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6
THEORIES OF TRUTH AND POSTMODERNISM
To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.
ARISTOTLE, METAPHYSICS 1077B26
If a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD but if the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the LORD has not spoken.
DEUTERONOMY 18:22
Pilate asked, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to
my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”
JOHN 18:37-38
1—INTRODUCTION Down through the ages, people have asked Pilate’s question. Is there such a thing as truth and, if so, what exactly is it? The Christian religion, as well as its rivals, essentially contains claims about reality, which are either true or false. Moreover, competing truth claims, especially those at the core of competing worldviews, often have very different consequences for life. As C. S. Lewis put it, “We are now getting to the point at which different beliefs about the universe lead to different behavior. Religion involves a series of statements about facts, which must be either true or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the human fleet; if they are false, quite a different set.”1
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The notion of truth employed in Lewis’s statement is called the correspondence theory of truth, roughly, the idea that truth is a matter of a proposition (belief, thought, statement, representation) corresponding to reality; truth obtains when reality is the way a proposition represents it to be. The correspondence theory of truth may properly be called the classical theory of truth because, with very little exception, it was held by virtually everyone until the nineteenth century. However, since then, the correspondence theory has come under criticism, and alternative theories of truth have been formulated. Moreover, according to many of its advocates, an important contemporary ideology—postmodernism—rejects the existence of truth, especially if it is construed according to some version of the correspondence theory.
In order to get at these issues, this chapter is divided into two sections: theories of truth and postmodernism. In the first section, after looking at some preliminary issues, a correspondence theory of truth will be analyzed and evaluated, followed by a discussion of alternative theories of truth. In the second section, different aspects of postmodernism will be presented and assessed.
2—THEORIES OF TRUTH
2.1 Preliminary Issues
Is there a biblical view of truth? The answer seems to be no and yes, depending on what one means. No, there is no peculiarly Christian theory of truth, one that is used only in the Bible and not elsewhere. If there were a peculiarly Christian view of truth, two disastrous implications would follow: claims that certain Christian doctrines are true would be equivocal compared to ordinary, everyday assertions of truth, and Christianity’s claim to be true would be circular or system-dependent and, therefore, trivial. Further, the Bible does not use technical philosophical vocabulary to proffer
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a precise theory of truth, nor is advocation of a specific theory of truth the primary intent of scriptural teaching.
However, none of this means that biblical teaching does not presuppose or make the most sense in light of a particular theory of truth. The Old and New Testament terms for truth are, respectively, ʾemet and alētheia. The meaning of these terms and, more generally, a biblical conception of truth are broad and multifaceted: fidelity, moral rectitude, being real, being genuine, faithfulness, having veracity, being complete. Two aspects of the biblical conception of truth appear to be primary: faithfulness and conformity to fact. The latter appears to involve a correspondence theory of truth. Arguably, the former may presuppose a correspondence theory. Thus faithfulness may be understood as a person’s actions’ corresponding to the person’s assertions or promises, and a similar point could be made about genuineness, moral rectitude, and so forth.
Whether or not this first aspect of a biblical conception of truth presupposes a correspondence theory, there are numerous passages in the second group, “conformity to fact,” that do. Two interesting sorts of texts, with numerous examples of each, fall within this second group. First, hundreds of passages explicitly ascribe truth to propositions (assertions and so forth) in a correspondence sense. Thus God says, “I the LORD speak the truth, I declare what is right” (Is 45:19). Proverbs 8:7 says, “For my mouth will utter truth,” and Proverbs 14:25 proclaims, “A truthful witness saves lives, but one who utters lies is a betrayer.” According to Jeremiah 9:5, “They all deceive their neighbors, and no one speaks the truth.” In John 8:44-45, Jesus says that the devil is a liar and deceiver who cannot stand the truth but that he, Jesus, speaks the truth. In John 17:17, Jesus affirms that the word of God is truth, and in John 10:35 he assures us that it cannot be broken (i.e., assert a falsehood).
Second, numerous passages explicitly contrast true propositions with falsehoods. Thus in Romans 1:25 we are told that “they exchanged the truth about God for a lie.” Repeatedly, the Old Testament warns against false prophets whose words do not correspond to reality, and the ninth commandment warns against bearing false testimony, that is, testimony that fails to correspond to what actually happened (Ex 20:16).
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It would seem, then, that Scripture regularly presupposes some form of correspondence theory of truth, and indeed, this is both the commonsense view and the classic position embraced by virtually all philosophers until the nineteenth century. However, prior to our analysis of the correspondence theory and its two chief rivals, two more preliminary issues should be mentioned. Admittedly, these two issues cannot be fully treated without some clarity about truth itself, and this sought-after clarity comes from analyzing theories of truth. So the discussion appears to be caught in a cul-de-sac. Fortunately, there is a way out. For at least two reasons, it is appropriate to ponder these two issues before analyzing the theories of truth. For one thing, while these preliminary issues cannot be adequately discussed without looking at theories of truth, the converse is also true. Since one has to start somewhere, these two issues are as good a place as any for launching the discussion. More importantly, before one comes to philosophy, one already has a commonsense notion of what truth is. As noted above, some form of correspondence theory appears to capture both commonsense intuitions and biblical teaching. Even if further analysis justifies rejection of the correspondence theory, its preanalytic justification gives one something with which to start.
The first issue is the distinction between absolutist and relativist depictions of truth claims. According to relativism, a claim is true relative to the beliefs or valuations of an individual or group that accepts it. It is made true for those who accept it by that very act of acceptance. A moral analogy may help to make this clear. There is no absolute moral obligation to drive on the right side of the road. That obligation is genuine relative to America but not to England. Similarly, “The earth is flat” was true for the ancients but is false for moderns.
Those who claim that truth does not vary from person to person, group to group, accept absolute truth, also called objective truth. On this view, people discover truth, they do not create it, and a claim is made true or false in some way or another by reality itself, totally independent of whether the claim is accepted by anyone. Moreover, an absolute truth conforms to the three fundamental laws of logic, which are themselves absolute truths. Consider some declarative proposition, P, say, Two is an even number. The law of identity says that P is identical to itself and different from other things, say, Q, Grass is green. The law of noncontradiction says that P
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cannot be both true and false in the same sense at the same time. The law of excluded middle says that P is either true or false; or, put somewhat differently, either P is true or its negation, not-P, is true. Note carefully that these three laws say nothing about one’s ability to verify the truth of P. For example, a colorblind person may not know whether Q above is true or false. The law of excluded middle says that Q is one or the other; it says nothing about people’s ability to discover which is correct.
Who is correct, the absolutists or relativists? For at least two reasons, the absolutists are right about the nature of truth. These two responses will be discussed more fully throughout the analysis below of the three theories of truth, but they may be briefly stated here. First, relativism itself is either true or false in the absolutist sense. If the former, relativism is self-refuting, since it amounts to the objective truth that there are no objective truths. If the latter, it amounts to a mere expression of preference or custom by a group or individual without objective, universal validity. Thus it cannot be recommended to others as something they should believe because it is the objective truth of the matter, and this is a serious difficulty for those who “advocate” relativism.
Second, the reasons for relativism are confused in at least three ways. For one thing, consider the relativist claim “The earth was flat for the ancients and is not flat for us moderns.” This claim suffers from an ambiguity that makes the assertion somewhat plausible. The ambiguity rests in phrases such at “P is true for them (him), false for us (me).” Shortening the phrase to enhance ease of exposition, ontologically (that is, with regard to being or existence), the phrase should be construed as “P is true-for-me” and, epistemologically (that is, with regard to knowing), it should be read as “P is true for me.” The ontological sense is, indeed, an expression of relativism, and it implies that something is made true by the act of believing it. However, the epistemological sense expresses an opinion that P is true in the objective sense: “I take P to be objectively true, but I’m not sure of that and, in fact, I lack confidence in my ability to defend P. So I’ll hedge my bets and say simply that the truth of P is just an opinion I hold.” So understood, the epistemological sense requires absolute truth. When most people claim that P is true (or false) to them and false (or true) to others, they are speaking epistemologically, not ontologically, and relativists are wrong if they think otherwise.
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The second confusion among those who argue for relativism is the confusion of truth conditions and criteria for truth. A truth condition is a description of what constitutes the truth of a claim. So understood, a truth condition is ontological and it is associated with what the truth itself is. For example, the truth conditions for S “Unicorns live in Kansas City” would be the obtaining of a real state of affairs, namely, unicorns actually living in Kansas City. Criteria for truth consist in epistemological tests for deciding or justifying which claims are true and false. Criteria for S would be things like eyewitness reports of unicorn sightings, the discovery of unicorn tracks, and so on. Now in a certain sense, the epistemological justification for a claim is relative to individuals or groups in that some may be aware of evidence unknown to others. In light of the available evidence, the ancients may have been justified in believing that the earth was flat. In light of new evidence, this belief is no longer justified. So in this benign sense, a claim’s satisfaction of criteria for truth is relative to the possession or lack of relevant evidence. But it does not follow that the truth conditions are relative. “The earth is flat” is objectively true or false, quite independent of our evidence.
Finally, sometimes relativists are confused about the three fundamental laws of logic associated with the absolutist position. Some claim that they are expressions of Aristotelian logic and, as such, are merely Western constructions or Western logic, which are not applicable cross-culturally. This “argument” confuses the logical status of a proposition or argument with the linguistic style used to express the proposition or the social processes used to reach a conclusion.
In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas used a literary style in which his prose explicitly follows strict logical form and syllogistic presentation. By contrast, an isolated culture in the mountains of Brazil may use a poetic form of oral tradition, their sentences may not follow an explicit, tidy subject-predicate form, and they may reach tribal conclusions in ways quite foreign to Western culture. But none of this has anything to do with the deep logical structure that underlies their claims or with the conformance of their individual assertions to the three laws of logic, and it is simply a mistake to think otherwise. We invite the reader to present any declarative utterance in any culture, including the assertion that “Western logic” is culturally relative, that does not conform to Aristotle’s three laws of logic.
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Any such assertion, to the degree that it is meaningful or asserted as true or false, will conform to the three laws of logic. Any alleged counterexample will either be self-refuting or meaningless. After all, Aristotle did not invent these laws any more than Columbus invented the New World. Aristotle may have been a Western thinker and he may have discovered these laws, but that does not imply that the laws themselves are Western constructions.
The second preliminary issue involves deflationary theories of truth. The three theories of truth examined below all take truth to be a real and important feature of the items that exhibit truth. But a recent view, the deflationary theory of truth, implies that there is no such property or relation as truth, and thus it is wrong-headed to develop a theory that clarifies the nature of truth itself. A major version of the deflationary theory of truth is the redundancy theory of truth, according to which the word true has no unique or special function within language and can be eliminated without limiting what can be expressed in language. Sentences that appeal to truth—for example, T: “It is true that Lincoln is dead”—have exactly the same content as others that contain no such appeal—for example, U: “Lincoln is dead.” Some advocates of the redundancy theory draw the conclusion that the role of assertions of truth is, at best, a way of expressing agreement with what is being asserted (“I agree that Lincoln is dead”) and, at worst, redundant.
A proper evaluation of deflationary theories lies beyond the scope of an introductory text. But two brief replies are in order. First, as we shall see in the treatment of the correspondence theory, it is arguably the case that people actually experience truth itself; that is, they are aware of truth itself. If this is correct, then truth exists. Second, it does not seem to be the case that T and U express the same thing. U is a statement about a state of affairs in the world, namely, Lincoln’s being dead. T is not directly about Lincoln. Rather, T is a statement about an assertion—U itself—and says of U that it has truth. Moreover, U and T play different functions in one’s life. One may be interested in U because one wants to know if Lincoln actually lived and, if so, whether he is still alive. By contrast, one who is interested in T may be concerned with inventorying his set of beliefs in an attempt to discern how many of them are true. Thus T functions to describe one of his beliefs, but U does not.
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It is time to look at three important theories of truth, beginning with the correspondence theory.
2.2 The Correspondence Theory of Truth
In its simplest form, the correspondence theory of truth says that a proposition (sentence, belief) is true just in case it corresponds to reality, when what it asserts to be the case is the case. Many correspondence theorists would hold that, more abstractly, truth obtains when a truth-bearer stands in an appropriate correspondence relation to a truth-maker. Thus a proper analysis of truth involves analyzing the truth-bearer, the correspondence relation, and the truth-maker.
Different versions of the correspondence theory analyze these three constituents differently. In fact, one of the main criticisms of the correspondence theory is that its advocates either cannot agree about the details of this analysis or provide mysterious entities in their analysis. Setting these criticisms aside for the moment, let us look at some issues and alternatives in analyzing these three constituents.
First, what is the truth-bearer? Three main types of candidates have been offered. To begin with, two linguistic candidates are sentences and statements. Second, two mental states, thoughts and beliefs, have been proffered. Finally, propositions have been named as the basic truth-bearer. Let us probe these in the order just presented, beginning with the linguistic options. A sentence is a linguistic type or token consisting in a sense- perceptible string of markings formed according to a culturally arbitrary set of syntactical rules. A statement is a sequence of sounds or body movements employed by a speaker to assert a sentence on a specific occasion. So understood, neither sentences nor statements are good candidates for the basic truth-bearer. For one thing, a truth-bearer cannot be true unless it has meaning, and there are meaningful and meaningless sentences/statements. Further, some sentences/statements ask questions, express emotions (“Ouch!”), or perform actions (uttering “I do!” at the right moment during a wedding). These sentences/statements are neither true nor false. In response to these problems, one could claim that it is the content of
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a declarative sentence/statement—what is being asserted—that is the relevant truth-bearer. Unfortunately, while this response seems correct, it also seems to move away from linguistic truth-bearers to propositions.
Second, certain mental states, namely, thoughts and beliefs, have been identified as the appropriate truth-bearer. Compared to linguistic entities, these candidates seem to be a step forward for two reasons. First, it would appear to be only those sentences/statements that express thoughts or beliefs that can be true or false, so the latter are more fundamental to truth than the former. Second, while language helps people develop their thoughts and beliefs, people—for example, young children—can have true or false thoughts/beliefs without thinking in language or without yet having acquired language.
On the other hand, there is a problem with identifying thoughts or beliefs as the basic truth-bearer. To see this, consider a person having the thought that grass is green. Considered from one angle, this thought is merely an individual mental event, a dated conscious episode. So understood, it may occur to a person at noon, last five seconds, and pass away. Considered solely as individual mental events, thoughts or beliefs do not appear to have meaning nor are they true or false. However, viewed from a different angle, a thought does seem to possess these features. It is the content of the thought that is true or false. An individual thinking event seems to exemplify a mental content—for example, that grass is green— and this is what is true or false.
So far, our study of truth-bearers has led to this conclusion: In the basic sense, it is the content of declarative sentences/statements and thoughts/beliefs that is true or false. Such a content is called a proposition, and it represents the third candidate for the truth-bearer. What are propositions? Philosophers who accept their existence are not in agreement on the answer to this question. However, here are some things relevant to answering it: A proposition (1) is not located in space or time; (2) is not identical to the linguistic entities that may be used to express it; (3) is not sense-perceptible; (4) is such that the same proposition may be in more than one mind at once; (5) need not be grasped by any (at least finite) person to exist and be what it is; (6) may itself be an object of thought when, for example, one is thinking about the content of one’s own thought processes; (7) is in no sense a physical entity. Though assessing the debate about the
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precise nature of propositions is beyond the scope of the present study, we shall return to propositions shortly.
What about truth-makers? What is it that makes a proposition true, and how does it do so? The most popular answer to the first question is facts or states of affairs. Some distinguish facts from states of affairs, but they seem to be identical, and the present discussion will treat them as such. What, exactly, is a state of affairs? Providing an adequate definition is more difficult than citing examples. A state of affairs is any actually existing whole that is ordered by the relation of predication or exemplification (see chap. 10). For example, two’s being even and the apple’s being red are states of affairs.
How does a state of affairs make a proposition true, and given a specific proposition, which state of affairs is the relevant one? To answer these questions, consider the proposition “Grass is green.” This proposition is true just in case a specific state of affairs, namely, grass’s being green, actually obtains. The important thing to note is that propositions have intentionality—ofness, aboutness, directedness toward an object. The intentionality of a proposition is a natural affinity or intrinsic directedness toward its intentional object, that is, the specific state of affairs it picks out. Thus truth-makers make truth-bearers true, not in the sense that the former stand in an efficient causal relation with the latter and cause them to be true. Rather, the truth-bearer, the proposition, picks out a specific state of affairs due to the proposition’s intrinsic intentionality, and that specific state of affairs “makes” the proposition true just in case it actually is the way the proposition represents it to be.
Currently, a certain version of the correspondence theory of truth is called the truth-maker theory: x is a truth-maker for the proposition p if and only if (1) p must be true if x exists, and (2) if x exists and p is true, then p must be true in virtue of the existence of x.
One thing to note is that the truth-maker theory requires the present existence of the truth-maker, granting that the relevant proposition p is true.
Certain counterexamples have been offered which purport to show that propositions can be true without having a truth-maker. If successful, these counterexamples may undermine the truth-maker theory by showing that truth-makers are superfluous. On the other hand, it is hard to know what
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one means by claiming a proposition p is true if there is nothing in virtue of which it is true.
Some advocates of the truth-maker theory respond to critics by rejecting what is called truth-maker maximalism, roughly, the view that there must be a truth-maker for each true proposition. These thinkers hold that in the vast majority of cases in which there is a true proposition, there is a truth- maker just as the truth-maker theory specifies. But in certain troublesome cases—cases in which it is not clear what the truth-maker is—there is still a sense in which the propositions are true without the relevant truth-maker. Other advocates of the truth-maker theory resist adjusting the theory in this way and seek to provide an appropriate truth-maker for the problematic cases. Is there a plausible truth-maker for these cases? Advocates of the truth-maker theory are divided on this question, and the reader will have to make up his or her own mind about the matter. To facilitate reflection on the issue, consider the following examples:
1. Baal does not exist.
2. Dinosaurs are extinct today.
3. All ravens are black.
4. Loving a child is morally right.
5. The US president in 2070 will be a woman.
6. If Jones were rich, he would buy a Lexus.
Are these examples of true propositions that fail to have truth-makers? It is at least plausible to think that a relevant truth-maker may be found for each proposition.
Consider (1). The truth-maker for (1) is simply the fact that all the states of affairs that obtain in the actual world lack the state of affairs of “Baal’s existing.” This is a real lack, a real privation that genuinely characterizes reality. Consequently, we have a truth-maker for (1).
Proposition (2) actually makes two claims: First, it asserts that at some time prior to today there were such things as dinosaurs (thus distinguishing (2) from such propositions as “Unicorns do not exist today”), and second, dinosaurs fail to exist today. Thus there must be two truth-makers for (2).
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The first is that at some time prior to today the state of affairs of “there being dinosaurs” was real, while the second is that there is a real lack of “there being dinosaurs” in all the states of affairs that obtain in the actual world today.
(3) is a universally quantified statement. As such, it applies to all ravens whatever, both actual and possible, and not just to those that just happen to exist. So the truth-maker cannot be “actually existing ravens being black.” What then is the truth-maker for (3)? The truth-maker is the conditionally obtaining state of affairs “if something is a raven, then it is black”; that is, on the condition that there is something that is a raven, then it will have the property of blackness. (There is a further metaphysical ground for this conditional being true; namely, there is a lawlike relation between the property of being a raven and the property of being black.)
(4) is a proposition of morality that implies neither that children exist, nor that any that do exist are actually being loved. What then is the truth- maker for (4)? We suggest the following. There is a type of action, namely, loving a child, that has the moral property of being right. This type of act actually has the property of moral rightness in all possible worlds, including those worlds without children, or without creatures capable of love. In worlds where there are individual examples of children being loved, each of those examples would have the property of moral rightness. Thus the truth- maker for (4) would be the state of affairs of the type of act loving a child having the property moral rightness.
As a future-tense statement, (5) poses distinct problems. Let us grant for the sake of argument that the US president in 2070 will be a woman. The problem with (5) is that in some sense it appears to be true now, even though the election of a female to the presidency has not yet occurred. How then should we handle (5)? Three strategies seem to be possible.2 First, sentence (5) may be translated as (5’ ): “It is (tenselessly) true that the US president in 2070 is a woman.” On this strategy, the state of affairs “the US president’s being a woman in 2070” tenselessly obtains, and is the truth- maker for (5). The second strategy does not translate (5) to eliminate tense, but posits a tensed state of affairs as its truth-maker. That is, the state of affairs “the US president’s being a woman” has the property of obtaining in the future, specifically in 2070. The fact that the state of affairs “the US
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president’s being a woman” currently has this future tense property is what grounds the truth of (5) on the second strategy. The third strategy says the relevant truth-maker is the state of affairs of a woman’s being president obtaining when 2070 is present, and 2070’s being present will obtain at a time after the present moment or “now.”
(6) expresses a true counterfactual of creaturely freedom, namely, what poor Jones would purchase if only he were rich. In examining (5), we learned that there may well be tensed facts about the future, facts that now exist even though the objects or events they are about do not. Similarly, we claim that there are “counterfacts” (counterfactual states of affairs) that actually exist, even though the objects or events they are about do not. Thus what serves as the truth-maker for (6) is the counterfactual state of affairs “if Jones were rich, he would buy a Lexus.” In other words, if Jones being rich obtains, then his buying a Lexus obtains.3
It would seem then that there are plausible ways of handling these putative counterexamples that do not require abandoning the truth-maker requirement, but again, the reader will have to decide whether these responses are plausible. In any case, our investigation of these alleged counterexamples allows us to make three important observations. First, truth-makers do not cause propositions to be true; rather, they are the intentional objects in virtue of which propositions that correspond to them are true. Second, a truth-maker does not need to be a concrete object; in many cases it is some type of abstract state of affairs.
Third, it may well be the case that current truth-maker theory is not an adequate version of the correspondence theory of truth. Recall that for an adequate correspondence theory, two features are crucial: (1) it is the proposition’s intentional object (the object the proposition is of or about) that is intimately related to “making” the proposition true; (2) the intentional object must correspond to what the proposition ascribes to the intentional object in the manner specified by the proposition. One implication of this is that the truth-maker does not need to exist presently for the proposition to be presently true. “Lincoln was shot in 1865” is true and does not require Lincoln’s being shot to be a tenselessly existing state of affairs, nor does it require something to exist currently (e.g., there being some trace fact of the original shooting that currently exists in the universe).
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The truth-maker for this proposition does not exist. But the relevant state of affairs did exist in the manner specified by the proposition, namely, at a time when the shooting was present and that this time is earlier than now.
But the truth-maker theory requires the truth-maker to exist in the present, and it does not need to be the proposition’s intentional object. Thus some have suggested that the truth-maker for “Lincoln was shot in 1865” is certain current facts about God’s memory. Recall the truth-maker principle: x is a truth-maker for the proposition p if and only if (1) p must be true if x exists, and (2) if x exists and p is true, then p must be true in virtue of the existence of x. Let x be certain current facts about God’s memory. We then have certain facts about God’s memory as the truth-maker for “Lincoln was shot in 1865” if and only if (1) “Lincoln was shot in 1865” must be true if certain current facts about God’s memory exist and (2) if certain current facts about God’s memory exist and “Lincoln was shot in 1865” is true, then “Lincoln was shot in 1865” must be true in virtue of the existence of certain current facts about God’s memory. The truth-maker principle seems to be satisfied, but the correspondence theory is not. The correspondence theory requires that the proposition’s intentional object is what makes the proposition true if it satisfies the ascriptions of the proposition in the manner specified by the proposition. But clearly the proposition is about something happening to Lincoln, not about a memory in God’s mind. Because the truth-maker principle uses the rather vague “in virtue of” locution and makes no reference to intentionality and a proposition’s intentional object, it seems to be an inadequate formulation of the correspondence theory.
Our study of truth-bearers has already taken us into the topic of the correspondence relation. What, exactly, is this relation? Note first that correspondence is not a monadic property of a proposition like redness is with respect to an apple. A monadic property is an attribute that requires only one thing to possess it. Rather, correspondence is a two-placed relation between a proposition and the state of affairs that is its intentional object. A two-placed relation, such as “larger than,” is one that requires two entities to be instantiated. Thus truth is grounded in intentionality. The intrinsic ofness of a proposition is directed toward a state of affairs, and the truth relation is exemplified just in case that intentional object matches, conforms to, corresponds with the proposition.
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Second, the correspondence relation seems to be unique among relations. As will be noted below, the correspondence relation itself can be directly experienced and made an object of thought, and it does not seem to be reducible to something else. It is not a causal relation, it is not physical, nor is it sense-perceptible. Neither is it a picturing relation. Propositions do not picture or mirror the states of affairs that correspond to them. This seems clear for states of affairs that are not themselves sense-perceptible; for example, two’s being even, mercifulness’s being a virtue, Gabriel’s being an angel. But it is also true for sense-perceptible states of affairs. The proposition “Grass is green” does not picture the state of affairs, grass’s being green. The proposition can be instantiated in a mind but is not itself green or sense-perceptible at all, while the corresponding state of affairs is, indeed, green. Thus the former is not a picture of the latter.
When we look at criticisms of the correspondence theory, we will see that some object to it on the grounds that the correspondence relation is too mysterious to admit into one’s ontology (one’s view of reality). For this reason, some advocates have sought to state the correspondence theory without employing the correspondence relation. For example, some claim that a true proposition is one such that what it asserts to be the case is, in fact, the case. Note that the claim does not explicitly mention correspondence. It may be that this expresses an adequate correspondence theory without mentioning the correspondence relation. However, it is more likely that this claim makes implicit use of the correspondence relation without mentioning it. When we ask what it is for something to actually be what an assertion claims to be the case, an answer seems to be possible: it is for the former (what is the case) to correspond to the latter (what is asserted to be the case).
Two main arguments have been advanced for the correspondence theory, one phenomenological and one dialectical. Edmund Husserl (1859– 1938) stated the phenomenological argument most powerfully. The phenomenological argument focuses on a careful description and presentation of specific cases to see what can be learned from them about truth. As an example, consider the case of Joe and Frank. While in his office, Joe receives a call from the university bookstore that a specific book he had ordered—Richard Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul—has arrived and is waiting for him. At this point, a new mental state occurs in
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Joe’s mind—the thought that Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul is in the bookstore. Now Joe, being aware of the content of the thought, becomes aware of two things closely related to it: the nature of the thought’s intentional object (Swinburne’s book being in the bookstore) and certain verification steps that would help him to determine the truth of the thought. For example, he knows that it would be irrelevant for verifying the thought to go swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Rather, he knows that he must take a series of steps that will bring him to a specific building and look in certain places for Swinburne’s book in the university bookstore. So Joe starts out for the bookstore, all the while being guided by the proposition “Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul is in the bookstore.” Along the way, his friend Frank joins him, though Joe does not tell Frank where he is going or why. They arrive at the store and both see Swinburne’s book there. At that moment, Joe and Frank simultaneously have a certain sensory experience of seeing Swinburne’s book The Evolution of the Soul. But Joe has a second experience not possessed by Frank. Joe experiences that his thought corresponds with an actual state of affairs. He is able to compare his thought with its intentional object and “see,” be directly aware that the thought is true. In this case, Joe actually experiences the correspondence relation itself and truth itself becomes an object of his awareness.
The example just cited presents a case of experiencing truth in which the relevant intentional object is a sense-perceptible one, a specific book being in the bookstore. But this need not be the case. A student, upon being taught modus ponens, can bring this thought to specific cases of logical inferences and “see” the truth of modus ponens. Similarly, a person can form the thought that he is practicing denial regarding his anger toward his father, and through introspection, he can discover whether this thought corresponds with his own internal mental states.
Some may reject the phenomenological argument on the grounds that it is overly simplistic. But it is not clear that this is so. The argument is simple but not simplistic because more sophisticated cases of the same sort can be supplied in which scientists, mathematicians, or other scholars experience truth. Moreover, it is a virtue of a theory of truth that it accords with (corresponds with!) what we all experience each day before we ever come to philosophy.
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The dialectical argument asserts that those who advance alternative theories of truth or who simply reject the correspondence theory actually presuppose it in their own assertions, especially when they present arguments for their views or defend them against defeaters. Sometimes this argument is stated in the form of a dilemma: those who reject the correspondence theory either take their own utterances to be true in the correspondence sense or they do not. If the former, then those utterances are self-defeating. If the latter, there is no reason to accept them, because one cannot take their utterances to be true.
A critic could respond that the second horn of this dilemma begs the question. The critic could claim either that his own assertions are not being offered as true or else they are offered as true in accordance with the coherence or pragmatic theory of truth (see below). The defender of the correspondence theory could reply as follows to each alternative: First, as we will see in more detail later in the discussion of postmodernism, a person may say that he does not take his own utterances to be true, but when one actually reads that person’s writings or listens carefully to his statements, one usually gets the distinct impression that the person really does, in fact, take his own claims to be true in spite of protests to the contrary. Second, it would, indeed, be consistent to reject the correspondence theory and take that rejection itself to be true according to a different theory of truth. However, when one looks carefully at the writings of those who defend alternative theories of truth, it often seems that they take their own points to be true because they correspond to reality. As a simple example, defenders of a coherence theory of truth sometimes argue for their position on the grounds that people cannot escape their web of beliefs and get to reality itself, or on the grounds that people actually justify their beliefs and take them to be true because they cohere well with their other beliefs. The most natural way to take these assertions is along the lines of the correspondence theory: the proposition that people cannot escape their web of beliefs actually corresponds to the way people and their beliefs really are, and similarly with the point about how people relate coherence to their beliefs.
Three main objections have been raised against the correspondence theory. First, some argue that since there is no clear, widely accepted theory about the three entities that constitute the correspondence theory, it should
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be rejected. Two things may be said in response. For one thing, even if it is granted for the sake of argument that no widely accepted account of the three entities is available, it only follows that more work needs to be done to develop the theory, not that it is false or unjustified. After all, we often know many things, that God knows the future, that electrons attract protons, even if there is no single, widely accepted theory for fleshing out the details of what we know. Second, we believe the analysis given above, though briefly presented, is along the right lines and can be given a more sophisticated defense. The correspondence theory also seems to accord well with clear cases such as the one involving Joe and Frank, and this fact may well provide enough justification to override the strength of this criticism if it is granted that it has some dialectical force.
Second, it has been argued that by distinguishing truth from the evidence one has for truth, that is, by claiming that truth transcends and is not identical to evidence, the correspondence theory leaves us vulnerable to skepticism. Why? Because if the correspondence theory is correct, then one could have all the evidence in the world for a belief and the belief could still be false. Two things can be said in response. First, even if the point is granted, it only follows that we cannot attain truth; it does not follow that the correspondence theory is false. Second, while evidence is truth- conducive, it is actually the case that evidence is not the same thing as truth itself. So it is, indeed, logically possible, even if implausible, to say that one could possess all the evidence one could possibly get and still be wrong. Thus the argument actually surfaces a virtue of the correspondence theory, not a vice. Moreover, in chapter four, a detailed argument was presented for the claim that the logical possibility of error does not render one vulnerable to skepticism.
Finally, some argue that the correspondence theory involves mysterious entities—propositions, irreducible intentionality, and the correspondence relation—and thus should be rejected. It is hard to see much force in this argument as it stands. That an entity is “mysterious” is not sufficient reason to reject it. Moreover, it is a virtue of the phenomenological argument for the correspondence theory that these three entities all seem to be ordinary and commonsensical, not mysterious. Everyday people experience the propositional content of their thoughts/beliefs, the intentionality of those
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thoughts/beliefs and the associated intentional objects, and the correspondence relation itself.
Critics who raise this argument usually mean something more specific by it. They approach metaphysics with a prior commitment to philosophical naturalism, including some requirement that a knowledge claim must in some way or another “be connected to” what is sense-perceptible. As a result, they hold that reality must fit into a naturalistic worldview, and this often means that some form of physicalism is required. The argument is that if naturalism is true, then entities such as propositions, irreducible intentionality, and the correspondence relation do not exist. It is open to a defender of the correspondence theory to adopt the modus tollens form of the argument: since these three kinds of entities exist, naturalism is false. Truth has always been a hard thing to countenance within the confines of an empiricist epistemology or a naturalist worldview. The reader should be in a position to see why this is the case.
2.3 The Coherence Theory of Truth
Since the discussion of the correspondence theory has already taken us into some of the key arguments and counterarguments regarding truth, it is permissible to treat the next two theories much more briefly.
According to the coherence theory, a belief (statement, proposition, etc.) is true if and only if it coheres well with the entire set of one’s beliefs, assuming that the set is itself a strongly coherent one. Thus the truth or falsity of a belief is not a matter of its match with a real, external world. Rather, it is a function of the belief’s relationship with other beliefs within one’s web of beliefs. Key advocates have been Spinoza (1632–1677), Hegel (1770–1831), and Brand Blanshard (1892–1987).
It is important to distinguish a coherence theory of truth from a coherence theory of justification (see chap. 5). The latter offers coherence as a test for truth and it is consistent with a correspondence theory of truth, since one could hold that when a belief coheres well with one’s other beliefs, it is likely to correspond to reality.
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One of the major problems for the coherence theory of truth is the lack of an adequate notion of coherence, and in fact, it has never been precisely defined, at least not in a way that is plausible. The trick is to define it in a way that is neither too strong nor too weak. It would be too strong to define coherence as entailment such that a belief is true just in case it entails other beliefs. One’s sensory belief that one seems to see a table could be true, but this does not entail that there is a table there even though both propositions (that one seems to see a table and that there is a table there) could be true and even though both “cohere well” with each other. It would be too weak to define coherence as mere logical consistency (two or more beliefs do not contradict each other). A person could have a bizarre set of logically consistent beliefs that would not be true. For example, if Tom Crisp believed that he was an eggplant, that eggplants are conscious, and that all attempts by others to change his mind were lies, Crisp would have a logically consistent but false belief about himself. In response to this problem, some coherentists define coherence as mutual explanatory power, hanging together, fitting together, or being in agreement with one’s set of beliefs.
Apart from alleged difficulties with the correspondence theory, the main argument for the coherence theory of truth derives from a commitment to a coherence theory of justification along with a desire to avoid skepticism. Recall that on the correspondence theory, one could have highly justified false beliefs since a justified belief could fail to correspond to external reality. It is this gap between justification and truth that provides ammunition to the skeptic who can argue that knowledge is impossible since justification does not guarantee truth. (Issues regarding justification and skepticism were taken up in chapters four and five, and they will not be rehearsed here.) The coherence theory of truth, however, defeats the skeptic because there is no longer a gap between adequate justified beliefs and true beliefs. Since truth just is an adequate coherence of a belief with an appropriate set of beliefs, when a belief is justified by way of a coherence account, it is automatically true. Truth is a matter of a belief’s internal relations with one’s other beliefs, not its external relations with reality outside the system of beliefs itself.
This argument for a coherence theory of truth provides a fitting occasion to turn to objections to the theory. First, according to the
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coherence theory, there is no such thing as an appropriately justified false belief since “appropriate justification” and truth are the same thing. Indeed, this is claimed as a virtue of the theory. But, in fact, it is a vice because it is entirely possible and, indeed, actually the case that one has an appropriately justified belief that is false. The only way to avoid this problem is to define “appropriate justification” as the same thing as truth, but this begs the question. Further, the coherence theory is cut off from the world since, on this view, truth is entirely a function of a belief’s relations within one’s system of other beliefs with no reference whatsoever to a reality outside the system. This is a serious problem. In response, most coherentists simply deny the existence of a mind-independent reality (independent of language or belief). In other words, they accept antirealism regarding reality. However, this move will be a further sign of the theory’s inadequacy for those who believe or actually know that there is an external world.
Third, the coherence theory allows for the possibility of completely different, contradictory beliefs to be true as long as they cohere well with alternative systems of beliefs. Consider the Tom Crisp case again. If P is Tom Crisp is an eggplant, then P is true since it coheres well with Crisp’s overall set of beliefs, and it is false since it fails to cohere well with one of Crisp’s critic’s beliefs. Since the coherence theory allows that P is both true and false, the coherence theory must be rejected.
A coherence advocate could respond by claiming that coherentism is a form of relativism regarding truth, and thus it avoids treating P as both true and false in the same sense. On this view, P is true relative to Crisp’s system and false relative to his critic’s. Earlier, criticisms were raised against truth relativism, and those criticisms, along with problems regarding relativism in general, apply equally to this coherence move.
Finally, the coherence theory fails in light of the phenomenological argument for the correspondence theory, as we saw in the case of Joe and Frank. That case, and countless examples of real human experience, teach us that we often bring individual propositions (Swinburne’s Evolution of the Soul is in the bookstore) and not entire systems of belief to reality to judge their truth value. We are often able to be directly aware of reality itself due to the intentionality of our mental states, and we are often able to step outside of our thoughts/beliefs, so to speak, and compare them with their intentional objects in the external world. When this happens, we experience
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the truth or falsity of our beliefs. The correspondence theory makes sense of all of this, but the coherence theory fails on this score and, accordingly, should be rejected
2.4 The Pragmatic Theory of Truth
In one form or another, the pragmatic theory of truth has been advanced by William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), and more recent philosophers Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. In general terms, the pragmatic theory implies that a belief P is true if and only if P works or is useful to have. P is true just in case P exhibits certain values for those who accept it. Pragmatism is widely taken to be an expression of antirealism regarding external reality.
Pragmatists differ about how to interpret works or useful to have, and accordingly, there is a distinction between nonepistemic and epistemic versions of pragmatism. According to nonepistemic pragmatism, a belief is true just in case accepting it is useful, where “useful” is spelled out in terms that make no reference to epistemic values. For example, P is true if and only if “behavior based on accepting P leads in the long run to beneficial results for the believer” or “accepting P provokes actions with desirable results.” These “beneficial results” or “desirable results” may, in turn, be identified with things such as the maximization of happiness, of the net balance of pleasure over pain, of technology and control over nature, and so on.
More frequently, works or useful to have is depicted in epistemic terms, according to epistemic pragmatism. For example, P is true if and only if P is (1) what one’s colleagues will allow one to assert rationally or (2) what one is ideally justified in asserting or (3) what an ideally rational scientific community with all the relevant evidence would accept or (4) such that P exhibits simplicity, explanatory power, empirical adequacy, the tendency to lead to successful predictions, and so forth. In one way or another, epistemic versions of pragmatism identify the truth of a proposition with its epistemic success.
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Advocates of pragmatism claim that problems with the other two theories, our inability to transcend our theories (language, beliefs) and get to the external world (if there is such a thing; most pragmatists are antirealists) all favor pragmatism. Critics claim that it is self-refuting, that in their defense of the view, its advocates do not recommend pragmatism because the theory is itself “useful” but because it corresponds to certain facts about language, scientific theory testing and so forth, that it is a form of relativism, and that it fails the phenomenological argument for the correspondence theory. Since these arguments have already been presented, we leave to the reader the task of developing in more detail an assessment of pragmatism.
3—POSTMODERNISM In the contemporary setting, a discussion of truth would be incomplete without an analysis of postmodernism. Unfortunately, for two reasons, such an analysis is extremely difficult to do in a brief, introductory way. For one thing, postmodernism is a loose coalition of diverse thinkers from several different academic disciplines, and it would be difficult to characterize postmodernism in a way that would be fair to this diversity. Further, part of the nature of postmodernism is a rejection of certain things —for example, truth, objective rationality, authorial meaning in texts along with the existence of stable verbal meanings and universally valid linguistic definitions—that make accurate definitions possible. Still, it is possible to provide a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism in general, since its friends and foes understand it well enough to discuss the view. But the reader should keep in mind that an advocate of postmodernism should be allowed to speak for himself or herself, and it would be wrong to attribute to an individual thinker every aspect of the characterization to follow unless such an attribution is justified.
3.1 General Characterization of Postmodernism
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Postmodernism is both a historical, chronological notion and a philosophical ideology. Understood historically, postmodernism refers to a period of thought that follows and is a reaction to the period called modernity. Modernity is the period of European thought that developed out of the Renaissance (14th–17th centuries) and flourished in the Enlightenment (17th–19th centuries) in the ideas of people like Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, and Kant. In the chronological sense, postmodernism is sometimes called “post modernism.” So understood, it is fair to say that postmodernism is often guilty of a simplistic characterization of modernity, because the thinkers in that time period were far from monolithic. Indeed, Descartes, Hume, and Kant have elements in their thought that are more at home in postmodernism than they are in the so- called modern era. Nevertheless, setting historical accuracy aside, the chronological notion of postmodernism depicts it as an era that began and, in some sense, replaces modernity.
As a philosophical standpoint, postmodernism is primarily a reinterpretation of what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge. More broadly, it represents a form of cultural relativism about such things as reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, the self, and other notions. Important postmodern thinkers are Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-François Lyotard. To grasp postmodernism more adequately, it will be helpful to break it down into seven different aspects.
3.1.1 Postmodernism and Metaphysical Realism
Philosophically, metaphysical realism includes a commitment to (1) the existence of a theory-independent or language-independent reality, (2) the notion that there is one way the world really is, and (3) the notion that the basic laws of logic (identity, noncontradiction, excluded middle) apply to reality. Postmodernism involves an antirealist rejection of these realist commitments. According to postmodernism, “reality” is a social construction. Language creates reality, and what is real for one linguistic group may be unreal for another. Thus God exists relative to Christians but does not exist relative to atheists. Further, the basic laws of logic are Western constructions, and in no way are they to be taken as universally valid laws of reality itself.
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Some postmodernists, who may be called neo-Kantian postmodernists, agree that there is in some sense a thing-in-itself, an external reality. But they also hold that we have no way to get to reality and, since we know nothing about it, reality itself is a useless notion and, for all practical purposes, can simply be ignored.
3.1.2 Rejection of the Correspondence Theory of Truth
Postmodernists reject the correspondence theory of truth. Some eschew any talk of truth at all, while others advance a coherentist or, more frequently, pragmatist notion of truth. The important thing is that truth is relative to a linguistic community that shares the same narrative (see below). There is no objective truth, no God’s-eye view of things. Rather, all thought is historically and socially conditioned. Moreover, postmodernists reject dichotomous thinking. Dichotomous thinking occurs when someone divides a range of phenomena into two groups and goes on to claim that one is better than the other. Here are some dichotomies: real/unreal, true/false, rational/irrational, right/wrong, virtue/vice, good/bad, and beautiful/ugly. Each pair represents a dichotomy in which the first member is to be preferred to the second one. By contrast, postmodernists claim that assertions that employ these terms are relative to a widely diverse range of groups constituted by a shared language, narrative, culture. Thus there are as many ways of dividing these pairs as there are groups that divide them, because all such divisions are social constructions.
3.1.3 Rationality and Knowledge
Postmodernists reject the idea that there are universal, transcultural standards, such as the laws of logic or principles of inductive inference, for determining whether a belief is true or false, rational or irrational, good or bad. There is no predefined rationality. Postmodernists also reject the notion that rationality is objective on the grounds that no one approaches life in a totally objective way without bias. Thus objectivity is impossible, and observations, beliefs, and entire narratives are theory laden. There is no neutral standpoint from which to approach the world, and thus observations, beliefs, and so forth are perspectival constructions that reflect the viewpoint implicit in one’s own web of beliefs. Regarding knowledge, postmodernists believe that there is no point of view from which one can define knowledge
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itself without begging the question in favor of one’s own view. “Knowledge” is a construction of one’s social, linguistic structures, not a justified, truthful representation of reality by one’s mental states. For example, knowledge amounts to what is deemed to be appropriate according to the professional certification practices of various professional associations. As such, knowledge is a construction that expresses the social, linguistic structures of those associations, nothing more, nothing less.
3.1.4 Antifoundationalism
Postmodernists reject foundationalism as a theory of epistemic justification (see chap. 5). Some of the reasons for this rejection are covered in the previous chapter in the discussion of criticisms of and alternatives to foundationalism; for example, the rejection of simple seeing. However, there is an additional reason for the postmodernist rejection of foundationalism that one finds peppered throughout postmodern literature: foundationalism represents a quest for epistemic certainty, and it is this desire to have certainty that provides the intellectual impetus for foundationalism. This desire, the so-called Cartesian anxiety, is the root of foundationalist theories of epistemic justification. But there is no such certainty, and the quest for it is an impossible one. Further, that quest is misguided because people do not need certainty to live their lives well. Sometimes Christian postmodernists support this claim by asserting that the quest for certainty is at odds with biblical teaching about faith, the sinfulness of our intellectual and sensory faculties, and the impossibility of grasping an infinite God.
3.1.5 Antiessentialism and Nominalism
Postmodernists deny the existence of universals (see chap. 10). A universal is an entity that can be in more than one place at the same time or in the same place at different, interrupted time intervals. Redness, justice, being even, and humanness are examples of universals. If redness is a universal, then if one sees (the same shade of) redness on Monday and again on Tuesday, the redness seen on Tuesday is identical to, is the very same thing as, the redness seen on Monday. Postmodernists deny such identities and claim that nothing is repeatable, nothing is literally the same from one moment to the next, nothing can be present at one time or place and literally
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be present at another time or place. Thus postmodernists hold to some form of nominalism, that is, rather than terms such as redness representing real universals, they consider such terms to be only names for groups of things.
Postmodernists also reject essentialism. According to essentialism, some things have essential and accidental properties. A thing’s essential properties are those such that if the thing in question loses them, it ceases to exist. A thing’s essential properties answer the most fundamental question, what sort of thing is this? For example, being even is an essential property of the number two, being human is essential to Socrates, being omnipotent is essential to God, being H2O is essential to water. An accidental property is one such that a thing can lose it and still exist. For example, being five feet tall is accidental to Socrates. According to postmodernists, there is no distinction in reality between essential and accidental properties. Rather, this division is relative to our interests, values, and classificatory purposes, and as such, the division is itself a social construction that will not be uniform throughout social groups. For example, if a group’s definition of birds includes having a beak, then, assuming for the purpose of illustration that everything that has a beak has feathers, having a feather is an essential property of birds. If the group defines birds so as to include bats, having a feather is an accidental property. Thus what is essential to birds is not a reflection of reality; it is a construction relative to a group’s linguistic practices.
3.1.6 Language, Meaning, and Thought
According to postmodernism, an item of language, such as a literary text, does not have an authorial meaning, at least one that is accessible to interpreters. Thus the author is in no privileged position to interpret his own work. In fact, the meaning of a text is created by and resides in the community of readers who share an interpretation of the text. Thus there is no such thing as a book of Romans. Rather, there is a Lutheran, Catholic, and Marxist book of Romans.
Further, there is no such thing as thinking without language, and in fact, thinking is simply linguistic behavior in which people exhibit the correct public know-how in their use of words according to the linguistic practices of one’s social group.
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Third, postmodernists adopt a linguistic version of Descartes’s idea theory of perception. To understand the idea theory, and the postmodern adaptation of it, a good place to start is with a commonsense, critical realist theory of perception. According to critical realism, when a subject is looking at a red object such as an apple, the object itself is the direct object of the sensory state. What one sees directly is the apple itself. True, one must have a sensation of red to apprehend the apple, but on the critical realist view, the sensation of red is to be understood as a case of being appeared to redly and analyzed as a self-presenting property. What is a self-presenting property? If some property F is a self-presenting one, then it is by means of F that a relevant external object is presented directly to a person, and F presents itself directly to the person as well. Thus F presents its object mediately, though directly, and itself immediately.
This is not as hard to understand as it first may appear. Sensations, such as being-appeared-to-redly, are an important class of self-presenting properties. If Jones is having a sensation of red while looking at an apple, then having the property of being-appeared-to-redly as part of his consciousness modifies his substantial self. When Jones has this sensation, it is a tool that presents the red apple mediately to him and the sensation also presents itself to Jones. What does it mean to say that the sensation presents the apple to him mediately? Simply this: it is in virtue of or by means of the sensation that Jones sees the apple.
Moreover, by having the sensation of red, Jones is directly aware of both the apple and his own awareness of the apple. For the critical realist, the sensation of red may, indeed, be a tool or means that Jones uses to become aware of the apple, but he is thereby directly aware of the apple. His awareness of the apple is direct in that nothing stands between Jones and the apple, not even his sensation of the apple. That sensation presents the apple directly, though as a tool, Jones must have the sensation as a necessary condition for seeing the apple.
For Descartes’s idea theory of perception, on the other hand, one’s ideas, in this case, sensations, stand between the subject and the object of perception. Jones is directly aware of his own sensation of the apple and indirectly aware of the apple in the sense that it is what causes the sensation to happen. On the idea theory, a perceiving subject is trapped behind his own sensations and cannot get outside them to the external world in order to
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compare his sensations to their objects in order to see if those sensations are accurate.
Now, in a certain sense, postmodernists believe that people are trapped behind something in the attempt to get to the external world. However, for them the wall between people and reality is not composed of sensations as it was for Descartes; rather, it is constituted by one’s linguistic categories and practices. One’s language serves as a sort of distorting and, indeed, creative filter. One cannot get outside one’s language to see if one’s talk about the world is the way the world is. In fact, it is superfluous to even talk about an external world, and for this reason, postmodernists claim that the “external world” is just a construction. In fact, the self itself is a construction of language. There is no unified, substantial ego. The “self” is a bundle of social roles, such as being a wife, a mother, a graduate student, an insurance salesperson, and these roles are created by the linguistic practices associated with them. For the postmodernist, consciousness and the self are social, not individual.
Finally, postmodernists reject what is called the referential use of language. Consider the sentence “The dog is in the yard.” According to the referential use of language, the term dog functions, among other things, to refer to an entity—a specific dog—in the language-independent world. On this view, people use language to refer to reality all the time. Postmodernists disagree and claim that linguistic units such as words actually refer to other words or, more accurately, gain their use in a community by their relationship to other words. Thus dog is not a term that refers to a real object; rather, it is a term that is socially related to other terms such as “man’s best friend,” “the pet that guards our house,” and so forth.
3.1.7 No Metanarratives
According to postmodernists, there are no metanarratives. The notion of a metanarrative has two senses. Sometimes it refers to a procedure for determining which among competing conceptual schemes or worldviews is true or rational. More often, it refers to broad, general worldviews that have come to be accepted by large groups of people, such as Buddhism, atheism, Christianity, and so forth. In claiming that there are no metanarratives, postmodernists mean that there is no way to decide which among
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competing worldviews is true, and more importantly, there is no single worldview true for everyone. There are no metanarratives, only local ones.
3.2 Assessment of Postmodernism
In some ways, this entire book is a critique of and an alternative to postmodernism, so there is little need to develop a detailed critique here. In chapter two, basic principles of logic and reasoning were stated and defended for their universal validity. In chapters three and four, the nature of knowledge was clarified and defended against various forms of skepticism. In chapter five, foundationalism was discussed and defended, and it was seen that the main arguments for foundationalism have little or nothing to do with the quest for Cartesian certainty. Foundationalism just seems to be the way that people actually and appropriately go about justifying their beliefs. In chapter nine the nature of existence will be discussed, and it should become obvious that people must enter that debate by starting with the real existence of particular things they are trying to explain. In chapter ten the existence of universals will be defended against different versions of nominalism, and chapters eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen include a defense of the claim that consciousness and the self are real and individual, not merely social constructions. In chapters twenty-five through thirty, topics will be included that justify the claim that Christianity is a metanarrative, a worldview true for everyone. To be sure, the items treated in the chapters just mentioned do far more than defend the theses in question, but they do include such a defense and, as such, provide grounds for rejecting postmodernism. Earlier in this chapter, the correspondence theory of truth was defended, as was the claim that one does not need to think in language. And the phenomenological argument for the correspondence theory of truth also supports the referential use of language and a critical realist theory of perception.
While a detailed critique of postmodernism is not necessary in light of all this, two objections to postmodernism should be raised as this chapter comes to a close. The first has to do with the postmodern rejection of objective rationality on the grounds that no one achieves it because
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everyone is biased in some way or another. As a first step toward a response to this claim, we need to draw a distinction between psychological and rational objectivity. Psychological objectivity is the absence of bias, a lack of commitment either way on a topic.
Do people ever have psychological objectivity? Yes, they do, typically in areas in which they have no interest or about which they have not thought deeply. Note carefully two things about psychological objectivity. For one thing, it is not necessarily a virtue. It is if one has not thought deeply about an issue and has no convictions regarding it. But as one develops thoughtful, intelligent convictions about a topic, it would be wrong to remain unbiased, that is, uncommitted regarding it. Otherwise, what role would study and evidence play in the development of one’s approach to life? Should one remain unbiased that cancer is a disease, that rape is wrong, that the New Testament was written in the first century, that there is design in the universe, if one has discovered good reasons for each belief? No, one should not.
For another thing, while it is possible to be psychologically objective in some cases, most people are not psychologically objective regarding the vast majority of the things they believe. In these cases, it is crucial to observe that a lack of psychological objectivity does not matter, nor does it cut one off from presenting and arguing for one’s convictions. Why? Because a lack of psychological objectivity does not imply a lack of rational objectivity, and it is the latter than matters most, not the former.
To understand this, we need to get clear on the notion of rational objectivity. One has rational objectivity just in case one can discern the difference between genuinely good and bad reasons for a belief and one holds to the belief for genuinely good reasons. The important thing here is that bias does not eliminate a person’s ability to assess the reasons for something. Bias may make it more difficult, but not impossible. If bias made rational objectivity impossible, then no teacher—atheist, Christian, or whatever—could responsibly teach any view the teacher believed on any subject! Nor could the teacher teach opposing viewpoints, because he or she would be biased against them!
By way of application, a Christian can lack psychological objectivity regarding the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus, and so forth, and still have and present good reasons for the empty tomb, the reality of God,
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and the like. Rational objectivity is possible even if psychological objectivity is not present, and this is what makes civil debate, rational dialogue, and the development of thoughtful convictions possible. When a Christian, Sharon, for instance, tries to present objectively good reasons for a position and is greeted with a claim of disqualification on the grounds of bias, the proper response is this: Tell the other person that she has changed the subject from the issue to the messenger, that while the Christian appreciates the attention and focus on her inner drives and motives, she thinks that the dialogue should get refocused on the strength of the case just presented. Perhaps at another time they could talk about each other’s personal motivations and drives, but for now, a case, a set of arguments has been presented and a response to those arguments is required.
Here is the second objection. Put simply, postmodernism is self- refuting. Postmodernists appear to claim that their own assertions about the modern era, about how language and consciousness work, and so forth are true and rational, they write literary texts and protest when people misinterpret the authorial intent in their own writings, they purport to give us the real essence of what language is and how it works, and they employ the dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism while claiming superiority for the latter. In these and other ways postmodernism seems to be self-refuting.
Postmodernists do have a response to this argument. For one thing, they can claim that critics misrepresent postmodernism and defeat a straw man. For example, some postmodernists defend their rejection of the objectivity of truth in the following way: to say that truth is not objectively “out there” in the real world is to say merely that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human language, and that human languages are social constructions. Unfortunately, this defense is not only false but, understood in a certain way, also fails to avoid the problem of self-defeat. The defense is false because it assumes that the proper truth- bearer is language. But as we saw earlier, a more adequate candidate is propositions. Moreover, there are numerous truths, such as mathematical truths, that have never been and may never be uttered in language, but they are surely “out there.” The defense may not avoid self-defeat because if the argument assumes a relativist notion of truth, then if the argument itself is presented as an objective truth in the nonrelativist sense, it is self-refuting.
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If it merely amounts to the claim that people are not able to express a truth unless they do so by way of language, then the point can be granted but it is irrelevant in the debate over the adequacy of postmodernism as a philosophical standpoint.
Sometimes postmodernists respond by denying that they take their own assertions and writing to be true, rational, constituted by their own authorial intent, and so forth. If these claims are correct, then they would, indeed, save postmodernism from self-refutation. But for two reasons, this response must be rejected. First, when one actually reads carefully postmodernist writings, it is very hard to avoid the impression that they do present their assertions as true, rational, and so forth. In this sense, when on the defensive, a postmodernist may deny that his or her writings exhibit these features, but an examination of those writings seems to undermine those denials. Second, postmodernists would need to offer postmodernist alternatives to truth, rationality, and so forth that make sense of their own claims while avoiding these undesired notions. It would seem that such alternatives have not yet been convincingly presented. But suppose they are forthcoming. What should we then make of postmodernism? Since postmodernism would not in this case be offering itself as true, rational, and capable of being understood by way of careful interpretation of postmodernist writings, it would not be self-refuting. But neither would there be any reason at all for accepting it, since it would not be claiming to be true, rational, or even understandable in a determinate way. It would be hard to know how a postmodernist could recommend his or her views to others or what the point would be in uttering them in public.
Does all this mean that there are no advantages to be gained from postmodernism? No, postmodernists are right to warn us of the dangers of using language to gain power over others, to recommend the importance of story and narrative, and to warn against the historical excesses of scientism and reductionism that grew out of an abuse of modernist ideas. But this admission does not mean that Christians should adopt a neutral or even favorable standpoint toward postmodernism, rejecting its problems and embracing its advantages.
To see this, consider Nazi ideology. Surely, some aspects of Nazi thought, say a commitment to a strong national defense and to solid education for youth, are correct and appropriate. But for two reasons, it
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would be wrong to say that one was neutral or even favorable toward Nazi thought, rejecting its problems and embracing its advantages. First, Nazi thought is so horrible and its overall impact so harmful that its bad features far outweigh whatever relatively trivial advantages it offers. Thus such an attitude would be inappropriate toward Nazi thought. Second, none of the advantages just cited (strong national defense and solid education) requires Nazi ideology for its justification.
The same points apply to postmodernism. Its harm to the cause of Christ and human flourishing far outweigh any advantages that may accrue to it, and whatever those advantages are, they do not require postmodernism for their justification. After all, the importance of narrative and story and the need to be aware of the inappropriate use of power have been understood long before postmodernism came on the scene. Moreover, the way to avoid scientism and reductionism is to argue against them by using the very things postmodernists deny. The only alternative to this argument is the use of mere rhetoric or sheer politically correct public power to marginalize scientism and reductionism, and this use of power is the very thing postmodernists rightly abhor.
CHAPTER SUMMARY The chapter began by supporting the claim that the correspondence theory of truth seems to be an important part of a biblical understanding of truth. Next, an absolutist or objectivist notion of truth was defended over against a relativist notion, and deflationary theories of truth were rejected.
The correspondence theory of truth was defined and an analysis was given of the three key entities relevant to it: the truth-bearer, the truth- maker, and the correspondence relation. A phenomenological and a dialectical argument were offered on behalf of the correspondence theory of truth, and three objections to the theory were examined.
The coherence theory of truth was analyzed, and arguments for and against the theory were presented. The phenomenological argument was offered as a serious difficulty for the coherence theory. Next, a pragmatic theory of truth was described, a distinction was made between epistemic
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and nonepistemic versions of pragmatism, and the strengths and weaknesses of the view were briefly described.
The chapter closed with an examination of postmodernism. Seven important aspects of postmodernism were clarified, and difficulties with postmodernism were examined.
CHECKLIST OF BASIC TERMS AND CONCEPTS absolute truth
Cartesian anxiety
coherence
coherence theory of justification
coherence theory of truth
correspondence relation
correspondence theory of truth
criteria for truth
critical realist theory of perception
deflationary theories of truth
dialectical argument
dichotomous thinking
epistemic pragmatism
essentialism
fact
idea theory of perception
intentional object
intentionality
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law of excluded middle
law of identity
law of noncontradiction
metanarrative
modernity
nominalism
nonepistemic pragmatism
objective truth
phenomenological argument
postmodernism
pragmatic theory of truth
proposition
redundancy theory of truth
referential use of language
relativism
self-presenting property
sentence
social construction
state of affairs
statement
truth conditions
truth-bearer
truth-maker
truth-maker theory
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truth-maker maximalism
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