In comments on this thread, neil and I began a discussion of truth. I asserted that the concept of truth plays no role in the way I think and live, and neil countered that I was refuting myself because I was making truth claims in asserting that truth was not a metaphysical property of objects, concepts, or signs. I just want to clarify my position here, which is nothing more than a restatement of the position of philosopher Richard Rorty.
In the late 18th century, philosopher Immanuel Kant dismissed scholastic metaphysics by asking the question, "What is added to a thing if we claim that it exists?" This simple question threw out hundreds of years of western philosophy by denying the substantive content of the metaphysical examination of the question of being. "Being" adds nothing to a thing; it is not a property that objects or concepts possess in addition to all other properties. Something either exists or not; nothing more nothing less.
In the late 20th century, Richard Rorty asked the question, "What is added to a sentence if we claim it is true?" I suppose, for the sake of clarity here, I should be clarifying the difference between "true" as in factually representative (this is scientific "truth; that which can be plotted on a graph) and "True" as in transcendentally reflective of a hidden order, a property which adheres to a concept giving it universal status across all languages, cultures, and which is in need of no translation. The first way of using the word "true" is common, even necessary. I would be insane if I asserted that there were no such thing as factual reporting of data. The second way of using the word "True" is a meaningless plus ultra that people insist is a metaphysical property of their sentences, granting them a certain privileged status of assertion and repetition. Whether it's the centrality of being, or the coninherence of the Persons of the Trinity or "L'etat, c'est moi", or the importance of race, nationality, the eventual triumph of the proletariat, claims have been made for the Truth of these sentences, a claim that demands they be accepted as transcendent.
The problem is that two hundred years of philosophy has taught us that all language is nothing more than, in Rorty's words, sounds we make or scratches on paper. After Darwin, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, it is silly to assert that such sounds we make or such scratchings on paper as we do contain some "stuff" called Truth that would privilege them above all other sentences we or others utter. Language doesn't work that way. There is not stuff out there that language reflects, or to which language is transparent, giving us privileged access to some transcendental realm.
As Democracy Lover uses the example of science, I will use our current paradigmatic way of thinking as an example. He claims that science makes assertions concerning certain "truths" that have to be revised due to "evidence". I would claim that science gives descriptions, derived from a statistical analysis of what it considers the most important evidence; the problem, however, is that scientists are constantly arguing about what constitutes "evidence", what constitutes proper statistical modeling, and which description is closest to the factual representation of dots on a piece of graph paper. Science is nothing more than a description of some people's interpretation of dots on graph paper, said dots being pre-determined by a general, always contingent, acceptance of what constitutes evidence. It is certainly not normative; it has a procedure, a "method", that is useful and productive, but the success of the application of what has been called "the scientific method" is not that it gets at what is "True". The success of science is that it works well as a short-hand description of the world that is useful and productive.
The claim that religious beliefs are "True" is on even less sure ground than the claims of scientific "Truth" because, at least with regards to science, we are dealing with intersubjective phenomenon for which there is at any given time a common vocabulary to which most people have access. Religious communities, on the other hand, have no such general vocabulary. Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Shinto - they all have distinctive ways of describing not just the world, but the place of their communities of belief within the world that are incompatible, contradictory, and incommensurable. That they all still exist and function quite well as descriptions not so much of some Divine Reality to which they alone are privileged to access, but of the history of different communities and their struggle to define themselves and the world in which they live even as they are incompatible shows that the question of truth adds nothing to a conversation about religion.
When I entered seminary in 1990, I was thrust in to a two-millenia old discussion on who God is, and I realized fairly quickly that, even within the Christian faith, there are incompatible definitions of who God is. To insist there is only one answer is to deny functionality to all others, and to deny the humanity of those who hold such beliefs. That is to say, if we assert that our understanding of "God" is "True", and all others are false, not only are those who adhere to false beliefs being either deliberately obtuse or are too stupid or ignorant to accept their error, they are also not living fully human lives because they hold beliefs that are not transcendentally normative, in tune with the Nature of Ultimate Reality. Yet, history and common decency belies such an assertion. People can be fully human and assert that Brahma dreams the world for a few billion years, then awakens. Or that there is only Allah and Mohamed is his prophet. Or that the ancestors guide our steps in the Tao of life. Or that any and all such attempts to explain Ultimate Reality are doomed to fail because there is no such thing. These latter assertions provide equally successful ways of living fully human lives, and have done so remarkably well across the life-span of the human race. To invalidate them arbitrarily because they do not have some property called "Truth" is to deny those who assert these beliefs their humanity.
We cannot "get behind" the what Rorty calls the "sentential structure" of reality. All we have to communicate with each other are sentences, all of which are contingent by their very nature. There is nothing to be gained by asserting that certain sentences can or must or should or are bracketed off because they are "True", contingent, yet still having some quality called "Truth" that overcomes their very contingency. Rather than go down that road, it would be much more fruitful if we examined the way beliefs function as contributing to human life and human fulfillment, rather than play a word game designed to eliminate certain players from the human race because they refuse to use them the same way we do.
It is not self-refuting, by the way, to say that I am making a truth claim when I say there is no "Truth", because I am not engaged in that particular language game (to use a wonderful Wittgensteinian phrase). Part of the game called "Truth" is the assertion that certain sentences are not just descriptively accurate, but normative for human conduct. All I am doing is describing the way I believe language functions, including language about Ultimate Reality. William James said that most of our beliefs are true, most of the time. He could say that because he refused to play the game called "Truth", and sought to understand the way beliefs work in human life, and the way different communities negotiate their different understandings of the world. This is a position I agree with whole-heartedly. I make no normative assertions here, no transcendent claims concerning the way the world is, because to do so is inherently impossible.
This is what I mean when I say there is "no truth".
