Notion Of Truth Research Articles

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.

Retrospective Witnessing: Paintings of Grievous Deaths in the Korean War

ABSTRACT This article examines visual arts that represent the mass killings of unarmed civilians by the state before and during the Korean War (1950–1953). It analyses three South Korean artists, Kang Yo-bae, Suh Yongsun and Jeon Seung-il, who produced paintings that made direct reference to the grievous and unjust civilian deaths, a taboo subject that is still controversial in a society bound by the unfinished war. This article seeks to contribute to the critical inquiry into the long-delayed yet urgent issue of historical injustice from the perspective of visual representation. It draws attention to the following questions: how the artists establish relations with the violent past, vicariously and retrospectively; how they represent the grievous deaths in critical, imaginative and affective modes of visual expression; and how their paintings participate in a socially engaged act of ethical witnessing. The article further considers how their works are in dialogue with and simultaneously depart from the official investigative attempts in approaching the notion of truth. It argues that the paintings enact a communicative practice of mourning that mediates the living and the dead, without anticipating premature reconciliation.

Modal Metatheory for Quantified Modal Logic, With and Without the Barcan Formulas

This paper develops some modal metatheory for quantified modal logic. In such a theory, the logic of a first-order modal object-language is made sensitive to the modal facts, stated in the metalanguage. This is radically different from possible worlds semantics, which reduces questions of validity to questions of nonmodal set theory. We consider theories which characterize a notion of truth under a second-order interpretation, where an operator for metaphysical necessity is treated homophonically. The form they take is crucially influenced by whether the Barcan formulas are part of the metalogic. The main result is that, with the Barcan formulas, formulating a modal metatheory is easy; principles of classical semantics transfer over smoothly with natural adaptations to the modal setting. Without the Barcan formulas, it seems to be much harder. Several options are considered, but each involves commitments plausibly in tension with the underlying philosophical motivations for rejecting them.

A “ideia plana” e a repulsa ao Outro

Buscamos analisar a forma da ideia que move o discurso do presidente do Brasil, Jair Bolsonaro, e dos seus filhos. Incluímos os filhos do presidente por conta de uma característica peculiar do atual governo brasileiro: os filhos, Flávio, Carlos e Eduardo, participam ativamente dos negócios da República, sejam influenciando o pai em decisões administrativas, por exemplo, na nomeação e queda de ministros, ou atuando juntos nas redes sociais da família com mensagens aos seus seguidores. Partimos das noções de verdade e opinião dos filósofos Leszek Kolakowski, John Dewey e Hannah Arendt; construímos a noção de “ideia plana” a partir das obras de Roland Barthes e Anselm Strauss e incorporamos a visão de autoritarismo pela literatura de Vassili Grossman, Edwin A. Abbot e Mikhail Bulgákov. Nosso trabalho apresenta a forma “plana” da ideia tanto como uma visada do populismo bolsonarista, de fácil comunicação de sentidos, quanto do seu traço autoritário, posto ser forma fechada ao diálogo democrático. Ideia no singular porque remete à verdade única, não admitindo que outras “ideias” possam conviver no mundo da vida.

Epistemological Questions for a Speculative Pragmatist

This essay will engage in a critical dialogue with Massumi’s concept of speculative pragmatism by reconstructing and interrogating the epistemology and metaphysics it presupposes. First, we will narrate and explicate the metaphysics embedded in the philosophy of speculative pragmatism. Secondly, we will recapitulate Massumi’s conceptualization of speculative pragmatism in his book Semblance and Event (2011). Our reading of this book will lead us to argue that speculative pragmatism can be reformulated as a philosophy of panperceptionism. The essay will end with some remarks and questions that aim to challenge the epistemology and metaphysics of speculative pragmatism. We will focus on Massumi’s synthesizing of the subject-object distinction, his theory of judgement, and his deflationary notion of truth. Article received: April 16, 2020; Article accepted: July 1, 2020; Published online: April 15, 2021; Original scholarly paper

La vérité de la clinique psychanalytique

ObjectiveThis article offers an examination of the notion of truth in psychoanalysis, specifically in the work of S. Freud and J. Lacan. Far from being linked to notions of accuracy, certainty, or objectivity, as it the case in the field of science, subjective truth offers itself for psychoanalysis from its own perspectives. By giving itself the goal of elucidating the truth of the subject and not the disappearance of symptoms, psychoanalysis also deviates from any reference to reality and its standards, and defines a field and criteria that are unique. MethodThis reflection is based on a chronological and thematic reading of the texts of S. Freud and J. Lacan; it does not claim to be exhaustive but makes it possible to trace the outlines of an elaboration where points of continuity and rupture are marked between the authors, but also within in one's elaboration. ResultsFor Freud, subjective truth is connected with the deciphering of the unconscious. Symptoms, dreams, and slips of the tongue are understood by opening up to an unintentional discourse, which is that of free association. The truth arises only by surprise, only manifests itself in fragments, only lets us grasp it after the fact. The work of psychoanalytic treatment leads to a reconstruction of the subject's story based less on accuracy than on plausibility, which earns the subject's conviction. For the Lacan of the 1950s, taking part in a re-reading of psychoanalysis based on linguistics, the dimension of truth is consubstantial with the dimension of language and therefore of the treatment: the subject cannot avoid confronting it from the moment s/he speaks. The speaking truth states a truth about which the subject would prefer to remain ignorant. The truth of the subject is that of a repressed desire, expressed in the field of the Other in the form of an inverted message. Rereading Epimenides's Paradox sheds light on the fact that truth belongs to the field of enunciation, the subject's own field. DiscussionWith Lacan, a second, more complex conception of truth emerges from the second half of the 1960s, when the possibilities conferred on speech and on the Symbolic recede in favor of a conception that recognizes an ever-expanding role of the Real and of the impossible. It is a truth designated as lying-truth, which can only be “half-said,” that of a truth recognized as horror, with the discovery of the unnamable thing, the objet-a, a part of the (speaking) body that is at once the most foreign and the most intimate. ConclusionThe subject's truth is not in itself, but in an object of a veiled nature: the objet-a that emerges in analytic discourse as impossible to say. This object is both the cause and the product of speech. The analyst's role is not to take pleasure in the truth of the analysand, which the former brings up as a question, without taking a position on the answer, which the analysand provides. At the end of a cure, the analysand can hope to have produced knowledge about her/his jouissance, irremediably of the order of fiction, which comes as close as possible to the impossibility of bearing witness to the Real.

The Consistency of a Certain Medieval-Like Solution to the Liar Paradox. Proof Given by Bolesław Sobociński

In Formale Logik, published in 1956, J. M. Bocheński presented his first proposal for the solution to the liar paradox, which he related to Paul of Venice's argumentation from Logica Magna. A formalized version of this solution was then presented in Formalisierung einer scholastischen Lösung der Paradoxie des ‘Lügners’ in 1959. The historical references of the resulting formalism turn out to be closer to Albert de Saxon's argument and the later solution by John Buridan. Bocheński did not pose the question of the consistency of his theory. The case was taken up by B. Sobociński in his private letter to Bocheński from 12 August 1954. Sobociński used a smart translation of the language of Bocheński's theory into the classical propositional language with the notions of truth and falsehood inverted. The translation preserves the structure of the formalized solution. We explore Sobociński's idea and reconstruct his original proof.

Fix, Express, Quantify: Disquotation After Its Logic

Abstract Truth-theoretic deflationism holds that truth is simple, and yet that it can fulfil many useful logico-linguistic roles. Deflationism focuses on axioms for truth: there is no reduction of the notion of truth to more fundamental ones such as sets or higher-order quantifiers. In this paper I argue that the fundamental properties of reasonable, primitive truth predicates are at odds with the core tenets of classical truth-theoretic deflationism that I call fix, express, and quantify. Truth may be regarded as a broadly logical, sui generis notion. However, this has little to do with the original aims of the deflationary theory of truth.

Desencantamento do mundo e objetividade científica em Max Weber

Defendendo a centralidade da filosofia da ciência do neokantiano Heinrich Rickert na reflexão epistemológica e metodológica de Max Weber, o artigo analisa a forma que o problema da objetividade (tanto científica quanto axiológica) assume no pensamento weberiano. Ademais, o trabalho sustenta a tese de que Max Weber inova na sua tentativa de salvar a noção de verdade (no âmbito das ciências culturais) ao mesmo tempo em que nega (contra Rickert) a possibilidade da validade objetiva e universal de valores, os quais, no entanto, são constitutivos daquelas ciências enquanto tais

On Trying to Leave Truth Alone

AbstractAccording to a certain conception of language, any sentence can, when used on an occasion, have any of indefinitely many truth-conditions. Such a conception of language gives us reason to think that the question of whether the notion of truth has a distinctive content cannot be settled by looking solely at the predication of truth. By focusing on the predicate ‘true’ when trying to determine the significance of the notion of truth, we may have been looking in the wrong place.

The Collision of Social Justice Perfectionism, Rival Faiths, and Ordered Liberty: Review Essay: Mark T. Mitchell, The Unholy Marriage that Spawned America's Social Justice Warriors

Amid the nation’s swelling social discord, Mark T. Mitchell’s new book, Power and Purity: The Unholy Marriage That Spawned America’s Social Justice Warriors, avoids sterility, sclerosis, and nostalgia, while offering a creative understanding of the origins of the nation’s divisions that have seen the rise of social justice warriors (SJWs). Endeavoring to unravel the undemocratic forces advancing in our republic, his analysis forecasts the rise of totalitarianism and the possible return of “separate but equal.” He argues that social justice activists, after embracing Nietzsche’s rejection of Christian Platonism, the notion of truth, and traditional morality, have now, paradoxically, embraced many aspects of Puritanism. Additional issues arise because, despite their adoption of Nietzsche’s intuition, SJWs frequently emphasize goals, which are orthogonal to his vision. Mitchell’s book provides answers to a number of salient issues including the provenance, consequences, and morality of social justice approaches. In an epoch featuring (1) the rude collapse of metanarratives; (2) an uprising of mimetic rivalries within the political, religious, and economic realm; (3) spreading social irruptions signaling democracy’s end and totalitarianism’s beginning; and (4) the self-immolation of the liberal project accompanied by the rise of illiberal liberalism; Mitchell poses a crucial question: whether social justice policies grounded in postmodernism, are reconcilable with contrary views grounded in rival faiths and the notion of ordered liberty within a constitutional republic? Without resolving this conflict, Professor Mitchell implies that common ground cannot be found between individuals and subgroups who are driven by claims of social justice and those who are not.

The Cartographic Paradox: Investigating the Fragmented Truth of a Map in Adrift and 438 Days

This paper seeks to examine the notion of truth in survival tales, Adrift (1986) and 438 Days (2015), through analysing the Cartographic element in them. Both Adrift and 438 Days, described as true tales of survival (where the castaway subject survived alone at sea), employ various maps in them. Deceptively innocuous though it may appear, this research will argue how the maps in these texts have multifarious-dimensions.
 A map attempts to be truthful, by relying on order and factuality. It has ability to compress mammoth details, while simultaneously presenting them with astounding clarity. However, it must also depend on distortions and omissions to convey a selective reality. The map becomes a contested site, where truth and lie coexist. The understanding of truth as a solid, monolithic entity suddenly shatters. This ambivalence becomes our entry point in understanding the nuanced nature of a map in life writing. Its paradoxical existence, its interconnectedness with things beyond itself, allows the map to possess an added dimension, which the written word does not possess.
 Furthermore, this paper will highlight how maps in survivor tales do not just place the narrative, but themselves exhibit a narrative potential. The relation between the written word and the experienced world culminates harmoniously in the visual world of map. This study will argue how the map provides a framework necessary to structure the text. Furthermore, this paper will also depict how a map transcends its factual role, and becomes a holder of memories by making the survivor’s traumatic experience more palpable. This research will ultimately attempt to challenge the rhetoric of concealment around maps, and pierce through the myth of their apparent objectivity. Through a work of select scholars this study will scrutinise maps as social constructions of power and knowledge in survivor narratives which mould the reader’s understanding of truth.

Fostering the truthful individualCommunicating media literacy in the comic Bamse

Abstract This study examines the construction of media literacy in a special issue on source criticism of the Swedish children's comic Bamse – Världens Starkaste Björn [Bamse – The World's Strongest Bear]. This is done with the purpose of understanding what values, perspectives, and practices are promoted when media literacy is communicated via children's edutainment media. Using narrative and discourse analysis, we problematise how notions of truth (such as post-truth) guide much of the discourse on digital media in today's post-political society, and how that and individualisation shape notions of media literacy. This is visible in the analysed case in how source criticism is constructed in relation to notions of truth and falsehood, and as moral lessons aimed at the individual media user. We argue that such an individualised, decontextualised, and depoliticised take on media literacy is problematic and an expression of neoliberalism and a middle-class gaze.

Arhitekta kao istorijski objekt

The paper problematizes the state of the contemporary architectural discipline, focusing on the functional crisis of the author, starting from the assumption that the dialectical form of the biographical approach in the analysis of architectural matter, in addition to its practical and pedagogical justifications, lacks the capacity to reveal its real historical purpose. The introductory part of the research explains the leading role that hermeneutic activity gained in modernism, thanks to the hermetic character of modern artistic principles as well as the pseudo-hermetic positioning of theoretical strongholds. The basic assumption of the paper is that in the present time, the system of values is radically changed by the weakening of the integral text, which in the epoch of modernization preceded the existence of the work itself. The second part of the research sheds light on the origin of the status of the author, from the initial moment of individualization of ideas in the Renaissance, all the way to its rationalization and formalization in modernism, while the third part analyzes the primary foundations of the discursive architectural discipline, derived from a vitruvian essay about the philosophical education of architects. The fourth part denotes a crisis of values whose roots are deeper and more elementary than the symbiosis between production and management, or the vanity of the performer, seeing it in the broader context of the specific state of Enlightenment culture and its world, as an inherent disintegration of a single notion of truth. The categories on which the modern epistemology of the architectural discipline rests inevitably set the condition for their own overstepping and destabilization, where the loss of the basic figure of identity and the stratification of the subjective horizon, as well as the disciplinary narrative, lead to either apparent or real anonymity of the discourse, by radicalizing creative acts and practice. The historical method in the paper is conditioned by the very nature of architectural objects, whose research engages independent sources of knowledge, differing from the paradigmatic models of some other disciplines that do not create forms but are exclusively related to the analysis of events.

\u201cNing\xfan lugar sagrado\u201d de Rodrigo Rey Rosa: una ficci\xf3n paranoica desde la di\xe1spora centroamericana

This paper analyzes “Ningún lugar sagrado” (1998) by the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa as a ‘ficción paranoica’ (“La ficción paranoica”, Clarín, 10 de octubre de 1991; Blanco nocturno, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2010). I will explain that Rey Rosa’s short story does not include univocal clues to identify the protagonist as an unreliable narrator whose overinterpretations give rise to a misrepresentation of the facts. According to my reading of “Ningún lugar sagrado”, the paranoiac features of the main character contribute to the ambiguity of the text that, in fact, never explicitly confirms or discredits his persecutory ideas. Following this line of argument, I suggest that Rey Rosa’s short story narrates an “imaginario de amenaza” (“La ficción paranoica”, Clarín, 10 de octubre de 1991) that, alluding to the climate of repression, intrigues and complicities in postwar Guatemala, generates paranoia –including that of the reader. “Ningún lugar sagrado” points to a more general tendency in recent Central American literature that, from the realm of fiction, highlights the widespread nature of paranoia in the region. Unlike social discourses that discuss the topic, these literary texts make use of narrative techniques that do not necessarily respond to a referential notion of truth (including hyperboles, digressions, irony and narrative ambiguity), when constructing the voice of a paranoiac character. According to my perspective, such narrative techniques lend themselves especially to capturing the alienating dimensions of violence in Central America where paranoia, rather than being a question of truth or exaggeration, constitutes a survival strategy.

ADORNO, GADAMER, THE WORK OF ART AND THE RETRIEVAL OF THE SACRED

This paper considers the significant role the sacred played in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Theodor Adorno’s theories of post Enlightenment rationality and experience. While these thinkers are typically thought to be at odds with one another, on this topic, as will become evident, their work remained proximate: both appealed at crucial points to theological models, somewhat controversially, to combat the limitations of strict methodological accounts of their rational. This paper first traces their mutual reliance in this endeavor upon Kantian and post- -Kantian accounts of aesthetics, which imported classical metaphysical notions of Truth, Beauty, and the Good into their accounts. Against this backdrop, I trace how Gadamer and Adorno employed theological models to articulate accounts of the poverty of contemporary experience and theory, affording possibilities for its reinterpretation. Thereby, both viewed the sacred as a still not exhausted critical reserve in our rational history, one that extends beyond the constraints of Enlightenment, precisely in posing the critical question of tradition itself: the question, as Adorno put it, of how “a thinking obliged to relinquish tradition might preserve and transform tradition.”

Como as ciências morrem? Os ataques ao conhecimento na era da pós-verdade

Neste artigo analisamos como o fenômeno da pós-verdade impacta a opinião pública por meio da criação de um ambiente hostil ao pensamento crítico e ao conhecimento científico. Movimentos negacionistas e obscurantistas atacam as instituições democráticas e negam a ciência, relativizando e pulverizando as noções de verdade e objetividade, promovendo uma desconfiança na possibilidade de tratarmos dos fatos e não apenas de narrativas ou versões. A partir de tal pano de fundo histórico e social, analisamos o papel dos estudos de ciências e propomos três níveis de reação; (a) Um papel mais ativo na proposição de políticas públicas e estratégias educativas em divulgação e ensino de ciências, (b) revisão dos fundamentos conceituais no campo dos estudos de ciências e (c) a defesa de uma imagem de ciência que resgate as noções de verdade, fato e objetividade e que contemple a ciência em sua dimensão existencial e não somente em sentido instrumental e utilitário.

A noção de verdade e a circulação do conhecimento científico em Fleck: elementos para uma reflexão sobre a era da pós-verdade

Os debates em torno da pós-verdade têm abrangido desde aspectos filosóficos e histórico-sociais, passando por questões linguísticas, psicológicas e axiológicas, até implicações éticas e políticas. O objetivo deste trabalho é buscar compreender o fenômeno da pós-verdade, a partir da epistemologia de Ludwik Fleck, e refletir sobre as possíveis implicações para a Ciência e para a Educação científica. Para isso, serão exploradas a noção de verdade e a descrição dos processos de circulação do conhecimento científico em Fleck. Conclui-se que a perspectiva fleckiana pode ser uma alternativa interessante para se pensar o fenômeno da pós-verdade. Para esse autor, existe uma relação de autoridade, confiança e dependência mútua entre o saber especializado e o saber popular. Seria importante manter essa relação nesse formato, a fim de preservar a democracia política e evitar o surgimento de movimentos de caráter dogmático e antidemocrático. Também parece ser importante buscar limitar a disseminação de ideias que podem ameaçar o caráter democrático da ciência e a sua própria existência. Por fim, uma popularização da ciência e uma educação científica que abrangessem a complexidade da construção do conhecimento científico poderiam contribuir para formar visões sobre ciência menos suscetíveis aos efeitos nocivos da pós-verdade.