Abstract
This essay concerns the connection between our use of the language of truth and falsity, and the political and social conditions in which such terms have or make sense. I argue that the problem is that a picture has gotten hold of us in which social, ethnic, economic and other divisions encourage the thought that commonality in our way of life is a pernicious delusion, rather than a sine qua non for the choice to live and to continue living together. Important for this context is the division between what is often termed “educated elites” and “uneducated masses”, which suggests somehow a straightforward divide between intelligent, open and informed opinion and dogmatic, narrow-minded prejudice. Were the matter so simple, then the answer to the question, “how are we to reconstitute and sustain the polity for the future good of man and the world?” would be relatively straightforward. I suggest that it is not.
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Notes
- 1.
One might object that what follows has more to do with the idiomatic peculiarities of the English language than with a way of thinking that belongs to the deep grammar of the language of modern thought. But here one might think of the influential discussion of le dehors et le dedans in Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit 1967, p. 46 ff). At any rate, if one considers the use of say, innerhalb and außerhalb in German, or innanför and utanför in Swedish, we find a constellation of words which, taken together, contain elements of what I describe here. In particular, I am thinking of how, for instance, utanför (outside of) simply juxtaposes the parts that make up förutan (without, in both senses of exclusion implied by the word). This is due to the prefix, -ut, which, depending upon what root it combines with, can indicate spatial division or deficiency, i.e., absence from, in the one case, and absence of, in the other. So too with the—auß in außer, etc.
- 2.
One might think here of Martha Nussbaum (see, for instance, 2013) as a case in point with respect to how attempts at respectful recognition of otherness and difference as a political resource can’t help but assume the centrality of their own starting points.
- 3.
- 4.
George Orwell’s Nineteen eighty-four, as mentioned, is perhaps the most influential in this genre, making terms such as doublethink, Newspeak, thoughtcrime and Thought Police common parlance. But Koestler’s (1940) Darkness at noon and Huxley’s (1932) Brave new world are, of course, also important representatives of this genre.
- 5.
Portions of this paper have been adapted from material published in other contexts. In particular, elements of the section on Ortega have appeared in slightly different form in Rider (2017a, b), respectively. The section on Aristotle and Hans Larsson contains a modified version of a few passages in Rider (2006).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Swedish Research Council, project number 2013–2317, ‘What Should a Swede Know?’.
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Rider, S. (2018). On Knowing How to Tell the Truth. In: Peters, M.A., Rider, S., Hyvönen, M., Besley, T. (eds) Post-Truth, Fake News. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8013-5_3
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