A Relational Hermeneutics Approach to Truth

A RELATIONAL HERMENEUTICS APPROACH TO TRUTH

Truth has long been at the core of Western thought, as noted by

Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault’s, and Fredrich Nietzsche. It is

perhaps easy to take truth for granted, at least as a concept or aim, but

Nietzsche calls us (1887/1997, pp. 111113, 118-120) to take up truth as

an issue. But truth has been taken up as an issue in multiple ways since

Nietzsche. This dissertation intends to take up the issue of truth in a

manifold way:

(1) it intends to re-examine and re-narrate the history of truth in

mainstream Western thought in a way which is perhaps more

thorough and updated than some past attempts (e.g., in

Heidegger and Foucault). This is the main purpose of

Chapters 1-4, and will involve going through the history of

truth in analytic philosophy (Chapter I), visiting examining

Nietzsche and Foucault as important historical “outlaws” of

analytic philosophy (Chapter 2), more recent

“renegade” figures of Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, and

Hans Sluga (Chapter 3), and the broader history of truth in

antiquity, modernity, and postmodernity (Chapter 4).

(2) It intends to review significant narrations of the history of truth

especially in

Heidegger, MacIntyre, Sluga, and Pierre Hadot. This is partly

introduced in Chapter 3 and a major focus of Chapter 4.

(3) It intends to argue for (Hans Gadamer-inspired) hermeneutics

as a sort of best-approach-so-far to truth which has a resilient

integrative ability—the ability or resources to attempt to

integrate past and present, history and presence, action and

thought, subject and object, and mind and world

(Chapter 5).

(4) In intends to further the development of a hermeneutic

approach to truth in what I call ‘relational hermeneutics’

(Chapters 5-6).

(5) It intends to go about its purposes in a hermeneutic way; it

intends to embody the approach it advocates.

Given that this dissertation intends to embody a hermeneutic

way, I wish to elaborate a couple things about the style of this

dissertation. First, since Gadamer, hermeneutics has had some

suspicion of seeking truth methodologically, which is why I say ‘way’

rather than ‘method.’ I actually don’t think I (or even Gadamer) can

completely avoid some degree of method and form in our finite attempts

at truth, but hermeneutics encourages a humility about the methods and

forms we employ. Second, since the hermeneutic way is pictured as

circular or spiral rather than linear, there is a certain interplay between

issues in each chapter, rather than a linear separation of neatly

delineated topics (one per chapter). For example, there is an interplay

between the history of truth and the versions given of the history of truth

—between history and historiography (in Chapters 1-4). Another

example: there is a deep interplay between description and evaluation,

and I am usually not all that concerned to neatly distinguish between

these two. Hopefully this approach opens up a fresh perspective on

various things, however, it may come at the cost of some organizational

clarity.

Chapter 1 is the messiest chapter organizationally. It contains

several purposes itself. First it delineates the path of the dissertation,

second it will give some more present-relevant motivations for its broad

concern for truth, third it will take up the history of truth in analytic

philosophy, and finally it will bring up some broader and transitional

issues arising from that history.

Broken Promises, Failed Dreams

Why is it that a book like Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable

Lightness of Being (1984/1999) could strike such heavy chords of

relevance, could in portraying disconnected and dispersed Nietzschean

lives struggling to live in the vacuum of vacated structures and fixities,

strike readers as perhaps touching or embodying deep truths? The

resonance and beauty found in the book is not just a distant recognition,

an acknowledgment of ingenious art or brilliant merging of philosophy

and life; it is often also an identification or recognition of the surprising

proximity of the characters with our own western-societal milieu and

perhaps with the very operations of our own life and how we must go

about navigating various vacuums, dispersions, disconnections, and

disoriented orientations. Nietzsche might appear dead in most ethical

discussions within analytic philosophy, but he has become a highly

dispersed uber-apparition in Western arts and humanities, even

laughing over the shoulder of his often more visible apprentice Foucault

as Foucault more perspicuously ripples far and wide across such

oceans (while most anglo philosophy imagines itself above such

waves). So we should not be surprised at Nietzsche’s surfacing in

prescient diagnoses of the current American political situation from the

likes of Wendy Brown (2018) or Sluga (2018), nor at the play of strong

reactions and admitted moral relativism in many of our undergrads, nor

at the continued experiments in removing or absurdifying various fixities

and structures in film and literature which has been a stronger

phenomenon in Europe than in the U.S. It seems that under the

surface, there is a strong impression that something was lost—

including some collection of optimistic beliefs concerning reason,

structure, progress, Enlightenment, modernity, and truth.

As the world has been undergoing speedy digitalization, in which

communication, ‘information,’ attention, etc. are susceptible to the

heavy gravitational pull of digital media and devices, one gets the sense

that the old Nietzschean stances are even more relevant, and in new

ways, as if they have been upgraded. It feels that ‘truth’ as a valuein-

itself is even more lost, and that if one attempts to apprehend the

dynamics of the digital world, drives, such as power or desire or

pleasure, are far more operative, and far more explanatory, than truth

as a fundamental cause or motivation. Or, if one takes truth as a drive

or will—Nietzsche’s “will to truth” or Aristotle’s “all men by nature desire

to know”—then the will-to-truth appears as one drive which operates

digitally (such as in online lectures and podcasts and blogs), but as a

drive which pales in comparison to other drives (as seen in the

prevalence, addictiveness, and economic weight of various types of

digital entertainment and social media). In the digital world, truth and

reason seem even more susceptible to being downgraded to a means

or instrument which can be separated out from what people are more

fundamentally pursuing—thus, it appears that we could potentially

outsource truth and reason to AI. The instrumentality of AI mirrors an

instrumentality of reason and truth and education—it manifests a

blurring of what is instrumental and what (if anything) is not, in a way

analogous to the blurring of what is artificial and what (if anything) is

not.

Hopefully this calls us back a step to attend to the question of:

what about truth was lost and continues to be lost in these postmodern

and digital cultural dynamics?

Was truth just a dream, or a promise, or a dream which held promise,

but which failed to actualize? Are there competing dreams which have

overshadowed past dreams about truth?

Perhaps I am attempting to extend the idea of “promise” from

Albert Borgmann reflections about the “promise of technology”: “It is the

promise of technology that has both fueled and disguised the gigantic

transformative endeavors that have given our time its character. The

promise of technology was first formulated at the very beginning of the

Enlightenment” (1984, p. 69). Borgmann elaborates how this promise of

technology was tied to a promise or dream of human reason and its

potential in Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, and to the

development of science. In this dream—we could call it the dream of

modernity—Descartes links reason and knowledge to both utility and

devices. There are various words for capturing the attempts at the

“implementation” (p. 75) of this dream: “project” (p. 70), “enterprise” (p.

74), “program” (p. 75).

What Borgmann does not attend to as much is the flip side of

promise—what might be called ‘threat.’ He does touch on what I want to

call threat: “the joys that technology is able to furnish seem to have a

parasitic and voracious character: they require as a contrast

pretechnological limits and contours, and they seem to draw vitality

from the firmness of pretechnological life by devouring and displacing it”

(1984,

p. 453). This calls for elaboration: with the promise of technology comes

the threat of backwardness, the threat of being excluded as out-of-date

or even uncivilized, the threat of domination through technology, and

the threat of being forced to join in the technological dream, or the

technological race. These threats turned out to be quite real in the

history of colonialism, as some of those ‘backward’ and ‘behind’ peoples

felt compelled to modernize perhaps out of fear at least as much as out

of ‘promise.’ These threats partially precede the actual unfolding of

implementation, the issue of whether the dream has failed, and the

question of whether the dream can be recovered (Chapter 26) or

reformed.

This connection between truth and technology in Borgmann is

explored in the light of Heidegger, and Heidegger is indeed a figure

which I will return to in Chapter 4.

However, given that I want to focus more on truth than on technology,

this elaboration of

Borgmann also brings to mind MacIntyre’s treatment of the

Enlightenment ‘project’ in

After Virtue (1981/2007) and ‘encyclopedia’ in Three Rival Versions of

Moral Inquiry (1988/2003). Instead of Borgmann’s ‘promise of

technology’ implicating an underlying promise of reason, MacIntyre

describes an Enlightenment promise (or dream) of rationally solving

morality: “The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had

decisively failed” (1981/2007, p. 48).

It’s not a far cry to consider that whether we are talking about

optimism in technology or in enlightenment morality, there is not just an

underlying promise of reason, but also an underlying promise of the

truth which reason pursues. In fact, the promise of reason does not

make sense without reference to truth, unless reason were to be

demoted to some sort of coping mechanism or rhetorical game. Even

philosophers who take reason in a pragmatic direction tend to

incorporate truth in their picture by redefining it in pragmatic terms.

At this point one might think that the promise of truth is based in

a certain optimism regarding objective reason arising in the

Enlightenment. However, if one examines antiquity (and the Middle

Ages), one quickly realizes that there was already a deeply engrained

promise of truth embedded in all manner of Western thought, whether it

was depicted in the form of escaping Plato’s cave, or fulfilling the most

divine part of one’s nature in Aristotle, or the universal reason of the

Stoics, or Jesus’ declaration “You will know the truth, and the truth will

set you free” (New International Version Bible, 2011, John 8:32). Thus,

there are certain promises or dreams about both philosophy and

religion which are tied to the promise of truth. This ‘promise’ is why

Foucault can focus on truth as the fundamental channel of

subjectivization in antiquity in his Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981-

82/2005). This ‘promise’ is also why Nietzsche’s questions about truth

are so foundational—questions along the lines of: “is truth a fiction?”, “is

truth good?”, and “is truth a mask or manifestation of power?”

If one indeed attempts to answer Nietzsche with a re-assertion of

the promise of truth—perhaps inspired by ancient philosophy, recent

philosophy, or some sort of progress of science or technology—one

must face the new problems of the 21st century. Why, in our information

age, with unprecedented access to ‘knowledge,’ are mental health

problems on the rise? Why are new digital addictions (or semi-

addictions) more powerful or desirable than the truth which people are

supposed to desire by nature? Why do addictions and power affect

many so-called wise or knowledgeable persons, whether philosophers,

professors, priests, or pastors—in a perhaps similar manner to how

they affect the so-called unwise? Why are humanities including

philosophy and theology ‘out of fashion’ and susceptible to cuts if they

are supposedly places where truth is faithfully pursued? Why does all

this information result in confusing divisiveness of various sorts, such as

in politics and in philosophy, rather than a convergence upon an

objectively accessible truth?

The promise of truth, it seems, has been broken. Truth, it seems,

has not been truthful about itself. And even worse, sometimes the

promise of truth has hidden a threat of exclusion and power.

One might wonder, however, if any better dreams have been offered.

Was

Nietzsche able to offer any better alternative dream? Does power have

a promise? What about consumption, convenience, prosperity, or

entertainment? Is it not true that one can actually make a similar claim

about other kinds of promises and dreams—the promises of

advertisements and politicians, of social media and online communities,

and of economic development and globalization—the optimistic dreams

regarding these things have also fallen short? And do they not also hide

threats, such as the threat of not participating in social media or smart-

phone-requiring-QR-code-accessibility, or the threat of not being

competitive, or the threat of various forms of exclusion from new and

‘exciting’ groups and activities and economic systems?

Alas, perhaps we humans are bound to be tragic dreamers. We

cannot help to think and make an issue of ourselves—perhaps we

cannot help but to narrate, and we cannot help but to narrate into the

future—to anticipate, to hope, and to dream. And somehow it turns out

that our dreams are often fraught with hubris. Perhaps it is not such a

bad thing that one might choose to return to dreaming about truth not

out of optimistic promise, but more out of desperation or humility arising

from the disappointment of other dreams. If truth is one of a number of

potentially tragic dreams, perhaps it is at least one of the ones worth

attempting or pursuing. I think one should be more cautious and

apprehensive here than that of Borgmann regarding the promise of

technology. The promise of truth may need some serious recovery or

reform or redemption, and we are likely to fail in our attempt to do so.

But unless we attempt something like a redemption, we won’t be able to

learn and grow from our failures and our pursuit. We might not find

much in our seeking, but if we seek, we will find more than if we give up

on seeking.

I’ll offer a couple of initial ideas for reforming the promise, or

promises, of truth— these ideas will help indicate some initial direction

to our exploration of truth. First, rather than consider truth by way of

some narrow philosophical question, such as “what is the definition of

truth?” or “is all truth relative?” or “is truth an end in itself?”, we can

open up the issue of truth so as to interface with other issues and fields.

This means we can be open to examining truth historically, examining

truth psychologically, examining truth sociologically, and examining truth

phenomenologically. Nietzsche was a trailblazer in this sort of opening.

MacIntyre is a more recent example of this opening, especially in the

area of moral inquiry; he sensed a need for ethics to make sense of

culture and culture to make sense of ethics and rival perspectives to

make sense of each other. He gave a new vision of what it means to do

ethics which involves perspectives on human nature, values, ethical

enquiry, interpretive narratives of the history of ethics and culture and

practice, and interpretations and diagnoses of rivals—in which these

various perspectives are all standing in relationship with one another. In

this dissertation I intend to approach truth in a somewhat similar style,

with an awareness of interrelated layers, but with the framework of

hermeneutics as a way to interface different layers. These layers

include the layers of truth, reason, the history of truth, and the

comparisons of rival versions of truth and reason and the history of

truth. My second idea for reforming the promise of truth will only

be touched on at the end of this dissertation, and that is the idea that

truth need not bear the full brunt of our hope, nor need it be rendered

hopeless, nor need it be its own dream. I wish to suggest and motivate

the exploration of ways of integrating the dream of truth with the dream

of relationship, and to prepare for this exploration by suggesting some

ways of integrating the issue of truth with the issue of relationship.

Truth’s Struggles in Anglo Philosophy

In this section I will start in earnest my investigation into the

history of truth which will continue through Chapter 4. This history will

start close to home by investigating the philosophical streams of our

time and place, namely the history of truth in anglophone philosophy,

which is mainly analytic philosophy, since the time of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche was not exactly appreciated in his time. His works

were hardly read, and were eclipsed by various other philosophical

developments. Searching JSTOR’s journal database (ITHAKA, 2020)

reveals how from 1876 (the first year of the journal Mind and an early

point of Nietzsche’s career) to 1950, “Kant” yields 32,269 search results

(hits), “Dewey” yields 22,506 hits, and “Nietzsche” yields 10,426 hits.

Narrowing the search to philosophy for the same years, “Kant” yields

17,339 hits, “Russell” yields

5,897 hits, “Dewey” yields 5,161 hits, and “Nietzsche” yields 3,995 hits.

(A broad

“Russell” search is not included because it would refer to more Russells

than just Bertrand.) So while Kant remained (and remains) a steady

towering figure, the twin rise of pragmatism (especially in the U.S.) and

analytic philosophy were far more impactful than Nietzsche, and Dewey

made an especially big splash outside of philosophy. William James

was another pragmatist with interdisciplinary impact. But it would be the

analytics who would more gradually come to dominate anglo philosophy

departments and to make anglo philosophy into a more specialized and

focused discipline.

During this time, a time when American philosophy was starting

to forge its own place and American university life was growing,

reactions to idealism and metaphysics were really the theme of

(especially) anglo philosophy, coupled often with a respect for science

or for the superiority of science as compared to the mess of

metaphysics. This resulted in the rise of pragmatism,

empiricism/positivism, a focus on language (Frege, Wittgenstein, Ryle,

Austin, the nascent subdiscipline of philosophy of language), logicism

with its focus on formalization (Frege, Russell, Whitehead), and logical

positivism (Carnap, Ayer). All of these diverged somewhat from the

flavor of “continental” trends (in which some Germans and Austrians

didn’t fit), wherein phenomenology was blooming (Husserl, Heidegger)

and existentialism was lively (Heidegger, Marcel, Jaspers). On the

moral side of anglo philosophy, there was a noticeable decline in

interest which accompanied the decline of idealism and the rise of

empiricism. With emotivism (Ayer, Stevenson) came the questioning of

whether ethics is about truth, but this was a bit different than

Nietzsche’s call to take up the question of truth per se. Pragmatism was

perhaps the main battleground where truth per se was at issue. E.g.

pragmatist D. L. Murray wrote “Why should we be upset by the

gorgeous spectacle of mulitudinous estimates of reality? ‘Every man his

own world’ is a good enough position to start from” (1909, p. 382). And

Bradley, in response to pragmatism:

“The doctrine that there is no truth in the end but the general working of ideas,

whatever is otherwise the character of these ideas, is, or may be, acceptable, I

once more agree, as a practical creed. But on the other side, with such a

doctrine, it seems to me, there is an end of philosophy” (1909, p. 490). In

retrospect, Rorty comments that “Georg

Simmel described [pragmatism] as ‘what the Americans were able to

get out of [Friedrich] Nietzsche.' Simmel was wrong if he thought that

William James and Dewey got their ideas from Nietzsche, but he was

right that their views overlapped his. All three wanted us to stop asking

metaphysical questions about the nature of reality and about the nature

of human beings.” (2007, pp. 915-16) As Rorty goes on to discuss (p.

916), the overlap between James, Dewey, and Nietzsche goes deeper

than a shared opposition of seeking objective metaphysical truths to a

questioning of the search for all objective truth and a questioning of the

concept of truth itself, as well as a consequent rethinking of the purpose

of philosophy.

As the century continued, analytic philosophy saw an increasing

amount of internal critiques and problematizations. First, there were

early pressures against logicism appearing in the 30s via Godel’s

incompleteness theorems and, in another direction, via Carnap’s

Principle of Tolerance, wherein Carnap claimed that there is no uniquely

correct logic or way of structuring the language of science (see Creath,

2017). Mid-century, logical positivism started to rapidly lose traction

under the attacks of Popper, Quine, and others. Finally, more generally,

empiricism and standard pictures of empiricism were being increasingly

dissected and questioned by the likes of C. I. Lewis, Sellars, Quine, and

Goodman. On the one hand, the problematization of concepts, theory,

and logical language was being carried out by, e.g., Carnap (as just

mentioned) and Lewis (with his conceptual pragmatism); and on the

other hand, the problematization of the given was taken up by Sellars.

Sellars’ attack on the given was also an attack, and led to further

attacks, on epistemological foundationalism. Any foundation for

knowledge, anything indubitable, anything acting as the raw material

transferred from reality to the mind, any analytic truth—starting with

Sellars, and then Quine, these all came under fire. It’s not that these

weren’t rejected before—the old way to reject these was to be a

pragmatist and accept a pragmatist view on truth. But now these were

being dissected piecemeal from within the realist camp, until, in an

extreme case, Goodman’s later thought problematized even reality, or

“the world,” itself, from a non-pragmatist perspective.

In order to better locate latter-20th century analytic philosophy,

first, notice that in the broader context of philosophy, the second half of

the 20th century saw a number of disruptive figures hit the philosophical

floor, starting especially in the 60s. Arguably Wittgenstein’s

(posthumous) Philosophical Investigations (1953/2010) was the

forerunner and more original disruption to the more conspicuous

disruptions in the 60s, but with its focus on language and its indirect

style, it was harder to digest in its implications for truth and reality than

Kuhn. Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a more

direct challenge on truth, reality, and all the optimism and

exemplariness which had been associated with science and scientific

knowledge. Then came Foucault, who mesmerized France with his

book The Order of Things

(1966/1970) and with his subsequent books and lectures, and his fame

spread to the U.S. in the 80s and 90s, together with a rise of interest in

Nietzsche, as shown by a highly synchronized rise in references to both

names according to the Google Books

Ngram Viewer (Figure 1). After Foucault, and with the further openings

of poststructuralism and deconstruction, it was not that all of a sudden

truth became an issue, or metaphysics and realisms were finally thrown

out altogether. Perhaps it was more like the gradual erosion of the hope

and optimism of certain frameworks, certain starting points and guide-

posts, some of which were deeply embedded in Western thought

(being, truth, knowledge), and others of which were newer aspirations

(systematic logical systems and languages, structures within subjects

and cultures and histories, language and discourse), such that the old

order of things, even any order of things, became insecure, became an

inevitable niche position amongst a plurality of copings amidst an

increasingly postmodern and post-structuralist setting.

Figure 1: Philosopher References on Google’s Ngram Viewer.

Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer,

https://books.google.com/ngrams/ (see

also Michel et al., 2010)

However, the world of analytic philosophy, despite increasing

turmoil, still remained something of a recognizable school with an

underlying order. As for the turmoil of analytic philosophy—in an

opening created perhaps in part by the retreat of logical positivism, the

various problems within empiricism, and Kuhn—realism, and with it any

notion of truth dependent on realism, came particularly under attack in

the 70s.

Davidson, struggling against the implication of Kuhn for concepts in

general, wrote his impactful “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual

Scheme” in 1973. His central concern (arguably) was to save objective

truth from the Kuhnian threat of conceptual relativism, and his solution

was to give up the scheme-reality dualism: “Given the dogma of a

dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth

relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by

the board” (p. 20). However, Davidson was cautious about giving any

substantial view of truth, and instead offered a stripped-down

disquotational account of truth: “The sentence ‘My skin is warm’ is true

if and only if my skin is warm. Here there is no reference to a fact, a

world, an experience, or a piece of evidence” (p. 16). Over the years,

Davidson struggled with the merits of disquotational or deflationary

views of truth inspired by Ramsay and Tarski (and picked up by Quine),

according to which there is no substantial definition of truth beyond

describing or ‘defining’ the logic of the truth predicate. (For some

discussion of such views in Horwich, Rorty, and others, see Davidson

1990.) Earlier, Davidson advocated for more exploration of a Tarski-

based correspondence theory of truth (2001, originally 1969). Later, he

admitted that Dummett helped him to see “the failure of Tarski's truth

predicates to capture completely the concept of truth” (1990).

Dummett’s work touched on truth from a variety of angles,

especially from issues in language and in considerations about various

realisms. Dummett followed in the steps of Wittgenstein in several

ways. First, he took up the theme of the examination of language as

central to philosophy. Second, and in a more specific manner than

Wittgenstein, he took seriously the idea of language as a plurality,

perhaps a plurality of games or discourses (or “seas”), each of which

could be examined separately on issues like realism vrs. anti-realism.

Third, he took up Wittgenstein’s focus on the use of language—

language as a practical ability or a practice—generally agreeing with

Wittgenstein’s notion that meaning is use: “The meaning of a

mathematical statement determines and is entirely determined by its

use” (Dummett, 1978, p. 216) and “To know a language is to be able to

employ a language” (Dummett, 1996, p. 4). In connection with this

picture of meaning, Dummett sensed a need to critique the truth-

conditional approach to meaning, offering instead a theory of meaning

based on a broadlyconstrued conception of verification (Dummett,

1976, pp. 67-137). As Putnam explained, “Understanding a sentence, in

[Dummett’s] semantics, is knowing what constitutes a proof (verification)

of it…. A primitive sentence... will be assertible if and only if verified….

The realist concepts of truth and falsity are not used in this semantics at

all” (1977, p. 487-88). Putnam, under the inspiration of Dummett,

retreated from his original belief in real realism, so to speak, into

“internal realism.” Putnam gave a logicism-based model-theoretic

argument against metaphysical realism as a major motivation for his

retreat, thereby continuing the analytic tradition of prioritizing logicism to

metaphysics. (By ‘logicism’ I am not referring to the more specific belief

in logic as fundamental to mathematics, but, loosely, as a sort of belief

in the foundational use of logic and logical models in studying broader

issues in language, epistemology, and metaphysics. For a clearer but

brief expression of this sort of logicism, see Davidson, 2001, p. 51.)

It was in this context of both new struggles—regarding Kuhn

(Davidson)—and old struggles—regarding the implications of logicism

and semantics upon realism

(Putnam)—that Rorty made an entrance with his monumental 1979

book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In it and other writings, Rorty

broadly attacked an array of traditional methods and views regarding

truth, realism, and related issues, instead advocating for a pragmatic

approach which relinquishes foundationalism and representationalism.

On this view, rationality, truth, and knowledge all arise within and are

determined by social practices and as have no higher, socially-

transcendent foundation. Rorty claims inspiration from Wittgenstein,

Heidegger, and Dewey (p. 5), and though he mentions Nietzsche but

once (p. 4) and Foucault not at all, his method is highly historical and

genealogical in a way that bears a striking resemblance of Nietzsche. In

fact, its seems that Rorty’s main argumentation is genealogical—he

claims:

One way to see how analytic philosophy fits within the traditional

CartesianKantian pattern is to see traditional philosophy as an

attempt to escape from history-an attempt to find nonhistorical

conditions of any possible historical development. From this

perspective, the common message of Wittgenstein, Dewey, and

Heidegger is a historicist one. Each of the three reminds us that

investigations of the foundations of knowledge or morality or

language or society may be simply apologetics, attempts to

eternalize a certain contemporary language-game, social

practice, or self-image. The moral of this book is also historicist,

and the three parts into which it is divided are intended to put the

notions of “mind,” of “knowledge,” and of “philosophy,”

respectively, in historical perspective. (pp. 9-10)

I’m not convinced as to the merits of uniformly characterizing the

philosophies of Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Heidegger as broadly

historicist, but the method of giving a genealogical debunking is

(arguably) a straight-up mirroring of the methodology of Nietzsche’s On

the Genealogy of Morality (1887/1997). In fact, this seems to be the key

difference between Rorty and the classic pragmatists—that Rorty had a

strong connection, however weakly he initially acknowledged it, to

Nietzsche. Rorty would mention Nietzsche more in later work,

eventually commenting that “Simmel was wrong if he thought that

William James and Dewey got their ideas from Nietzsche, but he was

right that their views overlapped his” (2007, pp. 915-16), and Cornel

West similarly claimed that postmodern American philosophers were

“unconsciously prefigured by

Nietzsche” (1981, pp. 251-52). In Rorty’s APA address at the end of

1979, he refers to

Nietzsche as “more fashionable than James or Dewey” (1980, p. 720).

With Rorty, Nietzsche was becoming a more conscious prefigure.

One might expect that analytic epistemology struggled in the

wake of Rorty to reassess truth, objectivity, and the world, but perhaps it

is more accurate to say that with the ever-increasing specialization of

the discipline, and with the unique and somewhat awkward space of

Rorty’s thought, (or awkward for analytics anyways,) Rorty became just

one of the authors one could become entangled in responding to. For

instance, Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (1986) doesn’t respond to

Rorty directly but it does rethink and re-argue for pursuing objectivity

despite the Nietzschean threat of “false objectification” (p. 4) and the

broader threat of the movement of “historical interpretation” (p. 11). But

Nagel includes a significant cautious caveat: philosophy “is after eternal

and nonlocal truth, even though we know that is not what we are going

to get” (p. 10).

Other strands of analytic thought continued far more in the wake

Wittgensteinian considerations rather than those of Rorty. Crispin

Wright’s Truth and Objectivity (2009) is a central case of this. Wright

describes his project as “how we should best understand the contrast

between so-called realist and anti-realist views concerning different

areas of our thought and discourse, and of how the debate between

them might most effectively be prosecuted” (p. 1). There are at least

two aspects of Wright’s approach which show his affinity to Wittgenstein

(and often Dummett) over Rorty. First, he takes language as a plurality

with different ‘areas’ with potentially different games being played in

each area with its potentially “local truth predicate” (p. 174), rather than

adopting any of Rorty’s effectively uniform approach to all discourse. I

should note that my claim here could easily be disputed. On the one

hand, it is far from clear that Wittgenstein was pluralistic about

language in a way similar to Wright’s pluralism about truth. On the other

hand, Rorty would acknowledge differences in the details of different

linguistic practices—however, Rorty does make claims which are

uniform across discourse on big issues such as representation and

realism. The second aspect of affinity between Wright and Wittgenstein

is that Wright has a kind of deference to the ‘ordinary language’ of an

area of discourse—a sort of non-revisionist, Wittgensteinian ‘leave

things as they are’ approach—which seeks to derive the type of truth

predicate appropriate to a discourse as it stands: “from the standpoint

defended in the present study, the issue of truth aptitude is carried by

the syntax and internal discipline of the discourse” (p. 178). In contrast,

on Rorty’s view, an area of discourse which seems to assume a sort of

representational or transcendent view of truth could be diagnosed as

having a genealogical history rooted in Cartesian representational

thought. So while Wright attempts to dig up the workings of a discourse,

to uncover the characteristics making the discourse what it is, by

examining the “features of the local truth predicate” (p. 174)—Rorty’s

methodology allows him to dig in an additional direction, namely the

historical direction, whereby he can attempt to unearth the historical

genealogy of a discourse. Wright, following Wittgenstein, lacked this

historical dimension (see Sluga, 2011, pp. 86-91 regarding

Wittgenstein).

One might accept the relevance of examining the genealogy of

discourse and come to a different conclusion than that of Rorty. Bernard

Williams’ attempt at the issue of truth in Truth and Truthfulness (2002) is

such a case, whereby, ironically, there are various elements in Williams’

style, scope, and methodology which resemble Rorty. Williams mostly

shies away from engaging in the technical discussions surrounding truth

and semantics, instead warning against offering a definition of truth (p.

50), which was a thought that had occurred to Frege: “it is probable that

the content of the word ‘true’ is unique and indefinable” (1956, p. 291).

Williams spends far more effort employing a genealogical examination

of truth and truthfulness, specifically crediting Nietzsche regarding such

methodology (p. 15). But the main weight of Williams’ view stands in

opposition to Nietzsche and to Rorty (whom Williams specifically targets

on p. 9 and elsewhere). Williams insists on the importance of the

concept of truth, perhaps as a primitive concept (p. 50; resembling

Davidson, 1990). He associates truth with the virtue of accuracy where

accuracy involves “a sense of reality” (p. 92). This doesn’t necessarily

imply a literal realism, but it involves an acknowledgement that truth and

accuracy are separate from the determination of the subject’s will. The

technical analytic reader will find Williams vague (e.g., Elgin, 2005), as

Williams is more concerned with describing and upholding the virtue of

truthfulness and the value of truth in society, since he is worried that

such a virtue has been undermined by the likes of Rorty.

Williams wasn’t the only one concerned with Rorty’s attempt to

toss out epistemology. McDowell’s Mind and World acknowledges the

presence of Rorty from the beginning: “Rorty's work is in any case

central for the way I define my stance here” (2000, p. x). McDowell’s

method also bears some resemblances with Wittgenstein and Rorty:

My aim is to propose an account, in a diagnostic spirit, of some

characteristic anxieties of modern philosophy-anxieties that

centre… on the relation between mind and world…. I aim at

explaining how it comes about that we seem to be confronted

with philosophical obligations of a familiar sort, and I want the

explanation to enable us to unmask that appearance as illusion.

(p. xi)

Arguably, McDowell has picked up the diagnostic style of Rorty,

whereby he is mindful of questions like “how did such-and-such a

conception of empiricism arise?” and “how did such-and-such a

problem or anxiety within empiricism arise?” However, this resemblance

in methodology is limited. In contrast with Rorty’s attempt to undermine

the whole framework for doing epistemology, McDowell’s diagnosis is

more focused in its scope, as it focuses on problems and assumptions

arising out of Quine, Sellars, and Davidson and background

considerations about the nature of science, as well as the occasional

addressing of mistakes that arise from Cartesian thought. It’s as if

McDowell is augmenting particular diagnostic considerations into

mainstream epistemological issues and discussions—a sort of hybrid

enterprise. McDowell is attempting to make sense of mind and world

and the way mind transacts with world in human experience, and what

bothers him about Rorty is the loss of a world to transact with and a

proper sort of rational normativity—including an answerability, or

accountability—which governs such transactions and their import.

McDowell doesn’t clearly identify his position on the nature of

truth, as epistemology is more his point of entry. But comments such as

this—“When one thinks truly, what one thinks is the case. So since the

world is everything that is the case ..., there is no gap between thought,

as such, and the world” (2000, p. 27)—have inspired discussion

locating McDowell in the vicinity of an identity theory of truth,

reminiscent of G. E. Moore: “On [the] Moorean view facts, and hence

true propositions, are, so to speak, bodily chunks of mind-independent

reality” (Dodd, 1995, p. 161). This has motivated further discussion of

identity theories of truth (e.g., Hornsby 1997).

As this story draws to a close, in order to offer a taste of the

diversity of views about truth continuing into the 21st century, I will

mention three parties to the issue. First, Frank Jackson has remained

as a representative of the continuance of the representational approach

to truth (e.g., 2006), including truth in ethical discourse (2014, p. 721).

Second, the deflationary approach to truth that had been advanced by

earlier analytic philosophers and toyed with by Davidson has continued

to find a home in the work of Field (2001) and Horwich (2010). Finally,

although expressivism spent decades wandering the confines of

metaethics discussions, Price, under the influence of Rorty and

Blackburn, advocates for a global expressivism about all discourse in

Naturalism Without Mirrors (2011).

At this state we might ask whether Foucault and his

attentiveness to Nietzsche has finally seeped through the

consciousness of analytic thought. Since it took till the 90s for Foucault

to widely affect anglo scholarship, I measure here from 1990-2020,

restricting to English language content: JSTOR (ITHAKA, 2020) gives

70,788 hits for “Foucault”, 41,898 for “Nietzsche,” 25,062 for

“Wittgenstein,” and 60,295 for the perennial “Kant.” Narrowing the

search to philosophy for the same timeframe yields 7,232 hits for

“Foucault,” 11,310 for “Nietzsche,” 11,425 for “Wittgenstein,” and 23,198

for “Kant.” Clearly Foucault and Nietzsche have deeply affected, indeed

saturated, much of academic literature in the broader humanities. Yet

the story for anglo philosophy remains particular to itself, with perhaps a

reluctance to fully grapple with

Foucault and Nietzsche.

Schematization of Truth Issues in Analytic Philosophy

At this point, I want to offer one schema to help puzzle through

the issues surrounding truth with which analytic philosophers have been

grappling (and which will help us later). This schema offers seven

aspects of considerations regarding truth and neighboring issues, as

follows:

(1) method/criteria aspect: what are crucial aspects of

discourse(s) which we should attend to in order to base a

fuller account of it (heavily discussed by Wright 2009), such

as looking at the use of the language (Wittgenstein,

Dummett), bivalence or not (Dummett), cognitive command

or not (Wright), the role of evidence in assertions or in truth

ascriptions such as truth being evidentially-constrained

(Dummett, Wright), the best-explanation behind beliefs

(Wiggins, 1987), the broader "cosmological" explanatory role of

states of affairs

(Wright), or intersubjective convergence of beliefs under

favorable circumstances (Wiggins)? Alternative approaches

include anti-foundationalism (Rorty, 1980), anti-essentialism

(Rorty), and quietism (one interpretation of Wittgenstein).

(2) truth-concept aspect--what is the definition of truth, what is

the concept of truth used to do, how does it function. E.g.,

deflationary/minimalist (Quine, Field, Horwich), identity

(McDowell, Dodd, Hornsby), correspondence (Jackson),

coherence (Putnam, 1981), pragmatism (Rorty), truth-

pluralism (Wright), superassertability (discussed by Wright).

(3) metaphysical aspect, involving realism or anti-realism or

non-objectivism (e.g., relativism) about objects or facts.

(What is the metaphysical status of x, is it mind-

independently real?)

(4) causal aspect: stories about what leads subjects to make

judgments. This is where claims of projectivism (Blackburn,

discussed in Joyce, 2016) or dispositionalism or intuitionism

or some kind of rationalism (e.g., of a Platonic sort or a

Cartesian sort) come in (although they can also enter the

epistemological-normative seventh aspect more thoroughly).

(What causes someone to claim that p?)

(5) semantic aspect: what does someone mean when they

make a judgment.

This includes cognitivism (e.g., objectivism or error theory) or

non-cognitivism (e.g., expressivism or subjectivism), or

Wittgenstein’s meaning-as-use pragmatic approach to meaning.

We could also include the issue of reference, which quickly

verges into the metaphysical aspect.

(6) language use aspect: what is involved in using the language,

what is the point of statements, what norms of assertion are

at play, or what is the relevant language game (Wittgenstein).

E.g., Blackburn wants to justify discourse about moral truth

while being a metaphysical anti-realist.

(7) epistemological-normative aspect: does truth have a

normative import for our thinking, or at least, is truth closely

related to something which has a normative import for our

thinking (McDowell)? What is the right way to go about

attaining true beliefs (perhaps to achieve knowledge)—e.g., if

a foundational epistemological approach is right, then there

will be an account of properly foundational beliefs and proper

reasoning/warrant/justification.

Notes on the History of Analytic Philosophy

Starting with some recent grapplings with the creature known as

“analytic philosophy”: one brief stab by Rorty (1992, p. 347)

acknowledges the historical dynamics of analytic philosophy such as

the ebb and flow of the ‘linguistic turn’—a fair observation—but he

focuses only on identifying then-current (1992) analytic philosophy with

a set of central problems, which is a far too limited conception. Scott

Soames far more thorough history gives this historical description:

“Analytic philosophy is a trail of influence” (2003, p. xii). Leiter (2004)

offered comments to the effect that it is hard to currently demarcate

analytic philosophy and that a merging of ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’

philosophy is underway, which was a bit ironic considering how the

collection of papers which these comments introduce was titled The

Future for Philosophy and contained no contributions from continental

philosophers. Gutting (2005) notes this lack, and also suggests that

analytic philosophy can still be roughly demarcated: “Typically, analytic

philosophy reads experience in terms of common-sense intuitions (often

along with their developments and transformations in science) and

understands reason in terms of formal logic.” Elsewhere in Leiter’s

volume, Williamson associates good analytic philosophy with “logical

rigour and semantic sophistication” (2004, p. 128). Hacker notes that a

vague commitment to analysis is one underlying feature of analytic

philosophy, and comments on the ‘linguistic turn’ that “Language was

not the central theme of all analytic philosophy—rather the careful

examination of language and its use was a salient method of analytic

philosophy from the 1930s onward” (2007, p. 134). But his preferred

conception of analytic philosophy is as a historical phase or phases: “It

seems to me more fruitful and illuminating to use the term ‘analytic

philosophy’ as the name of a specific phase in the history of our subject”

(p. 125).

Aaron Preston gives a more detailed treatment, including a far

more thorough review of histories and conceptions of analytic

philosophy than I do here, in his Analytic Philosophy: the History of an

Illusion (2010). Preston argues that although a proper school of

philosophy should have a cohesive unity of doctrine or method, analytic

philosophy never even had such a unity to begin with: “One of the

fundamental theses advanced in this book is that to lack defining

doctrines is a devastating problem for something that purports to be a

philosophical school, movement or tradition” (p. 2). This lack-of-unity is

historically quite interesting, and though I cannot agree with Preston

that in itself this lack is a problem, Preston makes far more interesting

criticisms having to do with the illusions of unity or of agreed-on-

standards which have supported the broad social hegemony of analytic

philosophy, a hegemony which has left foundational questions largely

unasked—questions as to exactly what standards and methods are

behind what passes as “good” or “professional” philosophy (pp. 17,

156).

In order to respond and make sense of this problematic of how to

understand analytic philosophy, my own view borrows mostly from a

couple of ideas from Sluga. First, in approaching the nascent issue of

analytics making sense of their own history, Sluga notes that analytic

philosophers were not trained to think historically (1998, p. 104). Sluga

suggests that the lens of Foucauldian discursive analysis might help in

this regard, and offers the idea that at the bottom of “all talk about

philosophical schools, movements, and traditions, lies (a) the

recognition of similarities and (b) that of causal relations” (p. 106).

Sluga’s approachcan also be seen as a way of elaborating

Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘family resemblance’ term (as evidenced by

Sluga, 2011, p.

87).

In analytic philosophy, these causal relations include lines of

influence, such as causes of intellectual inspiration or admiration in the

encountering of the work of an analytic philosopher, which influence

subsequent generations of students. But they also include more broadly

(and often mundanely) the relations of advisor-student descent, of

attentiveness to a certain cannon of important literature, of co-mingling

at certain respectable venues (e.g., APA conferences), of a sort of

partial anglo-insulation afforded by what might be termed the ‘natural

barrier’ of the English language, and of various expectations and

attitudes interwoven into the practices of academic philosophy (e.g.,

surrounding the desirability and status of ‘professor’).

The characteristic similarities will vary in terms of whether they

are aspects of doctrine or methodology or practice or central

problems, how obvious and conscious they are, how consistent and

widespread they are, and so forth. Some important similarities in the

area of doctrine and method include (1) attentiveness to the

importance or priority of language, (2) analyzing something (concept,

term, sentence, etc.) in terms of something else which clarifies the

former item, and (3) more controversially, what might be called an

immanent starting point, such as empiricism or naturalism or scientism

(Preston, 2010, p. 122), or common sense (Gutting, 2005). A similarity

in practice is the ‘lit review’ or the expectation that one will situate

oneself within ‘the literature,’ typically meaning relevant analytic

literature.

Navigating the Boundary of Analytic Philosophy

We are now perhaps better positioned to ask and to answer the

following question: is it the case, as Foucault elaborated, within the field

of discourse of analytic philosophy “the production of discourse is at

once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed” (1972, p. 216)

in a way which excludes and prohibits and distinguishes it from

unqualified philosophy—or, as Leiter proposed, is the boundary

between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy dissipating and

obsolete? I will give two pieces of evidence in support of the former

idea: analytic discourse has been controlled and selected in a

somewhat protective, insular, and conservative way.

First, as noted earlier, looking at the raw empirical ‘archive’ of

documents, recent anglo philosophy has shown a sort of reluctance to

speak all that much about Nietzsche, and a far greater reluctance to

speak about Foucault, relative to awareness of Nietzsche and Foucault

both in anglo academic articles and in the google ngram data. All this is

reflected in the more specific story of truth within analytic philosophy:

writers like Davidson, McDowell, and Wright show a separation from the

thoughts of Nietzsche and Foucault and other continental thinkers. This

same pattern is also quite evident in the history of the history of analytic

philosophy which was briefly examined in the last section, as noted by

Sluga (1998, p. 104).

Second, the standards of writing within academic philosophy are

generally maintained in a traditional manner. Grad students in analytic

departments are trained to talk and write clearly, narrowly, and in a way

that often analyzes or discusses the analysis of key terms and concepts

which have been attended to by previous analytic philosophers (and

which allows for a decent lit review). Even if a particular advisor

becomes flexible with such standards, mainstream analytic journals

reinforce these standards quite strictly.

In other words, I claim that analytic philosophy has been

relatively isolated from a variety of outside factors and dynamics. It has

largely separated itself from cultural and technological developments,

and it has largely remained separate from continental philosophical

developments, such as historicism, Foucault, phenomenology,

poststructuralism, and deconstruction. Obviously analytic philosophy is

not entirely insular, because various non-conforming ‘renegades’ (which

I will discuss in Chapter 3) are able to reach popularity and readership

within analytic circles. But there does seem to be a greater

conservatism of methodology and central problems than in the looser

collection of ‘continental’ thinkers.

I believe that this conservatism has led analytic philosophy to

largely maintain a modernist (or ‘encyclopedic’) approach to truth, and

to neglect broader dialogues about the history of truth and versions of

the history of truth. These broader dialogues will start to open up over

the course of the next three chapters.

‘Modernist’ or ‘encyclopedic’ is quite broad, so, one way to

examine more specifically analytic concerns about truth is to consider

the schematization of truth issues offered outlined above and to

examine how that differs from the issues surrounding truth in non-

analytic philosophers such as Nietzsche and Foucault. For

Nietzsche and Foucault, we could start a sketch of truth-issues in the

following manner. History would have to be involved: how does truth

arise in and get framed by history, and perhaps conversely, how does

history arise within truth; or just more generally, how do truth and history

relate? Sociology would also be involved, especially the role and

working of power within society (or society within power), so how do

society and power relate to truth? Such a collection of issues would

include two notable places of overlap with the issues for analytics. One

place is in the view of language use: e.g., Foucault depicts truth claims

being part of the dynamics of power relations and as part of regimes of

power or regimes of truth-and-power—a notably different approach from

analytic philosophy of language. The other is in the causal aspect.

Continental thought takes up this aspect with a historical, sociological,

and phenomenological awareness: what causes or leads to truth might

involve a sociological story, a historical-genealogical story, a

phenomenological story, and/or an evolutionary-genealogical story. This

too feels like quite a different approach from analytic philosophy.

However, historical awareness, including the idea of giving a genealogy,

has actually also gained traction in analytic thought: genealogy has

often come up in considerations about truth, e.g., in John Mackie

(1977), Putnam (1981), McDowell (2000), and Williams (2004). And yet

these discussions pay little-to-know attention to any continental thought

about history or genealogy or phenomenology. It is in the thinkers on

the fringes of the analytic boundary—such as Rorty (1979), MacIntyre

(2007), and Sluga (2014)—thinkers who interact with analytics but are

not exactly analytic themselves—where the conscious dialogue with the

likes of Nietzsche, Foucault, Hegel, R. G. Collingwood, Carl Schmitt,

and Hannah Arendt is able to occur.

I am trying to join in (and motivate my joining in with) those

conscientious fringe efforts. Nietzsche and Foucault have made large

waves in thought and culture due to their revolutionary ideas and

reinterpretations of history—including their reinterpretations surrounding

truth—but this has largely been excluded from analytic discussions of

truth, since they are not part of the reputed trails of thinkers; they

(mostly) don’t have a legitimate place within the respected network of

references. Furthermore, this kind of exclusion is part of the whole

insulated culture of analytic philosophy, wherein “analytic philosophers

managed to alienate academic philosophy both from other academic

disciplines and from the general public” (Preston, 2010, pp. 314-15). On

the small scale, more specifically, my motivation to turn to Nietzsche

and Foucault is that they seem to have powerfully threatened, and

perhaps undermined, objectivity and realism regarding truth—they do

this by attending to the genealogical and sociological factors in which a

claim is asserted, legitimized, and held to be true. They are focused on

the causal origins of truth and the operations of truth. But whether one

looks directly at their writing, or one looks at the non-philosophical

disciplines influenced by them, or one looks at the analytic philosophers

who pay little attention to them, it is not exactly clear what their

arguments or positions are. So Chapter 2 will examine the perspectives

on truth in Nietzsche and Foucault, thinkers outside the analytic canon.

It seems that we have started the attempt to redeem a dream by

retracing our steps through the retracing of past dreams. Overall,

analytic philosophy is just one stage or stream in the thinking of truth,

and the dream of truth, in Western culture—and it is a thinking which

tends not to retrace its place within a long history. As we look outside of

mainstream analytic philosophy for the remainder of this dissertation,

we will need to be more aware of the dual layers of (1) offering a dream

about truth and (2) offering a narrative about the history of truth.

Chapter 2: The Outlaws: Foucault and Nietzsche

Boundary-Crossing Dynamics and Content

In the next two chapters I will be describing various recent

thinkers who attempt to cross various boundaries of mainstream

thinking in regard to truth. I aim at simultaneously describing these

efforts and attempting to join them through critical discussion. On the

large scale, my motivation is that Nietzsche and Foucault have made

large waves in thought and culture due to their revolutionary ideas and