. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; and opthomologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. So, logotherapy tries to help us to see with our own eyes. It cannot show us the truth but can only help us to discover it for ourselves.
But this "meaning" is not to be used in the broad sense as in "What is the meaning of life?", but rather in a more specific way of "what is the meaning of YOUR life". In Frankl's words, asking the meaning of life is akin to asking the chess champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignement which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
Frankl talks about "The self-transcendence of human existence". It means that being human is about going beyond the self. He says "The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve, or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself."
Frankl’s
logotherapy may best be explained by comparison with Freudian therapy. The Freudian view hypothesizes that the gratification of desires is a necessary condition for mental health and happiness. Logotherapy, however believes that the key to happiness lies in the discovery of the meaning of (your) life, not in the pursuit or gratification of desires. It is through man's discovery of the purpose of his own life that he can find meaning in life in the general sense. When man is unable to find purpose or meaning in his own life a void is created, an "Existential Vacuum".
* Frankl Viktor, Man's Search for Meaning. An Introduction to Logotherapy, Boston: Beacon, and Random House / Rider, London 2004
(German mathematician, logician and philosopher, 1848-1925)
1. All the sciences have a specific goal that guides the scientist in the right direction. Just as “good” is the goal of ethics and “beautiful” is the goal of aesthetics, so the word “true” indicates the goal of logic.
For Frege, logic has nothing to do with psychology. Logic for him is not concerned with things ‘being held as true’ but with their ‘being true’. ‘Being true’ is quite different from ‘being held as true’ whether by one, by many, by all or by none. There is no contradiction in something being true which is held by everyone as false. Knowledge for Frege does not create what is known, but only grasps what is already there. Truths are independent of the knower. In attacking psychologism Frege wants to stay away from epistemological issues. The laws of truth are independent of anyone’s beliefs or opinions. The True transcends human recognition and is eternal. The laws of truth are not psychological laws: “they are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation”. Frege postulates a realm of objective entities much admodum Platonist philosophy.
2. A name or a concept is meant to point out at an object. This is its reference. A sentence too has its reference which is its truth-value, and that means that a sentence is used to say where there is truth or falsity. All sentences have the same reference: the true or the false. For Frege the true and the false are “objects”, objective realities, referred to by sentences just as names refer to objects. All true sentences refer to The Truth and this implies that all true sentences have one and the same reference. When we speak, we mean to say something true and such truth is an “objective” reality independent of us, just like an object is a reality external to the concept we use to designate it. The Truth is the “object” to which all true sentences refer.
3. According to Frege language has the primary goal to express what is true. But he pointed out that in language there is more than truth-assertion or reference to reality. He introduced the all important distinction between the sense or meaning of an expression and its reference. For instance ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ are expressions with different senses but both refer to the same reality, the planet Venus. At the level of objects (the planet Venus), there is nothing to distinguish the morning star from the evening star, but at the level of language the morning star is different from the evening star. Frege argued that reference cannot provide the complete account of what is going on. The two names have the same reference but they differ in sense, which consists in the “mode of presentation” of the reference. Thus Frege has pointed out that there is more in language than reference to reality, more than truth assertion: one must take into account not only the reference but also the sense of the assertion. He has open the whole problem of the difference between reference and sense, that is, between truth and meaning.
4. Frege deems futile to employ a definition in order to make clearer what is understood by ‘true’. He recognizes the difficulty to define truth in terms of adequation or correspondence between representations and things. To decide whether something is true we should have to inquire whether one can state that “a representation is true when it corresponds to reality”. But this is of no use. For to apply that criterion, one should in each case decide the question to know if such representation corresponds to reality. Is it “true” that this representation corresponds to the reality? But this is a vicious circle. So the attempts to explain truth by correspondence collapses. And every other attempt to define truth collapses too. For in a definition certain characteristics would have to be stated. And in application to any particular case the question would always arise whether it were true that the characteristics were present. So one goes round in a circle. Consequently it is probable that the content of the word “ true” is unique and indefinable.
* Frege, Gotlob, see Peter Geach, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1952; also Philosophes et Philosophies, Vol.2, B. Morichêre, Paris, Nathan, 1992, p.381-5
(Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, 1856-1939)
1. Two preliminary remarks are needed to situate Freud’s thought about truth. On the one hand, the truths in which he is interested are only particular and singular. It is not the universal or abstract Truth of epistemological philosophy, but the truth for you and for me, a subjective and individual truth with no universal bearing. On the other hand, the saying or not saying of the truth for Freud is not so much a matter of reference to the external reality than a reference to the other person, the interlocutor. It is not a question to present things as they are, but more a preoccupation of the way the other will understand what we say. This intersubjective dimension is essential to what he understands by truth.
2. Truth has several contraries: error (its epistemological contrary), lie (its ethical contrary) and illusion (its psychological contrary). As a psychologist Freud is mostly interested in the analysis of illusion.
Whereas error is due to ignorance, illusion is not caused by a lack of knowledge. To explain illusion one needs a theory of desire. The fact is that truth is not always pleasant, truth is not always loved. It often passes for an “incognito” , hiding itself and disguised because it is not beautiful to look at. It is often in conflict with the need of satisfaction. One rejects the facts of reality that cause displeasure. One refuses a sad, painful truth in favour of a happy illusion. However this does not mean that an illusion is necessarily false, in the sense of being unrealisable or in contradiction with reality. (A young lady has the illusion she is going to marry a prince charming and in some rare case it turned out to be that way!). Illusion consists in taking one’s desire for the reality. It is a belief in which the realisation of a desire is prevalent. An illusion could be true, but we take it for true not because we know or because it corresponds to reality but because we desire it to be so. And we desire because the object of our desire is pleasant and satisfying. This is the case with large numbers of religious beliefs.
Consequently the person under an illusion is indifferent to the procedures that demonstate the truth of the matter. He( she) does not want the truth. To remove the illusion, it is ineffective to show its falsity. The illusion can and will disappear only if the desire of it ceases.
3. The implication of such a view is that Freud regards truth a value. He recognizes that the moral and ethical quest for truth requires courage. Unfortunately in most people pleasure is more important than truth and few accept to sacrifice pleasure. Truth must be conquered but the price to pay is pleasure. Freud exalts truth and invites to go beyond displeasure to have access to the truth. But some of the contemporary ‘disciples’ of Freud (J. Lacan) ironizes on him and “his love of truth”. According to Lacan “the psycho-analytic approach excludes any collusion with truth”.
* Freud,Sigmund, see Soler,Colette, La Vérité en Psychanalyse, in La Vérité, Ed. by Quilliot, Paris, Ellipses, 1997, p. 109-120; also Kahn, ibid., p.59-62
(German born American psychologist, 1900-1980)
The ideologization of truth
Concepts are to be understood only if they are not separated from the experience to which they refer. Otherwise they lose their reality and are transformed into an artifact of a person’s mind. Fictions are created when ideas expressing an experience has been transformed into an ideology that usurps the place of the underlying reality within the living human being.
Thus the history of concrete , real persons – who are the producers of their ideas – becomes a history of ideologies. That is how one should understand the concept of God, for instance. The idea of God is a conceptualisation of the supreme power in society: the king or the chieftain. It is the outcome of a leap from experience to an abstract idea, the transformation of an experiential truth into an abstract truth. It shows how the conceptual expression of human experience is prone to be transposed into an ideology. A concept never adequately expresses the human experience it refers to. It points to it like the finger to the moon but it is not the moon. Concepts are useful to allow people to communicate but they lead themselves easily to an alienated use.
The other factor that contributes to the development of alienation and ideologization is the inherent tendency in human thought to strive for systematization and completeness. This is linked to the tendency of man’s quest for certainty. Nothing else that the whole truth will satisfy him. We are not happy to know only some fragments of reality: we want to complete them in such a way that they make sense in a systematic way. We tend to manufacture some additional pieces which we add to the fragments to make them all whole, a system. The intensity of our wish for certainty explains the awareness of the difference between the “fragments” and “the additions”. To give a system more plausibility fragmentary pieces are used as “padding”. This is the case in many scientific systems, political ideology as well as in religions. The history of religious concepts shows how humans, who had always a fragmentary knowledge of the possibility of solving the problems of existence, filled the blank spaces with many fictitious assumptions. Their new vision culminated in the unknown quantity “x” which took many names: God, Brahman, Tao. This “x” was soon converted into an absolute and a comprehensive system was built around it. Moreover as soon as the thought system becomes the nucleus of a bureaucratic organization, a Church, ideologies are created which compete and fight with each other.
* Fromm, Eric, You shall be like Gods, Henri Holt Paperback, 1998