Letter of the Day | Truth in the humanities

THE EDITOR, Madam:

I wish to comment on two claims made by Dr Orville Taylor in his column titled ‘A lesson in defamation’ published in The Sunday Gleaner of July 28. I do not know anything about the case he alludes to, but I think that the issues raised by him are of considerable importance.

First, I think he is right in deploring the false labelling of persons, which is regarded as a moral evil in every ethical system I know about. It is forbidden by the command against bearing false witness against others, one of the moral rules in the Ten Commandments. It is a breach of the ‘Do no harm’ principle, one of the oldest and most universal in ethics. The two most famous executions in the history of the West, those of Socrates and Jesus, were based on false labelling. An African proverb dubs the killing of a person’s name as the worst kind of murder. No wonder it is enshrined in the laws of many countries. Regrettably, it is a rule that is widely breached in this country.

But I disagree with the claim he makes about the humanities. After praising what he calls the rigorous methodologies of the behavioural sciences, he denies that this is the case with the humanities. In his view they “spin various versions of reality and we accept these things to be true, and because we do so they are ‘real”.

If by ‘real’ he means ‘true’, he is denying that historians can discover truths about the past; that literary critics can recognise truths about human nature and society in great novels, poems, plays and films (Karl Marx, one of the founders of sociology, said he found more truths in the English novel than in all the other descriptions of society he saw in his time); that investigative journalists can discover truths about the issues they explore. I could go further with this list.

Philosophy is one of these humanistic disciplines and it is one I know a little about. Logic, the study of good and bad arguments, is one of its central branches and a central part of its methodology. And it is one of the only two subjects known to me, the other is mathematics, that is capable of absolute proof. At their best, the sciences give us only probable truth. All the subjects that constitute the humanities are rational enterprises that use arguments to support and often justify their claims.The submitting of these arguments to close, critical and rigorous scrutiny is at the heart of what is understood as academic debate within them. The concept of truth is itself one of the core topics in philosophy, and the ideas generated by this quest contributed crucially to the development of the natural sciences (once called natural philosophy) and to the social sciences that came later. No subject has a monopoly on the search for truth. The view that Dr Taylor seems to espouse is known as logical positivism, the view that only statements that can be verified empirically are meaningful, and was refuted, by logic, sometime ago, since it is itself a claim that cannot be verified experimentally.

The view that none of the scientific or humanistic disciplines can obtain objective truth, and that all views are ‘views from somewhere’ and that there can be no ‘view from nowhere’ , is called epistemic relativism, and is espoused by several post-modernist thinkers. It is a core philosophical issue that cannot be explored here. I happen to believe in the possibility of objective truth. In this age of post-truth, alternative facts, deepfakes and conspiracy theories all around us, the struggle against epistemic relativism is one of the crucial issues of our times. And the humanities, like all the sciences, are central parts of this struggle..

EARL MCKENZIE