Truth and public reason

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 2-42

  Cohen, Joshua ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 58149337329     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2008.01144.x     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. To be sure, Pinter was thinking about the truth and falsity of assertions about matters of non-normative fact: For example, about the absence of weapons of mass destruction from Iraq in 2002. Nevertheless, because he states his point in more sweeping terms, just as he had earlier stated a perfectly general claim about truth, I think it is appropriate to interpret him as making a more general claim about the place of truth in the discourse of citizens.
2. I say "conception"or "understanding" rather than "theory," because I am not supposing that a conception needs to have the internal structure that we associate with a theory. See below, pp. 27-28 (final two paragraphs of Section III).
3. In the way that the political conception of objectivity, associated with political liberalism, is a genuine conception of objectivity, though different from and in a way less committal than rational intuitionist and Kantian conceptions of objectivity. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 110-16.
4. See
5. Gottlob Frege, "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry," Mind 65 (1956): 289-311,
6. There are many versions of the deflationary approach, and not all treat propositions (as opposed to sentences) as truth bearers: I have made that assumption here, but nothing in my discussion turns on it. For discussion of some of the variety, see Scott Soames, Understanding Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 8; Bradley Armour-Garb, "Deflationism: A Brief Introduction" (unpublished). On propositions as truth bearers, see Soames, chap. 1; Paul Horwich, Truth, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 16-17.
7. On public reason, see Political Liberalism, lecture 6; John Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,"in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 573-615.
8. For discussion of the charge, and the ways that it puzzlingly deploys a passion for truthfulness against the concept of truth, see Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
9. See "Declaration on Religious Freedom," The Teachings of the Second Vatican Council: Complete Texts of the Constitutions, Decrees, and Declarations (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1966), pp. 366-67; John Courtney Murray, "The Problem of Religious Freedom," in Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster, 1993).
10. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 37.
11. In emphasizing Rawls's concern specifically with truth, I disagree with Joseph Raz's claim that Rawls is equally concerned with a variety of terms of normative appraisal, including "reasonable."See his
12. "Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence," Philosophy & Public Affairs 19 (1990): 3-46,
13. John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 394.
14. The passages that follow are from Political Liberalism, pp. xxii, 116, and 94. In "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," Rawls does not address the issue of truth at all, though he does not suggest (except perhaps by the sheer omission) any change of mind.
15. Political Liberalism, p. 127.
16. "Reply to Habermas," in Political Liberalism, pp. 394-95.
17. Political officials and candidates for office have a "duty of civility" to explain their positions on fundamental issues by reference to the political conception that they take to be most reasonable. See "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,"in Collected Papers, p. 576. The point is not that it is advisable or obligatory to assert that one's view is the most reasonable. Instead, there is a duty to argue by reference to the view that one judges to be most reasonable. Judgments about the reasonableness of one's views thus belong to the terrain of political reflection and argument.
18. Rawls states that he takes justice as fairness, with its two principles, to be the most reasonable conception. See Political Liberalism, p. xlvi.
19. Samuel Freeman proposed in correspondence that Rawls wishes only to avoid claims about the truth of principles of justice, not about the truth of consequences drawn from those principles. We cannot, then, affirm, within public reason, that the principle of equal basic liberties is true, or that it is true that justice requires equal basic liberties. If that principle is, however, part of the most reasonable conception of justice, then there is no objection to saying about a law infringing freedom of worship that it is true that is unjust. The acceptable claim of truth is made from "within"the conception of justice, whereas the unacceptable claim is made about the conception itself. The same distinction, however, does not apply to the notion of being reasonable (or most reasonable). I do not see a case for interpreting Rawls this way, and do not, in any case, see the basis for the proposed restriction on the concept of truth. First, if we cannot say that the principles are true, can we nevertheless affirm the principles, or are we limited to asserting that the principles describe the most reasonable conception? If we affirm the principles, assert them, and believe them, what is the force of withholding the judgment that they are true? Second, suppose it is permissible to judge, from "within"a conception of justice, that it is true that certain policies are unjust. Let's say that is because we confine claims about truth to what we can argue for from common ground (not that I wish to accept that thesis). But then why is it not permissible to judge, from "within public reason"-which provides a terrain of argument that different conceptions of justice share-that certain principles of justice are true because they can be argued for from common ground? Third, the case for confining truth to judgments made "within"a conception of justice seems to turn on a sharp distinction, reminiscent of Carnap, between internal questions, which arise within a linguistic framework, and external questions, about whether to adopt a framework. But Carnap's distinction did not permit judgments about which framework or language (say, a thing-language or a sense-datum language) is "most reasonable."Our attitude to a framework, on Carnap's account, is a matter of acceptance, not belief or assertion: It is, he says, "not of a cognitive nature."So it is nonsense to describe a framework as true, but that is because the framework is not a matter of belief at all. See "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,"reprinted in Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 205-21. The idea that cognitive appraisal is entirely internal is foreign to public reason.
20. Political Liberalism, p. 129. I will come back later to this passage, which ties together two arguably very different ideas, one about holding a political conception as true, the other about holding it as the one suitable basis for public reason in virtue of its being true.
21. Ibid., p. 92. See also p. 111 ("in the familiar way") and p. 114 ("this idea of truth").
22. On rational intuitionism, and the idea of an independent order of moral values, see Political Liberalism, pp. 91-92; John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 69-83, esp. pp. 70-72.
23. When Rawls states that political liberalism "does without the concept of truth,"he identifies this as one of four elements in the contrast between rational intuitionism and political constructivism. See Political Liberalism, pp. 91-94. But, logically speaking, the alternative to endorsing a "traditional conception"of truth is to not endorse a traditional conception. There are two ways to do that: do without the concept of truth altogether, or endorse a nontraditional (that is, noncorrespondence) interpretation of truth.
24. On the political conception of the person, see Political Liberalism, pp. 18-20, 29-35, 48-54, and 86-88.
25. On the relevant kind of fatality, see Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, pp. 67-68. On truth as standard of correctness, see
26. Nishi Shah, "How Truth Governs Belief," Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 447-82
27. Nishi Shah and David Velleman, "Doxastic Deliberation," The Philosophical Review 114 (2005): 497-534.
28. See Donald Davidson, Truth and Predication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), chap. 3.
29. Gottlob Frege, Basic Laws of Arithmetic, sec. 5, in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), p. 156.
30. Frege, Posthumous Writings, ed. H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, and F. Kaulbach, trans. P. Long and R. White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 129. Neither this remark of Frege's about assertion, nor the previous remark about judgment, depends on his redundancy theory of truth, much less on his view that true sentences denote the same object.
31. On the good of accuracy and sincerity, see Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, chap. 3.
32. For an illuminating discussion of Heidegger on truth, see Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 3.
33. Allan Gibbard initially defended an expressivist account of normative discourse, and argued that such discourse is not fact-stating or truth-apt. See Wise Choice, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 8, 10. For criticisms, see
34. Paul Horwich, "Gibbard's Theory of Norms," Philosophy & Public Affairs 22 (1993): 67-78.
35. Anticipating what will come later: If public reason includes the concept of truth, does this impose a barrier for noncognitivists, who traditionally thought that truth is not in play in normative discourse? The answer lies in the content of the political conception of truth. Noncognitivists have no reason to object to that use, given the relatively minimal commitments that come with it. See Gibbard, Thinking How to Live, chap. 9; Simon Blackburn, Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
36. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 110-11. For a forceful statement of the point, see Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 7.
37. Veritatis Splendor, paragraphs 34, 99. This is an Encyclical by Pope John Paul II on moral theology. See 〈http://www.vatican.va/ holy_father/johnu¶l_ii/encyclicals/documents/ hf_jp-ii_enc_06081993_veritatis-splendor_en.html〉.
38. Ibid., paragraph 4.
39. David Estlund, "The Insularity of the Reasonable: Why Political Liberalism Must Admit the Truth," Ethics 108 (1998): 252-75,
40. "Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason, " Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995): 109-31,
41. In saying that it is very different, I am not criticizing the view. My aim in this section is simply to clarify the No Concept account.
42. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1994), p. 180.
43. See John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000). According to Austin, the moral rectitude of laws depends on conformity with natural law, understood as God's law for humankind.
44. See Paul Horwich, Truth, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
45. See Michael Dummett, "Truth,"in Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 2-3; on the importance of giving an account of the point of the concept of truth, see as well Davidson, Truth and Predication, as well as Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, and Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Dummett focuses on Frege's redundancy theory. "It is part of the concept of truth,"Dummett says, "that we aim at making true statements,"but Frege's account of truth "leaves this quite out of account." For criticisms, see Tyler Burge, " Frege on Truth," in Truth, Thought, Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 130, and more generally, pp. 88-93 (esp. n. 3).
46. See Crispin Wright, "Truth: A Traditional Debate Reviewed," in Truth, ed. Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 203-38, and Wright, Truth and Objectivity, chap. 2.
47. A distinction of some kind between truth and warrant seems important to understanding the practice of deductive argument. Deductive argument is both compelling and useful. It is compelling because it is truth preserving. But it is useful because we are often not antecedently warranted in endorsing the conclusion of a deductive argument, or warranted in endorsing the conclusion independently of its issuing from that argument. See Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), chap. 7.
48. Horwich, Truth; idem, "Norms of Truth and Meaning," in Reflections on Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 104-33, and
49. "The Value of Truth, " Noûs 40 (2006): 347-60,
50. Political Liberalism, p. 129.
51. Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics," in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 227-64, at p. 241. For an instructive discussion of the complexities of Arendt's views, see
52. Linda Zerilli, "Truth and Politics," Theory & Event 9 (2006):
53. Rawls says that citizens fulfill their duty of civility when they explain their positions to other citizens by reference to "the political conception of justice they regard as the most reasonable"("Idea of Public Reason Revisited,"p. 576). To be sure, as Philip Kitcher reminded me, several views may be tied for the most reasonable. The relevance of this is uncertain, because you are still left with the judgment that some are less reasonable. Public reason is animated by concerns about tolerance, not by an unwillingness to make judgments.
54. Political Liberalism, p. 42; "Idea of Public Reason Revisited," p. 766; Political Liberalism, p. 243. Emphases added. A number of other passages in Political Liberalism also focus their concern on appeals to the "whole truth." See pp. 216, 218-19, 225, 242-43.
55. Raz, "Facing Diversity," p. 9.
56. For a sketch of the familiar point, see Horwich, Truth, pp. 2-5. Horwich begins his discussion by saying that "the truth predicate exists solely for the sake of a certain logical need." The political conception does not include any such story about the sole reason, but can incorporate the rest of what is said.
57. Habermas suggests that Rawls endorses the full display argument. See "Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason,"pp. 124-25.
58. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 509.
59. Here I follow Rawls's discussion of "declaration,"in "Idea of Public Reason Revisited," p. 594.
60. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 33-34.
61. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, chap. 2, paragraph 10.
62. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, p. 7.
63. See in particular Richard Rorty, "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright,"in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 41-42. In his comments on my paper at a Stanford Law School colloquium in October 2006, Rorty disagreed that truth is a norm distinct from warrant, for reasons that struck me as assuming some form of pragmatism, and resisted my attribution to him of the cultural proposal. But once we accept that truth and warrant are distinct norms, and distinguish the word "true"from the concept of truth, then we must conclude that Rorty is endorsing something along the lines of the cultural proposal. Or so it still seems to me.
64. Rorty notes the wavering in ibid., pp. 21-22.
65. See Hilary Putnam, "Does the Disquotational Theory Solve All Problems?" in Words and Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 264-78.
66. Rorty, "Is Truth a Goal," pp. 29, 41.
67. Michel Foucault, "The Ethics of Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,"in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 295.