[MD] A Brief History of Truth.

[david buchanan]

I'm thinking about Nietzsche's attack on Truth with a capital "T".  It's a topic that should be titled something like "postmodern truth" or "what's a truth to do in these postmodern times". Larry Hickman's book, Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism, struck me as a pretty good way to frame the issue. What follows is a paraphrasing of a book reviewer's opening paragraph mixed with other stolen thoughts. 
As the book title suggests, Hickman makes a case that Dewey and other pragmatists had anticipated solutions to some major problems that plague postmodernism. Hickman characterizes postmodernism (with help from other scholars) as a rejection of epistemological foundationalism, objectivity, and metaphysical realism, as an affirmation of self-reflexiveness and relativism, and as an attempt to have meaning without transcendent value and action without absolute truth. Hickman concludes that Dewey's views afford post-postmodern solutions to postmodern problems about objectivity and the interminability of "self-referentiality, redescription, and reinterpretation".
There are no clean and uncontested definitions of the terms but let's frame the options along these lines anyway. Let's say that there are four basic stages of truth; premodern, modern, postmodern and post-postmodern. In this little story of truth, ancient and medieval thinkers sought a fixed and eternal Truth about reality as it really is beyond appearances. This kind of truth is tangled up in Forms, essences and divinities. Modern truth was also about reality as it really is beyond appearances, but used scientific and empirical methods to search for the Truth about Objective reality, which was increasingly taken to be a natural, physical reality. Postmodernism rejects those two kinds of Truth and some critics will even say that postmodern thinkers like Nietzsche reject any kind of truth so that postmodernism amounts to the worst kind of relativism. As I see it, this leaves us with three bad options, plus the possibility of inventing a blend of those options.
And then there is pragmatism. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a postmodern relativism and neo-pragmatism but, if Hickman is right, classical pragmatism had already found a way to reject Platonic Truth and Objective Truth while still retaining a workable concept and theory of truth. We don't need fixed and eternal truths anyway; we just need a truth that's strong enough to kill lies, nonsense and bullshit. Pragmatic truth is contextual and provisional and pluralistic but cannot count as relativism in the bad sense because it insists on retaining empirical standards. Despite the pragmatist's rejection the correspondence theory of truth, there is still a demand that true ideas must "agree with experience" and so truths still agree with reality in the sense that they work in practice, actually function as instruments for some particular purpose. That's all that "true" can ever really mean, they say. This may be disappointing to those who expected Truth with a capital "T" but it does provide earthly standard by which we can put truth claims to the test. You try them out and see what happens. If you crash and burn, it's time to get new truth. In this sense, pragmatic truths are never final resting places. They are programs for more work, as James might put it, or hypotheses to be tested in experience. This empirical element, I think, is what gets the pragmatist out of trouble with respect to nihilism and relativism. This is what makes it post-postmodern.