Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

empiricism — which some, including Kant, have done. (Phenomenology does not however deny the outside world — it is not idealist.)

It has to be said that not all philosophers think that truth is such a big deal. They might, for instance, just see ‘truth’ as being about how what are considered as honest statements are written down, spoken about or thought about. This is known as the ‘deflationary theory of truth’, thus, ‘deflationism’. So, for instance, ‘ducks quack’ has no meaning beyond quacking ducks! This may seem a somewhat trivial point, but the really interesting thing about deflationism is that it suggests there is no independent thing called ‘the truth’ into which we can put our ideas about the world. We have this tendency, both to reify things (such as making universals into eternal forms, of which more later) and also to commodify and materialise things. Truth is thus rendered into a commodity that we can ‘gather’ as if it were a possession that we can enjoy. Deflationism is, in part, trying to get us away from this tendency.

From Ernst Mach there is the idea of ‘instrumentalism’, which asserts that scientific theories are just useful instruments for explaining the results of experiments and observations. This is a form of ‘anti-realism’ — in this case, questioning the idea that reality corresponds with the theories that we use to describe it. Quantum physics, for instance, has very considerable predictive power in terms of what results we should expect in experiments, but it seems impossible to either visualise or model the theory onto actual things in the real

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