This paper offers a reading of Hartmann’s philosophy of literature from the perspective of contemporary aesthetics. In particular, I focus on his defense of the truth-value of literary works. After outlining the main concern of the paper (sect. 1), I place Hartmann’s view within the context of current aesthetic cognitivism (sect. 2). In the following three sections, I discuss Hartmann’s account, examining his critique of the thesis that literature is cognitively valuable because it transmits factual truths (sect. (...) 3); his defense of the view that literature discloses life (sect. 4); and the link between cognitive value and the ontology of the literary work (sect. 5). Finally, I discuss Hartmann’s focus on the concept of “truth” in the light of recent debates on knowledge of “what it is like” and on “understanding” (sect. 6). (shrink)

The article is based upon the following starting position. In this post-modern time, it seems that no scholar in Europe supports what is called “Enlightenment Project” with its naïve objectivism and Correspondence Theory of Truth1, - though not being really hostile, just strongly skeptical about it. No old-fasioned “classical” academical texts; only His Majesty Discourse as chain of interpretations and reinterpretations. What was called objectivity “proved to be” intersubjectivity; what was called Object (in Latin and German and Russian tradition) now (...) is related to as a phenomenon; what was called Subject either is looked upon as Cartesian “cogito” or disappeares at all; what was called Truth turned to be either method of demonstration (by positivists) or the author’s sincerity (by existentialists); what was called Essence is now merely a joke. Alternatively, we speak about Sense, Meaning, and Value. (shrink)

In this essay I want to offer an analysis of the structure of the fictional emotions that we have reading novels. I shall start with a presentation of the structure of emotions in general and their relation to aesthetic fiction. Afterwards, I shall offer a critical review of the current positions on fictional emotions. The aim of this section is to question the presuppositions that dominate the current debate on fictional emotions in particular and on emotions in general. Finally, I (...) shall develop my own account on this issue. The thesis that I am going to defend is that fictional emotions possess doxastic and practical rationality and that they are full fledged emotional experiences the reality of which we should not doubt, even though they show some peculiarities. Key Words: Fictional emotion, quasi-emotion, doxastic rationality, practical rationality, assumption. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the importance of literature in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections concerning two strictly connected phenomenological themes: 1) the virtuality of objects and of existence itself; 2) the genesis of truth and the intuition of essences. According to Merleau-Ponty, modern novelists have adopted a phenomenological method: instead of ‘explaining’ the world through words, they ‘show’ the lifeworld and its paradoxes indirectly. In his view, and against Jean-Paul Sartre’s position, analyzing literature means developing a theory integrating (...) perception and the imagination. Moreover, at the beginning of the 1950’s, this perspective led Merleau-Ponty to a deep revision of the Sartrian concepts of spontaneity and engagement in literary practice in favour of a theory of expression as style. As a conclusion, the paper argues for the key-role of literature in Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology as a way of rediscovering unity and harmony behind the metamorphosis of reality. (shrink)

The role of truth in pre-Han thought has been a focus of interest and controversy since Munro first suggested that early Chinese thinkers were concerned primarily with the consequences of a belief or proposition for action, not its truth (Munro 1969: 55). Scholars have defended a range of interpretations of the place of truth in early Chinese thought, from the view that pre-Han philosophy has no concept of semantic truth, for example, to the view that it (...) has several concepts with roles overlapping those of truth, to the view that early Chinese thinkers actually offer theories of truth.1 One reason for intense interest in the topic is signaled by Graham’s well-known remark that for pre-Han philosophers “the crucial question...is not the Western philosopher’s ‘What is the truth?’ but ‘Where is the way?, the way to order the state and conduct personal life” (Graham 1989: 3). How issues related to truth are framed may reflect central features of the theoretical orientation of early Chinese philosophical discourse. For example, if pre-Han inquiries into logic, language, knowledge, and metaphysics focused on accurate description of the structure of reality, they might accordingly devote much attention to explaining the nature of truth and evaluating which descriptions are indeed true. On the other hand, if such inquiries centered on questions concerning the proper dao 道 (way) of conduct and how it relates to the course of the natural world, they might instead be concerned primarily with questions regarding the appropriate use of language and the basis for norms of correct use— whether they are purely products of human convention, for example, or are grounded in natural patterns. A clearer grasp of how pre-Han philosophers thought about truth may help us better understand the overall framework and orientation of early Chinese philosophy. This article first reviews the long-standing debate in the scholarly literature concerning the role of truth in pre-Han philosophy. Next, it considers how we might effectively and informatively frame inquiry into the topic of truth in Chinese thought. It then offers concise interpretations of several concepts in pre-Han texts with conceptual roles overlapping that of truth. (shrink)

In Literature and Truth Richard Lansdown continues a discussion concerning the truth-bearing status of imaginative literature that pre-dates Plato. The book opens with a general survey of contemporary approaches in philosophical aesthetics, and a discussion of the contribution to the question made by British philosopher R. G. Collingwood in particular, in his Speculum Mentis. It then offers six case-studies from the Romantic era to the contemporary one as to how imaginative authors have variously dealt with bodies (...) of discursive thought such as Stoicism, Christianity, evolution, humanism, and socialism. It concludes with a reading going in the other direction, in which the diary of Bronislaw Malinowski is seen in terms of the anthropologist's reading habits during his legendary Trobriander fieldwork. (shrink)

Questions about the status of literary truth are as old as literary criticism, but they have become both more intricate and more compelling as literature has grown progressively more self-conscious and labyrinthian in its dealings with "reality." One might perhaps read The Iliad or even David Copperfield without raising such issues. But authors like Gide , Nabokov, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet seem continually to remind their readers of the complex nature of literary truth. How, for instance, are we (...) to deal with a passage like the following from William Demby's novel The Catacombs:"When I began this novel, I secretly decided that, though I would exercise a strict selection of the facts to write down, be they 'fictional' facts or 'true' facts taken from newspapers or directly observed events in my own life, once I had written something down I would neither edit not censor it ."1What does this sentence mean? When an apparently fictional narrator distinguishes between "fictional" and "true" facts, what is the status of the word "true"? It clearly does not mean the same as "fictional," for he opposes it to that term. Yet it cannot mean "true" in the sense that historians would use, for he calls what he is writing a novel, and even if he quotes accurately from newspapers, the events of a narrator's life are not "historically" true. · 1. William Demby, The Catacombs , p.93. Peter J. Rabinowitz, assistant professor at Kirkland College, is currently working on articles on Raymond Chandler, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky and is, as well, a music critic for the Syracuse Guide. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in comparative literature on the philosophical implications of Nabokov's use of humor and terror. "Truth in Fiction" is the first article he has had published in a scholarly journal. (shrink)

Addressing such issues as the claims of critics that the application of psychoanalysis to literature, philosophy, the arts, and history results in interpretations that are speculative, externally imposed, reductionistic, and subjective, Hanly (philosophy, U. of Toronto; training analyst, Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute) searches for objectivity in the epistemological foundations and methods of applied psychoanalysis. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

In Fiction, Truth and Literature, Lamarque and Olsen argue that if a critic claims or attempts to prove that the outlook of a work of literature is true or false, he is not engaging in literary or aesthetic appreciation. This paper argues against this position by adducing cases where literary critics discuss the truth or falsity of a work’s view, when their opinions are obviously relevant to the work’s aesthetic assessment. The paper considers in detail the (...) way factual errors damage a work’s aesthetic standing, and shows that Lamarque and Olsen’s alternative account of the role of propositional truths in literature only looks plausible because it considers a restricted range of examples. Finally, it considers the role intention, date and genre play in discussions of the aesthetic damage done by literal falsehood. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The presence of truth and honesty is a permanent demand, and becomes vital the more committed and intimate a relationship is. Medical practice is relevant to this discussion when one questions whether or not a physician should always tell their patient the truth in the face of a progressive or potentially fatal disease, regarding the diagnosis, outcome, therapy and evolution of the specific disease. From this discussion we aim, with the present report, to look at the (...) class='Hi'>truth applicable to the patient‐physician relationship, and its ethical and moral implications; and also to look at where the Brazilian Code of Medical Ethics (BCME) and the medical literature stand regarding this issue. One concludes that there are only two moments not to tell a patient the truth: when the patient does not want to be informed, and when the truth could be iatrogenic. The question now is, when would the truth be iatrogenic? Physicians, in our opinion, would not be able to judge solitarily when the truth might be deleterious to their patient. Alternatively, we propose the appointment of a multidisciplinary commission to help the doctor with such a decision. (shrink)

The Truth of Ecology is a wide-ranging appraisal of contemporary environmental thought. It explores such topics as the history of ecology, radical science studies and radical ecology, the need for greater theoretical sophistication in ecocriticism, the dubious legacy of Thoreau, and the contradictions of current nature writing.

Cassirer’s view on ethical objectivity is puzzling. In his scarce comments on Kantian ethics, he defines the “pure will” as a “function of consciousness,” which he considers a prerequisite for the possibility of objective ethical normativity embedded in empirical reality. In the existing body of literature, we find two different interpretations of Cassirer’s account of ethical objectivity. The “meta-philosophical” interpretation takes objectivity as a telos that humanity gradually approaches, thereby emphasizing the historically relative truth standards to which the (...) teleologically-evolving symbolic forms respond. The “Kantian” interpretation takes objectivity as a concept inherent to the conduct of the moral law, highlighting the evaluative and prescriptive aspects of his philosophical method. In this paper, I defend the thesis that, by interpreting Cassirer’s ethics through the lens of Hermann Cohen’s mature ethical theory, we can see that ethical deliberation in Cassirer involves a notion of universality that is a priori and depends on a substantiated concept susceptible to change. The proposed “contingent conception of universality” thesis accounts for both: the evaluative and teleological features of Cassirer’s ethical theory, grounding an a priori account of ethical objectivity conceptualized relative to contingent truth standards that gradually improve. (shrink)

In this essay, I aim to engage Martin Heidegger’s and Karl Jaspers’s views of the tragic in critical dialogue in order to show that for both of these philosophers tragedy, in literature and in its philosophical interpretation, defines the relationships of thought to transcendence, of history to truth, I begin with an account of Jaspers’s treatment of the tragic, proceed to interpret Heidegger’s account of tragic poetry and his post-tragic notion of Gelassenheit, and finally outline the limitations of (...) tragedy as a model for historical truth, I will argue that the fact that these limitations are explicitly denoted and called for by Jaspers but are to some extent neglected by Heidegger is due to a difference between their philosophies with regard to the primacy, and perhaps their rival conceptions, of ontology. (shrink)

Is it possible for postmodernism to offer viable, coherent accounts of ethics? Or are our social and intellectual worlds too fragmented for any broad consensus about the moral life? These issues have emerged as some of the most contentious in literary and philosophical studies. In Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory a distinguished international gathering of philosophers and literary scholars address the reconceptualisations involved in this 'turn towards ethics'. An important feature of this has been a renewed interest (...) in the literary text as a focus for the exploration of ethical issues. Exponents of this trend include Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, the latter a contributor and a key figure in this volume. This book assesses the significance of this development for ethical and literary theory and attempts to articulate an alternative postmodern account of ethics which does not rely on earlier appeals to universal truths. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-ModernismJames SeatonMyth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism, by Colin Falck; xix & 208 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 1994, $59.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.Colin Falck has written a book that seeks to bind a critique of postmodernism to a plan for salvaging what is best about it. He wants to devise “a true post-modernism,” (...) because until now the movement’s goal has been “the Abolition of Reality.”The critique is the stronger part of the book. Falck offers several reasons why the currently fashionable versions of postmodernism are unsatisfactory. Identifying it with “post-Saussurian theory” (p. xiii), Falck traces the fundamental mistake of postmodernism back to Saussure’s rejection of one linguistic theory in favor of another, sliding from the view that language is based on “the baptismal labeling of some kind of already-differentiated and pre-baptismally identifiable item of the world’s contents” (p. 22) to seeing it “as a disembodied and contextless process” (p. 11). To Falck, though, the notion that a rejection of the first requires an acceptance of the second seems “entirely fallacious.” And yet “the whole internally interdependent substructure of post-Saussurian literary theory” depends upon the unexamined assumption that the two are inextricable.Falck finds other instances in which poststructuralists leap from true but trivial premises to otherwise unsupported conclusions. Jacques Derrida, for example, moves from an uncontroversial rejection of theories about “fully-experienced ‘presence’” (p. 21) to the very different issue of the priority of speech over writing. The goal of such non sequiturs is “in effect the Abolition of Reality” (p. 31).Such abolitions are always subject to the refutation Samuel Johnson made to Berkeley’s idealism. Kicking a stone, he vindicated the materiality of the external world. Now any textbook will point out that Johnson’s gesture was not an argument, but Falck argues that gestures do indeed possess philosophical significance. Speech is prior to writing because it is in speech and the gestures that accompany it that the location of language within “our necessary embodiedness” (p. 115) is most evident. Exploring the implications of the thesis that “all knowledge must be based in bodily awareness” (p. 119) along lines suggested by Merleau-Ponty among others, Falck argues that any satisfying account of language and, especially, literature must take account of dimensions of experience that contemporary theory peremptorily dismisses with the slogan “Nothing outside the text!”Although Falck’s refutation of postmodernism is telling and effective, it parallels the critique offered by other critics, such as John Ellis in Against Deconstruction. The true originality of his book lies in its admirably straightforward call to take up again the project of English and German Romanticism. For [End Page 264] Falck “the essential function of the literary text is one of revelation or disclosure” (p. 90). Myth, Truth and Literature argues that literature can reveal truths otherwise inexpressible through the use of myth. The romantic revival that he calls for will, however, also be a true postmodernism, because it will share the postmodernist rejection of transcendence in favor of “the essentially Romantic, but philosophically profound, recognition of the necessarily embodied and located nature of all human experiencing” (p. 84). Considering Romanticism “the third great advent of spirituality to the Western world” (p. 140) after Hellenic paganism and Christianity, Falck looks forward to a postmodernist literature that will reaffirm the truths of paganism while avoiding the “imaginative exclusiveness” of Christianity.One may share Falck’s refusal to accept postmodernism’s Abolition of Reality and yet have serious doubts about his proposed alternative. A reconsideration of the theories of Friedrich Schlegel and Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers more hope for literary criticism than an acceptance of the dominance of postmodernism and cultural studies, but it is not clear that Falck’s version of romanticism avoids the pitfalls of the contemporary approaches he rightly criticizes.He may not attempt to abolish reality, but Falck does seem to neglect the lessons of contemporary history. He opens his book by asserting that “romanticism looks forward to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and to every significant modern attempt to persuade men to take... (shrink)

We humans are a curious species. Of all the life forms that inhabit the earth, we alone strive to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. For thousands of years we understood the world through stories. Our ancestors told stories of how the world began, how our people originated and came to be at this place, and how those people across the river or beyond the mountains came to be where they are. Some stories were of animals (...) and plants in our neighborhood, and their powers to help us, feed us, or cure our ailments. But in the last few centuries, starting in Europe and spreading throughout the world, a new way of understanding began competing with storytelling as a means of comprehending our world. Science supplanted storytelling largely because it empowered us to transform the world in ways that were unimaginable to our ancestors. We understand the world scientifically by describing the world instead of by telling stories about it. The stories our ancestors told no longer explain the world, but are data within the world, part of the world that science describes. Our stories have become myths, cultural artifacts that may be interesting and a subject of study, but cannot possibly be true. Yet even in societies that have thoroughly embraced science as a means of understanding the world, myths remain a powerful force. Myth and science exist side by side, often creating confusion and conflict. (shrink)

This interview with David Kleinberg-Levin, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, concerns his recent trilogy on the promise of happiness in literary language. Kleinberg-Levin discusses the relationship between and among philosophy, phenomenology, and literature. Among others, he addresses questions regarding literature’s ability to offer redemption, its response to suffering and justice, literary gesture, the ethics of narrative logic, and the surface of the text.Cet entretien avec David Kleinberg-Levin, Professeur émérite au département de philosophie de (...) la Northwestern University, est consacrée à sa récente trilogie sur la promesse du bonheur dans le langage littéraire. Kleinberg-Levin examine les relations réciproques et internes de la philosophie, de la phénoménologie et de la littérature. Entre autres, il pose des questions sur la capacité de la littérature à offrir une rédemption, sur sa réponse à la souffrance et à la justice, sur le geste littéraire, sur l’éthique de la logique narrative et sur la surface du texte.L’intervista a David Kleinberg-Levin, Professore Emerito presso il Dipartimento di Filosofia della Northwestern University, è dedicata alla sua recente trilogia sulla promessa di felicità nel linguaggio letterario. Kleinberg-Levin esplora il rapporto tra filosofia, fenomenologia e letteratura. In particolare egli affronta le questioni che riguardano la capacità della letteratura di offrire redenzione, la sua risposta alla sofferenza e alla giustizia, il gesto letterario, l’etica della logica narrativa, e la superficie del testo. (shrink)

This article is a reply to an earlier piece by kenneth seeskin (philosophy and literature, 1982). I argue that socrates' defense is more of a parody of gorgian rhetoric than seeskin is willing to allow. They key lies in socrates' use of rhetoric to persuade the beliefs of the athenian jurors by means of probabilities. When replying to the expressed pretexts of the trial, He uses "base" rhetoric; when finally attending to the real reasons behind his accusations, He resorts (...) to "the truth about his life.". (shrink)

foreword by Pierre Vidal-Naquet The acclaimed French classicist Marcel Detienne's first book traces the odyssey of "truth," aletheia, from mytho-religious concept to philosophical thought in archaic Greece. Detienne begins by examining how truth in Greek literature first emerges as an enigma. He then looks at the movement from a religious to a secular thinking about truth in the speech of the sophists and orators. His study culminates with an original interpretation of Parmenides' poem on Being.

This paper will critically assess Popper’s evolutionary philosophy. There exists a rich literature on the topic with which we have many reservations. We believe that Popper’s evolutionary philosophy should be assessed in light of the intriguing theoretical insights offered, during the last 10 years or so, by the philosophy of biology, evolutionary biology and molecular biology. We will argue that, when analysed in this manner, Popper’s ideas concerning the nature of selection, Lamarckism and the theoretical limits of neo-Darwinism can (...) be appreciated in their full biological and philosophical value. (shrink)

This book examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut literature off altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis, and cognitive value, founded on (...) the methods of analytical philosophy, restores to literature its distinctive status among cultural practices. The authors also explore metaphysical and skeptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world itself is a kind of fiction, and truth no more than a social construct. They identify different conceptions of fiction in science, logic, epistemology, and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are at root indistinguishable. They offer rigorous analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor, and "making" in human thought processes. Both in their methods and in their conclusions, Lamarque and Olsen aim to restore rigor and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide new, philosophically sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing. (shrink)

One and a half months after Victor Hugo died in 1885, Beşir Fuad published a biography of him, in which Fuad defended Emile Zola’s naturalism and realism against Hugo’s romanticism. This resulted in the most important dispute in nineteenth-century Turkish literary history, the hakikiyyûn and hayâliyyûn debate, with the former represented by Beşir Fuad and the latter represented by Menemenlizâde Mehmet Tahir. This article focuses on the form of this debate rather than its content, and this focus reveals how the (...) tension between classical and post-classical Islamic intellectual history had become deeply embedded in Ottoman Turkish literary history by the late 1800s. This particular event demonstrates two points: that dialectical disputation was viewed negatively as a return to the seemingly primitive practices of an antiquated mentality, as opposed to the relatively enlightened apodictic argumentation ; and that trajectories of Ottoman Turkish literary history can be understood within the context of general Islamic intellectual history. (shrink)

In contemporary literary theory, Plato is often cited as the original repudiator of literary truth, and Aristotle as he who set down that literature is “imitation,” thus himself involuntarily banning literature from truth. This essay argues that these interpretations adulterate the original arguments of Plato and Aristotle, who both believed in literary truth. We—literary theorists and philosophers of literature—should recognize this and rethink our interpretation of these ancient texts. This will, in turn, lead us (...) to ask better questions about the nature of literary truth and value. (shrink)

In general, most, but not necessarily all, patients want truthfulness about their health. Available evidence indicates that truth-telling practices and preferences are, to an extent, a cultural artefact. It is the case that practices among nurses and doctors have moved towards more honest and truthful disclosure to their patients. It is interesting that arguments both for and against truth-telling are established in terms of autonomy and physical and psychological harm. In the literature reviewed here, there is also (...) the view that truth-telling is essential because it is an intrinsic good, while it is argued against on the grounds of the uncertainty principle. Based on this review, it is recommended that practitioners ought to ask patients and patients' families what informational requirements are preferred, and research should continue into truth-telling in clinical practice, particularly to discover its very nature as a cultural artefact, and the other conditions and contexts in which truth-telling may not be preferred. (shrink)

Intense competition can compel lobbyists to exaggerate the benefits the government would see in tax returns and social welfare if agency officials allocate such resources to the lobbyist's members. This incentive to misrepresent grows when information asymmetry exists between lobbyists and government officials. A large body of literature has investigated how interest groups compete and interact, but it disregards the interdependency of interests between competing groups and associated strategic behaviors of other players. Our signaling model of lobbying reveals ways (...) in which agency officials can compel lobbyists for competing interests to lobby truthfully and what the policy implications of this compulsion can be. We also present case-study evidence of how this works in practice. (shrink)

Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument has (...) been attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works , spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not. · 1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 and was revised in his The Widening Gyre . Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 : 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten .· 2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is the author of Blake's Composite Art, and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature’". (shrink)

This paper responds to criticism of the Kripkean account of logical truth in first-order modal logic. The criticism, largely ignored in the literature, claims that when the box and diamond are interpreted as the logical modality operators, the Kripkean account is extensionally incorrect because it fails to reflect the fact that all sentences stating truths about what is logically possible are themselves logically necessary. I defend the Kripkean account by arguing that some true sentences about logical possibility are (...) not logically necessary. (shrink)

Fake news and alternative facts have become commonplace in these so-called “post-factual times.” What about medical research - are scientific facts fake as well? Many recent disclosures have fueled the claim that scientific facts are suspect and that science is in crisis. Scientists appear to engage in facting interests instead of revealing interesting facts. This can be observed in terms of what has been called polarised research, where some researchers continuously publish positive results while others publish negative results on the (...) same issue – even when based on the same data. In order to identify and address this challenge, the objective of this study is to investigate how polarised research produce “polarised facts.” Mammography screening for breast cancer is applied as an example. The main benefit with mammography screening is the reduced breast cancer mortality, while the main harm is overdiagnosis and subsequent overtreatment. Accordingly, the Overdiagnosis to Mortality Reduction Ratio is an estimate of the risk-benefit-ratio for mammography screening. As there are intense interests involved as well as strong opinions in debates on mammography screening, one could expect polarisation in published results on OMRR. A literature search identifies 8 studies publishing results for OMRR and reveals that OMRR varies 25-fold, from 0.4 to 10. Two experts in polarised research were asked to rank the attitudes of the corresponding authors to mammography screening of the identified publications. The results show a strong correlation between the OMRR and the authors’ attitudes to screening. Mammography screening for breast cancer appears as an exemplary field of strongly polarised research. This is but one example of how scientists’ strong professional interests can polarise research. Instead of revealing interesting facts researchers may come to fact interests. In order to avoid this and sustain trust in science, researchers should disclose professional and not only financial interests when submitting and publishing research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTE ON THE IDEA OF RELJ!GIOUS TRUTH IN THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION HE FOLOWING PAGES claim to be no more than provisional attempt to define a problem of considerble complexity within the Christian tradition. In this introductory note I shall meTely outline how the notion of the truth conveyed by faith soon,after it was established in the New Testament, developed a synthesis with Greek philosophy, at first Platonic, (...) later Aristotelian. In the nominalist crisis this synthesis broke down and two modes of " religious truth " emerged: one within faith with relatively little support from reason, and one of faith within a philosophy henceforth detaiched from theology. Since the nineteenth century we notice that philosophy and theology are moving towards a rapprochement while maintaining their relative aiutonomy. Philosophy appears more inclined to accept religious truth on its own terms without reducing it to an unsuccessful formulation of truth as defined in modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. Theology, from its side, has increasingly stressed the unique experience implied in faith itself, thus allowing philosophy to include it in its own, general reflection on experience. In a more comprehensive study, to appear in a collective work edited by Daniel Guerriere, I intend to review actual and possible overtures in recent philosophical theories of truth which would rendeT such a rappmchement fruitful. First a word about the biblical context in which the New Testament idea emerged. The earliest articulation of truth in the Bible basically consists in a relation of faithfulness (emet) or :firmness-1a moral quality. Not surprisingly, truth also appears as a correspondence between word and fact-a relation that even to the uncritical mind appears problematic from the start. Thus in Prov1 erbs rn, 17 we read: " He who utters the truth affirms that which will stand; but a lying witness that 499 500 LOUIS DUPRE which will bring dis1a.ppointment." 1 But the more fundamental truth consists in God's steadfastness toward his people and in their participation in it by fidelity to a divinely revealed law.2 In some of the Psalms (such as Ps. 119) the correlation between the law and truth appears particulady clear: the law reveals to us God's fidelity (His truth) and its observance enables us to share in that 3 With the idea that truth requires entrusting one-self to a higher authority, a cognitive quality joins the moml one. We remain in the truth to the extent that we heed the revelation of God's truthfulness as expressed in His commands, and that our deeds, values and attitudes correspond to that divine disclosure. The idea of correspondence, then, which came to dominate the later cognitive discussion started out as a morral-practical one. The same could be said about the idea of coherence. Trust in God's providence and obedience in the Covenant unite all aspects of communal and individual exfatence. The sapiential literature in particular stresses the harmony of a life guided the law. The emphasis upon trust, obedience, and receptivity in the attainment of truth distinguishes the biblical conception from that modem one according to which truth originates in the knowing subject.4 Yet more and more tihe idea of truth as disclosure, that 1 Of course, some of the olcler wisdom literature appears to have consisted of a series of maxims considered useful for promoting a career in Court administration -a relatively" secular" affair. 2 Martin Buber identified the original meaning of faith as steadfastnesseven more than trust in a person. He sees this symbolically represented in the story of Moses' prayer during the battle with Abimelek. As long as his hands remained steady Israel retained the upper hand, but the hands of faith always grow weak and need support. a Ignace de la Potterie relates truth and law in a causal way. "La verite est un concept plus large, plus enveloppant; elle clesigne la r·ev·elation meme de la volonte divine et du mystere de Dieu; par contre la loi, les commanclements, les paroles de Dien, sont autant cl'expressions concretes de la volonte divine." La verite dans Saint Jean (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1977), p. 152. 4 Even when revived in the Reformation the older... (shrink)

This article responds to the arguments put forth by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen in Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (1994). It argues that the said work is representative of the widespread tendency in literary theory today to discard the possibility of literary truth, and it provides counterarguments to the work’s main theses. Consequently, it criticizes the philosophy of pragmatism and its implications, and it offers a theory that defines fictional objects as existing and (...) solves contradictions that commonly affect our debates on the ontology of fiction. The article does not provide a positive theory of literary truth, but it undermines its denials, which have become popular in recent decades. (shrink)

This chapter examines truthfulness, or veracity, in the context of health care services within prisons, jails, and detention facilities in the United States. Mainstream discussions of bioethics often highlight the general importance of veracity within the patient-provider relationship, including providers’ obligations and constraints with respect to telling the truth to their patients, and, to a lesser extent, patients’ responsibilities and concerns regarding truthful reporting to their providers. However, a great deal of this literature largely overlooks how structural barriers (...) to health care impact the functions of veracity in the provision of health care—including racist and sexist biases in clinical judgment, inadequate staffing, infrastructure, and accessibility in medical facilities, and institutionally specific constraints. Through an analysis of Assata Shakur’s political autobiography, this chapter focuses on such structural barriers to health care in carceral facilities with a focus on the institutionally specific constraints that arise through the punitive aims of carceral facilities. By focusing on the intersection between punishment and health, this chapter argues that bioethicists and clinicians alike would be better equipped to analyze structural barriers to health care that exist both within and beyond prison walls through a nonideal approach. (shrink)

Quasi-truth (a.k.a. pragmatic truth or partial truth) is typically advanced as a framework accounting for incompleteness and uncertainty in the actual practices of science. Also, it is said to be useful for accommodating cases of inconsistency in science without leading to triviality. In this paper, we argue that the formalism available does not deliver all that is promised. We examine the standard account of quasi-truth in the literature, advanced by da Costa and collaborators in many (...) places, and argue that it cannot legitimately account for incompleteness in science. We shall claim that it conflates paraconsistency and paracompleteness. It also cannot properly account for inconsistencies, because no direct contradiction of the form S ∧ ¬S can be quasi-true according to the framework; contradictions simply have no place in the formalism. Finally, we advance an alternative interpretation of the formalism in terms of dealing with distinct contexts where incompatible information is dealt with. This does not save the original program, but seems to make better sense of the apparatus. (shrink)

D. H. Lawrence famously wrote that “art-speech is the only truth.” If we are to give credibility to these words, we must know what Lawrence means by “truth.” Here is the passage in which this expression occurs:Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives (...) from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.... Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.1One thing is made clear by the passage: “truth” here is not used in the sense of absolute truth, something that can never be falsified.... (shrink)

Examines three arguments on the truthfulness of metaphorical interpretations of historical data. Arguments of historians Hayden White, F.R. Ankersmit, and H. Kellner; Historical interpretations as a reflection of historian's values and conceptual frameworks. Examines three arguments on the truthfulness of metaphorical interpretations of historical data. Arguments of historians Hayden White, F.R. Ankersmit, and H. Kellner; Historical interpretations as a reflection of historian's values and conceptual frameworks.

Galligan (Professor Emeritus, English, Western Michigan U.-Kalamazoo) argues that contemporary American critics should embrace literary truths with all of their uncertainties rather than cling to make- believe certainties of ideologies. He celebrates values commonly associated with modern, not postmodern, criticism, applying them to contemporary works in a series of fresh and unusual inquiries. He finds implications for criticism in work from the physical sciences and in the works of largely ignored novelists. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

There is a large literature on the issue of the lack of properties (i.e. accidents) in quantum mechanics (the problem of “hidden variables”) and also on the indistinguishability of particles. Both issues were discussed as far back as the late 1920’s. However, the implications of these challenges to classical ontology were taken up rather late, in part in the ‘quantum set theory’ of Takeuti (Curr Issues Quant Logic 303–322, 1981), Finkelstein (in Beltrametti EG, Van Fraassen BC (eds) Current issues (...) in quantum logic. Plenum, New York, 1981) and the work of Décio Krause (1992)—and subsequent publications). But the problems created by quantum mechanics go far beyond set theory or the identity of indiscernibles (another subject that has been often discussed)—it extends, I argue, to our accounts of truth. To solve this problem, i.e. to have an approach to truth that facilitates a transition from a classical to a quantum ontology one must have a unified framework for them both. This is done within the context of a pluralist view of truthmaking, where the truthmakers are unified in having a monoidal structure. The structure of the paper is as follows. After a brief introduction, the idea of a monoid is outlined (in Sect. 1) followed by a standard set of axioms that govern the truthmaker relation from elements of the monoid to the set of propositions. This is followed, in Sect. 2, by a discussion of how to have truthmakers for two kinds of necessities: tautologies and analytic truths. The next Sect. 3, then applies these ideas to quantum mechanics. It gives an account of quantum states and shows how these form a monoid. The final section then argues that quantum logic does not, despite what one might initially suspect, stand in the way of an account of quantum truth. (shrink)

In this paper I address Jerome Stolnitz’s famous article “On the cognitive triviality of art,” with the aim of defending aesthetic and literary cognitivism against the charges Stolnitz issues at it therein. My defence of literary cognitivism is grounded in contemporary epistemology, which, I argue, is more embracive of cognitive values of literature traditionally invoked by literary cognitivists. My discussion is structured against Stolnitz’s individual arguments, dedicated in particular to the problem of literary truth. After exploring what such (...) notion might amount to, I move on to address the problems of applicability and triviality of literary truths, and I end by defending literature as a cognitively valuable social practice. (shrink)

In literary aesthetics, the debate on whether literary fictions provide propositional knowledge generally centres around the question whether there are authors’ explicit or implicit truth-claims in literary works and whether the reader’s act of looking for and assessing such claims as true or false is an appropriate stance toward the works as literary works. Nevertheless, in reading literary fiction, readers cannot always be sure whether the author is actually asserting or suggesting a view she expresses or presents because of (...) the artistic and imaginative nature of the work. In this essay, I shall argue that in addition to asserting and suggesting, authors make use of a third way of conveying knowledge by their works: they invite the reader to genuinely or extra-fictionally contemplate unasserted thoughts or viewpoints to a given issue, or they offer hypotheses or provide the reader fictional material for constructing a hypothesis. The aim of this essay is to examine this rather unanalyzed but extremely wide grey zone: the author’s act of ‘contemplating’ and the cognitive value of its products which I shall call ‘literary hypotheses.’. (shrink)

How should we characterise the view that we can learn about the mind from literature? Should we say that such learning consists in acquiring knowledge of truths? That option is more attractive than it is sometimes made to seem by those who oppose propositional knowledge to practical knowledge or “knowing how”. But some writers on this topic—Lamarque and Olsen—argue that, while literature may express interesting propositions, it is not their truth that matters, but their “content”. Matters to (...) what? To literary criticism, they reply: there is no place in criticism for “debate about the truth or falsity of general statements about human life or the human condition.” I argue, to the contrary, that ideas of truth and truthfulness are woven into the fabric of a kind of criticism that is widespread now and comes with a long and distinguished history. (shrink)

In the contemporary analytic philosophy of literature and especially literary theory, the paradigmatic way of understanding the beliefs and attitudes expressed in works of literary narrative fiction is to attribute them to an implied author, an entity which the literary critic Wayne C. Booth introduced in his influential study The Rhetoric of Fiction. Roughly put, the implied author is an entity between the actual author and the narrator whose beliefs and attitudes cannot be appropriately ascribed to the actual author. (...) Over the decades, this “the author’s second self,” a construct the actual author is seen to create in her act of writing, has gained an established place in literary theory. In the philosophy of literature, in turn, the implied author has evolved into multiple entities; it has been represented and developed as, for instance, “the postulated author” (Alexander Nehamas), “the fictional author” (Gregory Currie) and “the model author” (Umberto Eco). -/- The aim of this paper is to suggest that although the implied author, and its philosophical counterparts, sheds light on certain types of narratives, it is insufficient in approaches which emphasize the truth-claims conveyed by a work. In what follows, I try to show that, first, from an ontological point of view, actual assertions in literary fiction, if any, have to be attributed to the actual author and, second, that the question of truth-claiming in and by literary fiction is an epistemological matter concerning the actual intentions of the author. -/- . (shrink)

Der Wahrheitswert der Literatur ist in der Philosophie seit der Antike umstritten. Im 20. Jahrhundert konkurrieren Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktion und Analytische Philosophie um die Deutungshoheit für literarische Kunstwerke. Der Vergleich der unterschiedlichen philosophischen Wahrheitstheorien kann dazu beitragen, einen Begriff der Poetik zu entwickeln, der in der Literatur mehr sieht als einen Unfall der Sprache. Im 20. Jahrhundert differenzieren sich unterschiedliche theoretische Ansätze heraus, die eine Antwort auf die Frage nach der Wahrheit der Literatur zu geben versuchen. Ausgehend von den Gründungsvätern der (...) Phänomenologie und der Analytischen Philosophie, Husserl und Frege, zeichnet die Studie diesen Prozess der Ausdifferenzierung nach, um am Beispiel von Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, Davidson, Rorty und Cavell die Spannung zwischen philosophischer und literarischer Wahrheit herauszustellen. Im Mittelpunkt der kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit den jeweiligen philosophischen Wahrheitstheorien steht ein Begriff der Poetik, der zwischen den unterschiedlichen Ansprüchen von Philosophie und Literatur zu vermitteln vermag. (shrink)