File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-04-21.144, message 9


Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 23:44:03 -0500 (EST)
From: Howie Chodos <howie-AT-magi.com>
Subject: Re: BHA: An Open Question. A side query.


At 20:28 97-03-11 -0600, you wrote:
>    Howie speaks of a "simplistic correspondence theory of truth."
>
>    For decades I have wondered about the form, "simplistic theory of x."
>
>    My suspicion has always been that, usually, that phrase is
>redundant; that for the speaker/writer *any* form of x, is by
>definition, "simplistic" or "naive" or "vulgar."
>
>    Merely a query.
>
>    Carrol Cox



Carrol,

Two points. First, what do you think of people who say that they reject
simplistic versions of Marxism, the kind of versions that reduce all
phenomena to class, or that argue that every utterance has an implicit class
content, or that paint everyone who disagrees with them as some kind of
class enemy, but that they still think of themselves as Marxist?

Second, I do think that there is some sense in which it is important to
recognize that when we speak in terms of truths that we are utilising
concepts that correspond to something that is independent of us as thinking
subjects. I'm not sure how this relates to other dimensions of whatever it
is that we want to call truth. But I do think that it doesn't exhaust the
meaning of truth. In this sense, to reduce truth exclusively to its
correspondence dimension is to misinterpret its meaning. It seemed to me
that introducing a concept of absence as causal brought out the fact that
there was more to truth than simple correspondence. We need to be able to
make true statements that correspond to the reality of absence, that is to
nothing.

Howie Chodos



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