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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
What is truth? This famous question does not express merely the anguish—or the detachment—of the person who, at the moment of choosing, hesitates between deciding for one or the other of the contradictory theses being presented. At a second level, the question no longer concerns merely the content but the very conditions for the decision: in what name, by virtue of what criterion do we say that a given assertion is true while its contrary is false? We could limit ourselves to recognizing in this second phase a particular species of philosophical questioning, which proceeds reflexively from the constituted to the constituent, from the given of the experience to the conditions for the possibility of the experience in general. But in the question about truth, a prejudicial difficulty inevitably arises which is proper to this question and makes it incomparable to any other. How can I be assured of the truth of my assertions about truth without presupposing at the same time a theory for that truth which I am in tact in the process of seeking? In other words, any question about truth moves in a circle since, by demanding a true answer, just like every question it implies that the questioner already knows what is truth at the very moment when he is asking what it is.
1 Aristotle, Metaphysics, book Gamma, 8, 1012 b 8-11. The reader is asked not to see an anachronism in the fact that Aristotle is made to respond to the argument of a skeptic. Although historically skepticism did not appear until Pyrrhon (Third century B.C.), it is clear that this trend had been widely prepared for by the many arguments attributed to the Sophists of the Fifth century B.C., arguments which, in what follows, we shall consequently and recurrently refer to as "skeptic".
2 Ibid., 1012 b 15 sg. M.F. Bumyeat ("Protagoras and Selfrefutation in Later Greek Philosophy", The Philosophical Review, LXXXV, 1976, pp. 44-69) shows that the case of the two propositions is not exactly parallel. Unlike the proposition, "Everything is false", the proposition "Everything is true" is not immediately, but only "dialectically", self-refutable, because it requires the presence of a contradictor.
3 Cf. J.P. Dumont, Le scepticisme et le phénomène, Paris, 1972.
4 The fact that every proposition stated implies its own truth has been recognized from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. Cf. Aristotle: "Socrates is a musician means that this is true" (Metaph., book Delta, 7, 1017 a 33), and Wittgenstein: "What does a proposition's ‘being true' mean? ‘p'is true = p. (That is the answer)" (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Appendix I, section 5).
5 Skepticism, since it is not a theory, should not be confused with agnosticism, which affirms from the outset that being is unknowable or that truth is inaccessible.
6 Metaph., Gamma, 5, 1009 b 29.
7 Plato, Theaetetus, 189 e; Sophist, 263 e; Philebus, 38 ce. Aristotle, Metaph., Gamma, 4, 1006 b 8.
8 Aristotle, On Interpretation (Peri Hermeneias), 3, 17 a 4-5.
9 Id., Metaph., Gamma, 4, 1006 b 8-9.
10 This seems to me to be an argument against Karl Otto Apel's transcendental pragmatism (cf. Transformation der Philosophie, Frankfurt/Main, 1969), which tries to deduce all principles of reason from the "communicational situation" in which men have always found themselves. In fact, if only one single man refuses this situation, communication ceases being universal and therefore cannot serve as absolute foundation. Dialogue is an ideal, not a situation imposed on everyone.
11 Cf. W.O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 1969.
12 In a presentation to the conference of the International Philosophy Institute on "The Present Forms of Truth" (Palermo, Sept. 1985).
13 What Charles H. Kahn calls its "veridical use" (The Verb "be" in Ancient Greek, Dordrecht, 1973).
14 Cf. P. Aubenque, "Syntaxe et sémantique de l'être dans le Poème de Parméni de", in Etudes sur le Poème de Parménide, edited by P. Aubenque, vol. II, Paris, Vrin, 1986.
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