On Bull

A big week for Oxford books in The New Yorker! Truth: A Guide by Simon Blackburn was one of three books featured in Jim Holt’s A Critic At Large piece, “Say Anything.” After a long discussion of the various forms of bullshit – from car salesmen to Martin Heidegger to Louis Althusser) – Holt turns to Blackburn:

In “Truth,” [Blackburn] scrupulously considers the many forms that the case against truth has taken, going back as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, whose famous saying “Man is the measure of all things” was seized upon by Socrates as an expression of dangerous relativism. In its simplest form, relativism is easy to refute. Take the version of it that Richard Rorty, a philosopher who teaches at Stanford, once lightheartedly offered: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” The problem is that contemporary Americans and Europeans won’t let you get away with that characterization of truth; so, by its own standard, it cannot be true. (The late Sidney Morgenbesser’s gripe about pragmatism—which, broadly speaking, equates truth with usefulness—was in the same spirit: “The trouble with pragmatism is that it’s completely useless.”) Then, there is the often heard complaint that the whole truth will always elude us. Fair enough, Blackburn says, but partial truths can still be perfectly objective. He quotes Clemenceau’s riposte to skeptics who asked what future historians would say about the First World War: “They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.”

Read the whole article at New Yorker.com, or an excerpt “On Relativism” from Truth.