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Truth in the Post-Truth Era: Evaluating the Theories of Truth with a Table of Contingency

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Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift

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Abstract

Notwithstanding what the champions of post-truth may think, truth remains a key concept of scientific research. In this contribution, several theories of factual truth are evaluated with the help of a simple and straightforward tool, i.e., a logical table of contingency. Its application shows that most contemporary disconcerting theories of truth have critical flaws, and that, albeit imperfect, truth-as-correspondence is still the best theory. Further criticism of correspondence as adaequatio, compliance and isomorphism suggests that correspondence-as-mapping constitutes a more acceptable theory. This contribution provides a definition and examples in the empirical sciences.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Different social scientists were invited at this encounter that took place on June 18, 2015, at PACTE, Grenoble. Among them, several STS enthusiasts created a “LatouringClub”.

  2. 2.

    The first conspiracy theory dates back to the 1970s: Kaysing and Reid (1976).

  3. 3.

    Only a few references will be given not to accumulate too much literature. Each theory has collected a hundred of scholarly articles. The reader will find useful pointers to literature in Changeux 2003, Engel 2002, Kirkham 1992, and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online.

  4. 4.

    Note that Foucault is mentioned six times in Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar 1986, pp. 107, 184, 229, 251, 258 and 265).

  5. 5.

    Among the main proponents of the deflationary position, the German logician Gottlob Frege declares: “The sentence ‘I smell the scent of violets’ has the same content as the sentence ‘It is true that I smell the scent of violets’” (1956, p. 293). We also read in Tarski: “‘It is snowing’ is true if and only if it is snowing” (1933, p. 157), an expression that Wittgenstein reduced to: “‘p’ is true = p” (2010, §136). Frege, Tarski and Wittgenstein all play with the quotation marks around the sentence, but they do it in very different ways. The redundancy theory claims that the word “true” can be abandoned without any loss of meaning. This is untrue, because the disquotation works only if the hidden condition “if and only if” is met, that is, if some “material adequacy condition” binds propositions and real facts (Tarski 1933). Otherwise, this theory loses any difference between an unfounded opinion and a proven fact. The redundancy theory thus comes down to the correspondence theory with implicit elements.

  6. 6.

    Frege does not promote any other theory to replace the truth-as-correspondence: “Every other attempt to define truth collapses too […] the content of the word ‘true’ is unique and indefinable” (Frege 1956, p. 291). Truth is a primitive concept.

  7. 7.

    Arguably, the result of the operation 𝒪−1(𝜂) is just a part of 𝜉, hence the notation 𝜉*.

  8. 8.

    Sunspots are labelled according to McIntosh (1990) classification. In Fkc, F means “an elongated bipolar sunspot group with penumbra on both ends,” k “large, assymetric”, c “compact”.

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Acknowledgements

Plates A and B: Courtesy of NASA/SDO and AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams. Courtesy of SOHO/EIT consortium. SOHO is an ESA/NASA project of international cooperation.

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  1. Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France

    Dominique Raynaud

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    Michael R. Matthews

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Raynaud, D. (2019). Truth in the Post-Truth Era: Evaluating the Theories of Truth with a Table of Contingency. In: Matthews, M.R. (eds) Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16673-1_8

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