Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

technological advance. Nonetheless, it is only a picture. There are unresolved paradoxes in some of the findings of science. There may have to be a very large overhaul of current ideas before these paradoxes can be resolved. Such a paradigm shift may give rise to a very different picture of the world.

The ‘correspondence’ theory of truth suggests there has to be a fact out there in the world to which truth corresponds — and that this is a better guide to the world than ‘provable’ or ‘unprovable’. Truth must correspond with facts about the world, so the correspondence theory of truth is related to empiricism — observable facts — and may allow for a little rationalism. But it probably does not allow for ‘universals’ (of which, more later) or any of the more radical splits in how we view the world that we will be exploring in future chapters.

‘Positivism’ is the view that things are either true by definition or can be shown to be true by reasoning. An offshoot of positivism — logical positivism — took empirical observation and rationalism to be the benchmark for truth. Positivism is thus very close to correspondence theory. To be consistent, both, like naturalism, should allow for the existence of consciousness.

What’s especially telling here is the use that is made (especially by scientists) of mathematics. The reader will note that mathematics is based on analytic truth (and therefore the kind of ‘a priori’ idea introduced by Kant and Schopenhauer). So even if a scientist were to deny that ‘the truth’ about the universe somehow exists independently of us knowing it,

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