Date: Wed, 04 Jun 1997 09:54:07 +0100
From: ccw94-AT-aber.ac.uk (COLIN WIGHT)
Subject: Re: Against vulger theories of truth


This is weird and true. No, no I mean really true. Flannon sent this reply
to 'm' but it says I sent it. Wow man I really am getting through.


However, can someone tell me how this happened?

By the way this is really me. Colin, not Flannon.


> Well, this is also not such a simple example, although in a different way than
> the "intellectual inferiority" example.  Have you been at the game or do you
> know about it from the media?  If from the media, then your truth claims have
> to do not with simple descriptions of sense data about the game, but with
> a complicated web of assumed credibility and authority that mediates the
> relationship between a media report (or non-report) and the conclusions
> we draw about "facts".
>
> -m
>

Now with this we might be getting somewhere.  While its true that to
a certain extent we live in a world of empirically verifiable evidence
I would wager that we spend much more time in a world of presumed
and enfored authority.  Not enforced in the sense that one might
beat someone over the head until they acknowledge your point, but
enforced in the sense that the discourse relies on its ability to
appeal to its own structure of verification.

As Beckett would have it: "What does it matter who is speaking someone
said.  What does it matter who speaks?  For the most part we relie on
the 'fact' that the subject line of a message is indicative of the author
of the post.  But does this make it true?  And if so does the author
necessarily form a one to one correspondence with a perosn who is
writing?

This is a fairly cheap point that I'm trying to make,ift.

Flannon

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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA

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