[lit-ideas] Re: Nietzsche & truth
- From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 24 Jan 2005 21:00:47 PST
When I asked what grounds 'other than aesthetic' there might be for preferring
one narrative over another I was responding to Mike Chase's report that on
another list 'the current President of the American Philological Association,
[was] defending precisely the position that 'there is [no] Truth, all there are
are Narratives.'
I was struck by the notion of _defending_ here; usually one defends a position
one thinks is right against others one thinks are wrong or mistaken, and the
notions of right and wrong are surely close cousins of the notions of truth and
falsity. There are perhaps apparent exceptions: one might defend or advocate a
plan one thinks would be more effective than another, and mistakenly infer that
because if one were defending its comparative effectiveness one would be
adopting a crude Pragmatist notion of 'truth' as what works. But this is a
mistake; to advocate or to defend a plan because one thinks it will work just is
to defend the position that it will work. So far so good for truth.
Mightn't one defend the position that a plan might possibly work? Of course.
Again though what one is defending is the truth of the claim that the plan will
possibly work. 'It's true that it might possibly work, but think of the cost...'
'Is true' modifies 'is possible, bracketwise.
What distinguishes a true or false account from a mere narrative? The
distinction between truth and narrative isn't mine: it was introduced into the
discussion by the current president of the American Philological
Association--I'm working with what's given. When he or she distinguishes truth
from narrative I take this to mean not that truth (which, if anything is a
property of propositions and sentences variously conjoined) is being compared
with another predicate like 'is a narrative,' but that a narrative is an account
which _need not_ (ever) be true or false in some ordinary way. I don't doubt
that many narratives in this sense are true and that perhaps equally many are
false and others indeterminate; yet this is apparently not what the current
president of the APA thinks. If it were it would need no defense.
Something like the foregoing led me to think that the grounds for preferring one
narrative, so characterized, to another might be that one was more seemly or
more amusing or more richly detailed than its unseemly, unamusing, and nebulous
competitors, and this led me to mention aesthetics.
Mentioning aesthetics is usually a mistake. Yet here it had the happy outcome of
leading Eric to say some interesting things, for example;
'I'd ask whether 'aesthetic' can include a notion of accuracy or effectiveness.
One of the things I think goes for making a good story is that it have the
appropriate sort of 'realism' to it.'
Effectiveness and accuracy pass each other by, I think--wartime propaganda
illustrates this--although Eric might have in mind some other sort of
'effectiveness,' as in, e.g. 'The scene between the dentist and the psychiatrist
is very effective.' I don't know. Certain kinds of narratives are dismissed as
being 'unrealistic' even though they are accepted as fictions. I suspect that
such neo-Aristotelian criticism invokes the distinction between the possible and
the likely.
That different kinds of realism are suited to different enterprises and
subject-matter is surely true. Eric's examples seem to show this--e.g. that the
physicist describing her results need not give 'a vivid psychological portrait
of the experimenter in her laboratory.' True again. The psychologist might
though; yet one would expect that the psychologist's account would be given in a
context in which it was possibly true or false. That it isn't the physicist's
account tells us little about the grounds on which it is sensibly accepted or
rejected.
Eric says further:
'What makes for a 'realistic' psychological portrait and a 'realistic' account
of subatomic physics are very different. Why do those differences all need to
be
reconciled into a unified notion of Truth? And why does the fact that they're
hard to reconcile mean there's no sense in which there's something consistent
about how they all have to be realistic to be successful?'
He concludes by saying:
'I'm unsure why 'aesthetically preferable' *has* to be distinguished from
'truthful', which isn't to say that all aesthetic [preferences] must follow the
accuracy [gradient], just that the two aren't as inimical as the heat of the
debate might suggest.
About a 'unified notion of Truth' I have nothing to say. I'll certainly try to
say something later about the rest of these extremely interesting questions and
remarks.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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