On the Relationship between Truth and Liberal Politics
This paper examines the relationship between truth and liberal politics via the work of Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty. I argue that Williams is right to think that there are positive relations between truth, specifically a realist understanding of truth, and liberal politics that Rorty's abandonment of the realist vocabulary of truth undermines. At the heart of this concern is the worry that abandoning the realist vocabulary opens up the possibility that the standards of justification for our true beliefs can be manipulated by those with the power to do so in order to further their own political ends. The political benefit of realism is that it fixes the standards of justification and makes them immune to manipulation by the use of power. However, I suggest that there is a form of realism available that Rorty can accept which would deliver the political benefits of the realist vocabulary without requiring him to accept the thick realist metaphysics that he wants to avoid. My conclusion is that there is a positive and important relationship between truth and liberal politics, a relationship that can be sustained without any necessary commitment to realist metaphysics.
Truth and Progress: John Searle on Realism and Relativism
As North Americans use the term, “academic freedom” names some complicated local folkways that have developed in the course of this century, largely as a result of battles fought by the Canadian and American Associations of University Professors. These customs and traditions insulate colleges and universities from politics and from public opinion. In particular, they insulate teachers from pressure exerted by the public bodies or private boards that pay their wages. One way to justify such customs is to start from the premise that the search for objective truth is something quite distinct from politics, and indeed distinct from almost all other cultural activities. So, the argument goes, if politics or passion intrudes on that search, the purposes of colleges and universities – the accumulation of knowledge – will not be served. In particular, if universities are politicized, they will no longer be worthy of trust, just as doctors who care more for their fees than for their patients, or judges who care more about popularity than aboutjustice, are no longer worthy of trust. A politicized university will be likely to produce merely opinion rather than knowledge. A number of contemporary philosophers, including myself, do their best to complicate the traditional distinctions between the objective and the subjective, reason and passion, knowledge and opinion, science and politics. We offer contentious reinterpretations of these distinctions, draw them in nontraditional ways. For example, we deny that the search for objective truth is a search for correspondence to reality and urge that it be seen instead as a search for the widest possible intersubjective agreement.
Pioneer 10 Observations of the Ultraviolet Glow in the Vicinity of Jupiter
A two-channel ultraviolet photometer aboard Pioneer 10 has made several observations of the ultraviolet glow in the wavelength range from 170 to 1400 angstroms in the vicinity of Jupiter. Preliminary results indicate a Jovian hydrogen (1216 angstrom) glow with a brightness of about 1000 rayleighs and a helium (584 angstrom) glow with a brightness of about 10 to 20 rayleighs. In addition, Jupiter appears to have an extensive hydrogen torus surrounding it in the orbital plane of Io. The mean diameter of the torus is about equal to the diameter of the orbit of Io. Several observations of the Galilean satellites have also occurred but only a rather striking Io observation has been analyzed to date. If the observed Io glow is predominantly that of Lyman-α, the surface brightness is about 10,000 rayleighs.