Truth and Affordances

Abstract

The notion of living in a post-truth world compels many who speak of truth in a commonsense way to use the term “objective truth.” In various theoretical psychologies, by contrast, favor continues to be given to the affordances alleged to inhere in locally relativized psychological truths, over the epistemic violence observed in claims to objective psychological knowledge. Despite this sanguine view of epistemic relativity, it, too, has conduced to epistemic violence throughout history, resulting in the further oppression of othered peoples, by way of objectively false assertions cunningly disguised as objective truth. I analyze ways in which such typical relativist assertions as “Proposition X is true for some but not for all” creates epistemic muddles obscured by “prepositional attitudes.” Particular attention is given to ways in which (a) the “true-for” relativist/nonobjectivist epistemology that many theorists advocate depends on the non(true-for)relativist knowledge they reject, and (b) objectively false claims about othered peoples may have mislead progressively-minded scholars into believing that the cause of epistemic violence lies in an objectivist epistemology, a belief that keeps hidden from them the social-justice affordances that inhere in that very epistemology.