| FULL TEXT (FRENCH) |
Abstract:
Philosophy feeds on paradox and intellectual catastrophe. Paradoxes pertaining to truth go back all the way to Parmenides and Protagoras. They form two opposite poles that give rise to exemplary catastrophes, and define a spectrum along which most theories of truth adduced ever since can be ordered. Each of the main candidates-correspondence, coherence, pragmatism and minimalism-faces its own catastrophe. But the lessons you draw depend on your philosophical temperament: metaphysical, analytic, or biologistic. My own bias favours the third, which suggests that we might begin with a step back to the question: What does a child first learn about truth? Perhaps all we really need to know about truth is what we learned before kindergarten. Not surprisingly, common-sense is the gainer, and a version of the demand for correspondence finds itself rehabilitated. That demand can be summed up in a maxim: When you tell or hear a story, the truth of the story is not part of the story. As a test of this conception, one can ask how well it fits three domains generally thought of as metaphorical, or at best at the periphery of truth proper: fictional truth, emotional truth, truth in human relations. I will suggest that we might do better to regard these peripheral cases as defining the central or generic concept of truth, of which the "standard" sense is but a species, or special case. What distinguishes that special case is that it is appropriate to digital rather than analog forms of representation. And that, in turn, suggests a specific difference reflecting not the nature of things, but the representational systems we use to describe it.