Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

So far, in this chapter, we’ve considered truth or truth-seeking mostly in terms of empiricism (observation), rationalism and idealism. Scepticism — which was listed as our fourth truth option above — will be discussed below. I also want to make brief mention of a few others — some of which are of particular relevance to the argument of the book going forward. These are Pragmatism, Coherentism, Phenomenology, Deflationism and Mysterianism.

Pragmatism is the idea that the truth that we describe is only what is most useful to us for our human projects. Whether pragmatism is genuinely a type of truth or a type of truth-seeking or a type of knowledge is debatable — perhaps it’s a little of all three. Nevertheless it’s worth mentioning early on in the book, as pragmatism has an impact on all areas of our discussions — and especially for morality, justice and law.

Coherentism is the idea that there is no ultimate basis for knowledge, but there is a system of thoughts that hang together (thus, ‘cohere’) as a sensible story. We will examine coherence a little more in the next chapter.

Phenomenology is the idea that all that’s known of the world is through our direct experience of it — and taking ‘direct experience’ to mean something different from merely the gathering of empirical knowledge. We might describe phenomenology as ‘embodied truth’, and this idea is important to the way the discussion of the book is developed. Phenomenology is especially pertinent to the idea that ‘relation’ is

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