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Template:Critical theory, modernism and the death of objective truth: Difference between revisions
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====Objective truths==== | ====Objective truths==== | ||
{{quote| | {{quote| | ||
Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. | Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Aeroplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Aeroplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don’t. | ||
:—[[Richard Dawkins]], ''River Out of Eden'' (1995)}} | :—[[Richard Dawkins]], ''River Out of Eden'' (1995)}} | ||
{{drop|W|hen commentators like}} Richard Dawkins exasperate about the post-truth world, the “clinchers” they come up with tend to be these kinds of basic propositions concerning the physics of inert objects. | {{drop|W|hen commentators like}} Richard Dawkins exasperate about the post-truth world, the “clinchers” they come up with tend to be these kinds of basic propositions concerning the physics of inert objects. | ||
We will note, but leave aside for now, that cultural relativists | We will note, but leave aside for now, that cultural relativists tend not to disagree about the behaviour of inert objects. They tend, rather, to dispute social, cultural, economic, historical and political truths. These are truths of an entirely different category, so even if Dawkins could make out his claim about aeroplanes — and I don’t think he can — it would hardly win the argument. | ||
But he’s raised this example, so let’s address it. | But he’s raised this example, so let’s address it. His indubitable factual proposition could be one of three. If he can make any of them out he wins the argument. | ||
{{quote| | |||
{{L1}}Aeroplanes work (they reliably fly); <li> | |||
Aeroplanes are built according to scientific principles, or <li> | |||
The scientific principles by which aeroplanes are built truthfully describe the universe. </ol>}} | |||
Let | |||
====“Transcendent truth”==== | ====“Transcendent truth”==== | ||
{{drop|A| truth cannot}} “transcend” the language it is expressed in, because that language gives the proposition meaning. It doesn’t make sense for the truth to transcend it's medium.<ref>This is not even to take the point that, thanks to the [[Goedel|indeterminacy of closed logical sets]], no statement in a natural language can possibly have a unique, exclusive meaning.</ref> There is the further difficulty that “language” itself is an indeterminate, incomplete, unbounded thing; no two individuals share exactly the same vocabulary, let alone the same cultural experiences to map to that vocabulary, let alone the same metaphorical schemes. It is what {{author|James P. Carse}} would describe as “dramatic” and not “theatrical”.<ref>In his {{br|Finite and Infinite Games}}.</ref> This makes the business of acquiring and communicating in a language — where meaning does not reside in the textual marks, but in the indeterminate cultural milieu in which the communication occurred — all the more mysterious. That we call it “communication”; that we infer from that a lossless transmission of information from one mind, is a deep well of mortal frustration. | {{drop|A| truth cannot}} “transcend” the language it is expressed in, because that language gives the proposition meaning. It doesn’t make sense for the truth to transcend it's medium.<ref>This is not even to take the point that, thanks to the [[Goedel|indeterminacy of closed logical sets]], no statement in a natural language can possibly have a unique, exclusive meaning.</ref> There is the further difficulty that “language” itself is an indeterminate, incomplete, unbounded thing; no two individuals share exactly the same vocabulary, let alone the same cultural experiences to map to that vocabulary, let alone the same metaphorical schemes. It is what {{author|James P. Carse}} would describe as “dramatic” and not “theatrical”.<ref>In his {{br|Finite and Infinite Games}}.</ref> This makes the business of acquiring and communicating in a language — where meaning does not reside in the textual marks, but in the indeterminate cultural milieu in which the communication occurred — all the more mysterious. That we call it “communication”; that we infer from that a lossless transmission of information from one mind, is a deep well of mortal frustration. | ||