Letters

What Is Truth?

Nick Gillespie's review of The Truth About Truth ("Goodbye True World ," October) contains several elementary fallacies. First, he treats truth, knowledge, belief, and "truth" as if they were all the same thing. They are not. Knowledge consists of truths that are known, but since there are truths that are not known, truth cannot be identified with knowledge. "Truth" is what has been called true, presumably because it is believed to be true; but what is believed may not

be true, and what is true may not be believed.

Second, he implies that truth is relative to belief because all facts are interpretations. Yes, but he overlooks the fact that all interpretations are not facts; instead, some interpretations are false. Third, he seems to share the popular idea that belief in objective truth implies dogmatism. But only those who believe that there is such a thing as the objective truth can admit that they might not know what it is.

These truisms matter politically, because the doctrine that there is no truth, just equally good competing beliefs, has always been the great enemy of reason and the great excuse for arbitrary power. Liberals should believe not that there is no truth but that reason must be left free to find it.
Max Hocutt
Department of Philosophy
University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, AL

Nick Gillespie disparages the assumption of the Enlightenment that "man in the full knowl edge of what he was doing should deliberately create such a civilization and social order as the process of his reason enabled him to design." To be sure, "modern socialism, planning, and totalitarianism" have been post-Enlightenment phenomena. But their defects result from insuffi cient (rather than excessive) application of the Enlightenment's principles. Modern perpetrators of interventionism (e.g. socialists) neglect to heed man's inevitable lack of full knowledge. And it is precisely in light of this lack of full knowledge that the impropriety of an imposed social order can be deduceddeduced, that is, in full accordance with the principles of the Enlighten ment. Accordingly, libertarians from John Stuart Mill to Robert Nozick (men who would not exactly be termed postmodernists) advocated minimal government in direct acknowledgment of the fallibility to which people, and especially governments, are pronea model exercise in the Socratic knowing of what one does not know.

While faults exist in the epistemological optimism common to both the Enlightenment and modern forms of totalitarianism, postmodernism offers nothing more in the way of an antidote than does the wrecking ball relative to the limitations of modern construction and architecture. Advocates of postmodernism such as Mr. Gillespie would do well to recall the somewhat pre -modern insight that "[i]t is wrong to remove the foundations of a science unless you can replace them with others more convincing." (Aristotle's De Caelo III.1.299a5-6).
Chad Trainer
Phoenixville, PA

Nick Gillespie replies: Max Hocutt makes useful distinctions between truth, knowledge, and belief, though I think those categories are far less clear cut than he does. More important, he misunderstands what I think is useful in postmodern thought by equating a continuing interroga tion of what we believe to be true with relativism. It strikes me as self-evident that all competing interpretations are not equalsome have more predictive, explanatory, or conceptual value than others. But it is no great stretch to believe in objective truth and to recognize that we may never fully discover or understand those truths. In fact, that insight informs Karl Popper's view of rational inquiry and the paradoxical nature of "progress" in human understanding: The more we learn, the less we can be sure of. Chad Trainer errs, I think, in seeing postmodernism as antitheti cal to the Enlightenment. As I argued at the end of my review, that notion is more a marketing ploy (by champions and detractors alike) than anything else. Postmodernism extends the Enlight enment project in a Humean sense by using reason to challenge its own explanatory power.