Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie 2014/2: Wahrheit

The article delineates the program of a praxeology of truth that allows for studying the dynamics and variability of truth in the sense of situated doing truth. It proposes a heuristic differentiation between »truth scenes« and »truth figures« that helps to analyze the emergence of theories of truth as well as that of specific truth cultures.

The essay argues for a concept of absolute truth as a cognitive claim to validity and for the relativity of normative conventions in practical dealings with truth. In opposition to the idea of an absolute imperative to truthfulness, it advocates a relative moral legitimacy of lying. Ritualized public scandals about people lying are often not an expression of honest outrage, but rather serve as an untruthful affirmation of norms about dealing with truth, the social validity of which has already become questionable.

The article approaches »truth« from a situational point of view, arguing that truth claims are characterized by a certain type of validity claim that is in the last instance of a moral nature. In scenes of truth, a normative type of validity claim, which in Durkheim’s sense refers to the maintenance of a norm even when it is trespassed by an individual, is suspended. As a consequence, scenes of truth cannot tolerate the mismatch between reality construction and empirical observation that is characteristic of normative validity claims. Instead, they tend to eliminate any distance between construction and observation, radicalizing the norm to a quasi-natural law with a moral inflection.

The essay argues that »truth« as basic element of judicial decision represents the result of constructions of reality, guided by law. In creating such scripts their authors are limited in their power: There is actually room for different arrangements of these descriptions. Its size depends from the objectives of the particular legal system, which is to be applied in the respective case.

The essay scrutinizes the medial preconditions of Descartes’ notions of truth and certainty. The metaphorical exchange between Descartes’ epistemology and his contributions to optical theory is conceived as a both-way traffic. Just as imaginations from the realm of visual perception affect the philosophical notion of truth, so the epistemological demand of a »clear and distinct« perception regulates the fashioning of the physical theories of vision and light.

Three examples try to give an historical overview of strategies of visual normalization. Duchenne de Boulogne, Francis Galton and the taylorist procedures of Frank Bunker Gilbreth are conceived as strategies to transform the human face in practices of truth and knowledge.

»Alethic Pragmatism« is the seemingly complicated term for a rather trivial philosophical enterprise. Coined in allusion to Alston’s »alethic realism,« alethic pragmatism calls attention not only to the propositional but also to the procedural aspects of truth. Reaching back to the Peircean and Jamesian origins of pragmatism’s tradition, this paper deciphers different acts of verification, validation and truth-making. Special attention is devoted to alethic pragmatism’s concept of facticity and validity (or validation, Geltung). It is argued that one possible sense of bringing about truth could lie in the various performative linguistic, and scriptural acts determined to make propositions valid within a given system of beliefs or propositions.