Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 18:19:20 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: Bhaskar's theory of truth


Hi Tobin,

Tobin Nellhaus <nellhaus-AT-gis.net> writes
>That said, the central issue for me has been what you seem to take as a
>given: that the concept of "truth" can (indeed should) have the multiple
>meanings that you and Bhaskar accord it, rather than possessing the strictly
>propositional sense that (it seems to me) Heikki and Ruth have been working
>with.  
I don't take it as a given. My point was that there is a complex
argument for the theory of 'the truth tetrapolity' in DPF (see also
Plato Etc). Why don't people who wish to contest it at least look it up
and try to come to grips with it? (Very difficult, admittedly. I will
spell out what I take to be some bare essentials below, but make no
claim to understanding all the finer details, and even if I did,
couldn't lay them all out here.)

>I have no objection in principle to multiple meanings, 

I would speak rather of 'multiple [four in all - 'the truth
tetrapolity'] interrelated moments, aspects, levels, or forms',
expressive of degrees of groundedness: it is a layered or stratified
theory of truth, which Bhaskar, building on Hegel,  illustrates via a
dialectic of truth/ the epistemological dialectic of science/ a logic of
scientific discovery.

>but in light
>of the obvious importance that a concept of truth must possess, conceptual
>coherence would seem mandatory.  
Agreed. (This of course doesn't commit to a coherence theory of truth.)

>"Coherence" does not mean univocality, at
>least in my view, but I like having some notion of how alethia fits as a
>subtype of truth.  Under the propositional concept of truth, this would
>appear either impossible or a category error.  So am asking someone to
>replace the propositional concept of truth.
Well, the Bhaskarian theory of truth can't replace it for you, because
it *incorporates* it in its first three moments, moving beyond it to the
truth of things rather than propositions in its fourth and final moment.

The four moments are: Truth as
a) normative-fiduciary - in the communicative dimension of the social
cube:'trust me - act on it'; no other grounding necessarily supplied
b) adequating ('warrantedly assertable') - epistemological, relative, in
the transitive dimension. Vulnerable to the objection that a proposition
may be warrentedly assertable but false. So we have:
c) referential-expressive - as a bipolar ontic-epistemic dual [ie
existentially interdependent but essentially, hence conceptually,
distinct] and in this sense as absolute. I take this to mean that
insofar as it is ontic it is referentially detached, no longer in the TD
and relative. Truth as ontogenetic, rather than ontological, still tied
to language-use.
d) ontological, no longer tied to language-use as such and in this sense
objective and in the ID; typically achievable when referential
detachment occurs. 
d') alethic - the truth of or reason for things (in the ID), not
propositions. [A special case of d), which is a condition of a), b) and
c) DPF 385]. Includes causal structures and generative mechanisms, and
typically occurs with their referential detachment. I.e. alethic truth
is another name for natural necessity, as Colin in effect kept
repeating; and science itself employs an ontological notion of truth
(DPF 150) (Bhaskar is absolutely explicit that this is broadly what he
*means* by 'alethic truth'.) Attainable in virtue of ontological
stratification and the dynamic character of science - the rationality of
scientific revolutions is sustained insofar as theories change when a
deeper ontological layer is discovered. We get somewhere as both our
conceptual apparatus and our sensory equipment, our powers both to
understand and to absent constraints, are expanded (fallibly! every
theory is fated to be superceded; and contingently - the exercise of
powers is by no means the same as their possession.) (Colin baulked at
the dynamic character of science. What, are not new continents
discovered both in the natural and the social world? The alethia of
scientific dynamism is ultimately the dialectic of desire to freedom -
the drive to absent absences [constraints or ills] dating from the
('first') primal scream...) It is important to note that alethia can
include the alethic truth in the ID of *falsity* in the ID, eg of the
wage-form (whose alethic truth is generalized production for the market
on the basis of private ownership of the means of production) or of
sexism (whose alethic truth is, broadly, I would argue, patriarchal
social structures.) This sustains a non-arbitrary distinction between
ideology and science, and the transition from facts to values. In the
moral realm the alethia of the species is freedom, understood as the
free development of each as a condition of the free development of all,
and ultimately grounded in conceptions of developing human nature.

With respect to c) (in part) and d) I doubt that Bhaskar is contesting
the view that only propositions can be true - he is rather incorporating
this into a deeper account of truth on which in the ID things can be
*true of* each other in the sense that they causally generate them, or
speaking dialectically constitute their real or dialectical reason or
ground. (Thus I don't think he is committed to the notion that a causal
mechanism is 'true' rather than just 'is'; rather, that it may be 'true
of' another in the sense indicated.) This is so regardless of our
theories in the TD. If the human species, hence the TD, ceased to exist
tomorrow, the mechanisms which eg produce electrical conductivity would
go on doing so as if nothing had happened, would still be its real
reason or alethic truth in Bhaskar's sense; and it would still be the
case that human eg patriarchal social structures, before they were
destroyed, causally generated sexist ideologies or that reasons that
were acted upon were among the causes of ensuing actions. 

It would also be the case that humans had come to understand the
mechanisms that they did, and that the alethic truth of this (if it was
such) was ultimately the dialectic of desire to freedom.

When science discovers a new layer of the real, it does just that: it
grounds the truth of its propositions in another kind of truth, the
truth of things. If it didn't, aeroplanes couldn't fly, and pigs could.
It is a condition of the intelligibility of scientific change and
progress (epistemic relativism) that we come to understand real reasons.
The theory of the truth tetrapolity can thus be characterized as 'a
theory which neither elides the referent nor neglects the socially
produced character of knowledge' (DPF 217)

What are the arguments for d)? The argument for referential detachment
(detatchment of the act of reference from that to which it refers, thus
locating it within an ID and establishing the possibility of another act
of reference to it) is well known - it is a transcendentally necessary
condition of any intelligible discourse at all and is an axiological
imperative.
But this establishes only d) [besides one aspect of the duality at c)]. 
For d')  referential detachment of a causal mechanism is necessary.
'For [the case for alethic truth] to be established we must have a
creature capable of dividing the world into essential and non-essential
attributes, and of appreciating that the former do not always manifest
themselves in actuality [we have such]. With the *first referential
detachment* of structure and the transfactual efficacy it affords, we
get the first taste of *alethic truth*, the dialectical reason or ground
for things. And now we are doing science... But also, insofar as
differentiation is itself a causal act and causation is absenting, we
are on the terrain of dialectic, upon which 1M non-identity and
transfactuality can thus retrospectively be seen to depend.' (DPF 213)
(I include the last bit because it raises the issue of the dialectical
development of CR.)

Now to speak of referentially detached causal mechanisms as the
dialectical or real reason for, or alethic truth, of things, seems to
some an instance of the epistemic/ontic fallacy and anthroporealism (a
residue, perhaps, of Hegel's idealist monism). But I think that, far
from collapsing the TD/ID distinction, it bridges it; and far from being
incoherent, coherence (and completeness) demand a concept in our theory
of truth that bridges it. For the divide is not absolute, it rather
indicates distinctions/differences within an overreaching identity: the
constellational identity of epistemology and ontology within
epistemology within ontology (see the formulations at DPF271-2; 115; cf
149-50). Further, epistemological relativism in the TD is dialectically
linked to judgemental rationality in the IA and ontological
stratification in the ID: there is a constellational identity of the
three, judgemental rationality presupposing epistemic relativity
presupposing ontological stratification (9; cf the distinctions between
constellational unities and identities at 115).

It seems to me that, if anything, the boot is on the other foot here:
those who want to confine the theory of truth to the TD are reifying the
divide, such that any crossing of it is equated with collapsing it. But
we cross it all the time in performing referential detachment.
Not to see this is perhaps to head in the direction of losing sight of
the ID altogether, as the realm of unknowable things-in-themselves for
us poor prisoners in the world of propositions and discourse. Or to
confine yourself within the analytic problematic of either-or logic,
when, in the process of scientific discovery, that problematic is only
one (invaluable) moment in a dialectic of analytical and dialectical
reason (another constellational unity). (See DPF, 272, 1.9, 3.2, 373-4) 

Are we just involved in a terminological dispute in which what one side
calls 'causal mechanisms' etc the other wants to call 'alethic truth'
(also)? I don't think so. First, what is being resisted is the
apparently non-relativist implications of truth as ontological and
objective. But truth is still relative to the processes in the TD (now
'metacritically extended to include the whole material and cultural
infra-/intra-superstructure of society' 218). Even alethic truth has to
be expressed in language, and is subject to revision as our theories
change or are superceded. When this happens, while the phenomena
identified by them are for the most part 'saved', the theories
themselves are discarded as false or inadequate, giving place to a new
('emergent') theory that could not have been predicted. And when the
world itself changes new theories are  required to discover new alethic
truths of things... (Doubtless, however, this is not relativist enough
for some, and less relativist perhaps than the epistemic relativism of
CR seemed prior to its dialecticization.)

But secondly, there is an (open) political agenda too, dating back to
Tobin's queasy stomach in the present discussion, and beyond that to the
Frankfurt school, Heidegger, Nietzsche etc. This broadly equates
scientific reason with domination, control, violence. This is to make a
double (or multiple) conflation it seems to me: of (the various kinds
of) reason to instrumental reason, and of instrumental reason to its
application in the world. It is not reason as such but people, their
actions heavily conditioned by social structures, who commit violence
and (mis)use science to create the means of violence. Of course, if
social structure is 'dissolved' into the TD and discourse via the
linguistic fallacy (one of the great dogmas of the twentieth century,
practised by none of those who preach it) the conclusion that science is
the culprit seems to follow more readily. In obscuring the real causes
[sic] of violence and oppression such a view performs the classic
function of ideology and is reproductive of the status quo. It is not
science that perpetuates master-slave type relations throughout the
world and is currently throwing a majority of the world's people into
more abject poverty; this is being done in spite of science and in the
name of ideology masquerading as science. This is not to deny science
(or philosophy) some causal efficacy in the world, or that knowledge of
alethic truth can be used to oppressive ends. DCR however stresses its
enormous emancipatory *potential*, echoing Kant at the end of the
twentieth century in a call for a new enlightenment...

The theory of the truth tetrapolity is one aspect of the attempted
sublation of CR AND previous dialectics AND irrealist philosophy in a
new higher order system, and in my view is a truly revolutionary
conception (claimed as such by Bhaskar himself: one of two 'great
discoveries' in DPF - the other being development of an adequate account
of negativity -and as resolving 'a host of philosophical problems'). Our
own problems with it doubtless stem partly from the sheer difficulty of
assimilating the dialecticization of CR. We are still stuck to some
extent in our old CR ways -  better perhaps, still stuck in non-CR ways
that CR didn't compel us to come to grips with but DCR does. I think we
have to be prepared to dialectically detach ourselves from our existing
beliefs/theories to grasp fully what the man is saying. *Then* attack it
at its strongest point and see if it gives...

There is much much more that could and needs to be said. But I think
I've said enough to indicate that there might well be a good bit in the
theory... 


-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk


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