Toward a postmodern correspondence theory of truth

The correspondence theory of truth no longer holds the privileged place it once held. In a postmodern world there simply does not appear to be any objective reality to which our ideas might correspond in order to be true. Thus, today other theories of truth have become popular. Most theists bemoan the loss of correspondence and muster arguments to oppose the postmodern perspective. This paper argues that even given the postmodern perspective of our age a correspondence theory of truth is still a viable.     

Islamising Malayness: Ulama discourse and authority in contemporary Malaysia

This paper seeks to discuss Malay identity as it has been understood by the Malay Muslim religious elites (the Ulama) in Malaysia. I posit that the Ulama’s voices have been privileged in the context of the Islamic resurgence period. Although there has been a general consensus by the Ulama that Islam is a key component of the Malay identity and that the two are inseparable, the Ulama are, at present, divided in the contest for a clear definition of what ‘Islam’ is and how Malayness can be refashioned towards Islam. By couching these debates and contestations within the context of the Islamic resurgence period and the state’s Islamisation project, I shall highlight the ways in which issues such as Malay rites, rituals and cultural practices, and what constitutes bid’ah (sinful innovations) in Islam are elucidated. The works and sermons of three key Ulama in contemporary Malaysia—Nik Aziz, Mohd Asri, and Harussani Zakaria—shall be treated as case studies. Their attitude towards other key markers of Malayness, such as the Malay Royalty and Malay language, and how they are negotiated in relation to Islam are also examined.     

The Future of Education ... and its Philosophy

Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty, in their different ways, have represented the tension between acculturation and individuation, truth and freedom, as central to modern education systems, a tension which, both agree, they have failed to resolve. The paper argues that an additional complication is that in the contemporary postmodern landscape, which prioritises the notion of lifelong learning in its policy discourse, the very notion of education is threatened, and asks whether we should care. It considers MacIntyre’s suggestion that the notion of the educated public can solve the former tension and concurrently re-launch the notion of education in the postmodern world—central to MacIntyre’s plan is the reform of the university. And against it Rorty’s suggestion that acculturation and individuation be regarded as different but connected processes, with individuation conceived as self-creation and located in the non-vocational university.     

“The Flow of Her Cum”: On a Recent Semantic Shift in an Erotic Word

Recently there has been a semantic shift in the pornographic word ‘cum.’ Traditionally, the word, as a noun, is used to designate semen. However, ‘cum’ is now used to designate also female fluids during sexual activity. The concept of ‘female cum’ is discussed in relation to examples from a corpus of two hundred erotic short stories collected from the Internet, and to the physiological realities of female fluids during sex. In order to show how the innovation of ‘female cum’ is useful in written erotic narrative, a comparison is made with filmed pornography and drawn erotic comics. Finally, I argue that ‘cum’ in this new context is used as a device to arouse sexual excitement.     

A Narrative Approach to Supporting Students Diagnosed With Learning Disabilities

Students diagnosed with learning disabilities experience many challenges that school counselors may address through narrative therapy. Narrative therapy is a postmodern, social constructionist approach based on the theoretical construct that individuals create their notions of truth and meaning of life through interpretive stories. This article identifies potential challenges students diagnosed with learning disabilities encounter, provides an orientation to narrative therapy, and offers a case example illustrating the application of narrative therapy with this client population.     

‘Diverse Epistemologies’, Truth and Archaeology: In Defence of Realism

In a recent journal article, as well as in a recent book chapter, in which she critiques my position on ‘indigenous knowledge’, Lesley Green of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town argues that ‘diverse epistemologies ought to be evaluated not on their capacity to express a strict realism but on their ability to advance understanding’. In order to examine the implications of Green’s arguments, and of Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin’s work in this regard, I apply them to a well-known controversy between Native American (or First Nations) creationism and archaeology. I argue that issues in social justice should be distinguished from issues in epistemology. Moreover, in tightening in this paper the link between knowledge and truth, I attempt to defend science as a ‘privileged way of seeing the world’. The analysis of truth, and of related concepts like reality and ‘the way the world is’, will assume a central role here. I contend that, ultimately, the only coherent and consistent position is a realist view of the pertinent issues and ideas.     

试析后现代心理学影响下的心理治疗与咨询

后现代心理学强调心理现象的建构特性和心理学知识的文化相对性。后现代背景下的心理治疗和咨询接受社会建构主义的认识论主张,认为病理心理是语言的社会建构,并没有客观的意义。所有的治疗和咨询理论都是一种“建构”或“叙事”,而不是所谓的“真理”。承认这一点,将有助于在后现代多元化的基础上,实现各种治疗和咨询理论的整合。     

Substance,relation, and identity

One of the great insights of postmodern thought is that our understanding is perspectival, and that we have the perspectives we do because we have privileged one element of certain important binaries over others. Western civilization, or our understanding of it, is based upon our privileging of the male perspective over the female, the rich over the poor, and the white over the black. If that order were reversed and we privileged the perspective of those who had been marginalized, we would see things very differently. Traditional attempts to understand both our own identity and the identity of God all hinge on Aristotle’s privileging of substance over relation. The distinction between substance and relation is another important binary that has shaped Western Civilization. This paper looks at both human and divine identity by privileging relation over substance and considering identity from that marginalized perspective. Classic attempts to explain both our own identity and the identity of God all hinge on Aristotle’s privileging of substance over relation. Jesus, however, seems to privilege relation as a source of identity rather than substance. The social and behavioral sciences of the twentieth century also seem to indicate that human identity is based upon our relations with others rather than our own substance. Thus, contrary to Aristotle’s belief that substance (i.e., that which is independent of all else) is most real, perhaps relation is what is truly most real and the basis of both human and divine identity.     

Searching for a better story: harnessing modern and postmodern positions in family therapy

In this paper it is argued that modern and postmodern positions on reality and knowledge should not create a theoretical division in family therapy and that rather, by harnessing the two together, each may restrain the other. This combination creates the potential for drawing widely from the whole field of family therapy as well as challenging the separation of mainstream family therapy models from psychoanalysis. The concept of better story is used to replace both the polarized modern position of an objective discoverable truth and the polarized postmodern position of all stories having equal validity. It is suggested that better stories, which evolve in the meeting of family and therapist, may include those which are more congruent, object-adequate, encompassing, holding, shared, emotional, conscious, just, provisional and hopeful.     

The pathology of validity

Stephen Read has presented an argument for the inconsistency of the concept of validity. We extend Read’s results and show that this inconsistency is but one half of a larger problem. Like the concept of truth, validity is infected with what we call semantic pathology, a condition that actually gives rise to two symptoms: inconsistency and indeterminacy. After sketching the basic ideas behind semantic pathology and explaining how it manifests both symptoms in the concept of truth, we present cases that establish the indeterminacy of validity and that link this indeterminacy with the concept’s inconsistency. Our conclusion is that an adequate treatment of the semantic pathology thus revealed must deal with both of its symptoms. Further, it must extend to the occurrences of this condition elsewhere: in the concept of truth, in the other central semantic notions, and even in certain philosophical concepts outside semantics.     

A Sequential Analysis of Externalizing in Narrative Therapy with Children

Externalizing, or separating the person from his/her problem-saturated story, is a central approach in narrative therapy. Michael White, one of the therapy’s founders, lately revised his map of the externalizing process in therapy according to Vygotskian theory. In this study we sought to determine whether White’s proposed process was evident in therapy sessions. Sequential analysis indicated that therapists scaffolded children’s responses according to White’s map, and therapists’ and children’s utterances tended to advance across the levels of the map over the course of a session, indicating that White’s model of narrative therapy matched the therapy’s empirical process.     

Apophasis and the turn of philosophy to religion: From Neoplatonic negative theology to postmodern negation of theology

This essay represents part of an effort to rewrite the history metaphysics in terms of what philosophy never said, nor could say. It works from the Neoplatonic commentary tradition on Plato’s Parmenides as the matrix for a distinctively apophatic thinking that takes the truth of metaphysical doctrines as something other than anything that can be logically articulated. It focuses on Damascius in the 5–6th century AD as the culmination of this tradition in the ancient world and emphasizes that Neoplatonism represents the crisis of Greek metaphysics on account of the inability to give a rational account of foundations for knowing and of the ultimate principle of beings. Neoplatonism discovered how all such ultimate principles were necessarily beyond the reach of reason and speech. This apophatic insight is drawn out with the help of contemporary criticism of Neoplatonic philosophy, defining also some points of divergence. The essay then discusses the motives for thinking the unsayable in postmodern times on the basis of this parallel with Neoplatonic thought. Discourse’s becoming critical of itself to the point of self-subversion animates them both. However, the tendency in postmodern thought to totally reject theology, including negative theology, is a betrayal of its own deepest motivations. This tendency is debated through an examination of the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. While any traditional discourse can be negated, the negating and self-negating capacity of discourse itself is infinite, and this is where a perennial negative theological philosophy of the unsayable is to be located. Language, eminently the language of philosophy, as infinitely open, points in a direction which becomes equally and ineluctably theological.     

How to be a postmodernist: a user's guide to postmodern rhetorical practices

Family therapists are being encouraged to adopt a postmodern approach to therapy and knowledge. Postmodernism is more than a set of beliefs that therapists can either accept or reject; it is an approach to the construction of truth that eschews many of the forms of argumentation, such as appeals to logic or evidence, characteristic of earlier writing in family therapy. In this paper we present some of the alternative rhetorical strategies used by contemporary family therapy and family therapy texts in the construction of novel truths. These strategies include: writing in the first person; making qualified or conditional assertions; implying rather than stating truths; 'delegitimizing' conflicting views; and ignoring disagreement. We discuss the value of these strategies in maintaining the authority of therapists and commentators on therapy in the face of the widespread incredulity towards metanarratives, such as science, that characterize postmodern society.     

Truth from a Proof-Theoretic Perspective

Validity, the central concept of the so-called ‘proof-theoretic semantics’ is described as correctly applying to the arguments that denote proofs. In terms of validity, I propose an anti-realist characterization of the notions of truth and correct assertion, at the core of which is the idea that valid arguments may fail to be recognized as such. The proposed account is compared with Dummett’s and Prawitz’s views on the matter.     

Narrative Therapy Pathways for Re-authoring with Parents of Adolescents Coming-out as Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual

Narrative therapy with parents as they are coming to terms with their adolescent sons’ and daughters’ coming-out as lesbian or gay provides a framework for reauthoring stories and revisioning identities as they negotiate the challenge of becoming lesbian/gay-membered families. Recognized for complementing the elements of multicultural practice, narrative therapy offers therapeutic interventions that are culturally sensitive and acknowledge the role of power and privilege in socially imaging what it means to be lesbian or gay. In this article the familiar storylines that these families bring into therapy are illustrated, and family work with parents of lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents is conceptualized using a narrative therapy lens.     

Postmodernism versus psychotherapy

‘Postmodernism’has made a substantial impact on various schools of psychotherapy, including family therapy.‘Postmodern’therapists tend to focus on the productive capacities of language, developing narrative styles for their work.‘Postmodern’family therapy is differentiated from modernist approaches by its disavowal of truth claims and its encouragement of alternative‘voices’or narratives. In this paper, it is argued that this represents too narrow an approach to psychotherapy and to postmodernism. Postmodernism takes as a central concern the limits of symbolization, so a postmodernist therapy would deal primarily with failures of language. Language-based therapeutic procedures such as those to be found in family therapy are consequently not postmodernist. This state of affairs should be welcomed, as a truly‘postmodern’mode of therapy would probably celebrate irrationality.     

Theology and narrative: the self,the novel,the Bible

This paper critically evaluates the work of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre by comparing their understanding of the narrative structure of selfhood with paradigms derived from three other sources: Heidegger’s conception of human being as Dasein; Rowan Williams’ interpretation of Dostoevsky’s theology of narrative; and Kierkegaard’s project of reading the Old Testament narrative of Abraham and Isaac as part of the Christian God’s autobiography. These comparisons suggest that Taylor and MacIntyre’s own narratives of Western culture lack a certain, theologically required openness to a variety of specific ways in which both individuality and history resist understanding in narrative terms as much as they demand it.     

How Truth Behaves When There’s No Vicious Reference

In The Revision Theory of Truth (MIT Press), Gupta and Belnap (1993) claim as an advantage of their approach to truth “its consequence that truth behaves like an ordinary classical concept under certain conditions—conditions that can roughly be characterized as those in which there is no vicious reference in the language.” To clarify this remark, they define Thomason models, nonpathological models in which truth behaves like a classical concept, and investigate conditions under which a model is Thomason: they argue that a model is Thomason when there is no vicious reference in it. We extend their investigation, considering notions of nonpathologicality and senses of “no vicious reference” generated both by revision theories of truth and by fixed-point theories of truth. We show that some of the fixed-point theories have an advantage analogous to that which Gupta and Belnap claim for their approach, and that at least one revision theory does not. This calls into question the claim that the revision theories have a distinctive advantage in this regard.     

Metaphysics as interpretation of conscious life: some remarks on D. Henrich’s and D. Kolak’s thinking

In this article, I discuss the manner in which Dieter Henrich’s theory of subjectivity has emerged from the fundamental questions of German Idealism, and in what manner and to what extent this theory effects a reinstatement of metaphysics. In so doing, I shall argue that Henrich’s position represents a viable refutation of the attempt of the physicalist explanation of the world to prove the concept of the subject to be superfluous. Henrich’s metaphysics of subjectivity is primarily focused on the ‘ultimate questions’ which also compose “the deep levels of our subjectivity” and concern the factors that should promote stability in our emotional, moral and intellectual life. I argue with Henrich that the indisputable facticity of our conscious life is worthy of our special consideration and interpretation, explanation and clarification, just as the deeper meaning (the individual and collective subconscious structure) hidden beneath the layers of apparent comprehensibility calls for urgent investigation. Such interpretation and elucidation of life’s meaning has a tripartite character: first, it consists of clarification of the totality of human experience together with the realities playing a part in it; second, it builds on the process by which the contents of experience are cognized, and the knowledge thereof which results; thirdly, it embraces the transcendental precondition enabling each and every one of us to consciously lead our lives—for life, in a human sense, does not merely happen to one. Henrich’s metaphysical foundation of subjectivity is compared with Kolak‘s position, according to which individual consciousness is not insular, but integrated into the totality of overall unity that some have called “the Universal Self”, “the Noumenal Self”.