Truth Without Borders Workshop

Political Bald-Faced Lies Are Performative Utterances 

Susanna Melkonian-Altshuler (University of Connecticut)

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This talk is about the role of bald-faced lies in politics. Sometimes, political bald-faced lies pass for truth. Certain groups of people behave according to them – behave as if the political bald-faced lies were true. How can this phenomenon be explained? I argue that to explain it we need to take political bald-faced lies to be performative utterances whose goal is to bring about a worldly state of affairs just in virtue of making the utterance. When the former US-President tweets ‘we won the election’, he is trying to make it the case that they have. And indeed, people storm onto the streets to protest election fraud. In this way, the bald-faced lie is successful in bringing about a certain kind of result, that is, the lie passes for truth. 

 

My view of political bald-faced lies is to be preferred over various other views such as the contempt for truth view (Lynch 2021), the deception view (Lackey 2013), and the value-signaling view (Stanley 2012). These alternative views fail to adequately account for how political bald-faced lies pass for truth.

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Do stakes and context influence people’s use of ‘true’?
Kevin Reuter (University of Zurich)

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Starting with Tarski (1944), many philosophers have argued that a fruitful definition of truth must be materially adequate, i.e., must fit with the ordinary notion of truth. It is then usually assumed that this ordinary conception involves something like correspondence with reality. While Arne Næss (1938) –– a pioneer of the experimental philosophy movement –– provided some empirical evidence against the idea that the common-sense view of truth is clearly rooted in correspondence, his methodology was arguably too explicit, e.g., asking people what the common property of true statements is, to reveal how people apply the term ‘true’ in ordinary contexts (for a recent discussion, see Barnard & Ulatowski 2016).

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Within the last two decades, philosophers have increasingly used experimental methods to investigate folk concepts such as knowledge and moral responsibility. More recently, philosophers have begun to run empirical studies on the folk concept of truth. Kölbel (2008) considers the two statements ‘Ali G is very funny’ and ‘Statements concerning what is funny can’t be true or false’. When presenting his students with both statements, a substantial amount considered both of them to be true, which he takes to indicate an ambiguous use of the term ‘true’. Bernard & Ulatowski (2013) show that people will entertain a correspondence notion of truth more strongly in the empirical domain compared with the mathematical domain. Recently, Reuter & Brun (2021) investigated the application of the truth predicate in the empirical domain. Their results suggest that even within the empirical domain, truth is ambiguous between a coherence and a correspondence reading.

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Empirical research on knowledge has shown that stakes and authority can influence people’s use of a term (Buckwalter & Schaffer 2015). In this talk, I present the results of a pilot study which suggests that the higher the stakes and the more scientific a context, the more likely people are to use a correspondence notion of truth in the empirical domain.

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134 participants (61 females, 73 males, 0 non-binary, M(av)=35.62 years) were randomly assigned to three different conditions.

(1) Rolex Case: Low Stakes (vignette taken from Reuter & Brun (2021))

Maria is a watch collector. She keeps all her watches in a safe and knows her collection really well. One day, her friend John asks her, whether she has a 1990 Rolex Submariner in her safe and, if so, could show it to her. Maria answers that she has got a 1990 Rolex Submariner in her safe. After all, she had purchased that watch a few years ago.

 

When Maria opens the safe a little later, she finds out that a burglar has stolen several watches, among them the 1990 Rolex Submariner.

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(2) Sugar-Father: Scientific Context / Mid Stakes

Peter's next chemistry class will be about sugar. At the weekend, his father tells Peter that the chemical composition of sugar is C12 H18 O9. On Monday morning, Sandra asks him what the chemical composition of sugar is: He answers that the chemical composition of sugar is C12 H18 O9, because that is what his father has told him at the weekend.

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When Peter and Sandra attend their chemistry class in the afternoon, they find out that their chemistry textbooks state that the chemical composition is actually C12 H22 O11.

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(3) Sugar-Textbook: Scientific Context / High Stakes

Peter's next chemistry class will be about sugar. So, he decides to read his chemistry textbook over the weekend which states that the chemical composition of sugar is C12 H22 O11. When Sandra and Peter meet up on Monday morning, Sandra asks him what the chemical composition of sugar is: He answers that the chemical composition of sugar is C12 H22 O11, because that is what he has read in the textbook.

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When Peter and Sandra attend their chemistry class in the afternoon, they find out that scientists have recently discovered that the chemical composition is actually C12 H18 O9.

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After the participants read one of the three vignettes, the were asked “Was Peter's [Maria’s] answer true or false?”, and responded with either “True” or “False”. Previous research by Reuter & Brun (2021) suggests that in the Rolex case many participants believe the protagonist to be operating with a coherence reading of ‘true’. I predicted that in a more scientific context (Chemistry setting), more participants would select ‘False’ as an answer indicating a correspondence reading of ‘true’. Furthermore, I varied the stakes of the scenarios: Whereas in Sugar-Father, Peter’s father provides false information about the molecular composition of sugar (Mid Stakes), in Sugar-Textbook, it is the textbook that contains false information about sugar. It is a reasonable assumption that textbooks containing wrong information constitute a higher stake context than if a single person provides wrong information.

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Pairwise comparisons were conducted using Pearson χ2-Test. Differences between the Rolex and Sugar-Father (χ2 = 19.60; p < 0.001) as well as Rolex and Sugar-Textbook (χ2 = 7.51; p = 0.006) were significant. The two sugar cases failed to be significant, but only marginally so (χ2 = 3.41; p = 0.065). The percentage of true-responses are shown in Figure 1 below.

 

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The outcome in the Rolex case replicates previous findings from Reuter & Brun, showing that laypeople have a tendency to entertain a coherence reading of the term ‘true’ in non-scientific but empirical contexts. However, in the scientific contexts of chemistry, the results were reversed, indicating that a majority of people consider a statement false that does not correspond to reality. Additionally, for the condition in which the stakes were highest, 4 out of 5 participants considered a claim false that relied on wrong textbook information.

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The results of this study are preliminary. Nonetheless, they do indicate that the meaning of the term ‘true’ is relative to context and stakes. I will discuss the relevance of these studies for research on the folk concept of truth, as well as philosophical debates on truth. Furthermore, I will argue that empirical research on the folk concept of truth is crucial to “convey the central role that truth and related concepts play in our everyday lives” (Stated Aim of the Truth without Border Project).

 

References:

Barnard, R. and Ulatowski, J. (2013). ‘Truth, Correspondence, and Gender,’ Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4(4), pp. 621–638.

Barnard, R. and Ulatowski, J. (2016). ‘Tarski’s 1944 Polemical Remarks and Naess’ ‘Experimental Philosophy’,’ Erkenntnis 81(3), pp. 457–477.

Buckwalter, W., & Schaffer, J. (2015). Knowledge, stakes, and mistakes. Noûs, 49(2), 201-234.

Næss, A. [original: Ness](1938). ‘Truth’ as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers. Oslo: Jacob Dybwad.

Kölbel, M. (2008). ‘‘True’ as Ambiguous,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77(2), pp. 359–384.

Reuter, K., & Brun, G. (2021). Empirical Studies on Truth and the Project of Re‐engineering Truth. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

Tarski, A. (1944). ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, pp. 341–375.

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Why We Need Both Realist and Pragmatist Notions of Truth

Céline Henne (University of Cambridge)

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What norm of truth should guide our conversations and inquiries? In this paper, I argue that there are two distinct norms of truth needed for our conversational and epistemic practices, depending on whether we are making and evaluating claims within a settled conceptual framework (“Is it true that there were more people at Trump’s inauguration than at Obama’s inauguration?”) or whether we are reconfiguring an unsettled conceptual framework (“Is it true that trans women are women?”). One is a realist notion of truth, the other is a pragmatist notion of truth. The paper has three main parts.

 

I start by presenting and contrasting the realist and pragmatist notions of truth, broadly construed. At first sight, they seem to be irreconcilable. According to the realist notion, whether a belief is true depends on how things are, and is independent from whether the belief is verified, coherent, useful, etc. (Kirkham 1992; Alston 1996; Lynch 2009). According to the pragmatist notion, the truth of an idea depends on (or is constituted by) its workableness (James 1909), its warranted assertibility (Dewey 1941), its ability to stand up to indefinitely continued inquiry (Peirce 1998; Misak 1991).

 

I argue that these two notions should not be in conflict, because they do not have the same (legitimate) scope. I give a preliminary justification of this claim by showing that pragmatists and realists are not usually interested in the same things. The realist applies her notion of truth to propositions such as “snow is white” or “the cat is on the mat”. Surely the truth of such propositions only depends on how things are: whether snow is in fact white or the cat is indeed on the mat. Pragmatists, on the other hand, often talk about the truth of general ideas or conceptions such as the idea of “the atom, of inertia, of energy, of reflex action, or of fitness to survive” (James 2000, 150). They reject a representationalist theory of language and truth, according to which terms and predicates correspond to pre-carved natural kinds or structures in the world.

In other words, it seems that pragmatists are primarily interested in evaluating conceptual frameworks, whereas realists are concerned with the truth of particular claims. Unfortunately, the two parties share a common mistake, which is to generalize their view of truth beyond their legitimate scope.

 

Building on these preliminary remarks, I develop my account of the two norms and their respective scopes. Realist truth is adapted to what I call “framed” situations: when we already have a settled conceptual framework in place. The notion of realist truth I defend is deflationary, in the sense that it does not appeal to a substantive property that all true statements possess. Following Sellars (1968), truth is a norm that follows from the normativity of language itself. Concepts have (implicit and explicit) semantic rules governing their correct application. Whether the correctness conditions are satisfied depends on how things are in the world (in the same way that whether the conditions for a checkmate are fulfilled depends on the position of the pieces on the board), and it does not depend on whether we did, will, or are able to verify that they are satisfied. Hence, it fulfils the two conditions for a realist notion of truth.

 

Pragmatist truth is the norm adapted to what I call “framing” situations: when we are still building, refining, or reconfiguring our conceptual tools. I examine how the three main notions of pragmatist truth (Jamesian, Deweyan, and Peircian) can operate as norms for framing. To put it briefly, the concept or idea’s “truth” can be nothing over and beyond its ability to work in various situations in which it is or will be used (solving problems, producing the intended consequences, promoting inference, guiding our actions).

 

I briefly distinguish my account from Lynch’s alethic pluralism: the variation in scope (framed/framing) cuts across all domains of discourse (scientific, moral, aesthetic, etc.).

 

Finally, I expose the dangers of generalizing either notion across the board. In framed situations, there is a fact of the matter about whether a claim is correctly assertible, independently from our purposes or the consequences of asserting the claim. I will not repeat the well-known objections made against the pragmatist theory of truth. Instead, I will emphasize that a person following the pragmatist norm instead of the realist norm in a framed situation is both disregarding the facts and breaking the rules of social cooperation, by ignoring the rules of the conceptual framework. However, we might need to change the rules of the conceptual framework, because they are defective in some way. We then move to a framing situation.

 

In framing situations, following the realist norm of truth leads to fruitless metaphysical debates and dangerous essentialism. The construction and revision of concepts is taken to be a matter of accurately representing the world. In other words, the rules governing our concepts (e.g., object, personal identity, woman) should directly answer to and align with the structure of the world (what objects, personal identity, and women really are). Here, I follow Thomasson’s alternative view of metaphysics as “normative conceptual work” (Thomasson 2017; 2020). I also respond to the realist’s worry that, if we follow the pragmatist norm of truth, our framing inquiries cannot be answerable to the facts or reality at all. Far from “anything goes”, I show that Dewey’s notion of truth as “operational correspondence” (Dewey 1941) rests on the coordination between facts and ideas.

 

I conclude by emphasizing the flexibility of my proposal, both with regard to the notions of truth at play (e.g., realist truth can be Tarskian or Sellarsian, the pragmatist notion of truth can be Jamesian, Deweyan, Peircian) and the very use of the term “truth”. There are good reasons to prefer keeping the term “truth” for realist truth: it seems to better align with our ordinary use of “true”, and the use of the same term for both realist and pragmatist truth is conducive to the confusion of the two norms.

 

References

Alston, William P. 1996. A Realist Conception of Truth. Cornell University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv75d3h3.

Dewey, John. 1941. “Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth.” The Journal of Philosophy 38 (7): 169–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/2017978.

James, William. 1909. The Meaning of Truth. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.

———. 2000. Pragmatism and Other Writings. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin Books.

Kirkham, Richard L. 1992. Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Lynch, Michael P. 2009. Truth as One and Many. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Misak, Cheryl. 1991. Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth. Oxford University Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1998. The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893-1913). Bloomington, United States: Indiana University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=923144.

Sellars, Wilfrid. 1968. Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Routledge & K. Paul.

Thomasson, Amie L. 2017. “What Can We Do, When We Do Metaphysics?” In The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, edited by Giuseppina D’Oro and Søren Overgaard, 1st ed., 101–21. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316344118.007.

———. 2020. “A Pragmatic Method for Normative Conceptual Work.” In Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics, by Amie L. Thomasson, 435–58. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198801856.003.0021.

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Why Truth Deflates

Matthew Shields (University College Dublin)

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Abstract: In this paper, I argue that there is an unappreciated but crucial value that deflationary truth adds to our linguistic and cognitive lives: it allows us to make sense of the world from perspectives other than our own. 

 

In the first section, I begin by laying out a certain inflationary view of truth. This neo-pragmatist approach seeks to ground our accounts of truth in our practices of inquiry and is defended separately, but in kindred forms by both Hilary Putnam (1994) and Huw Price (2011). For Putnam and Price, the value or function of truth lies in how it allows speakers to view one another as talking and thinking about the same thing despite differences in belief or worldview. In particular, both Putnam and Price argue that truth allows speakers and thinkers from different conceptual backgrounds to construe themselves as genuinely disagreeing with one another; truth is “the grit that makes our individual opinions engage with one another” (Price 2011, 169). These are not traditional inflationary views: they require no metaphysical commitments on the part of the theorists’ advocating for them. But they are nonetheless inflationary because they claim that speakers take one another to be mutually accountable to something over and above their respective idiolects and webs

of belief.

 

After sketching this Putnam-Price inflationism about truth, I argue in the second and main section of the paper that while Putnam and Price are right methodologically to push for grounding our view of truth in our practices of inquiry, they nonetheless underestimate the full range of these practices. Putnam-Price views cannot account for contexts of inquiry where speakers do judge themselves to be talking and thinking past one another. I draw here on the later work of Thomas Kuhn (2002). Kuhn argues that if we always default to the assumption that speakers are talking and thinking about the same things as we are (because they use the same words we do or engage in seemingly kindred linguistic behavior), we will be able unable to make sense of speakers from different historical moments and cultural backgrounds.

 

For example, Kuhn describes trying to make sense of Aristotle’s account of motion and finding his texts riddled with “egregious errors, both of logic and observation”, speculations of a “dreadfully bad physical scientist” (2002, 16). After “wrestling with [these] nonsense passages”, Kuhn comes to a realization: “[T]he fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I’d never dreamed possible” (16). For Aristotle, ‘motion’ means a change in quality, rather than change in position of an object (as it does for many contemporary speakers). The catalyst for this shift in Kuhn’s perspective is that Aristotle’s “words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine” (16). To engage in this form of inquiry – to learn to view the world from a perspective that fundamentally differs from one’s own – we cannot default to the assumption that we are samesaying with such speakers, or else they will continue to show up to us as making “baffling” or “absurd” errors in their linguistic and epistemic behavior.

 

For Putnam’s and Price’s speakers, however, for whom truth is always inflationary and where, as such, they take one another to be mutually accountable to something over and above their utterances and thoughts and therefore to be samesaying with one another, speakers from distant historical moments or different cultural backgrounds will inevitably show up to them as absurd or nonsensical. Putnam-Price speakers will always substitute our contemporary understanding of the relevant words or expressions onto the target speaker’s linguistic behavior because they will assume these speakers are engaged in the same project of getting something over and above their respective idiolects and webs of belief right. But Kuhn shows that we have an entire practice of inquiry where we do not assume that simply because speakers are using the same words we are or engage in

seemingly kindred linguistic behavior, they must therefore be talking and thinking about the same things as we are. This assumption is in fact an impediment to inquiry where we work to acquire the language and concepts of historically or culturally distant speakers and thereby understand the world as they do.

 

To engage in these practices, then, truth cannot be exclusively inflationary for us in the way Putnam and Price argue. Truth must also be able to deflate for us such that we can view another speaker’s utterances and thoughts as the product of a distinct language. We must be able to treat other speaker’s utterances and thoughts as a self-contained unit that, despite their truth-aptness, are not primarily accountable to a shared extralinguistic, extramental world. For example, I need not take Aristotle’s use of ‘motion’ to refer to the same kind or state of affairs as my use of ‘motion’; I can view Aristotle’s use of this word and its corresponding meaning as a product of an interrelated web of semantic and epistemic commitments that are not primarily accountable to something over and above those commitments and therefore do not necessarily implicate views contradictory with my own. Because truth does not only inflate for me, but also deflates, I am able to view other speakers as possessing perspectives on the world that I do not yet have, but can nonetheless come to grasp.

 

In the third and final section, I show that this role for deflationary truth differs from those typically invoked – for example, serving as a device of generalization, as Horwich (1999) argues, and grounding the varied pragmatics of truth talk, as, for example, Rorty (2000), Grover (2001), and Kukla and Winsberg (2016) argue. I also show that the position I defend accords with a certain pluralism about truth (Wyatt and Lynch 2016).

 

References

Grover, D. (2001). “The Prosentential Theory: Further Reflections on Locating Our Interest in Truth” in The Nature of Truth, ed. M.P. Lynch (Cambridge MA: MIT Press): 505-526.

Horwich, P. (1998). Truth. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Price, H. (2011). “Truth as Convenient Friction” in Naturalism Without Mirrors (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 163-183.

Putnam, H. (1994). Words and Life, ed. J. Conant (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press).

Kuhn, T.S. (2002). The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essay, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, eds. J. Conant and J. Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Kukla, R. and Winsberg, E. “Deflationism, Pragmatism, and Metaphysics” in Meaning Without Representation: Essays on Truth, Expression, Normativity, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), eds. S. Gross, N. Tebben, and M. Williams: 25-46.

Rorty, R. (2000). “Universality and Truth” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. R.B. Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd): 1-30.

Wyatt, J. and Lynch, M.P. (2016). “From One to Many: Recent Work on Truth”. American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (4): 323-340.

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Disagreement and Entrenchment in Morality and Politics: Reason, Passion, and the Point of Moral and Political Discourse

Drew Johnson (University of Connecticut)

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Disagreement in moral and political matters is particularly widespread and often resists easy resolution. Recent work by social epistemologists and psychologists has offered useful tools for analyzing disagreement and polarization both online and in person, by describing how general cognitive biases and heuristics, as well as the affective dimension of normative judgments, make certain moral and political beliefs resistant to rational revision through reasonable discourse. This talk discusses the affective and social aspects of moral and political judgment, how they contribute to explanations of deep disagreement and polarization, and their implications for the possibility of moral and political knowledge.

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Truth and Negation in Nāgārjuna’s Catuṣkoṭi

Chris Rahlwes (University of Connecticut)

 

Abstract: From Priest and Garfield (2002), a common dialetheist reading of Nāgārjuna’s (c. 200 CE) catuṣkoṭi (tetralemma or four-cornered argument) has formed. The typical logical structure of Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi is taken to be A, Not A (¬A), Both (A &¬A), and Neither (¬[A∨¬A]). The dialetheist reading holds that these four options establish four different truth-values: True, False, Both, Neither. This reading finds its origin in Garfield’s (1995) translation and commentary on Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā verse 18.8. This verse establishes the relationship between everything (sarva) and truth (tathya) with the catuṣkoṭi’s framework. Nāgārjuna states that ‘everything is true’, ‘everything is not true’, ‘everything is true and untrue, ‘everything is not true and not untrue’. This is further complicated by the Indian and Tibetan commentarial tradition’s appeal to Nāgārjuna’s two-truths doctrine of conventional truth (saṃvṛti satya) and ultimate truth (paramārtha satya) to explain the four corners. This leads to two different terms and concepts for ‘truth’: tathya and satya. The question I address is: how do these two terms relate to each other for Nāgārjuna? In addressing this question, I further address the question of what exactly the relationship between Nāgārjuna’s use of negation and falsity is. Through these questions, I propose that Nāgārjuna adopts a correspondence theory of truth relativized by the two-truths doctrine and that he does not take negation as truth-functional. Without a truth-functional negation, Nāgārjuna is not led to adopting a truth-value of Both nor a truth-value of Neither.

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Reflections on the Relation Between Knowledge and Truth

Su Wu (Sun Yat-sen University), Jing Zhu (Xiamen University), Jiawei Xu (Xiamen University), Junwei Huang (Huaqiao University)

 

Abstract: Mainstream epistemology assumes a very close relationship between knowledge and truth. For example, the JTB analysis of knowledge takes truth as a necessary condition of knowledge. In another word，knowledge implies truth. However, we will find that this understanding of the relation between knowledge and truth is puzzling and confusing with some reflection.

 

Firstly, students in their first lesson of epistemology are often troubled with the definition that knowledge is necessarily true: A proposition can be taken as knowledge only if it is true, but how the truth value of the proposition can be known at the very beginning. Isn’t there a circularity in the definition?

 

Second is the issue of fallibilism and skepticism. Is knowledge fallible? If knowledge is fallible, how can we still say that knowledge must be true? While if it is not, then how can we deal with the threat of skepticism? 

 

The third is closely related to the second. There are some typical kinds of knowledge, such as scientific knowledge or historical knowledge, that can be updated by the discovery of new evidence or the development of new technology. Is it possible to have knowledge in these fields?

 

These are fundamental philosophical issues of great significance and need to be taken seriously. And the first step to handling these problems should be to rethink the relation between knowledge and truth.

 

Taking truth as a necessary condition of knowledge is problematic in at least three aspects：

 

1) From a theoretical point of view, it does not apply to the actual or possible epistemic inquiry of human beings. The truth condition presupposes a third party with the perspective of God. In the actual epistemic inquiry, there is no such third party, so it is impossible to first decide whether a proposition is true or not, and then judge if it is knowledge. On the contrary, when we can determine a proposition is true, we will take ourselves as knowing the proposition. 

 

2) According to evidence from experimental epistemology, it is not supported by the common-sense understanding of the relationship between knowledge and truth. It is found that the truth condition of knowledge is not an essential part of folk epistemology, and knowledge is not always necessary to be strictly accurate. Meanwhile, a belief that can be wrong or need double-check can also be attributed as knowledge.

 

3) Considering the normality aspect of epistemology, it cannot provide useful guidance for epistemic inquiry. The truth condition can only give a standard to evaluate the result of the epistemic inquiry from a retrospective view. It can only tell us whether a certain epistemic inquiry has succeeded. But a theory with normality should also tell us how to succeed, which means that it can also guide how to achieve our epistemic goals from a forward-looking view.

 

Therefore, this paper attempts to propose a new epistemology framework of the relation between knowledge and truth: We propose that the aim of the epistemic inquiry is truth, which means that all epistemic inquiries are attempts to approximate truth. However, in different situations, the efforts we can make and need to make to approximate truth are different. Knowledge is a sign of where we can reasonably end our epistemic inquiry and take it as an epistemic achievement.

 

Above all, the aim of epistemic inquiries is to approximate truth. The close relationship between knowledge and truth is not that knowledge implies truth, but that knowledge is the epistemic product obtained by seeking truth. And with the goal of truth, knowledge can have a cross-situation core behind multiple standards.

 

At the same time, knowledge is a sign that we can reasonably end our epistemic inquiry. In different cultures, fields, and contexts, there are differences in the availability of various epistemic resources, the understanding of acceptable methods, the degree of approximation to the truth that is allowed or required, etc. Therefore, although knowledge is the product of truth-seeking across all these situations, its constitutive elements and standards can be very diverse.

 

This framework can well respond to the three problems raised to the traditional understanding of the relation between knowledge and truth.

 

1) The new framework does not need to presuppose a third party with the perspective of God. It is more appliable to possible epistemic inquiry practice of human beings, which is obtaining knowledge during the continuous procedure of approximating the truth.

 

2) The new framework can better accommodate the empirical results on folk epistemology so far. Based on the resources and standards in our daily life, we agree that when the epistemic product is close enough to the truth or of enough certainty for our current purpose, there is no need to make additional epistemic efforts and the inquiry is allowed to stop.

 

3) The new framework focuses not only on epistemic consequence but also on epistemic procedures. Taking knowledge as a sign of where the epistemic inquiry can stop makes it possible to provide more direct guidance on our practice of truth-seeking (of course, the specific guidance depends on the resources and standards of the specific situation).

 

In addition, the framework has some advantages:

 

On the one hand, it unifies knowledge under the epistemic aim of truth. Therefore, knowledge can be distinguished from other rational goals, such as maximizing one’s utility by making the right decision for actions. Meanwhile, it also makes knowledge not just a polysemy with loose and various meanings in different contexts.

 

On the other hand, such a framework can help answer that in what sense we can take false propositions in previous science or primitive society as knowledge. Those propositions, which are false from the perspective of the latest science and modern society, can be counted as knowledge by historians of science and anthropologists because those are also epistemic products obtained by seeking truth, based on the resources and standards at that time.  Even though we may think that their methods of approximating truth are far from efficient or accurate according to our current resources and standards in science or society. In addition, this framework also helps us to realize the huge differences between epistemic inquiry such as academic research, which has abundant resources and extremely high standards, and ordinary epistemic inquiry in our daily life.