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What and How We Know and True vs. "true"
Denis Frayssinous, trans. by John Benjamin Jones, Chapter One in A Defence of Christianity (Gilbert & Rivington: December 1835), pp. 33-62.
Frayssinous, a French academic and
preacher of the highest stature under Louis XVIII, begins his defense
of Christianity with an ode to truth. Along with happiness, it is our
greatest need and longing. But not only are we "made for truth", we
are, accordingly, equipped with faculties to discover it. Against
skepticism, Frayssinous advances a particularist epistemology,
arguing that some beliefs arise in us in such a way that they serve
as anchor points by which we can considerably extend our knowledge.
These moorings are marked by several qualities, namely: "perspicuity,
antiquity, universality, and immutability". For example, propositions
that are immutable "resist ignorance, prejudice, and passion". We can
no more make it so that "there should be effects without causes, than
to appoint that for the future men should live without food". Our
abilities to discern these basic truths "serve us as guides and
torches". "We are compelled to admit the existence of primary truths,
felt and perceived as soon as announced, incapable of proof, because
they themselves are the proof of every thing, primary in their
existence, they precede the experienced use of reason, as the seed
precedes the plant." Conceding that his principles for establishing
such truths avails only a meager handful of knowledge, Fraysinnous
argues that by these lights much can be inferred. "If then the chain of
our reasonings are suspended on any one of these primary and immutable
principles; if they are united together like the links of that chain,
the last held by the one preceding, until they reach the fixed point
which sustains the whole, then will the very last consequence be
inseparably united to its principle." Finally, Frayssinous addresses
the inevitable objection that, if these faculties are so wonderfully
veracious, why then the persistence of such disagreement and so many erroneous beliefs. He
continues his abbreviated response here in his second discourse, "On the Causes of Our Errors".
Disposed as I am to well-qualified particularism, Frayssinous' brief but artful
defense is a welcome alternative to his less
epistemically sanguine countrymen, such as Foucalt and Derrida. ~ Afterall
Michael P. Lynch (The MIT Press: August 2005), 216 pages.
Why does truth matter, when politicians so easily sidestep it and intellectuals scorn it as irrelevant? Why be concerned over an abstract idea like truth when something that isn't true — for example, a report of Iraq's attempting to buy materials for nuclear weapons—gets the desired result — the invasion of Iraq? In this engaging and spirited book, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. Lynch explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is. "We need to think our way past our confusion and shed our cynicism about the value of truth," he writes. "Otherwise, we will be unable to act with integrity, to live authentically, and to speak truth to power." True to Life defends four simple claims: that truth is objective; that it is good to believe what is true; that truth is a goal worthy of inquiry; and that truth can be worth caring about for its own sake—not just because it gets us other things we want. In defense of these "truisms about truth," Lynch diagnoses the sources of our cynicism and argues that many contemporary theories of truth cannot adequately account for its value. He explains why we should care about truth, arguing that truth and its pursuit are part of living a happy life, important in our personal relationships and for our political values. ~ Product Description (Gold Award Winner for Philosophy in the 2004 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards)
Moreland & Craig, eds., Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal (Routledge: 2002), p. 37.
The anti-correspondence, representationalist theories which now fill up the recent philosophical past are far from coming together in an adequate account of the mind-world relation or lack thereof. It is not as if there were now available some solid insight grounding an alternative to the type of accessible correspondence described above. In fact there is no generally acceptable alternative to correspondence. There is a series of successively discredited theories from Locke to Hume, to Kant to Hegel (or Fichte) to positivism and phenomenalism in their various forms; and then "language" (the "new way of words") is substituted for way of "ideas" or "experience," and the old battles fought over gain. This time about how words tie to the world, and the outcome being a lingo-centric predicament instead of a ego-centric predicament. One cannot easily suppose that there is a philosophically credible alternative to the correspondence theory of truth. We do not have "something better" on hand.
"Hall of Mirrors", in Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000.
How should scientists respond to the allegation that our "faith" in logic and scientific truth is just that — faith — not "privileged" over alternative truths? An obvious response is that science gets results. As I once wrote, "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet, and I'll show you a hypocrite... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there — the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field — is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right." Science supports its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops, and to predict what will happen and when.
Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio by John Paul II, (14 September 1998).
This has given rise to different forms of agnosticism and relativism which have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread scepticism. Recent times have seen the rise to prominence of various doctrines which tend to devalue even the truths which had been judged certain. A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today's most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth. Even certain conceptions of life coming from the East betray this lack of confidence, denying truth its exclusive character and assuming that truth reveals itself equally in different doctrines, even if they contradict one another. On this understanding, everything is reduced to opinion; and there is a sense of being adrift. While, on the one hand, philosophical thinking has succeeded in coming closer to the reality of human life and its forms of expression, it has also tended to pursue issues — existential, hermeneutical or linguistic — which ignore the radical question of the truth about personal existence, about being and about God. Hence we see among the men and women of our time, and not just in some philosophers, attitudes of widespread distrust of the human being's great capacity for knowledge. With a false modesty, people rest content with partial and provisional truths, no longer seeking to ask radical questions about the meaning and ultimate foundation of human, personal and social existence. In short, the hope that philosophy might be able to provide definitive answers to these questions has dwindled.
A Treatise on Human Understanding (Clarendon Press, 1896).
Nothing is more usual and more natural for those who
pretend to discover any thing new to the world in philosophy
and the sciences, than to insinuate the praises of their
own systems by decrying all those which have been advanced
before them. And indeed were they content with
lamenting that ignorance, which we still lie under in the
most important questions that can come before the tribunal
of human reason, there are few who have an acquaintance
with the sciences that would not readily agree with them. 'Tis easy for one of judgment and learning to perceive
the weak foundation even of those systems which have obtained
the greatest credit, and have carried their pretensions
highest to accurate and profound reasoning. Principles
taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them,
want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole,
these are every where to be met with in the systems of the
most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace
upon philosophy itself.
The Great Divorce (Simon & Schuster: 1946), 44.
I can promise you none of these things. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I
will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you
shall see the face of God. "Ah, but we must all interpret those
beautiful words in our own way! For me there is no such thing as a
final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow
through the mind, must it not? Prove all things, to travel hopeful is
better than to arrive." If that were true, and known to be true, how
could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for. "But
you must feel yourself that there is something stifling about the idea
of finality? Stagnation, my dear boy, what is more soul-destroying than
stagnation?" You think that, because hitherto you have experienced
truth only with the abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can
taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom. Your
thirst shall be quenched.
The God Who Is There, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), p119.
Why should God not communicate propositionally to man, the verbalizing
being, whom he made in such a way that we communicate propositionally
to each other? Therefore, in the biblical position there is the
possibility of verifiable facts involved: a personal God communicating
in verbalized form propositionally to man, not only concerning those
things man would call in our generation, religious truths, but also
down into the areas of history and science.
John Locke on Disagreement said...
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Fraser (New York: Dover, 1959), vol. 1, p. 27.
The grounds of those persuasions which are to be found amongst men, so
various, different, and wholly contradictory; and yet asserted
somewhere or other with such assurance and confidence, that he that
shall take a view of the opinions of mankind, observe their opposition,
and at the same time consider the fondness and devotion wherewith they
are embraced, the resolution and eagerness wherewith they are
maintained, may perhaps have reason to suspect, that either there is no
such thing as truth at all, or that mankind hath no sufficient means to
attain a certain knowledge of it.