Date: Wed, 07 Oct 1998 10:07:42 +0100
Subject: Re: BHA: Truth, a query


Howie,

Nice to hear from you again. leaving aside the issue of alethia i find you
paper troubling. It seems to me you are drawing an ontological conclusion
from the vastness of the epistemological task. I don't see you providing
any real arguments that deny that there is no way the world is, only that,
in the examples given, such a description would be rather large. 

Also, on the correspondence theory of truth I'm no expert or great
defender, but you seem to reject it because of the distance betwen the
object of thought and the thinking subject. Two things here, if this is an
absolute distance, then clearly this object must have a mode of being
independent of thought; that is a way it is independent of thought? But you
seem to be denying this. But it seems to me what you are really denying is
that we can ever come to know this absolutely. Second, there is no need to
think that knowledge of things requires us to step outside of our concepts
to see how they match up to the world. We come to know the world, *through*
our interactions with it, not in spite of them - which I think Howard was
getting at (Hi Howard).

Also, I have to say, you say.

 Is there a truth about my study, a reason for it being the way that it is?

You are asking here for a reason for it being the way it is. This question
presupposes what you are attempting to deny. The question of the reason,
can't be raised unless you assume that it is. Which you do. You assume *it
is* and then ask the reason for it being this way.

>Even assuming that it was possible to trace in complete detail the history
>of my study (say that aliens trained a remote video camera on it from the
>moment it was built and have kept the tape running ever since then) is
>there a finite set of reasons that account for the way that my study is?
>There are several hundred volumes in my library. Why these books and not
>others? You would have to trace not only the structure of the room in
which they are housed but also the process by which they came to be there.
This >involves nothing short of my entire life history. 

Yes, but this doesn't entail the denail that there *is* and has been such a
life history.

Cheers,




------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales
Aberystwyth
telephone: +44 (0)1970-621769
fax      : +44 (0)1970-622709
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