ICA Talk on Troof
So, those of you in or around London have a joyous opportunity to go to a talk on the question ‘Does Truth Matter?’. It sounds like fun to me. I’d go if I were in or near London – if I could scrape together the 8 quid.
Truth has become a nebulous, even unfashionable notion in our contemporary society. Relativism and postmodernism have undermined our belief in the importance and certainty of truth.
On what basis can we now investigate the validity of claims by our politicians – the existence of weapons of mass destruction, for example? Is there still a moral imperative to tell the truth?
Speakers: Simon Blackburn, professor of Philosophy at Cambridge; Stephen Law, lecturer in Philosophy at Heythrop College and editor of the journal Think; Nick Cohen, journalist for the Observer, New Statesman and New Humanist. Chair: Jeremy Stangroom, author and co-editor of Philosophers’ Magazine.
Lucky you – maybe you’ll get to hear Jeremy say ‘No, it doesn’t,’ and giggle.
Oh, no! I’m sure it’s much more complicated and intellectual than simply saying, “No, it doesn’t,” and giggling.
See, the truth matters unless everyone thinks it matters, at which point it doesn’t matter any more. As I understand it, Dr. Stangroom will argue valiantly in favor of the truth mattering right up until most people around him agree. At which point he will switch positions and argue that it doesn’t. Because it’s very important to argue about things, much more important than whether or not it’s true that truth matters. Truth might matter, just not that much.
Who knows? Perhaps a gaggle of hard-core relativists will show up and tip his balance into “truth matters”. Or perhaps so many people will argue that the really important thing is “dialectical engagement”, not truth, that Jeremy will find himself switching positions in order to argue with them. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Well one has to be mentally agile about this kind of thing, because as soon as too many people believe something, it becomes untrue. No, wait, that’s not right – as soon as too many people believe something, it stops mattering whether or not it’s true, because it’s more important to be not smug and complacent. That’s it!
Of course if that’s the case it’s too bad we didn’t write a book called Why Being Not Smug and Complacent Matters, but oh well.
Being a hard core relativist myself, I have an almost absolute (and thus, inconsistent) belief that the first sentence of that announcement is almost total bollocks.
Alas, the politics of truth have become such that, for example, we were assured that the fact that a former president had a simple sexual fling in office mattered less than that he lied about it; we have a president in this country who is pounded on much more for having lied about the WMD Saddam was supposed to have possessed than about authorizing a world wide network of torture; we have long, rambling pop culture orgies about whether this or that self help memoir is true or not (which I guess kicks Defoes Journal of a plague year out of the canon). Truth and lies have become more important than the content of what is truthfully reported or not.
Or at least, I could easily make that case. I can’t, really, make any sense of how truth has become “nebulous” in modern society — was it really bright and shining in the fourteenth century? Or in 1933? Or did the truth really get definition on its muscles in 1968?
Since this is, presumably, about philosophical theories of truth, I imagine the decay all goes back to Tarski, or is to Nietzsche, or perhaps it is to the relativists of the Edinburgh Enlightenment.
In any case, I have rarely read a more unpromising intro to a talk.
Well, I’m going. Just booked tickets.
Will try to find time to let y’all know whether or not it was fun.
DB
Yes please do DB. I am, naturally, eager to hear!
I’d make a special trip to that London if they could add a spot for Colbert on ‘Why Truthiness Matters’.