David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Truth and Muddlement




Franz Kafka (tr. Kaiser/Wilkins)







Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge





Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities





Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction




  1. Happy birthday. I think this is great.

  2. Hmnn, I never noticed that Musil anticipated Thomas Kuhn like that. Also, always delighted to see Polanyi. Overall, lovely post.

    Re birthday, in light of your comments on fallibility, perhaps I should wish you many happy reversals!


  3. On truth, consider the Timothy Williamson ‘spiders’ example that comes in at about 6.10 in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4kQaDrMWew&t=75

    The way he plays it, it’s a ‘return to first principles’ move that reminds me very much of the spurious libertarian claim that we are born free.

    He claims that ‘one way or another, there is a truth’ about ‘the number of spiders in this room’. I’m not sure that’s right. At least, for me to feel content claiming that, it’d have to be much more exhaustively specified. The number of spiders at what precise time? If a spider, at that time, is half in and half out of the room, does it count? What if it’s 30% in and 70% out? Is the proportion of the spider that’s in and the proportion that’s out of the room another of those things about which, one way or another, there is a truth? What if there are spiders in wallspace about which it’s ambiguous whether it’s part of the room or not? And what if the classification of one or more of the species of spider present in the room as spiders in fact reflects a longstanding arthropodological misconception, due to be corrected in the coming century by new discoveries and techniques?

    I don’t know. The better specified it is, the more trivial the truth will become. Such specific things are precisely what we’re not really interested in having truths about. And however exhaustively specified we make the statements about which we’re certain there is ‘a truth’, it seems like we’ll always be able to be called upon to specify further. How can any truth which is described in language be independent of minds? Why would it even console us to think there was such a truth, if we can’t know what it is?

    I’m pretty certain there isn’t a truth about how many spiders there are in this room. That statement is just too great a reduction of the world’s possibilities to be legitimate. Such reductions can only become truths in human hands. What they leave out carries on being true, without them, indifferent to them.

    That there is ‘truth’, rather than ‘a truth, here’, seems a much better thing to say. But it isn’t consoling at all.

  4. Would you care to put forth thoughts as to why such realisations or positions are not more widespread?

  5. I confess to being a Williamson detractor. I think the libertarian analogy is quite fantastic, actually–by appealing to some vague sort of common sense, Williamson gets around issues that people have been sweating through for decades if not centuries, in order to focus on his favored phantoms. It must be quite comforting.

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