Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

3. Truth and Knowledge

‘The man who tells you truth does not exist is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.’

Roger Scruton — Modern Philosophy

In the last chapter, truth was divided into seven main foundational types — empiricism, rationalism, coherentism, correspondence, pragmatism, mysterianism and phenomenology. In this chapter we will be looking at the first four of these.

Knowledge is often defined as justified true belief. On this account, not only do things need to be true, but we must have some justification for claiming that they are true and we must also have a belief in their truth.

This is a tough challenge, and indeed one of the greatest of ancient philosophers — Aristotle — believed it could not be met. This is Aristotle, who, when asked if he was the most intelligent man in the world, argued that it was only because he knew one thing. But the one thing he knew was that he knew nothing.

Aristotle concluded that one way we deal with the matter of truth is just to accept that we must take some things to be brute facts! Some things we just seem forced to accept, even

35