Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

key to our understanding of the world.

The ‘deflationary theory of truth’, or, deflationism, seems to be suggesting that truth is not such a big deal. ‘Truth’, for instance, might be seen simply as being about how honest statements are written down, spoken about or thought about. 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. This is an important theme that will crop up in other areas of the book.

I use the term ‘mysterianism’ in this book to include a belief in the supernatural and a belief in transcendent, or formal, truth. I include religious belief within this description. It is worth mentioning ‘intuition’ at this point. Intuition is a term that has changed its meaning somewhat over the years. To know by intuition is often now taken to be a way by which we perceive mystical or occult knowledge, but it previously meant something like being able to apprehend ‘innate’ truths. We might, for instance, recognise the Platonic forms (formal truth) by intuition. So intuition covers both types of mysterianism that I’ve defined — the supernatural and the transcendent. The term is

32