New Threats to Truth or Just the Old Ones?
Review of Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, Why Truth Matters, London, Continuum, 2006. (202 pp.). ISBN: 0‐8264‐7608‐2
David Macarthur
In a court of law witnesses are asked to swear an oath ‘to tell the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. That raises the question: Is
there a truth to tell? If so, is it an unqualified, unvarnished,
unconditional kind of truth? And, supposing such truth exists, why does
it matter? The authors of Why Truth Matters, Benson and Stangroom
(henceforth, B&S), want to convince us that these important questions
are not simply the stuff of philosophical debate in the academy. They see
a threat to “the reality, meaning, possibility and importance of truth”
within contemporary culture, manifested in a wide variety of ideological
and philosophical positions including “postmodernism, epistemic
relativism, anti‐realism, anti‐foundationalism, neopragmatism, feminist
epistemology, the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge,
[and] postcolonialism” (p. 18). The aim of the book is to defend truth or,
rather, something variously called “absolute” or “foundational” or “real
truth” (p. 40, p. 43) against the challenge supposedly posed by these
Within philosophy it is hard to find anyone willing to openly
endorse relativism about truth although the position is said to be
popular with undergraduates. On the other hand, there are always
debates about what is true and in some areas such as history, ethics and
politics there is often the suspicion that what presents itself as truth is
nothing but a cover for some form of power or ideology or interest.
Countries, institutions, politicians and people like to present themselves
in the best light, and, as we all know, that can involve omitting or
bending the truth, as well as simply denying it. Such familiar truth‐
avoidance techniques lend weight to the unmasking strategies of
modernist masters such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. And their
influence, in turn, has no doubt led some postmodernist thinkers to
routinely see talk of “science” or “objectivity” or “knowledge” in purely
political terms. But is there an influence running in the other direction?
Do postmodernist discourses largely confined to the academy really
pose a serious threat to truth within the culture at large? And, if so, are
they any different in kind from the familiar everyday threats of lying,
delusion, foolishness, fantasy and consolation?
B&S describe the subject of this book as “various (but related)
forms of scepticism and relativism about truth and the possibility of
knowledge“ (p. 18). Let us consider the first part of this diagnosis,
scepticism and relativism about truth. If that’s supposed to be the
problem then there really should not be much to worry about since
these doctrines are so obviously self‐refuting. When the skeptic says
‘There is no truth’ isn’t he supposing that the skeptical thesis is itself
true? If so, his general thesis is false. And when the relativist says ‘All
truth is relative to the speaker (or a society)’ one can reply, “Is
relativism itself true or just true for you?’ Either way, it seems that the
relativist must concede the existence of non‐relativist truth after all. So
relativism, too, fails. However, the blatant inadequacy of scepticism and
relativism about truth ought to make us suspicious whether B&S are
right to trace contemporary suspicion of science and truth to these
absurdities. The authors provide no texts to support the view that
anyone actually holds these views so, at the very least, it seems
implausible and uncharitable to suppose that they are implicit in the
views they consider. For instance, they provide no evidence that Derrida
A second problem for the diagnosis is that it is painted with much
too broad a brush. The authors treat scepticism and relativism about
truth as part of the same threat or syndrome as traditional scepticisms,
ancient and modern. But this is a serious mistake for two reasons.
Firstly, neither ancient nor modern scepticism raise any threat to the
meaning or possibility of truth. Indeed they presuppose that there is
truth out there to discover. What they raise doubts about is whether we
have adequate reasons to show that we are entitled to our beliefs
(ancient scepticism) or our claims to knowledge (modern scepticism).
For example, ancient sceptics of the Pyrrhonist school proceed by
asking of any given belief whether we have good reason for holding it. If
we do they ask what reason we have to accept this reason and so on. It
seems to be a requirement on reasons that we cannot appeal to
anything that has already been called into question on pain of arguing in
a circle. And we cannot stop the regress of reasons for reasons by simply
assuming something without reason, for that would be unacceptably ad
hoc and arbitrary.
This ancient form of scepticism is apparently well motivated and
has resisted all attempts to refute it. It is certainly not “self‐defeating”
intuitive and no less difficult to refute. The contrast with scepticism‐
and‐relativism‐about‐truth could not be starker: here we have problems
that are unintuitive and all too easily refuted! So, even if we agree with
B&S that scepticism is false—a diagnosis, by the way, that presupposes
that scepticism is perfectly intelligible—we surely do not know why that
is so.
The Targets of Criticism
As we have seen, B&S’s hit‐list of the enemies of science and truth
include political/cultural trends (post‐modernism, postcolonialism) as
well as various diverse philosophical positions in epistemology
(epistemic relativism, anti‐foundationalism, neopragmatism, feminism,
radical sociology of science) and metaphysics (anti‐realism). The
authors tend to think of many of these trends or positions as
“postmodernist” although they provide little in the way of support for
this claim and no definition of “postmodernism”. In fact, they only
provide a relatively small sample of texts for criticism, apparently
preferring to build their case against postmodernism by association‐‐
assuming, for example, that postmodernism is responsible for Holocaust
Lehman’s jeremiad against “deconstructivism” (p. 150‐1) and Alan
Sokal’s criticism of Bruno Latour (p. 55, p. 58). That the authors fall in
behind Sokal is worthy of further discussion.
You may recall that several years ago the mathematical physicist,
Alan Sokal, wrote a satirical article full of half‐truths, falsehoods, non‐
sequiturs, and nonsense sentences that was published in Social Text, a
leading cultural studies journal (1996 a). Its aim, as Sokal put it, was to
parody “a fashionable postmodernist/poststructrualist/ social
constructivist discourse” (Sokal 1996 b, p. 339). But, for all its deliberate
flaws, Sokal’s article does not look or sound like the work he is
intending to parody e.g. it is, unlike many postmodernist texts, neither
obscure nor jargon‐ridden. Consequently, it is quite unclear what the
implications of its publication are supposed to be. It might seem that all
we are entitled to conclude is that the editorial standards at Social Text
are lax. Any wider moral depends upon seeing a close connection
between Sokal’s article and work in the field of cultural studies. Yet, how
can we draw such a connection if, as Sokal suggests, it is so hard to
understand postmodernist discourse in the first place?
B&S do not explicitly discuss the Sokal Affair but they do follow
sociologist Bruno Latour, the feminist epistemologist, Sandra Harding,
and the cultural commentator, Andrew Ross. They, too, cast a very wide
net, launching criticisms at postmodernist “Theory” including
“postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, queer theory, gender studies,
whiteness studies, disability studies, critical race theory and critical
legal theory” (p. 154). They, too, deride postmodernism in terms such as
this: “It’s arguable that obfuscation is what postmodernism is all about”
(p. 9); and they equate Theory with “complicated but empty pseudo‐
theory” (p. 168) without evidence or argument. In all of these cases the
reader is unable to come to any independent opinion since the authors
offer nothing in the way of detailed commentary and careful criticism.
At times B&S reveal intellectual prejudices that go well beyond an
aversion to postmodernism. A striking example is their suggestion that
the entire Continental tradition of philosophy (a tradition that includes
no less than Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger) is
wilfully obscurantist! (p. 55) –‐as if its complexities were not very often
a function of the difficulties inherent in its subject matter. Another
example is their simple‐minded equation of religion with mere wishful
thinking (p 16‐17). However skeptical or suspicious we might be of a
writings of Continental philosophers, and however hard it is to accept
religious language as literally true, the interests of Enlightenment
reason are not served in the least by these largely rhetorical and
unthinking attacks.
Turning to the philosophical positions previously mentioned, B&S
are way off target. None of these positions involve a commitment to
relativism about truth or a denial of its possibility: 1) Epistemic
relativism about justification holds that what counts as justification (or
evidence) for a claim can change with context (e.g. the availability of
evidence, the difficulty and importance of obtaining it, our audience, our
standards of evidence and so on) ‐‐ a position that is fully consistent
with belief in non‐relative truth. 2) Anti‐foundationalism has nothing to
do with truth, but holds that knowledge does not require a base of self‐
evident foundations. 3) Anti‐realism defines truth in terms of conditions
of warranted assertion but that is not the same thing as relativism; and,
in any case, it is typically a local doctrine. An anti‐realist about moral
discourse is very often also a realist about scientific discourse (e.g. Ayer
1983). So, again, there is no general threat to truth here. 4)
Neopragmatism, like traditional Peircean pragmatism, is not even in the
truth plays in our lives. And not all versions of feminist epistemology nor
of the study of the political, social, cultural or gender‐specific influences
on scientific research imply either that scientific truth is relative or that
it is impossible.
How could two philosophers have gotten these philosophical
positions so very wrong? Because it is not the positions that are to the
fore in this book but the work of particular philosophers that the
authors associate with these positions. B&S make a breathtaking
assumption about the relation between the individuals they consider
and these general positions. Their attitude to Sandra Harding is
indicative. Her work is taken to be representative of all forms and
versions of feminist epistemology without any discussion of what these
forms and versions are. In the cases of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) and
Thomas Kuhn (1962), it is not even the individual philosopher but his
supposed influence that is in question however much it may depart from
his actual views! Such claims are hard to assess and they carry little
weight. Does the fact that Wittgenstein and Kuhn have been
This is not the occasion to investigate in detail the (de)merits of
each of B&S’s accounts of the thinkers they consider. But I’d like to draw
attention to the following passage as typical of their general approach:
The story which has unfolded here about scepticism, relativism and doubt could easily have featured a different cast of characters. It would have been just as pertinent to have talked about Kant’s noumenal world; Nietzsche and perspectivism; Peirce’s
pragmatism; Derrida and deconstruction; Foucault on power/knowledge; and Rorty’s neopragmatism. (p. 40)
Elsewhere Heidegger and Freud are added to this list for good measure.
The trouble is that none of these thinkers hold the simple‐minded view
that truth is relative, nor are they skeptical of the possibility of truth.
And none of them denies the possibility of knowledge either. Some of
them are skeptical about particular kinds of knowledge (e.g.
metaphysical knowledge) and some of them hold views about the
relativity of knowledge or justification to various factors (human
sensibility, history, culture, power, conversational context and so on)
but such epistemic relativism is by no means a self‐refuting doctrine;
nor is it obviously false. Whether we agree with it or not, it is not to be
dismissed out of hand without argument! Indeed how can such ad
hominem dismissal be squared with the author’s avowed concern for
It is perhaps worth briefly considering B&S’s hasty dismissal of
the last figure on this list, Richard Rorty, if only to suggest that the
authors’s polemical agenda often gets in the way of the accuracy of their
characterizations. B&S are happy to think of Rorty as an enemy of truth,
“reasoned argument and the requirement of reference to evidence” and
a “postmodern epistemic relativist” (p. 40, p. 171). This is a gross
misrepresentation. What Rorty opposes is, in the first instance, the
Correspondence Theory of truth, the theory that holds that truths
correspond to states of affairs in the world. Rorty follows Hilary
Putnam, Donald Davidson, Robert Brandom and other neopragmatists
in thinking that no one has yet made sense of the relevant notion of
correspondence. We might have some idea how a drawing can
correspond to a fact in terms of resemblance but sentences have no
natural resemblance to worldly facts. As Rorty is fond of saying, the
world does not come to us already packaged into sentence‐shaped
objects. When Rorty criticizes The Way the World Is (capitalized) he is
not saying there is no way the world is (uncapitalized): he is opposing a
philosophical idea of reality called metaphysical realism, that
presupposes that there is a single right description of the world,
it‐is‐in‐itself B&S wrongly take Rorty to be denying the world itself; and
when Rorty denies the Correspondence Theory of truth B&S wrongly
take him to be denying truth itself. As for the charge of relativism, Rorty
has written, “’Cultural relativism’ is largely an imaginary bugbear, but to
the extent that it actually exists it… should be resisted.” (Rorty 2002).
The Proposed Solution
Philosophical reflection on truth can be broadly divided into two
domains:
1) The Metaphysics of Truth: attempts to answer the question
“What is truth?” and traditionally presupposes that there is a
general story to tell, one that is applicable to all truths no matter
how various in content.
2) The Epistemology of Truth: attempts to answer the question
“How do we discover the truth?” where matters of justification,
inference and methods of inquiry are to the fore.
In recommending “absolute, foundational truth” B&S are defending two
claims: the metaphysical claim that there is something called absolute
truth and the epistemological claim that knowledge has foundations.
existence of absolute truth is the self‐refuting character of relativism
about truth. This is to make the unwarranted assumption that
absolutism and relativism exhaust the options, but they don’t. Rather
than answer the metaphysical question “What is truth?” one can simply
turn one’s back on it. This is the key move of a position called
minimalism. It is important to see that the minimalist about truth, whilst
not an absolutist, is not a relativist either. He rightly thinks there are
truths. But he also thinks that there is no general story to tell about
what makes all truths true, no common thread tying together “Murder is
wrong”, “Bill Clinton was president,” “Water consists of hydrogen and
oxygen” and so on. Although B&S give no hint of it, this position is a
major player on the contemporary philosophical scene. The heart of
minimalism is the claim that the only general truth about truth is this:
“P” is true if and only if P.
Typically, for example: “The sun is shining” is true says the same as The
sun is shining. Minimalism is motivated, in part, by the difficulty
philosophers have had in providing a plausible metaphysical account of
truth. There have been many such theories in the history of philosophy
– Correspondence, Coherentist and Pragmatist among them – but all
does not involve the metaphysical difficulties that beset traditional
metaphysical approaches one might think that B&S at least owe us a
positive argument in favour of absolute truth.
To make matters worse, B&S do not say what they mean by
“absolute” truth. Is there really any difference between saying “The sun
is shining is absolutely true” and saying “The sun is shining is true” other
than a difference of emphasis. We might compare it to saying “The sun is
shining is really true”. Without an alternative account, it is plausible to
think that terms like “absolute(ly)” and “real(ly)” add nothing
theoretically substantial to the term “true”.
As for “foundational” truth, the authors say so little that it is quite
unclear what they mean. Foundationalism as it is usually understood is
a controversial doctrine, which sees the structure of knowledge as an
inverted pyramid resting on a small number of self‐evident truths (e.g.
experiential beliefs). It is not, contrary to what the authors suggest, a
common assumption shared by philosophers who defend the reality and
importance of truth.
Apart from declaring their allegiance to “absolute, foundational
truth” B&S are often content to offer staggeringly simplistic remedies
• “truth matters and… it shouldn’t be subject to our wishes” (p. 16)
• “we know scepticism and relativism are false” (p. 42)
• “Theories can begin anywhere, even in dreams. But when it
comes to justification more reliable evidence is required” (p. 64)
One wonders in reading through these trivial claims who the audience
for this book is supposed to be. Who on earth could possibly find these
claims informative or useful? That these claims are not news to anyone
ought to have led B&S to question their assumption that it is over such
claims that postmodernists and the like are fighting. Elsewhere their
remedies are quixotic and simply beg the question at issue:
• “the right answer has more authority than the wrong one” (p. 63)
• “real enquiry presupposes that truth matters” (p. 180)
How does truth have more authority that a falsehood that appears true
even after careful reflection? Perhaps real enquiry only presupposes
that what matters is having the best justification we can muster, as
Rorty thinks. If not, why not?
It is worth considering that believers in astrology, or ESP, or
political conspiracy theories could easily agree with B&S’s “remedies”. A
recent example is provided by a 9‐11 conspiracy theorist, David Von
government itself was behind the destruction of the World Trade
Center. Despite the overwhelming implausibility of this view it would be
hopeless to tell Von Kleist that he needs the “authoritative” answer, the
one supported by “reliable evidence,” for it is precisely his contention
that the evidence does not support the standard view that commercial
airliners were high‐jacked and flown into the two towers. His program
consists in re‐examining the documentary evidence, including
painstaking frame by frame examination of the video footage of the two
planes striking the towers, with the intention of showing that the
available evidence is better explained in terms of a conspiracy theory.
Crazy, yes, but not because he does not care about “the power of science,
rational enquiry, logic and evidence to get at the truth” (p. 176). He
demonstrates a clear allegiance to these standards of acquiring truth.
The problem is that there are different ways of applying these standards
and different ways of interpreting evidence and there are no general
rules for doing so. Judgments of the plausibility of any given
interpretation are always local, depending on the specific circumstances
of the case in question. General programmatic statements about reason,
evidence and so forth, despite being perfectly correct, are quite
In sum, this is a populist work in the tradition of ‘postmodernism
bashing’, which is written for those already convinced of its conclusion.
Although this reviewer agrees that non‐relative truth exists, that it
matters, and that science is often our best guide to it (at least in the
empirical realm), the way in which these themes are defended is
completely broken‐backed. In the name of truth and the methods of
science, rational enquiry, and logic, B&S are happy to misrepresent their
opponents, appeal to authority, and throw mud pies in the form of ad
hominem objections and insults. There are serious doubts about their
proposed diagnosis, multiple targets and overly simple therapy. And,
finally, a better version of this book already exists. Simon Blackburn’s
recent publication Truth provides a philosophically less flat‐footed
account of the same (questionable!) sense that truth is under serious
threat from “postmodern irony and cynicism, multiculturalism and
relativism” (2005, xiii). But where B&S want to take sides in what
Blackburn calls the Truth Wars – championing absolutistism over
relativism—Blackburn wisely opts out of the whole debate, recognizing
that minimalism makes available the saving insight “that whatever side
we were on, we may have been fighting phantoms” (2005, p. 55).
References
Ayer, A. 1983 (1936), Language, Truth and Logic, Penguin, New
York.
Blackburn, S. 2005, Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed, Allen Lane, London. Kuhn, T. S. 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Rorty, R. 2002, ‘To the Sunlit Uplands’, London Review of Books, vol. 24 no. 21, 31 Oct, Available:
www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n21/print/rort01_.html Sokal, A. D. 1996 a, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,’ Social Text, vol. 46 no. 47, pp. 217‐252.
1996 b, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword’, Philosophy and Literature, vol. 20 no. 2, pp. 338‐346. Wittgenstein, L. 1953, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, Oxford.
