Alethic Pluralism and the Role of Reference in the Metaphysics of Truth

In this paper, I outline and defend a novel approach to alethic pluralism, the thesis that truth has more than one metaphysical nature: where truth is, in part, explained by reference, it is (relevantly) relational in character and can be regarded as consisting in correspondence; but where instead truth does not depend upon reference it is not (relevantly) relational and involves only coherence. In the process, I articulate a clear sense in which truth may or may not depend upon reference: this involves distinguishing semantic denotation from pragmatic speaker reference and claiming that there may or may not exist a metasemantic connection between these two notions. Finally, I argue that reference is not in general inscrutable—that this metasemantic connection does exist in the case of our ordinary discourse about present macroscopic concrete objects—but that it is in pure mathematics, where reference cannot be secured, and which therefore plays no role in accounting for truth. In this manner, alethic pluralism is upheld.     

Ecumenical alethic pluralism

Ecumenical Alethic Pluralism (EAP) is a novel kind of alethic pluralism. It is ecumenical in that it widens the scope of alethic pluralism by allowing for a normatively deflated truth property alongside a variety of normatively robust truth properties. We establish EAP by showing how Wright’s Inflationary Arguments fail in the domain of taste, once a relativist treatment of the metaphysics and epistemology of that domain is endorsed. EAP is highly significant to current debates on the nature of truth insofar as it involves a reconfiguration of the dialectic between deflationists and pluralists.     

On Moderate Pluralism About Truth and Logic

According to moderate truth pluralism, truth is both One and Many. There is a single truth property that applies across all truth-apt domains of discourse, but instances of this property are grounded in different ways. Propositions concerning medium-sized dry goods might be true in virtue of corresponding with reality while propositions pertaining to the law might be true in virtue of cohering with the body of law. Moderate truth pluralists must answer two questions concerning logic: (Q1) Which logic governs inferences concerning each truth-apt domain considered separately? (Q2) Which logic governs inferences that involve several truth-apt domains? This paper has three objectives. The first objective is to present and explain the moderate pluralist’s answers to (Q1) and (Q2). The second objective is to argue that there is a tension between these answers. The answer to (Q1) involves a commitment to a form of logical pluralism. However, reflection on the moderate truth pluralist’s answer to (Q2) shows that they are committed to taking logic to be topic neutrality. This, in turn, forces a commitment to logical monism. It would seem that the moderate truth pluralist cannot have it both ways. The third objective is constructive in nature. I offer an account of what moderate truth pluralists should say about logic and how they might resolve the tension in their view. I suggest that, just like moderate truth pluralists distinguish truth proper and “quasi-truth,” they should endorse a distinction between logic proper and “quasi-logic.” Quasi-truth is truth-like in the sense that instances of quasi-truth ground instances of truth. Quasi-logic is logic-like in the sense that it concerns arguments that are necessarily truth-preserving but are not generally so in a topic neutral way. I suggest that moderate truth pluralists should be monists about truth proper and logic proper but pluralists about quasi-truth and quasi-logic. This allows them to say that logic proper is topic neutral while still accommodating the idea that, for different domains, different arguments may be necessarily truth-preserving.     

Architecture of the Unconscious

Finally, when Freud unveiled the predominant role of the unconscious in psychic processes, it turned out that our ego does not even rule its own house.

— Slavoj ?i?ek, How to Read Lacan

Get up off the pavement, brush the dirt up off my psyche …

— rapper Earl Sweatshirt, “Chum” In the Kitchen

Psychoanalysis is known primarily for its preoccupation with the “truth” that “speaks.” Following the critical tradition pioneered by Lacan and now ?i?ek, I would instead like to shift our attention to the “site[s]” where these pivotal experiments in truth take place—the environments we transform and the objects we fashion as we “learn to live with” the social plight we have inherited. Simply put, the aim of this paper is to explore the architecture of the unconscious. To develop this argument, I draw upon an array of genres and cultural artifacts, including personal memoir, cartoons, and hip hop lyricism.     

An Ethic of Refusal: Simone Weil and the Choice of the Lesser ‘Lesser Evil’

In “On the Abolition of All Political Parties,” Simone Weil poses the hypothetical predicament of a person who is intent on solving highly complex mathematical problems but is flogged every time the answer he arrives at is an even number. The person will oscillate between his genuine desire for the truth and the painful cries of his body. “[I]nevitably,” Weil writes, “he will make many mistakes—even if he happens to be very intelligent, very brave and deeply attached to the truth.” She then asks: “What should he do?” Weil’s answer may surprise many readers, even though she claims it is “simple.” If possible, “he must run away” from those who wield the whip. It would have been best, she avers, had he avoided these associations in the first place. Elsewhere in her writings, Weil openly endorses the argument for the lesser evil, justifying active, potentially violent, resistance instead of a pacifist ethic of refusal. This essay analyses the tension between Weil’s ethic of “running away” and her acceptance of the lesser evil.     

Putting Pluralism in its Place

Pluralism about truth is the view that there are many properties, not just one, in virtue of which things are true. Pluralists hope to dodge the objections that face traditional monistic substantive views of truth (such as the correspondence theory), as well as those facing deflationary theories of truth. More specifically, pluralists hope to advance an explanatorily potent understanding of truth that can capture the subtleties of various realist and anti‐realist domains of discourse, all while avoiding the scope problem. I offer a new objection to pluralism that challenges its fundamental commitment to there being a set of alethic properties in virtue of which claims are true. In its place I offer an alternative view that merges standard truthmaker theory with a primitivist conception of truth. This combination of views satisfies the theoretical desires that pluralists claim for themselves, but without taking on pluralism's host of challenges and problems.     

The Search for Integration or How to Work as a Pluralist Psychoanalyst

In my professional path, I strove for the integration of my identity as a psychiatrist and as a psychoanalyst, in the frame of pluralism, which exists in modern psychoanalysis. Having been trained in a Kleinian approach, I will explore the painful breach experienced during my parallel trainings as a psychoanalyst and as a dynamic psychiatrist. I worked for five years as a psychoanalyst and a researcher in Germany and was involved to a large extent with the psychoanalytic world, which increased my self-definition as a pluralist. On my return to Chile, I discovered the need for political changes in the psychoanalytic society and curricular modifications in my training institute to recover psychoanalysis from its academic isolation. Finally, I will analyze the extant connections between the ideology of pluralism in psychoanalysis and its application in clinics. I will show that the exploration of the inference processes of the psychoanalyst inside a session—the psychoanalyst's mind at work—demonstrates that the analyst in fact functions as an artisan thinker. This means that pluralism—that is, the use of more than one theoretical frame and of different levels of abstraction and explicitness—is the way the majority of psychoanalysts “naturally” work. What probably differs is the self-consciousness, scope, and rank of pluralism.     

CRITICAL AFTERWORD

This Afterword looks back over both parts of the discussion of “God and the World of Signs”—“Semiotics and the Emergence of Life” in the previous issue of Zygon and “Semiotics and Theology” in this issue. Three central questions in this extended debate are identified: What is the nature of biological organisms and biological evolution? What is the relationship between the natural world and the Triune God of the Christian theological tradition? What should be the goals of Science/Religion Studies? I summarize the answers that Christopher Southgate and Andrew Robinson have given in their program and the challenges raised by their critics. Their strengths and weaknesses are assessed. In the conclusion I ask readers to imagine that this particular research program were to be taken as a model program in science‐and‐religion research (with some tweaking) and then consider the features of the program that could function as standards for scholars working in other areas of the dialogue.     

Prozac and the Post-human Politics of Cyborgs

Working through the lens of Donna Haraway's cyborg theory and directed at the example of Prozac, I address the dramatic rise of new technoscience in medicine and psychiatry. Haraway's cyborg theory insists on a conceptualization and a politics of technoscience that does not rely on universal “Truths” or universal “Goods” and does not attempt to return to the “pure” or the “natural.” Instead, Haraway helps us mix politics, ethics, and aesthetics with science and scientific recommendations, and she helps us understand that (without recourse to universal truth or universal good) questions of legitimacy in science come down to local questions of effect and inclusion. What, in the case of my example, are the effects of Prozac? And for whom? Who is included and empowered to create legitimate psychiatric knowledge? Who is excluded and why? And, what political strategies will increase the democratic health of psychiatric science and practice?     

The Nonworseness Claim and the Moral Permissibility of Better-Than-Permissible Acts

Grounded in what Alan Wertheimer terms the “nonworseness claim,” it is thought by some philosophers that what will be referred to herein as “better-than-permissible acts”—acts that, if undertaken, would make another or others better off than they would be were an alternative but morally permissible act to be undertaken—are necessarily morally permissible. What, other than a bout of irrationality, it may be thought, would lead one to hold that an act (such as outsourcing production to a “sweatshop” in a developing country) that produces more benefits for others than an act that is itself morally permissible (such as not doing business in the developing country at all) with respect to those same others, is not morally permissible? In this article, I argue that each of the two groups of philosophers that are most likely to accept the nonworseness claim—consequentialists and non-consequentialists—have reason to reject it, and thereby also have reason to reject the belief that better-than-permissible acts are necessarily morally permissible.     

Presentation as indirection,indirection as schooling: The two aspects of Benjamin’s scholastic method

Why does Walter Benjamin claim “indirection” (Umweg) to be the proper method for philosophical contemplation and writing? Why is this method—embodied, according to Benjamin, in the convoluted form of scholastic treatises and in their use of citations—fundamental for understanding his Origin of German Trauerspiel as suggesting an alternative to most strands of modern philosophy? The explicit and well-studied function of this method is for the presentation of what cannot be represented in language, of what cannot be intended or approached in thinking. Namely, of what Benjamin understands as “truth.” Indeed, as Adorno implied, providing a method for presenting an intentionless reality, rather than for re-presenting the world as corresponding to the mind, is revolutionary. However, I claim that beyond its presentational function, the method of indirection has a further, pedagogical function. Benjamin’s concept of truth requires thinking in a manner that does not impose any exterior form, any conceptual or intuitive intention on truth and the materials in which it might be exhibited. The methodological adoption of digressive and intermittent writing is supposed to transform the way we think, or more accurately, the position (Haltung) from which thinking occurs. By examining Benjamin’s use of pedagogical terms against the backdrop of scholastic history and the Urfigure of modern method, that of Descartes, I show that writing and reading in the form of the tractatus serves as exercise in receding from the subject-position—a position of a subject intending an object—and thus conditions the presentation of intentionless truth.     

THE CASTRATION OF SIGNS: CONVERSING WITH AUGUSTINE ON CREATION, LANGUAGE AND TRUTH

This article takes as its starting point Nicholas Lash's use of the Buberian distinction between the basic words “I‐It” and “I‐You” to address the question of how the difference between God and creation is “displayed” within the world. Drawing on a rather different discourse—the semiotics developed by Augustine in the distinctions he makes between sign and thing, use and enjoyment—it seeks to explore the concrete shape that might be taken by practices that foster the speaking of the basic word “I‐You”, and which thereby manifest God's redemptive activity within the world, focusing specifically on practices of debate and argument. “What might a redeemed practice of debate look like?” is the question that this article seeks to answer.     

Search for Security

This article uses fictionalized accounts of counseling situations in various periods of history—prehistorical, Greek, Middle Ages, and the twentieth century—to illustrate that man's search for security, his need for an answer to the question “What shall I do?” and other men's responses to that need have not changed much throughout history.     

Can Multimodal and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy be Reconciled?

The purpose of this article is to determine whether two distinct modes of cognitive-behaviour therapy—Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) and Multimodal Therapy (MMT)—can be reconciled. This quest in the spirit of integrationism is pursued along three lines of inquiry: Do we talk about schools, approaches, or techniques? A reconciliation between MMT and REBT as systems seems not to be feasible, just because of the simple fact that MMT is not a new school with an idiosyncratic theory, whereas REBT is. However, REBT is also a congenial approach consisting of various eclectic techniques, as is MMT. It is explained how the A-B-C format and firing orders of the BASICI.D. modalities stem from an S-O-R model. Furthermore, the circular character of the various modalities (thinking, feeling, and behaving) is recognised both in MMT and in REBT. The techniques used in REBT and MMT overlap for 65–80%, according to a comparative perusal of Ellis's and Lazarus's presentations of preferred techniques. This means that MMT and REBT, as an approach with distinct techniques, “must” be very similar in practice. The conclusion is that philosophically Ellis and Lazarus see eye-to-eye and that MMT and REBT overlap a great deal. But a fusion is not yet at hand. At best the two can be described as two sides of one coin. “When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what's the first thing you say to yourself?” “What's for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?” “I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It's the same thing,” he said. “What's that?” the Unbeliever asked. “Wisdom from a Western Taoist,” I said. “It sounds like something from Winnie-the Pooh,” he said. “It is,” I said. From The Tao of Pooh Benjamin Hoff (1982)     

WITNESS AGREEMENT AND THE TRUTH‐CONDUCIVENESS OF COHERENTIST JUSTIFICATION

Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “witness agreement” by itself implies neither an increase in the probability of truth nor a high probability of truth—the witnesses need to have some “individual credibility.” It can seem that, from this formal epistemological result, it follows that coherentist justification (i.e., doxastic coherence) is not truth‐conducive. I argue that this does not follow. Central to my argument is the thesis that, though coherentists deny that there can be noninferential justification, coherentists do not deny that there can be individual credibility.     

“In One”: The Bearer Issue and the Principles of Exemplification

Traditionally, the so-called exemplification or the relation between the particular and the universal has been one of the three central problems making up the classical problem of universals: (1) What is a particular? (2) What is a universal? (3) What is the relation between the particular and the universal? I used the expression “classical problem of universals” instead of “the problem of universals” since the classical formulation of the problem could be said to contain a questionable assumption, namely that substance should be the bearer “in” which are the entities of (other) categories. Under these circumstances, a neutral approach to the problem of universals could consist in reformulating the three problems of the classical problem as follows: (4) What is the fundamental bearer of categories? (5) What categories are there? (6) What is the relation between the fundamental bearer and the categories? My purpose in this paper is to answer the latter three questions. In order to accomplish this task, I shall discuss the views of two leading figures in substance-ontology, Aristotle and Jonathan Lowe, and the views of two leading figures in fact-ontology, Gustav Bergmann and Reinhardt Grossmann. I shall answer the first question by claiming that the fundamental bearer of categories is facts; the second, by pointing out that it depends on the answer to the previous one; and the third, by showing that the relation between the fundamental bearer and the categories is the one between facts and its constituents, not between a substance or particular and its accidents or properties. In this connection, I shall argue that the “in” of property exemplification should be categorially reconstructed in order for entities other than properties, say, particulars, relations, connectives, numbers, and even facts, to be “in” facts. This categorial reconstruction will also argued for with respect to the Principle of Exemplification.     

Truth Incorporated

What is the cognitive value of the concept of truth? What epistemic difference does the concept of truth make to those who grasp it? This paper employs a new perspective for thinking about the concept of truth and recent debates concerning it, organized around the question of the cognitive value of the concept of truth. The paper aims to defend a substantively correct and dialectically optimal account of the cognitive value of the concept of truth. This perspective is employed in understanding the critical discussion around what Hartry Field (2001a) has called “the incorporation model” for extending a deflationary view of truth to foreign sentences. Field's original intentions in discussing the incorporation model were to defend the deflationary view from some counterintuitive consequences concerning the understanding of truth attributions to foreign sentences. However, more recently, philosophers unencumbered by deflationary commitments have taken over the incorporation model for their own inflationary purposes. In particular, and in my terms, these philosophers can be understood as making what I argue is the ultimately too radical suggestion that the cognitive value of the concept of truth is to allow the incorporation not only of the linguistically foreign, but also of the conceptually alien. I clarify this dialectic en route to explaining and arguing for the cognitive inflationary view, according to which the cognitive value of the concept of truth is is to make possible the proprietary kind and quality of knowledge allowed by reflective clarity over the concepts and thoughts that one already has.     

Moral principles as moral dispositions

What are moral principles? In particular, what are moral principles of the sort that (if they exist) ground moral obligations or—at the very least—particular moral truths? I argue that we can fruitfully conceive of such principles as real, irreducibly dispositional properties of individual persons (agents and patients) that are responsible for and thereby explain the moral properties of (e.g.) agents and actions. Such moral dispositions (or moral powers) are apt to be the metaphysical grounds of moral obligations and of particular truths about what is morally permissible, impermissible, etc. Moreover, they can do other things that moral principles are supposed to do: explain the phenomena “falling within their scope,” support counterfactuals, and ground moral necessities, “necessary connections” between obligating reasons and obligations. And they are apt to be the truthmakers for moral laws, or “lawlike” moral generalizations.