Risking Truth*

Herbert Hrachovec

John, who's name might well be Richard, and Thomas met each other at the seventh World Congress for the Advancement of Minimal Philosophy. John likes to describe himself as a post-modern liberal, whereas Thomas is more of a modern post-liberal (some people might prefer to call him Herbert). They are in the middle of discussing the Los Angeles riots 1992, following the acquittal of four policemen who mishandled Rodney King.

Thomas

Imagine Rodney King being beaten up without someone, unknown to the policemen involved, putting the event on video by chance. We would have gotten an official announcement seriously distorting what happened. It might have been extremely plausible, though. After all, this is what public relation experts are trained to do. But this communique would have been wrong, no doubt about that. Truth is not to be determined from the press releases of your preferred lobby or from the voting behavior of some jury. There is on old saying ,,Truth shall make you free'' and indeed I do not know of any other way to break through the web of lies systematically produced by the media. Getting down to the facts is an essential first step in order to change an oppressive situation, just look at the case of Rodney King. Otherwise one is caught within shifting power struggles and this can only lead towards a never-ending series of uneasy compromises. If there is nothing like plain truth, not even in the case I mentioned, I cannot see any development towards freedom at all.

John

As you know my slogan is the opposite one: ,,Provide for Freedom and Truth will take care of itself.'' Rodney King actually is a good example of how this might work. There would have been no chance of what you call ,,The Truth'' to become known without TV as well as the press being free of state intervention. I am not claiming that there is no use for our commonsense talk about truth. It comes in handy when we want to express some well-founded, shared set of convictions. But I do not think that it can bear the stress you put on it, regarding it as an anchor of insight, exempting it from social maneuvering. Such has been the rhetoric of the Enlightenment, nowadays it sounds pretty shallow. But since it is easy to exploit examples the one way or the other, let us focus our discussion on some of the philosophical issues surrounding the concept. You have been making much of a certain set of common intuitions about truth, but failed to indicate how a philosopher living in our culture could defend a notion like ,,plain truth''. If you are going to appeal to correspondence theory may I just remind you that the Rodney King video could well have been a clever fake. No judge can position herself absolutely outside already established language games. And since each language game determines its own very specific ,,world'' there is no guarantee that a certain expression or depiction unfailingly and permanently catches something that is the case.

Thomas

Here we go again, accusing each other of relativism and dogmatism respectivly. I agree that we should shift this discussion to a terrain that allows us to deal with our intuitions in a more experimental way. But to answer your question first: I am not concerned with setting up correspondences between words and facts, even though it looks tempting in the case of a video. Such a strategy might work in particular instances, but then again it might be pointless in a lot of others. Let us postpone the question of warrants for truth and start with an investigation of commonsense assumptions about true sentences. A basic semantic feature of our understanding of the predicate ,,true'' consists in singeling out certain propositional utterances, i.e. those that are distinct from phantasies, rhetorical tropes or playful experiments. To qualify a sentence as true amounts to imposing a certain weight on it and to expect others to go along with this linguistic activity. Critical considerations are absent at this stage. All we do is to help ourself to a tool for distinguishing one type of sentences from others. Now I agree that - starting from that - a very sophisticated discussion about the proper use of the predicate unavoidably arises. But without an initial understanding of what truth is about this discussion could never get off the ground. One cannot call a concept into question without having a certain prior understanding of the use of this very concept. Before we are able to suspend a particular belief many of its features have to have made an impact. This should, by the way, sound familiar to you since it is pretty much Donald Davidson's position.

John

Well, what a surprise! You want to beat me with my own weapons. Very well, in this way we shall at least share a common point of reference. So I take it that you abandon metaphors like fitting a key into a keyhole or hitting a nail on its head to describe what entitles you to utter true statements. You cannot, then, help yourself to arguments that make freedom dependent on some indisputable grasp of a situation, because this just amounts to saying that in addition to your conviction you have some very special metaphysical guarantee about how things are. But now: If this guarantee is discarded I cannot see how your conviction should be any better than its force to convince other speakers. From your beginning statement I gathered that this would not be good enough for you. Considering true sentences as pragmatically different from any other set of sentences we commonly make use of does not satisfy your requirement for ,,plain truth''. And your reference to Davidson is not very helpful either. He has indeed stressed our competence in using the truth-predicate and even made it the starting point of his theory of radical translation. But he has nothing to say about how to describe this competence which he simply introduces as an undefined given. Using truth in various socio-economic contexts does not entitle us to any epistemological or ontological confidence.

Thomas

This is not my reading of Davidson. As far as I understand him he is concerned with the conditions of our understanding of a language - and truth is playing an important role in his account. Ordinarily this is called a transcendental investigation. But I realize that you will not be easily convinced of that. So let us start on common ground, with Davidson's theory of ,,radical translation''. The purpose of this theory, as you will certainly agree, is to get rid of any points of reference ,,objectivly'' lying outside a given web of convictions, intentions and actions. Its point is to obviate the need even to think about ,,getting the meaning right''. Davidson's proposal essentially consists in redescribing the hermeneutical enterprise in a way that precludes objectified meanings. I have no quarrel with this, but it is not the whole story. We might agree on not positing strange semantic entities, one question, however, remains: How do we know what we are talking about? Or, more appropriately: How do we know what we are talking about? That we do understand our own language is simply presupposed in radical translation. The way you look at Davidson this is a trivial observation. I think that, on the contrary, it opens up interesting perspectives even within Davidson's own investigation.

John

You are going to fast for me. Let me make sure that we are talking about the same thing. Davidson is concerned to develop a theory of understanding completely avoiding what Quine once called the ,,museum myth of meaning'' ...

Thomas

...and in order to achieve this he turned to one of the best known devices in Analytic Philosophy, namely Tarski's idea about how to define a truth-predicate. Tarski first established what he called ,,Convention T'' with the aim to grasp the intuition behind our ordinary use of the concept of truth. This convention was supposed to articulate the general condition under which sentences are ordinarily held to be true, namely if the world is the way we say it is. (Let me skip the problem of how to understand this claim.) Taking this convention as his guideline Tarski then proceeded to construct his truth-definition for given object-languages. Basically what he did was to establish systematic correlations between quoted expressions of an object-language and the vocabulary-in-use of an already functioning meta-language. By recursivly setting up his semantics in an appropriate way he succeeded in proving that any given sentence of the object-language falls under the truth-predicate if and only if certain conditions within the meta-language are satisfied. That is to say: Given the rules to build sentences and given an understanding of the semantic behavior of their constituents we can define truth on the strenght of our mastery of the language employed to talk about the object-language.

John

O.K. Now Davidson proposes to employ that pattern in an innovative way. His starting point, as we already mentioned, is Quine's thought-experiment concerning radical translation. Quine used it to sketch a behavioristic theory of how an investigator, given only sensual stimuli, could arrive at an understanding of a language utterly foreign to her. Davidson is interested in a different question, namely: How to describe the methodological structure a theory of meaning takes under those circumstances? Disengaging himself from Quine's behaviorism he allows beliefs and intentions to be employed by the linguists. They have to have some preconceptions about what the natives are up to. But, in addition to that, they need some methodological guidelines governing their own investigation. At this point Davidson turns Tarski's scheme into a heuristic tool. Instead of defining truth for a given language he proposes that we start from mastery of truth within our home language and employ it to impose some sort of structure onto the utterings of the foreigners. This amounts first of all to singling out ,,sound-bites'' they handle in more or less the same way as we handle affirmative or negative judgements. The next step is to hypothetically inscribe internal structure to those ,,sentences'' according to the overall behavior of their components within language generally. It's the reverse of Tarski's procedure: Hold truth fixed and use it as a handle to investigate the grammar of an unknown language.

Thomas

Yes, and Davidson's remarkable achievment can be seen to stem from this gestalt-switch, moving Analytic Philosophy very close to hermeneutics. One can easily compare his sketch of how to develop a theory of meaning with the steps a student has to take to comprehend a dead language, Latin for example. Basically, what she does is to impose some grammatical structure onto language-fragments, hoping that this will lead to plausible interpretations. Since we are dealing with actual people, however, speech acts are more prominent, most notably assertion. Once what counts as affirmative sentences is established, the task of someone inquiring into the semantics of the language under investigation consists in segmenting those sentences into smaller pieces and to recombine them to form new sentences which in turn can be tested for agreement or dismissal in particular circumstances. That is what hermeneuticists have been doing all along: Trying to develop a maximally consistent picture of manifestations of foreign agents, given a set of restricted and frequently puzzeling inputs. Now, I notice your amused smile. Let me guess what you want to interject. You want to point out that in linking Davidson to hermeneutics I am moving even further away from traditional realism. For hermeneutics is notorious for rejecting the idea that there is a single way of how the world is or how it should be approached.

John

Exactly. Given the set-up you describe, such restrictions do not make any sense at all. We are dealing, on the one hand, with a certain amount of information and we try, on the other hand, to figure out how to arrange it cleverly, so that it fits into our understanding of a given situation (and its implications) as best as we can. There is no appeal to any structure or entity given independently of our best efforts to correlate strange sounds to more familiar ones. We have to search for an optimal fit between two linguistic practices rather than for ,,correspondence''. This picture, by the way, serves liberalism quite well. For, once we abandon our phantasies about a substantive common ground for the whole of humanity what we find ourselves doing is to carefully scrutinize non-familiar interventions, not excluding their impact in advance of trying to make them look sensible to us. But what about your initial advocacy of ,,plain truth''? Up to now you have not even begun to develop an argument in favor of it.

Thomas

You are right but after all this preliminary setting of the stage, the time has finally come. Let me begin by pointing out that to present the Tarski-Quine-Davidson view as demythologizing the ,,museum myth of meaning'' is just one way of looking at what this approach is about. There is another feature that does not fit into the suggestion of open-ended, permanently readjustable interpretation at all. Notice that in all attempts to figure out the internal logic of the interpretandum the competence of the interpreter is never called into question. This, in fact, is the cardinal point on which the whole enterprise turns: whoever tries to understand someone else is supposed to be in command of his or her own language. Only by using the familiar idiom can one try to dissemble and rearrange foreign utterances in the appropriate way. Failing to do so results in a breakdown of the attempt to make sense of what is offered. This is what I alluded to at the beginning of our conversation when I linked ,,plain truth'' to certain minimal conditions of self-assurance. Quine, at certain places, seems to imply that every frame of reference for interpretive activities can be relativized and that there is nothing in principle blocking a complete reinvention of ourselves and our surroundings. It might have escaped your attention but Davidson explicitly disagrees with this suggestion. He critizises ,,ontological relativity'', his reason being precisely that we cannot fail to hold on to our most basic convictions. In allowing them to be put into doubt we lose our grip on ourselves. So even if hermeneutics provides a lot of flexibility we must not forget its limits, namely that to be open to everything without exemption amounts to being completely empty. You have to take a stand in order to appreciate the position of some other person. Heidegger, by the way, must have had something like this in mind when talking about ,,geworfener Entwurf''. ,,Anything goes'' does not provide freedom at all. Only in establishing a certain basic frame of reference liberation can even begin to make sense. At this point the issue is not how members of some linguistic community argue for the validity of their truth-claims. Davidson's point is a systematic one: Their only option is trusting their actual sentences (or at least most of them).

John

Well, I agree in a way. Davidson is indeed careful to avoid the charge of relativism and he does so by relying on the patterns of agreement that are in force in a given community. There has to be a certain minimum of shared linguistic practice so that two speakers can recognize each other as speakers. Confronted with what to me sounds just like gibberish I lack any reason to call such acoustic phenomena language. In this sense I am stuck within my view of what amounts to human talk. In other words I do have to presuppose a certain set of convictions on my part if I want to penetrate into the unchartered terrain of foreign speech. But this does not imply anything more than a passing certitude because, obviously, everyone exploring the barely known might find himself challenged to alter his presuppositions. I grant you that one has to keep something fixed while trying various approaches to unfold the system behind a given pattern of (speech-)behavior. But it does not follow that we are entitled to any definite ensemble of presuppositions once and for all. No pragmatist would deny that he operates within certain restrictions regarding the actual disposibility of beliefs and expectations. But it is crucial to add that there is no a priori limit on how to rearrange presuppositions, adapting them to what we learn during an investigation. Pragmatism is not chauvinism, contrary to what some critics like to imply.

Thomas

You are missing the point. You expect me to show that there is one substantial set of presuppositions that every rational agent would, as it were, have to subscribe to. But, as I told you already, that is not what I am driving at. Rather, I want to emphasize that, according to Davidson, no understanding can get off the ground unless there is such a ground, ,,plain truth'' in common parlance. You cannot simultaneously strive for an understanding of an unfamiliar language and question the legitimacy of any of your basic convictions. Unrestricted contingency does not make sense in this predicament. The frame presupposed by our understanding something is systematically external to whatever can be articulated within its boundaries. I certainly do not deny that the frame can in turn be critically questioned. But it should be obvious that this only pushes our problem one level up. There is no getting rid of an element of absoluteness in our understanding. Only in exempting a certain set of presuppositions from doubt we can establish any relation to others persons and to the world we share with them. You objection to this will certainly be that such a set cannot be of much use if it looses its credentials the moment we turn our critical attention upon it. But - as I told you - I am not concerned with getting hold of some unshakeable truth. My argument is directed towards a less rigid account of the relationship between contingency and metaphysics. Every speaker operates on the basis of presuppositions the denial of which amounts to a collapse of his or her world. To give you a silly example: If someone in all seriousness calls me a plant and starts to treat me like a vegetable there is not the slightest chance that we will be able to communicate. I cannot jump outside the a priori supposition that I am human as opposed to rocks and lower forms of life. Surely we are thoroughly contingent beings but this does not preclude our taking a singular stance in history. Just as - according to Kripke - this wooden desk could not entirely be made of ice this particular person can not be made of straw or silicon chips.

John

Let me see! That sounds like a transcendental argument. First you reflect on something that has to be presupposed for a certain activity to take place and secondly you try to establish that your procedure opens up a very special cognitive realm, one that offers insights of a very special nature. I cannot see how such insights might make a difference to our ordinary, everyday concerns. For the sake of argument I let myself become involved into a discussion of the general architecture of Davidson's view of understanding. But what does the man on the street care about constitutive features of an interpretation? If you cannot give him certainty in any straightforward way - and I gather you cannot do this any more than I can - why should you turn to fancy philosophical arguments to compensate for that loss? No matter what concepts and convictions you care to name I offer to design some set of circumstances that would lead you to abandon them. Pushing Davidson towards transcendental thought might be an interesting intellectual exercise, but I fail to see how you can reconcile this with your insistence on ,,plain truth''. Aren't you cheating here? Speaking pragmatically I think we should just settle for being rooted in some way or other and not embellish this situation with talk about the realm of the synthetic-a priori. Deducing very special insights by means of the transcendental method is something we should really have overcome some time ago.

Thomas (slightly ironic)

I cannot see why you refuse to enter into the territory that opens up here. After all you have always been stressing that we need a great variety of different approaches and should never dismiss suggestions only because they do not answer to what we have come to expect. To rule something out only because it leads into a difficult terrain is not a strategy you ordinarily advocate, so why not give me the benefit of doubt? I will conceed, however, that there should be an attractive argument for pursuing my mode of thought and I'll try to develop one. As I regard the issue both of us are engaged in a discussion about how to preserve certain intuitions inherent in our use of the concept of truth. And I have been stressing that, whenever someone has to deal with assessing the linguistic performance of another speaker, he or she simply presupposes certain facts without even coming near to questioning them. To me, no account of truth can be complete if it does not include this touch of absoluteness, which might be called spontaneous confidence in one's convictions. No amount of subsequent disappointments can eradicate this feature. And since it cannot be captured on the very primitive level of uttering assertions I find myself forced to move onto the level of reflection. Now, the way I am talking admittedly seems puzzeling, even a contradiction in terms. What is ,,a touch of absoluteness'' supposed to mean? But remember: you have often come out in favor of confronting non-transparent and possibly confusing contexts.

John

What you have been saying might sound impressive to old-fashioned humanists, but it seems like a fancy way to talk about something perfectly straightforward to me. O.K seriously proclaiming some judgement puts us on the spot - so what? We will rapidly loose our audience if we are seen to be bluffing, i.e. not committing ourselves to actually defending what we have said. I already admitted that we are not free to claim whatever we want, but constrained by the rules of a given community. This has nothing whatsoever to do with absoluteness. As hard as you try to turn a structural feature of Davidson's proposal into an enhancement of your views on non-contingent elements in our talk about truth, I fail to see why you should want to blow so much hot air into this particular balloon. Davidson, in my opinion, succeeds beautifully in retaining some objectivistic intuitions while rearranging the conceptual architecture of ,,truth'' so as to allow this concept to play a pivotal rôle in describing our civilization's socio-historical pursuit of knowledge and a better life.

Thomas (mockingly)

Once upon a time there were some disgruntled philosophers that were very fond of pricking ballons. It was a nice pasttime, but hardly a full-time job. It never really proved as interesting as the more difficult task of carefully scrutinzing formations of thought. But seriously, John, can't you see that in your deflationary mood you are just continuing the overcoming-philosophy legacy that constantly invokes any number of stale dualisms, separating the Old from the New, Temptation from Salvation, Confusion from Enlightenment and Dogmatism from Pragmatism? If these are not metaphysical gestures then nothing is. Against such dichotomies I want to investigate how one could go along with the widespread opinion that there is something final about truth while at the same time avoiding to fall into the fundamentalist trap. To me, Davidson's most interesting move is his attempted synthesis of chauvinism and liberalism, proposing an attitude which combines straightaway rejection of doubt with an openness to further inquiry. In my opinion you are tipping this balance because you fail to do justice to Davidson's realism. While you refuse to be drawn into the battle between realism and anti-realism Davidson clearly cares for objectivity and genuine truth. Listen to this recent statement: ,,Judgements, unlike mere responses, can be true or false. It is only with concepts and judgements that we can be said to have the idea of an objective world, a world that is independent of our sensations or experience.'' It seems disingenious to present utterances like this as being beyond realism and anti-realism. A more adequate gloss would be to say that Davidson insists on pointing out that the term ,,objectivity'' plays an essential rôle together with ,,concept'', ,,sentence`` and ,,truth''. You are the one abandoning common ground!

John

Maybe I am revisionary as far as truth is concerned. This is because I cannot see any profit in this kind of meta-theoretical ruminations. To bring things down to earth we might regard our present discussion as a good example of what we are fighting about. There is no truth concerning ,,truth'', its meaning is to be determined by serious attempts to fit our use of this concept into the overarching pattern of cognitive activity. For all I know our positions may change at a later time. Right now, however, if someone tries to take this concept very seriously I can only try to turn his attention away from it.

Thomas

And what about this steadfast refusal? Is this just how you happen to feel? It seems to me that it exhibits all the features of someone fighting for what should be regarded as true. I do not agree with your position, but even in opposing each other we exhibit the qualities I have been talking about. This is what holds our discussion together: Each of us pushing his convictions to convince the other one. It is not an idle game, rather it is a risk both of us take. How are we going to describe this risk? There has to be an issue we are quarreling about if we are not just talking past each other, even if this issue seems to force us into opposite directions. Such is the glue that holds our discussion together. The challenge, as I perceive it, is to be able to stand the tension between contingency and absoluteness that I have been trying to establish. It is a feature of our propositional practice that - as historically unique beings - we stand apart from the rest of nature. This motive has certainly been badly exploited by all kinds of ideologies. I find myself interested in its implications nevertheless.

John

No matter how you try to explain this intuition that you seem to care about so much, in my opinion it is just a rhetorical addition to something decent speakers do anyway, namely to pay attention to what their interlocutors say and to try to deal with it as best as they can. Furthermore, I will not allow you to pin some hidden universal claims on to my utterances. My sentences, as far as I am concerned, imply nothing of the sort. We are probably talking past each other, trying without success to find some common ground. Does this mean that our conversation is entirely useless? I do not hope that you are pushing for all or nothing here! People constantly assert lots of things and sometimes they manage to agree upon them. I could even tolerate that they call this ,,succeding with the search for truth'' as long as they don't stop their search just because their current prejudices are fulfilled. And if they recognize the thoroughgoing contingency of their enterprise they will not burden talk about truth with all the implications of our dogmatic past. If you want to squeeze some metaphysical content from my position - that's your game, not mine. I guess I'll just break off our conversation if you insist.

Thomas

So that's the bottom line of someone proclaiming Hope instead of Truth? You disappoint me. All I asked of you was to enlargen your horizon and to consider some suggestions about how radical contingency might coexist with the utter seriousness of truth. If we are stuck in some corner of our language game one reaction is to dismiss the moves that led into this impasse. Now, I prefer another attitude, at least as far as ,,truth'' is concerned. We should accept that there are strange corners, resulting from the way our language is patched together from multiple sources of cognition and desire. They might contain dangerous traps, but then again they might also open up to creative reconfigurations. You have to try them out, if you want to know. Just closing them to public access will not settle the matter, neither will any proposal to sanitize those pockets of metaphysical resilience. This is my prescription for hope: We cannot smoothly exclude the contradictions of the human predicament from surfacing in our discourse. Rather than feeling embarrassed - why not take up the challenge and confront our most simple prejudices with the enourmous complexity of what we have come to know. It is the job of the artist, but of philosophers as well. From Davidson I learned that the concept of truth lies at the crossroads of sentences one can control and sentences one has to use, establishing claims well before they can be scrutinized by the respective speaker. He is torn between utterances he does not (yet) understand and utterances he cannot afford to misunderstand. Truth is established in between, when the unconditional touches the unfamiliar.

John (smiling)

What an elaborate description! I hope you find someone who joins you in your enterprise since you have lost me here.

Thomas (smiling back)

No problem, truth is stronger than you are willing to concede.

NOTE

This text was written in reaction to a series of lectures given by Richard Rorty at the ,,Institut für die Wissenschaft vom Menschen'' in Vienna, June 1993. Rorty's relevant contributions are collected in Philosophical Papers 1, Cambridge 1991. For Donald Davidson see his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford 1984. On the issues discussed see also: Herbert Hrachovec Reprivatisierung der Utopie. Richard Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity in: Wespennest 77 (1989), pp. 57-63 and Kollaps des Realit„tsbegriffes? Antrag um Aufschub in: Mesotes 3/1991, pp. 67-77. Cf. also Michael Billig Nationalism and Richard Rorty: The Text as a Flag for Pax Americana in New Left Review 202(1993) S.69-83 (with further literature) and J.E. Malpas Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning. Holism, truth, interpretation. Cambridge 1992.