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PART I
THE UNIVERSITY AND LIFE
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1
LIFE IN TRUTH AND TRUTH IN LIFE
Introduction
In this, the twenty-first century, we are being told that we live in a post-truth age. How might the signals here be read? Is it that there is a lack of care about truth? Is it that a background belief in truth has been shed? The very concept of truth has fallen out of the opinion-forming culture. If someone uses the phrase ‘the truth is that … ’, it now seems to indicate that a dialogue is closing down and not opening up. It is a paradox that ‘truth’ has come to signal something that is untrue (Rider, 2018). So, is this a truth-less age?
These are matters of concern in this inquiry. It has long been assumed that the university could be counted as an institution that took truth seriously. Its principal activities, in research and teaching, were motivated by a desire to get at truth. Certainly, what counted as truth might change and there would be disputes over it. The medieval university, through its scholastic culture of teaching and learning, had a curriculum fused with understandings of argumentation, reason and deduction and logic. Scholarly techniques developed that allowed scholars opportunities to interrogate the texts of the Greeks and the reliable knowledge that ensued gave the mediaeval universities status in affairs of the state and its administration. Over time, even though there developed something of a ‘conflict of the faculties’ (Kant, 1979), and even though there emerged a sense that the truths of one discipline were worthy of a higher status than the truths of another, still it was understood that the life of the university was bound up with truth.
However, now, not least against a background in which truth as a category is a target of suspicion in the wider world, it is not at all clear that the university can anymore be assumed to be intimately associated with truth. The term itself is notably absent from university websites and rectors’ addresses; and even from statements about methodology in academic papers and theses. A concern with truth as such seems to be fading in higher education, if it has not altogether vanished. If there remains such a connection (‘university’–‘truth’), it is in need of a re-interpretation and re-statement.
There is, however, an even deeper concern here. That the university is a truth-oriented institution is indicative of a certain way of life held to be valuable in the university. And this way of life hinges on a fundamental belief that truth matters in life generally. Without this tacit value background in favour of truth,1 inquiry becomes a mere technical endeavour, at best concerned with arcane matters of methodology and, at worst, a matter of academic might. The matter of truth, accordingly, is bound up with the kind of life that the university represents.2 These, then, are the theses of this opening chapter.
Hunting for truth
Wrapped up here are the matters of power and authority and, indeed, life itself. We may think of Socrates being condemned to death for corrupting the minds of the young of Athens or Galileo pointing, on the basis of new observations, to the sun lying at the centre of the Earth’s motions but with his way being barred by the ecclesiastical authorities. Truth has had a history of trying to negotiate with power. And in suppressing truth, power has implicitly suppressed life. However, contemporary positions have taken on an even more radical edge in suggesting that truth as such is questionable. Such a public scepticism towards truth has found backing in philosophy and social theory. Here are three examples.
Firstly, in analytical philosophy, for some time it was commonly agreed that what counted as ‘knowledge’ was ‘justified true belief’. All three conditions – justification, truth and belief – had to be met for knowledge to be present. However, Edmund Gettier pointed out – in a three-page paper (1963) – that there were situations in which the three conditions could all be said to be met but where we would normally decline to confer the status of knowledge on a person’s situation. A huge supplementary literature has arisen, examining many different kinds of example, both for and against Gettier’s position. Characteristic of examples in support of Gettier – including those provided by Gettier himself – are situations in which a person (p) justifiably believes x and x is true, and it turns out that x is indeed true but not for the reasons that p believes, but for some other quite spurious and even accidental reason. All three conditions – justification, truth and belief – may be present but their co-presence does not seem to amount to ‘knowledge’.
The point here is that truth is central to knowledge but that locating its place in relation to knowledge is difficult. Does it need to be backed up by belief? Does it need to be backed up by justification? Such matters take on practical point, and connect directly with academic life in the contemporary internet age. In a large research team (consisting perhaps of scores or even hundreds of participants across the globe), does every member of the team need to subscribe to (to ‘believe in’) the team’s truth claims, or is it sufficient that only a large proportion of the group assent? Would it be justifiable – as with parliamentary committee reports – for a sub-set of such a team to issue a minority report? But, in any event, in an internet age, in which not every member of the team can be intimately involved in every aspect of the research process, what of justification? In what aspects of the research process does justification lie, if at no time has every member of the team been involved? In short, it is far from clear that truth can be given a precise location in academic activities.
Take a second example. Over the past forty years, spreading out from work in the sociology of science, academic work has come to be understood by virtue of the networks that constitute the research process (Kuhn, 2012). In turn, the category of truth appears to dissolve into those networks or relationships. Indeed, back in the 1970s, the ‘Edinburgh School’ of the sociology of science was associated with the ‘strong programme’ that explicitly nailed its colours to this truth-dissolving mast (Edge, 1976).
More recently, that approach has been endorsed in the actor, inspired by Bruno Latour (2007). In this perspective, networks have been substantially widened so as to capture the micro-detail of the networks – not just scientific but also social and political – in which scientists come at their readings of the world. This philosophy – for that is what it has become – opens to a large number of ‘worlds’, with few explicit concerns about truth. And if it has an ontology (if it has a sense of the world as such), it is a rather thin ontology, since it denies to itself any chance of being able to assess the veracity of understandings in terms of their relationships to the world. So the category of truth has tended to fade away, in these frameworks within social theory. We have life – in these epistemic networks – but it is life without the category of truth. And it is life without a proper account of what is to count as the world. It is an impoverished life.
Our last example is that of Foucault (1980, 2002). Truth occupies an ambiguous place in his work, which has played an influential role in showing how knowledge and power have been intimately associated in the evolution of disciplines. By and large, Foucault evades the matter of truth. For him, knowledge has to be understood as regimes of power, an insight that he backs up with voluminous historical studies into the ‘archaeology’ of knowledge in its emergence of disciplines and their associated practices. Notably, Foucault revealed the regimes of ‘biopower’ that social and psychological disciplines have apparently legitimised.
The problem here is that in pressing the association between knowledge and power – and, implicitly, with life – the category of truth is dissolved. It is pertinent that Foucault (1980: 118) was uncomfortable with the concept of ideology, being happier to stick to his theoretical guns of regimes and discourses. Ideology, after all, gains its traction precisely from its association with truth. In observing that a discourse is ideological, we are implicitly pointing to its partiality, to its being economical with the truth (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). It is not the case that ideologies are untrue but rather that they gain their force from being highly selective. They pick up on matters of inequality, or freedom or collectivity but then spin matters to their own ends. Ideologies have bits of reason and the world on their side. It’s just that their accounts ultimately don’t pass muster. They have only glimmers of truth in them. This kind of analysis is denied to Foucault, who has nothing to say about truth as such.
There are, then, examples in philosophy and social theory that have helped to undermine the very idea of truth. Truth appears to have little going for it, even within the academic profession. It no longer seems to be part of the self-understandings of the academic community, which seems to want to get along without reference to truth, and even has developed a phobia toward it (Bailey, 2001). Variously, truth is either difficult to pin down, or it is difficult to give a robust account of truth, or it is unnecessary for the purposes of giving a fair understanding of the world or, on examination, it just dissolves. This is not a needle-in-the-haystack problem for it is not even clear that there is any such needle (of truth).
This is a matter that the university ignores at its peril, not least amid accusations within the academic community of texts as having unwarranted veracity, of researchers recanting their own data even after publication, of a wider public accusing the academy of being ideologically driven and of a contemporary discourse of ‘post-truth’. The matter of truth bears directly on what is it to be a university and of the form of life that supports truth-oriented inquiry (cf Benson and Stangroom (2006: 140)). And if suspicions grow that truth doesn´t matter, even in the academy, then it is not clear that it matters at all.
Expanding the standard accounts
There are three standard accounts of truth – truth as correspondence, as coherence and as use. Each has value but other accounts are surely needed for the university of the twenty-first century. Truth-as-argument; truth-as-conflict; truth-as-venturing; truth-as-aesthetic-experience – all these need to come into play. Truth has to be worked at, and conflicts negotiated. Truth, accordingly, is bound up with life. But we are running ahead of ourselves.
For a long time, Western philosophy understood truth as a relationship between propositions and the world. Propositions were felt to be truthful providing that they corresponded to the world. However, this correspondence idea of truth ran into several difficulties.
Firstly, it implied that it was possible to gain access to the world, such that propositions could be judged as to the degree to which they corresponded to the world. But just such a direct access to the world had long been doubted, not least in Kant’s philosophy (Kant, 1999). All that is available is a hope in some kind of correspondence with the world (Meillassoux, 2014). Secondly, the correspondence theory of truth harboured a mirror view of truth, a view debunked by the American philosopher Rorty (2017). This mirror image was unduly static, implied an unrealistic isomorphism between truth claims and the world and failed to reflect the way in which the category of truth is deeply embedded in life. And thirdly, it conveyed a sense that truth expressed a separateness between human beings and an external world of hard physical objects. This presupposition seemed to rule out of court the idea of truth in matters of personal and social value and in practical matters of life. It also implicitly ruled offside the possibility of truth coming into play in indigenous and traditional cultures, in which humanity is understood as being part of the world and not as separate from it. In short, the correspondence account of truth was life-less.
The coherence theory of truth took an altogether different tack. It said that if we cannot have direct access to an external world, at least we can assess the degree to which true propositions support (‘cohere with’) each other. This is a view that has been endorsed by the German philosopher and theorist, Jurgen Habermas (1984). Habermas has sought to lay bare the basis of reason, especially as it lies within modernity. For Habermas, human collective speech is rational insofar as it complies with certain ‘validity claims’ inherent in the give and take of a serious discourse. On this view, reason lies within dialogue, and not beyond it.3, 4
Support for such a view lies in a sense that this is in fact how, to a large extent, we assess claims to truth. We wonder to what extent a claim makes sense in relation to other contiguous claims. This idea of truth-as-coherence finds warrant in Thomas Kuhn’s (2012) idea of ‘normal science’, characterised by often long periods where academic work takes place within largely-taken-for-granted frameworks. Individual mavericks, who try to run counter to the conventional pictures, run the risk of excommunication from the research community. Imre Lakatos’ (1999) idea of a research programme correspondingly too underwrote a sense of research work hanging together and which gave a programme coherence over time. There was life here, of a sort.
Unfortunately, the real world has a habit of breaking in, and disrupting proceedings. The truth of taken-for-granted frameworks characteristically breaks down in the end, as features of the world press themselves forward, requiring new kinds of truth claim. The usefulness of the old truth claims expires and new ones are needed. Hence arose a more pragmatic sense of truth. In the hands of its architects, such as John Stuart Mill (2001), Charles Sanders Peirce (2011) and William James (2000), this was less to do with the practical usefulness of a truth claim but was much more bound up with its value in doing justice to all the evidence and experience that the world offers. Certainly, there was an offshoot at work here, namely that a test of a theory is its performance in the world. Does it live in the real world? In the end, however, this theory of truth has been traduced into a sense that usefulness is understood as practical use in the world. And this has seemed to provide a legitimation of contemporary valuations of research findings in terms of their ‘impact’ upon the world. This usefulness harbours but a stunted sense of life.
What might we gain from this doubtless over-quick canter through the major views of truth when put into the context of this present inquiry? Our view is straightforward: even if brought together in some magical jigsaw picture so as to do justice to their very different orientations, their combination is insufficient to do justice to the idea of truth as embodied in the life of the university. For that, especially the university of the twenty-first century, we need yet other accounts of truth.
The life of truth and the life in truth
For the most part, universities just get on about their work. As one might say these days and without any tinge of embarrassment, they get on about their business, and without perplexing themselves over ‘truth’. Truth is not a matter that trips up most academics. This is not to say, however, that truth is abs...
