Truth: A Guide

by Simon Blackburn

The author of the highly popular book Think , which Time magazine hailed as "the one book every smart person should read to understand, and even enjoy, the key questions of philosophy," Simon Blackburn is that rara avis --an eminent thinker who is able to explain philosophy to the general reader. Now Blackburn offers a tour de force exploration of what he calls "the most exciting and engaging issue in the whole of philosophy"--the age-old war over truth.

The front lines of this war are well defined. On one side are those who believe in plain, unvarnished facts, rock-solid truths that can be found through reason and objectivity--that science leads to truth, for instance. Their opponents mock this idea. They see the dark forces of language, culture, power, gender, class, ideology and desire--all subverting our perceptions of the world, and clouding our judgement with false notions of absolute truth. Beginning with an early skirmish in the war--when Socrates confronted the sophists in ancient Athens--Blackburn offers a penetrating look at the longstanding battle these two groups have waged, examining the philosophical battles fought by Plato, Protagoras, William James, David Hume, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and many others, with a particularly fascinating look at Nietzsche. Among the questions Blackburn considers is science mere opinion, can historians understand another historical period,
and indeed can one culture ever truly understand another.

Blackburn concludes that both sides have merit, and that neither has exclusive ownership of truth. What is important is that, whichever side we embrace, we should know where we stand and what is to be said for our opponents.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Metaphysics, British Literature, Academic, 20th Century, Logic

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Simon Blackburn FBA is an English academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language; more recently, he has gained a large general audience from his efforts to popularise philosophy.

He retired as the professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2011, but remains a distinguished research professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaching every fall semester. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a member of the professoriate of New College of the Humanities. He was previously a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford and has also taught full-time at the University of North Carolina as an Edna J. Koury Professor. He is a former president of the Aristotelian Society, having served the 2009–2010 term. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002 and a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2008.

Reviews

[Andrew]

Blackburn's title is misleading. Rather than being any kind of a "guide for the perplexed," he has authored a case for his particular school of thought. And it's a serviceable one one. He's at his best when he's looking at Nietzsche, both applauding his efforts, and noting his flaws.

Where he's at his weakest is when he goes up against "relativism," a straw man he erects, and then attempts to light aflame. This straw man is, in Blackburn's mind, in cahoots with such rogues as William James and Richard Rorty. He doesn't specify any straight-up relativists, though, but instead darkly suggests that there are lots of "postmodernist" "academics" who engage in this witchcraft. His lack of specificity comes from the fact that the relativism he attacks is taken up by virtually no one. His arguments for a metaphysics closer to classical realism are intelligent and deserve to be taken seriously, but he fails to provide suitable rebuttals to his opponents' challenges.

[Stewart · Rating 2 out of 5]

An easy-to-read philosophical book on "truth" I will admit is not the easiest thing to write, and Simon Blackburn fails to achieve it with "Truth: A Guide." The book greatly lacks clarity and organization and lurches from idea to idea and chapter to chapter. The one exception is a chapter called "Nietzsche: The Arch Debunker," in which that German philosopher's hammer-like prose spurs Blackburn to better clarity. The best book on small-t truth is still Sissela Bok's 1978 "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life." A good book on truth and falsehood is the 2001 "The Liar's Tale: A History of Falsehood" by Jeremy Campbell.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There are real standards. We must fight soggy nihilism, scepticism and cynicism. We must not believe that anything goes.”

This is the beginning of the book. Blackburn is fighting against relativism. And I surely applaud.
But it is not a book about Truth. At least not in the way I expected, that is a book on theories of truth.

Nietzsche, Rorty, Derrida and Davidson are his targets of attack amongst others. “It looks as though the conventional building blocks of Western thought – representation, truth, objectivity, reason, knowledge – can and must survive Rorty’s battering.” (p. 166)

Is it true that nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief, as Davidson claims? Of course not.

This is all quite right, but is the book worth reading twice? Not really. (But I keep the four stars, since I liked it a lot when I first read it.)

[Error Theorist · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic tour through the philosophical problems related to the concept of "truth". The only thing that stopped me from giving this book 5 stars is Blackburn's writing style. He tends to jump around a lot, and has trouble with maintaining a linear narrative. Otherwise, a worthwhile and fun read.

[Arturo Javier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es un libro ideal para leer al inicio de una licenciatura en filosofía o ciencias sociales. Está escrito en un estilo ensayístico, libre de tecnicismos, rico en ejemplos y analogías bastante clarificadoras, pero no por eso le hace falta rigor. Lo que sí le hace falta, me parece, es un poco de sistematicidad. Es mejor leerlo como una colección de ensayos sobre una familia de temas más o menos relacionados (relativismo, realismo científico, verdad histórica) que como la defensa de una tesis filosófica.

[Prithvi Shams · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat dense exposition of the debates around the nature of truth and how/if we are equipped to catch it in its entirety. The author ends with a positive note that regardless of all the uncertainty that surrounds the notion of truth, we may not need an absolute authority to settle all issues after all, since we have managed to be confident in our intellectual endeavors and yet, still be aware that the future may uproot the notions we hold dear. This is by far, our most valuable asset.

[Bookish Hedgehog · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent set of papers, with a great introductory essay. For the first time I’m convinced that the philosophical debate re: Truth isn’t meaningless or just sophistry — a conclusion I was prejudiced against, thanks to all the noise around anti-realism and the scientific wars, owing to postmodernists and their ilk. However, it’s telling (even though the book was published circa 2000) how little psychology is discussed.

The greatest gift of this book was convincing me about the sincerity (and ingenuity) of Frege & Tarski, who, it turns out, have more to contribute than their scary names and German mystique. However, it’s strange that as we progressed in time (the papers are more or less chronologically ordered), the treatment of Truth becomes less satisfactory. Maybe it’s the forbidding formalism, or a symptom of genuine progress away from common-sense intuitions — but I maintain a healthy skepticism. For instance, JL Austin who can single-handedly put you off an entire field of philosophy with his style and writing.

[Imlac · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is derived from Blackburn's Gifford lectures. Interesting meditations on truth, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and language. The discussion of relativism and postmodernism is illuminating. The chapters on Nietzsche and Wittgentstein are particularly good. However, I can't see how anyone not professionally trained in philosophy can even begin to appreciate the issues and arguments. The chapter on Realism in Science is especially challenging.

[Stefania Vede · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really good book if you want to stop struggling with the line of thinking of relativists. I often disagree with a lot of postmodernist views, so this book offered good insights into things that really interested me, mostly issues regarding moral relativism, subjectivism and the general suspicion of reason.

[Morris Yen · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, the book gets more difficult to understand in later chapters. Might have to re-read.

[Richard · Rating 1 out of 5]

Truthfully, I encourage inquisitive readers to investigate stronger theistic positions.

[Supinder · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lucid and readable. The short text expounds on several definitions and interpretations of truth without getting bogged down in logical axioms some other philosophical texts use.

[Zsoltm · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book provides a helpful overview of the various schools of thought on epistemology, but it becomes very abstract and dense towards the end. The later chapters are quite frustrating to read.

[Stephie Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

The truth about truth is that is very hard to pin down. So, just like so many other books on truth, it failed to bring the truth down to earth. It just kind of floats around from cloud to cloud. It could be concluded that truth has different applications in different situations. This is actually not so out there as it might appear. There are lots of areas, especially in philosophy, that are really talking about different concepts, or aspects of concepts, that use a single word, or cluster of words to communicate them.

I found the book to be slightly meandering. Granted that Blackburn might have meant the book to take on this movement. However, he does cover a lot of ground in a fairly short book. He looks at truth from lots of different positions. These include realist, pragmatist, relativist, idealist, coherentist, foundationalist, eliminatavist, phenomenalist, quietist, and finally minimalist.

It appears that he prefers the minimalist position. A minimalist holds that the truth of something is just what makes that something hold. Consider: my cat is asleep. It is the case that my cat is asleep if he is asleep, so the statement holds. If it is not the case that my cat is asleep, than the statement does not hold. There is nothing more to consider. Either my cat is asleep or not. There is no extra component to consider. While the minimalist position is certainly attractive, I am not to sure that this gives truth all that is implied in this concept. I still need evidence that my cat is asleep or not to assess whether that statement holds.

Of course these different postions on truth do not have to be mutually opposed to each other. There can be a certain blending, and Blackburn certainly points this out. This might bring the issue more into focus or make it even more blurry. The book certainly held my interest, but could have been better structured.

My reccomendation is that, while the book is accessable from a novice's point of view, it is not a very good general introduction to truth. Still there is good deal that makes it worthwhile to read.

[Gregg Sapp · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a philosopher to describe an intellectual conflict as a "war" seems like a strained metaphor. Surely, few of us in our mundane worlds perceive what amounts to a rarefied dispute over metaphysical principles to be even remotely analogous to strife and carnage. Simon Blackburn obviously does not claim anybody ever died in the "Truth Wars" between absolutists and relativists. Still, even using bellicose imagery seems to insist upon a relevance that regular folks like me just don't get.

Once you give up the concept of "logos," what's left for an absolutist to believe in? Blackburn answers: "Science and common sense offer their own explanation of why we do well using them." That strikes me as an awkward intellectual marriage, for science depends upon validation through experimentation and common sense, however efficacious, is usually considered intuitive. Still, the idea that the absolute truths of physics and that it is smart to come in from the rain are hard to argue with. Pragmatism makes sense.

But, to me, relativism is a much more flexible concept. How else are you going to reconcile any interpretive assertions of truth. ("The Sex Pistols were the greatest rock band ever!") Not only does relativism NOT have to prove itself to be right all of the time, it presents a stronger case when it is wrong sometimes. Logically, doesn't it make sense to say that if truth is relative just some of the time, then relativism is true all the time?

I'm no philosopher, so I have no quibble with Blackburn, who is fair-minded in arbitrating points of view from Socrates to Nietzsche. While we might argue about what such things as "truth," "reason," and "justice," mean, those words must still and always be part of our working vocabulary.

[A Ter · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times enlightening although at other times dense and academic. More of a philosophy course text than a book for general consumption (guidance would have been helpful in navigating the evolution).

Some highlights:

"Perhaps we never found logos or a 'first philosophy', an underlying foundational story telling us, from somewhere outside our own world view, just why that world view is the right one. But perhaps we have learned to do without that, just as we learn to retain our hard-won confidences, without closing our minds to any further illuminations that the future may bring. ... We can take the postmodernist inverted commas off the things that ought to matter to us: truth, reason, objectivity and confidence. They are no less, if no more, than the virtues that we should all cherish as we try to understand the bewildering world around us." (220-1).

[Edward · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-crafted, open, and even at times funny exploration about "truth", where he argues convincingly that truth is more than "what your friends let you get away with" (to paraphrase Rorty) but it is also less than "correspondence with reality". Put another way, usually we have no need to say "it is true that it is raining right now", when we can simply say "it is raining right now".

Plus, what an opening to a book: “It is easy to feel frightened at the beginning of the twenty-first century. And among the most frightening things are the minds of other people”.

Thank you, Simon Backburn!

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good introduction to theories of truth (and the interwoven epistemological issues of knowledge, belief, and justification) for the lay-reader. Blackburn has his realist stance from which he writes, and while it is one I find much to agree with even after my own dances with Rorty, Davidson, and Idealism, the book is very much geared to arguing for that point of view. This isn't meant as a bad thing, mind you, and Blackburn writes clearly enough about what is an intrinsically difficult topic.

[Ms_G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blackburn's thoughts and ideas about truth left me feeling scattered in his philosophies in an attempt to clarify his idea or interpretation of truth. Blackburn's writing is purely subjective and confused the issue more.

[Willa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book. Clearly written, but be prepared to think going in. Blackburn doesn't spoonfeed you any answers, but he does gently guide you through some pretty complex tangles of debate while being generously respectful of all sides.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't follow some of it, but there were some chapters that had me underlining like crazy. Those chapters were worth slogging through the others. (People who have read Hume and Davidson should have an easier time.)

[Mark Heyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book. I return to it regularly. He has lots to say about relativism and our need for a firm grounding of our beliefs.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as clearly written as his other books. Still, an interesting read for anyone with an interest in Philosophy.

[Elise Woodard · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good introduction for the lay-reader.. A little too basic for anyone with training in philosophy though.

[Ian Divertie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun book, easy read for a philosophy book.