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Truthmongering: Less Is True

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Arthur Fine
Arthur Fine*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL60208, U.S.A.
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Extract

In defending NOA against some contemporary antirealisms I distinguish two antirealist camps: the epistemology inflaters, who come to their antirealism by filling up inquiry and belief formation with various warrants and principles of justification, and the semantic inflaters, or truthmongers, who come to their antirealism by exchanging truth for some epistemic notion, like ideal rational acceptablility. In parity with arguments against the correspondence theory of truth, which I see at the heart of various realisms, I argue against antirealist truthmongering in two ways. One is inductive and hortative. I point to the history of failures of all past attempts at theories of truth, and try to suggest better things for philosophy to do instead. The other way is deconstructive. I examine the attempted explications of truth in the terms set by their own discourses, and try to show that they cannot actually stand on their own there. Lily Knezevich looks at this deconstructive work in her ‘Truthmongering‘ and finds it flawed by what I will call ‘Knezevich’s fallacy.’ (Generously, she refers to it as my fallacy. But surely the rule in these things is to let the name, and therefore the honor, attach to the discoverer, not the alleged perpetrator.)

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 1989 , pp. 611 - 616
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1989

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References

1 Fine, Arthur The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986),Google Scholar and ‘Unnatural Attitudes: Realist and Instrumentalist Attachments to Science,’ Mind 95 (1986) 149-79

2 Knezevich, Lily ‘Truthmongering,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19,4 (1989), 603-10CrossRefGoogle Scholar, picks up Simon Blackburn’s disparaging term ‘quietism’ for this strategy. But my exhortations to do better and more difficult philosophical work hardly seem passive, unless one clings to the stultifying view that the philosophical agenda has already been set by the greybeards, and that the only things any longer worth doing in philosophy involve repeating their mistakes. (Further references to this paper will be made in parentheses in the text.)

3 Two remarks are in order here. First, of course not even simple redundancy is benign in the context of the semantic paradoxes, which is not the context or concern here. Second, I recognize that there are possible ambiguities among the phrases ‘to judge that P,’ ‘to judge whether P,’ ‘the judgment that P,’ and so on. These are not always the same, and each one can be ambiguous between the act (judging) and the object (what is judged). My concern below is with the act, and I treat these phrases as stylistic variants in the belief (and hope!) that the possible ambiguities do not infect the argument.

4 Putnam, Hilary ‘Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,’ Synthese 52 (1982) 3-23, at 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Ibid., 21