我们能找回我们的真相吗?
Joshua Landy

2017年9月10
I think we can all agree that this is a pretty terrible time to be a fan of truth. Politicians have always lied, of course, but few have dared to deny the verifiably obvious, such as the size of an inauguration crowd. Few have perpetuated conspiracy theories, such as the one about Obama’s place of birth. Few would have defended their distortions by claiming that their words were “not intended to be a factual statement,” that there are “alternative facts,” or that “facts don’t exist any more.”
Meanwhile, an absurdly high percentage of the population believes that Barack Obama is a Muslim, that human-made climate change is a hoax, or that vaccines cause autism. What we’re witnessing, in these cases, is a dismaying decline of trust in expert knowledge combined with a creeping disdain for analytical methods of reaching judgments.
Is this a good thing for our society? I very much doubt it. Hannah Arendt put it best, as she so often did: “ the ideal subject of totalitarian rule, ” she said, is “ people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction... and the distinction between true and false... no longer exist. ”
你可能认为哲学是公共话语水平可怕下降的解药——总的来说我同意——但这可能取决于你头脑中有什么样的哲学。毕竟，曾经有哲学家对真理的概念提出过全面的怀疑;有些人甚至说，没有它我们会过得更好。例如，理查德·罗蒂(Richard Rorty)说:“词汇有用或无用……但它们不是‘更客观’或‘不客观’，也不是多或少‘科学’”;毕竟，“任何[科学]描述都不可能是世界存在方式的准确表征。” (So if I say that human beings are contributing to climate change and you say it’sjust God hugging us closer, your claim is every bit as scientific as mine.) Rorty also said that we should give up “the distinction between discovery and creation, finding and making.” (There’s no difference, then, between me discovering that there was statistically insignificant level of voter fraud and you inventing three million illegal votes.) And he said “the very idea of a ‘fact of the matter’ is one we would be better off without.” Arendt would beg to differ.
Of course, there’s plenty of cause for doubt when it comes to knowledge of the world, including the fact that different conceptual schemes parse the data of sense differently, as well as the fact that different features become more or less salient within different conceptual schemes. But if such worries lead us to say that science is no more scientific than scientology, or that we’d be better off without the notion of a fact of the matter, I think maybe that’s a sign that we’ve gone too far.
Some people defend philosophers like Rorty by arguing that their theories were necessary counter-forces to hegemonic narratives. I don’t think that’s right: in real life, when you see people successfully attacking hegemonic narratives, they generally do so by showing that these narratives arefalse, not by suggesting that there is no truth to be had. The critiques were absolutely necessary, but Rorty-style skepticism was not.
Others try to defend Rorty-type philosophers by arguing that they have been misinterpreted: they didn’t reallymeanall those things they appeared to be saying; they were just using lively language to talk about some technical issues in philosophy, and they’d be the first to admit that there’s a fact of the matter about whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that it’simportantthat there’s a fact of the matter about that, that you can’t just invent what you want and say you discovered it, and so on. Maybe; but it’s worth remembering what Rorty and companydid, as well as what they said. I remember once asking Rorty why he attributed a view to Nietzsche that Nietzsche himself repudiated in his published works the vast majority of the time. “Well,” explained Rorty, “it just makes him into a more interesting and innovative philosopher.” Rorty and his ilk didn’t justsay我们应该少关心真相;他们践行了这个想法，说了一些他们自己都不相信的话。
So did people like Rorty contribute to the situation we’re in today?Daniel Dennett thinks so. “Maybe people will now begin to realise that philosophers aren’t quite so innocuous after all,” said Dennett. “I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.”
For my part, I wouldn’t go so far: I don’t think philosophers got us into this mess. What happened, instead, was a conglomeration of circumstances, including the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine, the rise of 24-hour news, and the amplification of fringe views via the internet and social media. But even though philosophers didn’t get us into this mess, I do think they can help us get out of it, by training generations of students to be allergic to lies and to what Harry Frankfurt calls “bullshit.” All we need to do is stay firmly on the side of truth. As Tim Williamsonrecently put it, “Obviously it wasn’t mainly postmodernism or relativism that won it for Trump… Still, those who think it somehow intolerant to classify beliefs as true or false should be aware that they are making it easier for people like Trump, by providing them with a kind of smokescreen.”
So: no more smokescreens. Let’s hang on to our facts of the matter and start getting our truth back.

Comments(4)

Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Tuesday, September 12, 2017 -- 10:22 AM

Many believe that fake news

Many believe that fake news is the love-child of a certain executive and his various assistants. I'm not certain, but, it seems to me that fake news has been on the scene for many years. Perhaps we ought to consider the totality of the circumstances, generally, and propaganda, specifically. Circumstantially, we use many kinds of artifice to sell others on our opinions and point(s)-of-view. Facts are used in many ways, often to the extreme of disproving things which are facially well-grounded. Propaganda is at least as old as World War I, and, to my simplistic thinking, it is the epitome of fakeness. I liked Frankfurt's take on bullshit, along with some of his other notions. Fake news, then, is mostly a re-incarnation of what we have seen before. Shows just how uncreative some people can be.

twashington0541's picture

twashington0541

Thursday, September 14, 2017 -- 12:39 PM

I would argue that "fake news

我认为，“假新闻”并不是操纵民意的新手段。所有这些对“边缘新闻”的认定都有一个奇怪的地方，那就是它要求一方有权威在特定的背景下定义什么是“真相”。事实上，如果一个真理需要一个语境，那么它根本就不是绝对的真理。如果真理不是绝对的，那么它是会变化的。如果它是有变化的，那也不过是一种强烈的固执的信念，认为有人把一个需要上下文相对性的情况混为一谈。

joranscot's picture

joranscot

Friday, September 29, 2017 -- 4:18 PM

One man's "fake news" is

One man's "fake news" is another man's "gospel truth" and conversely. So it has been for the millennia.

Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Sunday, January 19, 2020 -- 12:54 PM

I have been busy the past two

I have been busy the past two years. Writing essays; reading philosophers (old and newer); developing some of my own little caveats, admonitions and philosophical blurbs---the latter after reading those sorts of asides, as penned by some of the masters. And so, for your critique, edification and/or amusement, I give you:
Neuman's Trinity
I. A priori, for every point-of-view, there is a different one. II. A fortiori, if you are not a little curious, you have no business doing philosophy.
III. A posteriori, if you always keep your mouth shut, you will never say anything foolish. Or controversial. Or important...Think better, not harder.

I will attempt to offer these sorts of notions from time to time. They are mostly just for fun, but now and then, they may may make you 'think better, not harder'. I hope so anyway...

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