Re: BHA: truth

[Colin Wight <cow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ruth,

Why not raise a few hard question while your at it (my poor attempt at
postmodern irony:-))

For very good reasons it is sometime since I have delved into this, but let
me try and think on my feet. On the one hand RB rejects the correspondence
theory of truth, hence it must be incorrect to view a CR theory of truth as
a correspondence between anything. Now Collier takes RB to task over this
and argues that the correspondence theory of truth should not be so easily
discarded and that it provides a description of a state of affairs that we
call true. I must admit I personally am quite attached to the idea of
correspondence.

Now in Plato etc, what RB means by an 'alethic notion of truth' is not a
correspondence, but 'the truth of or reason for things, people and phenomena
generally...not propositions.'

So RB is _not_ saying that truth is an idea which describes a relationship
of correspondence. Not that I think he consistently denies this, but in good
CR fashion truth is a differentiated and stratified concept.

I think I read him as saying that this alethic notion of truth points out
the nature of things independent of their nature being thought. Moreover,
since alethic truth is the deepest form of truth and is ontological, this is
what allows him to claim that truth is given on the ontological side. That
is, that what makes a proposition true is not so much the relationship
between the proposition and the object, but whether or not the proposition
captures the alethia of the object - this may be a subtle distinction but I
think an important one. It is the ontological side of the relationship which
makes the epistemological side true or not, since the epistemological claim
cannot change the alethia of the object. This doesn't mean that we can't
intervene and change things, but we are talking about truth calims embedded
in time and where referential detachment takes place.

So I suppose what RB is trying to do is much more radical insofar as he
wants to argue that alethic truth can and does exist without ideas. This
isn't as problematic as it might appear and we readily accept the idea that
gravity would exist without the thought of it (no idea of gravity that is).
Alethic truth then does not express a relationship of correspondence, but
refers to the nature and mode of being of things and it is this which truth
as referential-expressive, i.e. the ontic-epistemic dual, or correspondence,
attempts to capture. BTW, in-between this latter form of truth and alethic
truth RB refers to an ontological truth.

And don't hold back on the social reality bit, that's probably the most
exciting bit. Still, I accept RB's argument that social reality can be
considered existentially intransitive to us but not causally.


Thanks,


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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales
Aberystwyth
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