Date: Thu, 03 Nov 1994 18:01:49 +0000 (GMT) From: mkusch@castle.edinburgh.ac.uk To: h-verkko@sara.cc.utu.fi Subject: Re: On relativism
Jukka Sarjala wrote:
> Esa Itkonen asked earlier: why do we
> have to deny that all of us are doomed to truth? Questions of truth and
> freedom are sometimes horrible questions as - to the best of my knowledge -
> Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have shown.
Enlisting Nietzsche as a back-up for Itkonen is a bit of a curious move, and I would suspect that Nietzsche would turn in his grave ... Let's not get into a dispute here about what Nietzsche wrote and meant; let me only say that what I find most valuable in Nietzsche is his critique and ridicule of the pathos of suffering and pain linked to the pursuit of knowledge. It is just this pathos with which Jukka speaks. I work in history and philosophy because it's so much fun, not because I'm doomed ...
> >(2) But what if the notion of absolute truth is itself bogus?
> It has something to do with moral questions. To speak in the language of
> Kant: the notion of absolute truth is a 'regulative'. We think and act
> according to a universal norm. In science this regulative is extremely
> powerful. All of us have many experiences of it.
First, I register with some relief that Jukka grants my points (1) and (3), and confines himself to an answer to (2). Second, I would suggest that IF one accepts that the notion of absolute truth is paradoxical than it makes little sense to treat it as a universal norm. Just as Hegel pointed out against Kant's moral metaphysics. That the notion of absolute truth is 'extremely powerful' in science is an empirical claim. Sociologists who have studied scientists' discourse and values have not found that scientists made much of absolute truth. OK, I do like to win arguments, and with people who share frameworks of reasoning with me, we can come to agree who has the better points. But I can't see why that has much to do with absolute truth.
Cheers, Martin Kusch
Science Studies Unit University of Edinburgh