Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

2. Foundations

‘We are theologians in childhood, metaphysical in youth and natural philosophers in virility.’

Auguste Comte — The Foundations of Sociology

Before beginning this chapter properly, it’s worth pointing out that there is a difference between what we mean by truth, what we mean by truth-seeking and what we mean by knowledge. Many of the terms used in this and the next chapter could apply to all three — for instance, there can be an empirical truth, empirical truth-seeking and empirical knowledge — but some terms belong in only one of the categories I have mentioned. If you do a search for types of truth you’ll likely get coherence, correspondence, realism and deflationism — all of which will get a mention in the chapters that follow. Given this, it might be fair to say that what I am mostly investigating here is types of truth-seeking rather than types of truth itself. This is perhaps a subtle distinction, but I feel it is worth mentioning. Anyway, let’s begin.

Both Einstein and Wittgenstein said that the most amazing thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible — so a very clear sense of explanations and truths is working out there in the world, even whilst truth seems so difficult to

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