Notion Of Truth Research Articles

Nietzsche's Pragmatism: A Study on Perspectival Thought

Nietzsche's Pragmatism: A Study on Perspectival Thought

The Symbolism of Clothing: The Naked Truth About Jacques Lacan

In the work of Jacques Lacan there exists an extended metaphor of clothing, whereby the ‘naked’ truth is always ‘clothed’ in deception. For Lacan, clothing functions at the intersection of the symbolic and the imaginary, with outward appearance shaping what we imagine to be underneath in order to determine the landscape of symbolic desire. Joan Copjec considers the political implications of this metaphor, arguing that utilitarianism, in particular, divides desire into a false dichotomy of rational, naked desire, and the ornamental clothing of irrationality, a mindset woven into both capitalism and French colonialism. The article then examines two examples from Lacan’s commentary on ethics: the story of Saint Martin and the beggar, and the myth of Actaeon and Diana, further demonstrating how clothing metaphors are entwined with notions of truth and deception. The article concludes by considering whether Lacan’s words are similarly clothed in deception, and ponders whether he should be telling us the naked truth. Lacan weighs both options and concludes that the most effective form of communication constitutes a double bluff in which he strategically pretends to lie, not for the sake of deception, but in order to ‘clothe’ (and thus protect) the naked truth concealed underneath.

The Notion of Truth among the Yoruba’s

The Notion of Truth among the Yoruba’s

Truth, Thinking, Ethics

Today it is said that we live in a condition of post-truth. In this essay, I will query this claim. In doing so, I do not intend to argue the contrary position, and neither will I attempt to offer some hope for a “return” to truth. Rather, my query will begin with an exploration of the assumptions behind the claim of post-truth and then consider an alternative notion of truth offered by Martin Heidegger and put into practice by Vaclav Havel. Next, I consider how this Heideggerian/Havelian notion of truth is perhaps better thought in terms of thinking as articulated by Hannah Arendt, and a conception of ethics that runs close to Arendt’s thinking on thinking. Finally, the essay ends with the consideration that in the increasingly complex worlds of global and informational interconnectedness, perhaps what is most needed is not truth but thinking. That is, thinking that gives way to a sense of the world.

„Somnul rațiunii naște monștrii”

The sudden appearance of a term imported from across the Atlantic - almost unknown until a few months ago - is spectacular. Cancel culture started with a noble goal, at least on the surface: to suppress those who make racist, homophobic speeches or promote any kind of hatred against a person. During the COVID-19 pandemic, cancel culture began trending again. This concept was made possible with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and LGBTQ+ movements which were over-promoted on social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Each movement uses its own definition, contradicting the others, sowing confusion, stirring up anger, and contempt. The culture of nullification denies the very notion of truth and leads to extreme polarization in society, resulting in unhealthy violence in debate. These "condemnations" are aimed at university professors, writers, intellectuals, journalists, columnists, producers, actors, and anyone who dares to "offend" certain minorities or the dogmas of certain left-wing circles, even with a left-wing phrase. As a result of this phenomenon of cultural cancellation, books, films, and cartoons have begun to be altered or banned. Journalist, essayist, and researcher Alvaro Vargas Llosa (son of the famous writer Mario Vargas Llosa) believes this practice threatens democracy and is reminiscent of a dictatorship like North Korea.

A Philosophical Appraisal of Igbo Epistemic Metaphysical Notion of Truth

The concept of truth has been a relative notion in different eras and in varied philosophical and historical context. On that very day Pilate directed to Jesus the question, what is truth?; truth has become a preponderant problem in philosophical discourses though not preposterous in the sense that it is not over and above human comprehensibility. Undoubtedly, the conception of truth is relative to different societies of the world just as philosophy varies geographically. This is certainly as a result of the geographical setting of the society in question, coupled with the cultural inclination and social interaction among members of the society. To this end, truth has been one of the most important, if not the most important issue in the history of Man. Philosophy in itself is built on the excavation of truth in its changing nature. With critical and reflective approach, therefore, this study is geared towards excavating the Igbo epistemic and metaphysical notion of truth.

Tensed Metaphysics and Non-Local Grounding of Truth

Abstract It is argued that the assignment of truth values to future contingents is threatened not by a tensed metaphysics but by a temporally “local” notion of truth, i.e., by the assumption that whatever is true at a given time needs to be grounded in what exists at that time. If this assumption is accepted, tensed and tenseless metaphysics are equally vulnerable; if it is rejected, both can accommodate true future contingents. This means that semantic decisions are largely independent of metaphysical considerations. The work of Correia and Rosenkranz (2018) is a clear example of how the tensed metaphysics of the growing block can incorporate true future contingents. Two potential worries are discussed in the context of their work: (a) that their grounding strategy overgeneralizes and admits true counterfactual contingents; and (b) that the growing block theory lacks sufficient resources to distinguish the unique possible future course of events that is relevant for the grounding of future contingents.

Revisiting Rorty’s Notion of Truth

Abstract This paper is intended to explore the Rorty’s notion of truth and its vicinity and divergences with Putnam’s notion of truth. Rorty and Putnam, both the philosophers have developed their notion of truth against the traditional representational notion of truth but their strength lies in its distinctive characterization. For Putnam, truth is the property of a statement which cannot be lost but the justification of it could be. I will also examine the importance of Putnam’s idealized justificatory conditions without which he may succumb to the charge of relativism at the same time how does Putnam overcome the tension between metaphysical and relativistic stances of truth. For Rorty, truth is not representational rather it is social, which means the justification for a true belief is not external but internal to the community of believers. I would further examine how Rorty tries to dispel the charge of relativism which is hard to overcome. Finally, I shall try to defend the concept of truth which is free from metaphysical baggage and relativistic threats; and in this enterprise Rorty walks half the way and Putnam completes the journey.

From measurement to classificatory practice: improving psychiatric classification independently of the opposition between symptom-based and causal approaches

The article advances a new way of thinking about classifications in general and the classification of mental disorders in particular. By applying insights from measurement practice to the context of classification, I defend a notion of epistemic accuracy that allows one to evaluate and improve classifications by comparing different classifying methods to each other. Progress in classification arises from the mutual development of classification systems and classifying methods. Based on this notion of accuracy, the article illustrates with an example how psychiatric classifications can be improved via circumscribed comparisons of different perspectives on mental disorders, without relying on complete models of their complex aetiology. When applying this strategy, the traditional opposition between symptom-based and causal approaches is of little consequence for making progress in the epistemic accuracy of psychiatric classification.

Trans-humanism’s and Post-humanism’s Dialectics between Truth and Post-truth

The aim of this paper is to invite the reader to reflect on the essence of truth and post-truth in two approaches present in humanities and social sciences: trans-humanism and post-humanism. The notions of truth and post-truth, just like those of trans- and post-humanism, do not have a single defining interpretation. This implies disputes about what truth is and what is the role of man as an being, capable of creative activity, and thus of creating other entities and concepts describing them. However, the problem still remains the doubt as to what extent the ability of creative action allows man to know the truth (alternatively, to establish it), and to what extent it leads us astray. Post-truth emerges as a proposition in the face of the impossibility of reaching a consensus on the former. It is similar in the case of trans- and post-humanism, as concepts offering improved, because more up-to-date, approaches to the exploration of the human being himself, the motives of his actions, and his progress. The issues are presented by means of a critical analysis of selected scientific discourses, including definitions and research approaches that are gaining popularity in academia of the so-called Western cultural circle.

Melusine as Emblem of Truth: Philosophical tentacles, themes and approaches explored in the audiovisual essay The Mystery of Melusine

This article introduces the philosophical underpinnings, themes and approaches explored in the audiovisual essay The Mystery of Melusine (2021). Its footage consists of a dramatic performance in which I am enacting the contents of a philosophical poem authored by myself as the titular character. The narrative of the film essay explores the nature of truth and espouses an ontology of magic through a re-interpretation of the myth of Melusine. In European folklore, Melusine is the reclusive and mysterious wife who agrees to marry upon the condition that she is granted her privacy every Saturday. On Saturdays, she spends her solitude secretly bathing her fish tail until one day her husband peeps through the keyhole of her bathing chamber. She learns he has broken his promise to not impede her privacy, and so she evanesces. In my film essay, Melusine is a metaphor for the secretiveness and elusiveness of truth, and the way life unfurls itself in secretive and clandestine ways. The notion of truth as elusive and secretive derives its inspiration from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and this film essay can be considered a mythic interpretation of some of his ideas. In addition to a mythic interpretation of truth, the film essay provides a narrative for the way life meets itself through otherness and recounts the journey of personal transformation in which the querent must reconcile to truth; this is elaborated as a process of self-seeing and self-recognition that takes place through the alien other.

Putnam, James and “Absolute” Truth

While historians of pragmatism often present William James as the founder of the “subjectivist” wing of pragmatism that came back into prominence with the writings of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam has argued that James’s views are actually much closer to Peirce’s (and Putnam’s own). Putnam does so by noting that James distinguishes two sorts of truth: “temporary truth,” which is closer to a subjective notion of warranted assertibility, and “absolute truth,” which is closer to Peirce’s own comparatively objective notion of truth as what would be believed at some idealized end of inquiry. Putnam then argues that the temptation to read James as a precursor to Rorty requires privileging his talk of temporary truth, when, in fact, it was always absolute truth that was the primary sense of the term for James. This paper will argue that James’s views on truth are, in fact, much less tied to the absolute notion than Putnam suggests, and, indeed, that James’s account of the relations between our concepts and reality leave open the possibility that no claim of ours could ever be “absolutely” true, and thus that “temporary” truth would be all we could ever expect to have.

Philosophy, Science, Capitalism and Truth

Fascinated by the recent scientific progress, even some philosophers today claim that philosophy is dead and that natural sciences (quantum cosmology, cognitive sciences) can answer questions which were once considered a domain of metaphysics: is our universe finite? Do we have free will? etc. The essay tries to problematize this claims by raising a series of questions. First, it is easy to show that modern science itself relies on a series of philosophical propositions. Second, what accounts for the role of science in our world is its link with capitalism. Third, we should distinguish between knowledge and truth: not only philosophy, other discourses (like Marxism or psychoanalysis) also practice a notion of truth which cannot be reduced to knowledge.

The many dimensions of truthfulness: Crowdsourcing misinformation assessments on a multidimensional scale

Recent work has demonstrated the viability of using crowdsourcing as a tool for evaluating the truthfulness of public statements. Under certain conditions such as: (1) having a balanced set of workers with different backgrounds and cognitive abilities; (2) using an adequate set of mechanisms to control the quality of the collected data; and (3) using a coarse grained assessment scale, the crowd can provide reliable identification of fake news. However, fake news are a subtle matter: statements can be just biased (“cherrypicked”), imprecise, wrong, etc. and the unidimensional truth scale used in existing work cannot account for such differences. In this paper we propose a multidimensional notion of truthfulness and we ask the crowd workers to assess seven different dimensions of truthfulness selected based on existing literature: Correctness, Neutrality, Comprehensibility, Precision, Completeness, Speaker’s Trustworthiness, and Informativeness. We deploy a set of quality control mechanisms to ensure that the thousands of assessments collected on 180 publicly available fact-checked statements distributed over two datasets are of adequate quality, including a custom search engine used by the crowd workers to find web pages supporting their truthfulness assessments. A comprehensive analysis of crowdsourced judgments shows that: (1) the crowdsourced assessments are reliable when compared to an expert-provided gold standard; (2) the proposed dimensions of truthfulness capture independent pieces of information; (3) the crowdsourcing task can be easily learned by the workers; and (4) the resulting assessments provide a useful basis for a more complete estimation of statement truthfulness.

Partages de la Perspective

Abraham Bosse (c. 1604–76) was a well-known French printmaker and a zealous propagator of Desargues's perspectival technique, which basically was an elaboration of the linear perspective invented by Florentine painters of the fifteenth century. For a book of 1647 called The Universal Technique of M. Desargues, Bosse made an etching, untitled but commonly referred to as Les perspecteurs, in which we see an almost empty space with three well-dressed men placed at different distances and in different orientations. They seem to look for something to paint, since they are represented each with an “eye pyramid.” The top of the pyramid—Desargues called it “le rayonnement de la vue” (the radiation of the gaze)—is the point between the two eyes. That point is connected by straight lines to the four corners of the supposed visual field of the viewer. This pyramid is meant to help the artist to calculate the right proportions for the objects in his paintings.Emmanuel Alloa uses this image to illustrate a problem often associated with perspectivism in philosophy: in Bosse's etching, the men do not see one another; their gazes do not meet; each seems to live in a separate world. Those men embody the “banal” or “weak” conception of perspective that Gilles Deleuze criticizes. Instead of connecting people, the notion of perspective as an eye pyramid, a kind of tunnel, induces them to avoid encounter. It corresponds to the notion of perspective used to put an end to discussion by saying that we all have our different viewpoints, thereby dissolving a disagreement instead of learning from each other's standpoints.Contrary to the “perspectivers” depicted by the printmaker, Alloa asks whether we can try to “share perspectives.” By examining that question in response to Deleuze's challenge, Alloa develops a stronger version of perspectivism. He emphasizes that any perspective is a perspective of someone on something—on some thing, quelque chose, not all things, toutes choses—which means that a perspective, intrinsically limited, always cries out for completion by other perspectives. Inspired by Nietzsche (“the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’ ”), Alloa constructs in other ways and independently an epistemology akin to that of Sandra Harding and other proponents of “standpoint theory.” Against recent objections to a perspectivism that is too closely linked to relativism, Alloa advances a “new perspectivism” that demands and even celebrates plurality without abandoning the notions of truth and objectivity.

Unintentional investigations: Truth in drama and “all that ‘ordinary’ in the phrase ‘ordinary language philosophy’ means”

This paper explores the notion of truth in relation to literature. It opens with a critical exposition of some dominant tendencies in contemporary aesthetics, in which narrow views of truth and reference guide the aesthetic investigations in harmful ways. One of the problems with such as view is not merely that it becomes difficult to talk about truth in art, but that it also makes the idea that we can learn something from literature problematic. The effort of this paper is thus to open up for a variety of notions of truth, that are not immediately tied to the notion of representation or correspondence. We need a way of talking about truth in art. The effort to explore a notion of truth in art that is not tied to narrow views about reference, and which broadens our sense of “aboutness” goes, in this paper, via a reading of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture from 2005, together with some reflections inspired by some of Stanely Cavell’s reflections about the relevance of reflecting upon ordinary language. It is argued that literature engages in a form of conceptual reflection, by means of making the sense of our concepts clear and by challenging philosophical preconceptions about what our concepts must mean. What we can learn from art is thus not necessarily toed to either representation or authorial intent, but comes into view by means of the literary exercises that often (but certainly not always) require a conceptual sensitivity; that is, by means of careful attention to what words mean and what follows from them in specific contexts of use.

Miguel de Cervantes, Author of the Apocryphal Quijote: Borges, ‘Pierre Menard’, and Literary Creation as Apocrypha

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ (1939) and Miguel de Cervantes’s two-part novel (1605 and 1615) in terms of Borges’s notion of the apocryphal. With reference to Borges’s writings on the apocryphal as a productive form of literary creation and interpretation, particularly the way in which he defines the apocryphal in terms of the ‘hidden’ meanings in a text, the article considers Cervantes’s own relation to the apocryphal in his imitation of various literary genres and in his response to Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s apocryphal Quijote (1614) in the second part of the novel. By analysing the significance of the chapters from the first part of the Quijote that Menard reproduces, as well as Menard’s explicit refusal to reproduce the prologue to the second part of the Quijote, the article concludes that Menard’s engagement with Cervantean notions of truth, falsehood, and originality (as well as with Cervantes’s own treatment of Avellaneda’s apocryphal Quijote) ironically articulates the apocryphal nature of all ‘original’ literary texts.

Compound Figures: A Multi-Channel View of Communication and Psychological Plausibility

Philosophical views of language have traditionally been focused on notions of truth. This is a reconstructive view in that we try to extract from an utterance in context what the sentence and speaker meaning are. This focus on meaning extraction from word sequences alone, however, is challenged by utterances which combine different types of figures. This paper argues that what appears to be a special case of ironic utterances—ironic metaphorical compounds—sheds light on the requirements for psychological plausibility of a theory of communication and thus presents a different view of communication and language to that dominant in philosophy of language. In the view presented here, the hearer does not extract the speaker’s communicative intention from the sequence of words in the utterance, but from other channels (gesture, intonation, facial expression), so as to constrain the inferential space for the sentence and speaker meaning. Specifically, we examine an example of ironic metaphor discussed by Stern (2000). He argues that ironic content is logically dependent on metaphorical content, but makes no claims about how psychologically plausible this is in terms of the processing order. We argue that a straightforward translation of logical order into temporal order makes little sense. The primary sticking point is that without a prior understanding of the speaker’s communicative intentions, it is computationally more challenging to process the sub-component meanings. An alternative solution based on communicative channels leads us to a more psychologically plausible account of the structure of communicative acts and intentions. This provides support for the psychological realism of a richer theory of communicative intent.

Re-thinking Rorty´s Ethical-Political Pragmatism from Perspectivism and Language Games

Abstract Rorty holds that it is possible to defend a liberal democratic policy without having to substantiate it according to universal criteria linked to corresponding notions of truth, instead, he affirms that this democratic policy can be founded on a notion of truth narrowly linked to justification. Following this idea one would expect Rorty to take a position committed to pluralism understood in a strong sense, where different positions are justified and validated in relation to specific existential conditions, however, this does not happen. As we will demonstrate, Rorty´s proposal, although it is partly inspired by Nietzsche´s perspectivism, as well as the ethical-political reading of plurality based on Wittgenstein´s proposal of language games, it goes no further than a contextualized pretence which is not based on a real posture of pluralism. In this article we maintain that the Rortian position, far from being pluralist, tends toward ethno-centrism and even domination through persuasion.

Russell and Jin Yuelin on Truth: A Comparative Study

Jin Yuelin’s logical and philosophical thought was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Bertrand Russell. The same influence existed also in the case of his view on truth, which was considerably close to the views maintained by Russell in his phase of logical atomism. In their investigations, Russell and Jin not only focused on similar topics, but also occupied similar philosophical positions, such as realism in the domain of ontology, empiricism in epistemology, and the correspondence theory in the domain of the theory of truth. Nevertheless, Jin Yuelin’s view on truth was not only a mere imitation or recapitulation or even plagiarized copy of Russell’s, but also contained innovations and characteristics of its own. Jin, for example, emphasized certain general characteristics of truth, including the notion of truth as a relational quality, that truth is not a matter of degree, and that it is relative neither to time and space nor to the different types of knowledge. By so doing, Jin underlined the objectiveness, reliability, and transcendence of true propositions. By arguing that the correspondence theory of truth possessed strong foundations in common sense, Jin set out to defend the role of common sense in philosophy and science, maintaining that the former cannot be completely eliminated and arguing against the notion that any modification of a part of common sense would ultimately be founded on yet another segment of common sense. Moreover, Jin delivered his own response against the theory of the gap between “subject and object/the internal and the external,” which had been used to question the correspondence theory of truth, proposing a variety of cognitivist theory, which defined facts as “the given” (datum) that has been received and arranged. Most importantly, facts are cognitive constructs created on the basis of “the given” and encapsulate both subjectiveness and objectiveness. Jin Yuelin was a modern Chinese philosopher who had achieved profound erudition in both Chinese and Western thought, and, above all, an independent an profoundly original thinker.