Some deep and heavy philosophy in another IAI video: After the End of Truth. This one got a substantial and in places rather odd discussion on Reddit recently.
Hilary Lawson starts with the premise that Wittgenstein and others have sufficiently demonstrated that there is no way of establishing objective truth; but we can’t, he says, rest there. He thinks that we can get a practical way forward if we note that the world is open but we can close it in various ways and some of them work better for us than others.
Perhaps an analogy might be (as it happens) the ideas of truth and falsity themselves in formal logic. Classical logic assigns only two values to propositions; true or not true. People often feel this is unintuitive. We can certainly devise formal logics with more than two values – we could add one for ‘undetermined’, say. This is not a matter of what’s right or wrong; we can carve up our system of logic any way we like. The thing is, two-valued logic just gives us a lot more results than its rivals. One important reason is that if we can exclude a premise, in a two-value system its negation must be true; that move doesn’t work if there are three or more values). So it’s not that two-valued logic is true and the others are false, it’s just that doing it the two-valued way gets us more. Perhaps something similar might be true of the different way we might carve up the world.
John Searle, by video (and briefly doing that thing old people seem mysteriously prone to; sinking to the bottom of the frame as though peering over a wall) goes for common sense, as ever, albeit cloaked in technical terms. He distinguishes between epistemic and ontological senses of objectivity. Our views are unavoidably ontologically subjective to some degree (ie, different people have different views: ‘perspectivalism’ is true); but that does not at all entail that epistemic objectivity is unattainable; indeed, if we didn’t assume some objective truths we couldn’t get started on discussion. That’s a robust refutation of the view that perspectivalism implies no objective truth, though I’m not sure that’s quite the case Lawson was making. Perhaps we could argue that after all, there are such things as working assumptions; to say ‘let’s treat this as true and see where we get’ does not necessarily require belief in objectively determinable truth.
Hannah Dawson seems to argue emphatically on both sides; no two members of a class gave the same account of an assembly (though I bet they could all agree that no pink elephant walked in half-way through). It seems the idea of objective truth sits uneasily in history; but no-one can deny the objective factuality of the Holocaust; sometimes, after all, reality does push back. This may be an expression of the curious point that it often seems easier to say that nothing is objectively true than it is to say that nothing is objectively false, illogical as that is.
Dawson’s basic argument looks to me a bit like an example of ‘panic scepticism’; no perfect objective account of an historical event is possible, therefore nothing at all is objectively true. I think we get this kind of thing in philosophy of mind too; people seem to argue that our senses mislead us sometimes, therefore we have no knowledge of external reality (there are better arguments for similar conclusions, of course). Maybe after all we can find ways to make do with imperfect knowledge.