Power and Freedom in Heidegger’s First Notebook

ABSTRACT

In the first notebook published in Überlegungen II-VI, which covers the years 1931 and 1932, Martin Heidegger uses a conception of power that is different to that found in his later work. Rather than power being the expression of the will to will and source of ruin for humanity, he says that humanity can only be saved from ruin if it can pave the way for an “empowerment of being” (Ermächtigung des Seins). This article will show that this early understanding of power is related to Heidegger’s conception of freedom as the essence of truth, developing his thinking on this topic from the period of 1927–1930. It will show that the terms “empowerment of being” and “letting be” (Seinlassen) are akin, and that Heidegger uses the former to distance his thinking from potential misinterpretations of the essay “On the Essence of Truth”.     

A Minimalist Theory of Truth

This article, after briefly discussing Alfred Tarski's influential theory of truth, turns to a more recent theory of truth, a deflationary, or minimalist, theory. One of the chief elements of a deflationary, or minimalist, theory of truth is that it replaces the question of what truth is with the question of what “true” does. After setting out the central features of the minimalist theory of truth, the article explains the motivation for opting for such a position. In addition, it provides some reasons for thinking that such a theory of truth is “minimal” or “deflationary” in the way that contemporary truth theorists have claimed it to be.     

Facts as Social Action in Political Debates about the European Union

This article focuses on the argumentative role of making factual claims and counterclaims in broadcast political debates. Despite the rise of “post‐truth politics,” this article argues that orientations to issues of “fact” and “truth” are a live and controversial matter when debating the European Union. Using Discursive Psychology (DP), the analysis is on how politicians use fact‐based (counter)claims in multiparty interactions, in the form of debates about the United Kingdom and the European Union. Three types of factual challenges are presented to illustrate the rhetorical function of claims: challenging the essence of an argument, providing another fact to recontextualize the preceding fact and using hypothetical scenarios to undermine facts. The analysis demonstrates that the use of facts is a highly strategic, argumentative, matter. This study, understood against a backdrop of the rise of post‐truth politics, highlights that concepts of “fact” and “truth” are not done away with; rather they are an argumentative resource and need to be understood in their fragmentary and rhetorical context.     

Filtering Theories of Truth: Compositionality as a Criterion

The traditional way to filter out the implausible candidate solutions to the semantic paradoxes is to appeal to the so-called “cost/benefit analyses.” Yet it is often tedious and controversial to carry out such analyses in detail. Facing this, it would be helpful for us to rely upon some principles to filter out at least something, if not everything, from them. The proposal in this paper is thereby rather simple: We may use principles of compositionality as a “filter” for this purpose. The paper has four sections. In Section 2, the author uses the filter to examine Kripke’s fixed-point theory and to thereby show how it works. In Section 3, the author gives more examples from the classical theories of truth to demonstrate the power of the filter. In Section 4, the author addresses the skepticism concerning whether there is any consistent or non-trivial theory of truth that can survive this filtering procedure. A “nearly sufficient” condition for a theory of truth to survive this test is discussed in order to show that at least some consistent or non-trivial theories of truth do indeed survive the filtering procedure.     

Meaning‐Theories and the Principle of Humanity

In this paper, I briefly outline the notion of a truth‐conditional meaning‐theory and introduce two prominent problems it faces. The “extensionality problem” arises because not all correct specifications of truth‐conditions are meaning‐giving. The “explanatory problem” concerns the extent to which truth‐conditional meaning‐theories can contribute to the task of clarifying the nature of linguistic meaning. The “principle of humanity” is supposed to resolve both issues simultaneously. I argue that it fails to do so.     

Truth as transcendental in Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas presents his most complete exposition of the transcendentals inDe veritate 1, 1, that deals with the question “What is truth?”. The thesis of this paper is that the question of truth is essential for the understanding of his doctrine of the transcendentals. The first part of the paper (sections 1–4) analyzes Thomas's conception of truth. Two approaches to truth can be found in his work. The first approach, based on Aristotle's claim that “truth is not in things but in the mind”, leads to the idea that the proper place of truth is in the intellect. The second approach is ontological: Thomas also acknowledges that there is truth in every being. The famous definition of truth as “adequation of thing and intellect” enables him to integrate the two approaches. Truth is a relation between two terms, both of which can be called “true” because both are essential for the conformity between thing and intellect. The second part of the paper (sections 5–7) deals with the manner in which Thomas gives truth a place in the doctrine of the transcendentals, and shows that his conception of truth leads to important innovations in this doctrine: the introduction of relational transcendentals and the correlation between spirit and being. If “truth” is transcendental, it must be convertible with “being”. Sect. 6 discusses objections that Thomas advances himself to this convertibility. Sect. 7 deals with a difficulty in his account of truth as a relational transcendental. Ontological truth expresses a relation to an intellect but the relation to the human intellect is accidental for the truth of things. Essential for their truth can only be a practical intellect that causes things. In this way, Thomas argues, the divine intellect relates to all things.     

The Ethics of Stats

This essay argues for the importance and interest, within and beyond theological ethics, of the ethical questions faced by professionals who are called on to be producers of statistics (herein “stats”) for management purposes. Truth‐telling, in the context of demands for stats, cannot be evaluated at the level of the individual statement or utterance, nor through an ethical framework primarily focused on the correspondence between thought and speech. Reflection on stats production forces us to treat truth‐telling as contextual and political, and to engage with the idea that the capacity to tell the truth is learned or acquired in communities, societies and institutions. I develop this engagement through a rereading of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on “telling the truth” and Michel Foucault on parrhēsia, identifying and exploring the relationship between the responsible use of stats and the “cynical” protest against them.     

Embedded taste predicates

Wide-ranging semantic flexibility is often considered a magic cure for contextualism to account for all kinds of troubling data. In particular, it seems to offer a way to account for our intuitions regarding embedded perspectival sentences. As has been pointed out by Lasersohn [2009. “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments.” Synthese 166 (2): 359â374], however, the semantic flexibility does not present a remedy for all kinds of embeddings. In particular, it seems ineffective when it comes to embeddings under operators with truth evaluative adverbs such as ‘correctly believes that’ and ‘incorrectly believes that’ and under factive verbs. This paper takes a closer look at the problematic embedding data with respect to predicates of personal taste. It argues that there is indeed no semantic solution for contextualism but a pragmatic way out.     

The value of philosophy: A Canguilhemian perspective

This paper represents a philosophical reflection on the nature and value of philosophy itself. Georges Canguilhem somewhat scandalously argued that the fundamental value of philosophy does not lie in truth. He suggests that truth is a typical value of science because truth is what science says and what is said scientifically. Why would a philosopher depreciate his own discipline? And does he really do so? Or is there a different motivation: to help philosophy to become a much more self-confident voice? And if truth is no longer a value of philosophy, what value fits it better? The article follows Canguilhem in his conception of truth, science, and philosophy. It is against the background of these considerations that the specific revised anthropology of the scientist or philosopher is formed. The main question is what this means for current philosophy and why it could be inspiring for philosophers today.     

Two Key Differences between Science and Philosophy

C. S. Peirce made the following claim: If science reveals truth, then consensus among scientists can be expected in the limit. This article does not dispute this claim; it simply assumes it. On the basis of this assumption, the following question is asked: Is it possible to extend Peirce's claim to philosophy in a natural way? It is argued that two important differences between science and philosophy strongly militate against such an extension. Does this mean that there is no truth to be found in philosophy? Are there, perhaps, different kinds of truth (scientific, philosophical, religious, and so on)? But such questions, though related to the present investigation, are nevertheless well beyond the scope of this article.     

EVOLUTION,NATURALISM, AND THE WORTHWHILE: A CRITIQUE OF RICHARD JOYCE'S EVOLUTIONARY DEBUNKING OF MORALITY

Abstract: In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce argues there is good reason to think that the “moral sense” is a biological adaptation, and that this provides a genealogy of the moral sense that has a debunking effect, driving us to the conclusion that “our moral beliefs are products of a process that is entirely independent of their truth, … we have no grounds one way or the other for maintaining these beliefs.” I argue that Joyce's skeptical conclusion is not warranted. Even if the moral sense is a biological adaptation, developed moralities (such as Aristotelian eudaimonism) can “co‐opt” it into new roles so that the moral judgments it makes possible can come to transcend the evolutionary process that is “entirely independent of their truth.” While evolutionary theory can shed much light on our shared human nature, moral theories must still be vindicated, or debunked, by moral arguments.     

Relevance differently affects the truth,acceptability, and probability evaluations of “and”, “but”, “therefore”, and “if–then”

In this study, we investigate the influence of reason-relation readings of indicative conditionals and “and”/“but”/“therefore” sentences on various cognitive assessments. According to the Frege–Grice tradition, a dissociation is expected. Specifically, differences in the reason-relation reading of these sentences should affect participants’ evaluations of their acceptability but not of their truth value. In two experiments we tested this assumption by introducing a relevance manipulation into the truth-table task as well as in other tasks assessing the participants’ acceptability and probability evaluations. Across the two experiments, a strong dissociation was found. The reason-relation reading of all four sentences strongly affected their probability and acceptability evaluations, but hardly affected their respective truth evaluations. Implications of this result for recent work on indicative conditionals are discussed.     

Symbolic Sequence Effects on Consumers’ Judgments of Truth for Brand Claims

We introduce symbolic sequence effects—the consequences of whether the sequence of the initial letters of a pair of words (e.g., a word representing a putative cause and another word representing a putative effect) conforms to the structure of symbolic sequences that are stored in the mind as overlearned natural language traces (“natural sequence”). We synthesize insights from psychophysics as well as numerical and natural language symbolic representations to demonstrate that consumers are able to unconsciously perceive the mere sequence of symbols contained in a brand claim, and that this sequence information influences judgments of truth. Across three experiments, we showed that when a brand claim is structured in a way that is consistent with the natural sequence of symbols (“A causes B” rather than “B causes A”), people experience feelings of sequential fluency, which in turn influences judgments of truth. This occurs despite the inability of participants to attribute the true source of the feelings. Our results suggest that carefully designed brand claims are likely to benefit from this natural sequencing. These findings provide important contributions to the literatures on processing fluency, branding, and advertising. These findings also have sobering societal implications and warn that fake news might be more persuasive if the perpetrators understand symbolic sequencing techniques.     

Stop Doubting with Descartes

Did Descartes manage to overcome the skeptics? If we understand “overcome” in the sense of “refute,” the answer is no, since his hyperbolic doubt harbors several blind spots and is, therefore, not as radical as is commonly argued. In this way, the victory of the cogito is perhaps less decisive and fruitful than it is claimed. If we understand “overcome” in the sense of “remove” or “move beyond,” the answer is yes. Descartes has overcome skepticism, but at the cost of a decision, a sort of bet made in favor of reason based on a confidence in the human mind that is never really subverted. This faith in reason, truth, and specific epistemological principles in Descartes’ philosophy constitute what Wittgenstein calls “hinges,” which are indispensable for doubting and searching for truth. In this sense, Descartes’ anti-skepticism is more a confidence in reason in order to save the possibility of science than the result of a logical refutation.

     

The distinctive “should” of assertability

Recent work has assumed that the normativity associated with assertion differs from the normativity of morality, practical rationality, etiquette, and legality. That is, whether an assertion “should” be made is not merely a function of these other familiar sorts of normativity and is especially connected to truth. Some researchers have challenged this assumption of distinctive normativity. In this paper I report two experiments that test the assumption. Participants read a brief story, judged whether an assertion should be made, and rated several other qualities of the assertion, including its truth value, morality, rationality, etiquette, legality, and folly. Of these qualities, truth value most strongly predicted assertability. The findings support the assumption of distinctive normativity and provide further evidence that the norm of our social practice of assertion is factive (i.e., it makes truth essential to assertability).     

Michel Foucault and the “care of the self” approach to the Buddhist dharma

In line with a particular form of analysis as developed by Michel Foucault, this article proposes to elucidate a particular way of understanding Buddhist monastic culture as detailed in the rules concerning behaviour (the Vinaya), which may be called the “care of the self approach”. To develop this argument, the article first describes the nature of the Vinaya as a “training scheme” rather than a system of prohibitions or rules. Second, it examines the nature of confession or what is called “truth telling”. Third, it examines the nature of transgression of the Vinaya rules. Fourth, I examine the Vinaya and the role of ethics. Lastly, it is shown how these approaches to monastic Buddhism deal with the nature of the transformation of desire to construct what may be seen as a form of “ethical technology” or alternatively as a “transgressive technology”.     

METHODOLOGY IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION: A REPLY TO CRITICS

Debates about methodology have been central to the emergence of the “field of science of religion.” Two questions that have motivated scholars in that field over the past half century: “is it theoretically justifiable to bring scientific and religious beliefs into dialogue?” and “can theology be rational in the same way as science?” This article responds to commentary on Against Methodology: Recent Debates on Rationality and Theology, a book which critically examines three major methodologists of recent years: Nancey Murphy, Alister McGrath, and J. Wentzel van Huyssteen. Themes raised in the commentary include the status of realism and truth in science, the unity of science, the adequacy of the term “critical realism,” proper ways of seeking legitimacy for an academic discipline, and new directions for the field of science and religion.     

Binding,narcissistic pathology and the psychoanalytic process

This article discusses the question of truth claims in psychoanalysis, revolving around the concepts “construction”, “reconstruction”, “historical truth” and “narrative truth”. In Part I of the article, these concepts are discussed in an historical context, in particular, Freud's view, the narrative tradition and some of Bion's ideas. In Part II, an attempt is made to synthesize these concepts. It is argued that the constructed character of the unconscious has to be integrated into the patient's reconstruction of his/her life story. The psychoanalytic project enables the patient to create a new narrative that claims to possess historical validity. It is important in this context not to understand the notion of “history” objectivisticallv as if it were a question of revealing certain objective historical facts. Instead, it is suggested that the connection between the present understanding of the past and the past as it was experienced in the past should be understood as a fusion of horizons. Finally, the necessary function of consciousnesslself-consciousness for the psychoanalytic project of acquiring knowledge about one's unconscious is pointed out.