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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (37604)	8/13/2002 12:57:06 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

He is saying that there is no objective truth, everything is relative. I would say that objective truth exists, but we are probably incapable of recognizing it unless, for example, the objective truth is that we are about to be hit by a train.;^)

To: LindyBill who wrote (37604)	8/13/2002 2:23:59 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

>>[Postmodernism] affirms that whatever we accept as truth and even the way we envision truth are dependent on the community in which we participate . . . There is no absolute truth: rather truth is relative to the community in which we participate. <<< ( Grenz, S. J., A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 8.) There is something wrong with that citation. I've never seen Grand Rapids as a location for Cambridge University Press. Live and learn, I guess. That formulation is at least one that fits within a whole series of formulations about postmodernism. It's a little too simple for my tastes. The basic problem with it is the notion of "community." I prefer Rorty's use in which he argues that when we try to persuade one another of either the accuracy of a truth claim we make or of the rightness of a moral claim we make, we are extending the notion of community. And, in doing so, we often find, in a media globalized world, that "community" is very broad, that it carries all sorts of moral axioms, some contradictory, some complementary, some just there. When, for instance, you wished to persuade someone from what you thought of as a more collectivist culture about something to do with a specific issue of individual rights, you might well discover there were such claims either in their tradition or in their newly globalized views of the world. By the same token, they might discover you have some collectivistic notions in your traditions to which they could appeal. And so forth. All this is why I prefer the much more simple formulation that no one has privileged access to either the "truth" or to some sort of god. When we argue we have better values or know more about the truth, we have to persuade others of that; we don't have some transhistorical basis for such assertions. Whew, getting much too academic for a hot Thursday afternoon in Jersey.