I'm thinking about Nietzsche's attack on Truth with a capital "T". It's a
topic that should be titled something like "postmodern truth" or "what's a
truth to do in these postmodern times". Larry Hickman's book, Pragmatism as
Post-Postmodernism, struck me as a pretty good way to frame the issue. What
follows is a paraphrasing of a book reviewer's opening paragraph mixed with
other stolen thoughts.
As the book title suggests, Hickman makes a case that Dewey and other
pragmatists had anticipated solutions to some major problems that plague
postmodernism. Hickman characterizes postmodernism (with help from other
scholars) as a rejection of epistemological foundationalism, objectivity, and
metaphysical realism, as an affirmation of self-reflexiveness and relativism,
and as an attempt to have meaning without transcendent value and action without
absolute truth. Hickman concludes that Dewey's views afford post-postmodern
solutions to postmodern problems about objectivity and the interminability of
"self-referentiality, redescription, and reinterpretation".
There are no clean and uncontested definitions of the terms but let's frame the
options along these lines anyway. Let's say that there are four basic stages of
truth; premodern, modern, postmodern and post-postmodern. In this little story
of truth, ancient and medieval thinkers sought a fixed and eternal Truth about
reality as it really is beyond appearances. This kind of truth is tangled up in
Forms, essences and divinities. Modern truth was also about reality as it
really is beyond appearances, but used scientific and empirical methods to
search for the Truth about Objective reality, which was increasingly taken to
be a natural, physical reality. Postmodernism rejects those two kinds of Truth
and some critics will even say that postmodern thinkers like Nietzsche reject
any kind of truth so that postmodernism amounts to the worst kind of
relativism. As I see it, this leaves us with three bad options, plus the
possibility of inventing a blend of those options.
And then there is pragmatism. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference
between a postmodern relativism and neo-pragmatism but, if Hickman is right,
classical pragmatism had already found a way to reject Platonic Truth and
Objective Truth while still retaining a workable concept and theory of truth.
We don't need fixed and eternal truths anyway; we just need a truth that's
strong enough to kill lies, nonsense and bullshit. Pragmatic truth is
contextual and provisional and pluralistic but cannot count as relativism in
the bad sense because it insists on retaining empirical standards. Despite the
pragmatist's rejection the correspondence theory of truth, there is still a
demand that true ideas must "agree with experience" and so truths still agree
with reality in the sense that they work in practice, actually function as
instruments for some particular purpose. That's all that "true" can ever really
mean, they say. This may be disappointing to those who expected Truth with a c
apital "T" but it does provide earthly standard by which we can put truth
claims to the test. You try them out and see what happens. If you crash and
burn, it's time to get new truth. In this sense, pragmatic truths are never
final resting places. They are programs for more work, as James might put it,
or hypotheses to be tested in experience. This empirical element, I think, is
what gets the pragmatist out of trouble with respect to nihilism and
relativism. This is what makes it post-postmodern.
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
