Postmodernity and its Discontents by Bauman Zygmunt;

Author:Bauman, Zygmunt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

9

On Truth, Fiction and Uncertainty

As William James put it in 1912,1 the true is ‘only an expedient in our way of thinking’. In Richard Rorty’s rendition, the role which James ascribed to that ‘expedient’ consisted in praising – and through praise, endorsing – the beliefs held. By this view, one that I share, the word ‘truth’ stands in our usages for a certain attitude we take, but above all wish or expect others to take, to what is said or believed – rather than a relation between what is said and certain non-verbal reality (as Locke first suggested – between ideas and the objects which they well or poorly represent). It needs to be pointed out, however, that the particular form of endorsement accomplished by the ‘expedient of truth’ consists precisely in asserting that there is more to certain beliefs than our approval – this ‘more’ being, in most cases, the supposed identity between what the beliefs assert and that something they tell us about, or an exemplary cohesion between the belief in question and other beliefs currently undisputed; that there are, in other words, grounds for approval more solid and reliable than the fickle and erratic agreement between the believers – so that the beliefs in question may not just be approved, but approved with trust and confidence, and embraced firmly enough to reject other, alternative or downright contrary views on the subject.

In this commentary on James, Rorty adds other uses of the truth concept: apart from the endorsing use, a cautionary use and a disquotational use are named.2 And yet, however enriched, Rorty’s list of the truth concept’s uses is still short of one function which, I suggest, underlies, conditions and endorses all other uses, the ‘endorsement use’ among them – namely, the disputational use.

The idea of truth belongs to the rhetoric of power. It makes no sense unless in the context of opposition – it comes into its own only in the situation of disagreement: when different people hold to different views and when it becomes the matter of dispute who is in the right and who in the wrong – and when for certain reasons it is important to some or all adversaries to demonstrate or insinuate that it is the other side which is in the wrong. Whenever the veracity of a belief is asserted, it is because the acceptance of that belief is contested or anticipated to be contestable. The dispute about the veracity or falsity of certain beliefs is always simultaneously the contest about the right of some to speak with the authority which some others should obey; the dispute is about the establishment or reassertion of the relations of superiority and inferiority, of domination and submission, between holders of beliefs.

The theory of truth, by this reckoning, is about establishing systematic and thus constant and secure superiority of certain kinds of beliefs, on the ground that they have been arrived at thanks to a certain procedure which may be trusted, or is vouched for by the kind of people who may be trusted to follow it.

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