 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word of the year for 2016 is POST TRUTH. Do we now live in a post-truth world? What does that mean? That's the central question we're exploring in the 38th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. If you guys have been enjoying these long forum philosophic discussions, go check out my YouTube channel, youtube.com, slash Steve Patterson. I've just started putting up short, punchy videos that you guys really enjoy. They're around five minutes long and they cover topics that I haven't talked as much in detail on this podcast. It's fresh material, so if you like Patterson Pursuit, you'll definitely like those videos. This week's episode is coming to you from Auckland, New Zealand. It is summer down here in the southern hemisphere, and so my guest this week was kind enough to meet me in the summer break for the Auckland University System. I'm joined by Professor Robert Nolo, who's been teaching at the University of Auckland for more than 40 years. Our discussion starts where I like to start conversations at the very basics, talking about what is truth in the first place. Then we get into some post-truth discussion. We talk about faith and the methodology of religious thinking, and then we end up returning to the post-truth discussion by noting this interesting observation that those who are most loudly lamenting the era of post-truth politics seem to be those who just five or ten years ago were talking about how all truths are relative. The relativists, maybe by virtue of recent political phenomena, seem to have found their footing in objective truth, so we have an interesting discussion about that. Dr. Nolo's work is in philosophy, and it specializes a great deal in the philosophy of science and the relationship between science and religion. So I think you guys are really going to enjoy this conversation with Dr. Robert Nolo of the University of Auckland. There's a new term that has been gaining a lot of popularity. Just in the last couple of months, people are throwing around the term post-truth. And as somebody who's interested in philosophy, that's a really interesting choice of words. And so I want to talk to you about it. But before we talk about what post-truth means, I figured a good place to start would be to talk about truth itself. So questions like what is truth? Is there such a thing as truth, objective truth? Does those terms mean anything? So the first question that I want to ask you is just kind of definitional. What is truth? Oh well, there's a very good definition given by Aristotle when I hope I remember it correctly. And he said, to say of what is that it is not, or to say of what is not that it is, is to say the false. Whereas to say of what is that it is, or to say of what is not that it is not, is to say the true. Now it's hard to get your mind around that, but if you think about it in this way, when he talks about a what is, it's what is the case, or what is the fact? Like it's the case now that there are two people sitting in this room. And if I said there's one person sitting in this room now, I would have said the false on that definition. But if I went and said there are two people sitting in this room, it's what I say, and the what is, the case at the moment is there are two people here, I'd have said the true. So I think Aristotle's definition is a pretty good starting point. And most modern theories of truth incorporate at least something like this in their basis. So Aristotle. So when people use the term objective truth, then maybe that's a sticking point for a lot of people, is the truth as you've described it, does that qualify as being objective truth? Yep. So let's look at this from the falling point of view. You can, things are objective in the sense they would be the way they are, even if you went around. So for example, if we weren't here in this room, if we suddenly dropped dead or never existed, there would still be this room. So in that sense, there can be things which exist objectively. But there are things which exist, let's say subjectively, in the sense they require you to be around. So if you've got a pain in your left knee, let's say you're slightly arthritic, then you don't have pains in your left knee, if you're not there to have them. So pains are kind of dependent on you, you could say they're subjective. So now the tricky bit is, can I have an objective truth in the sense that it doesn't depend on me in any way? And let me pick another example, there's a tree out the window here, that is true independently of whether I exist or not, it doesn't require me. But of the subjective state of affairs, I have a pain in my knee, I think that is still an objective truth, because according to Aristotle's definition, either I have it or I don't have it. And if I go and say the wrong thing about it, I would have told you the false. Or if I say the right thing about it, I would have told you the truth. Okay, so I guess the next connection is, if there's such a thing as objective truth, can we know objective truth? Well, that's that's one of the things we strive to do. And there are plenty of truths that we can come to know reasonably well. Perception is a reliable form of getting to know the world. So I see that you're sitting on a chair at the moment, and that is something that I pick up on perceptually. But then there are lots of things that we don't know in that kind of direct perceptual way, like electrons, DNA molecules, all the stuff of science. And there you require much more complicated forms of inference. They will involve observational claims, perhaps, but we need to have ways of inferring what from what we can observe to the things that we can't observe. And perhaps we'll never be able to observe them like electrons. I don't think we'll ever be in a position to see an electron, though you see its effects as soon as you flip the switch over there, the light comes on, and you see one of the effects of the flowing of electrons, you don't see the flowing of the electrons, but you see the light. So there's the whole business of scientific inference, how you get from what we can observe to things we simply can't observe. Okay, if I were to say there is objective truth, and we have theories that seem to get at what that objective truth is, I guess the next natural question is, but could we ever be certain that what we know is actual objective truth, or is it just kind of guessing? So I can imagine with the electrons, I can imagine that that theory works, but the underlying phenomena that's taking place is totally different than what we make it out to be. So can we ever have that kind of confident grasp that we know what it is? Yeah, well, this is a bit more complicated, but let me give you a line that was proposed by Karl Popper, namely we can hit on the truth, even though we don't know that we've hit on the truth. He often speaks about this being a guess, which turns out to be correct. Perhaps that's putting it in too strong a form, but there are theories which we propose, which either they're going to be true or they're going to be false. If they're true, we may not be in a position to actually establish their truth, though we might establish that so far they haven't gone wrong. That's okay. But there can be cases then where we hit on the truth, but we don't have sufficient evidence to actually show that it's true. And quite often in science, that's our position. So yes, one quick answer might be yes, there are truths, but we may not be in a position to actually show them to be true, but we may have something else, namely lots of evidence in support of that claim. So the notion of having evidence in support of is quite important here, whereas what you wanted before was to be able to verify or establish the truth of these things. Perhaps we can't do that, but they may resist our attempts to show them to be false. Okay, so a couple of questions on that. If it's the case that there is a gap between the objective truth and the knowing of the objective truth, why would we posit that there is such a thing as objective truth in the first place if we can't ever know what it is? Well, you have to go back to the original definition of what objective truth is, namely there's ways the world is independently of being present. So I'll challenge that then. Why do we believe that's the case? Okay, not to believe that would be to say there is no world that is independent of the existence of me or the existence of you. Now, if you think about that, you've got a slightly awkward position to explain, say, the history of evolution of things, which is again part of our current scientific theory, or coming into a world which has got certain characteristics when we're born and then are departing from it. So if one of us happened to die right now, much of the rest of the world would just go on the way it is. And so the idea of there being an objective world gets a grip at this point where you think of things going on in ways that don't require you to be present. When you say that, I think, even if it were true that there was no world outside of myself, couldn't we still say that there is objective truth in the sense that however I am, even if I'm the only thing that is, that's the way that I am? Well, take the phrase that you just gave me, if I get it right, there is no world other than the one I'm in. Was that the way you put it? Let's say that there's no type of existence separate from my existence. Right. Now, you take that to be a truth of some sort. That's kind of what I'm asking is even in a world where the only thing that existed was me, even in such a world, couldn't we still say there is sort of an objective truth in the sense that however I am, that's how I am? Well, there is already one, namely that the world is your subjective experiences. There's a kind of anecdote that comes from Bertrand Russell where he gave a talk on solipsism and a woman came up to him afterwards and said, I enjoyed your talk on solipsism. I wish there were a lot more of us. That's very good. And so that actually does contain, even though it's a joke, it does contain the seeds of its own refutation because you need to acknowledge that there are things other than you around and that kind of solipsism just doesn't go to work. Now, whether you could be a consistent solipsist or around is a difficult philosophical question that perhaps we can't go into now. But I think it faces certain difficulties of the sort we've just mentioned. Namely, you're going to be quite restricted in what the truths are, but you couldn't infer from solipsism that there were no truths because you've already given me one. Namely, everything is solipsistic. And that's one of the paradoxes that comes up with the relative truth as well. Yes, that's a natural segue. So one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is this notion of relativism. So in my own experience in getting an undergrad education, it wasn't in philosophy, but the conversations that I had were heavily dominated by what you could call relativists. This notion that there's essentially no such thing as truth. Truth is relative. It's all about truth. We could understand as just statements of your own perspective. There's no truth out there in the world. And my own disposition is to bulk at that. I really don't like that idea. But I wonder your analysis if you think that, well, first of all, what is a proper definition of what relativism means? But two, if you think that, as you just said, there's some internal self-refutation within its own theory. Yes, well this points to a lot of interesting history and philosophy starting with an encounter between Plato and Protagoras. And Protagoras is reputed to have said that man, meaning human beings, man is the measure of all things, of those things that are, that they are, and of those things that are not, that they're not. And the thing is to understand what the measure is. And one way Plato takes this is to say, well, I'm the standard whereby truths are to be accepted. So if I say, say, the sun is up at the moment, then that's true for you, but it, sorry, that's true for me, but it may not be true for you. And then you want to know where you go from there. How come you get this kind of possibility of the same proposition, the sun is up being true for some person, but false for another. And so Plato works around that one and tries to show that there's going to be something self-refuting about it. Now, when you try to follow his argument, it's not always clear, but a lot of other people have had a go at this. And I think there is, again, a self-refuting element in it. One of the problems is we've touched on is you can't state the doctrine itself. So if I say all truths are relative to whatever, then that is an objective truth, but the very claim itself undercuts it. So stating the doctrine is difficult. Okay, so two questions. Well, more on a statement than one question. I can imagine a circumstance in which somebody can say the sun is up and be talking to somebody, and it not be the case that the sun is up if they're talking to somebody on the other side of the world. That could be the case. Well, there is something there that's kind of important You don't want to rule out all kinds of relativity. You might say, well, relative to your being in New Zealand at the moment, the sun is up, but relative to being in Spain, the Antipodes of New Zealand, the sun is not up. And you can sort that problem out. So you don't want to deny all kinds of relativity relative to your position on the earth, the sun is up or it's not up. Right. And what you do is kind of complete the statement that you're making, like the sun is up in New Zealand now, as opposed to the sun is up in Spain now, the New Zealand one is true, the Spain one is false. And so you've reasserted absolute truth back in there by specifying the relativizes. Okay. And you use that term absolute truth. Does this have a metaphysical implication? So if it's the case that we have access to objective truth, and even if it's in some limited way, doesn't that imply then that whatever we are, whatever the mind is, is a thing that has access to this perspective, which seems pretty remarkable? Well, yes. I think one of the, here I might just appeal to the theory of evolution rather blandly and quickly and say, well, we've evolved as creatures to interact with the world. And we've developed perceptual systems that are on the whole in the conditions in which they standardly work are reliable for getting its truths, you see. So I'd want to say that there's a long history of human development that leads us to have the perceptual abilities that we do have that give us contact with the world. I was just reading the other day that whales have genes that if they were back on land, they'd be able to smell. But having evolved from land creatures into the sea and then living in the sea, they have retained these genes, but they no longer use them, not expressed in any way, so they don't smell anything. So that's interesting evidence for a kind of relativity of perception, depending on your genetic makeup and your interaction with the world. Again, some birds detect polarized light, but we don't detect polarized light, but we came to know of it scientifically, I don't know, in the 18th century at some time. So polarization is not something we developed, we developed perceptual apparatus to detect, but some birds do have that. But we can come to know about this by scientific means. Are there any truths out there that are kind of perception independent entirely? So something like mathematical truths, do you think that those are in another realm of knowledge? I can give you a quick answer, but it might hide a difficult question underneath. But first of all, I would rather talk about facts. Facts are things in the world that make our statements or beliefs true. So there's sort of the truth makers out in the world, facts, if you like, and then these beliefs or statements that we make, which are bare truths. So I don't know, two plus two equals four, that's something we believe to be true. But what's its truth maker? What's the thing out there that makes it true? Now, a story in the philosophy of mathematics would try to be able to spell this out for you, but or if I say the number two exists, that's something we think to be true. But what's the fact? What's the truth maker out there that makes it true? And it's some kind of weird abstract entity, perhaps. And so when philosophers think about this, they say, well, if you think there are these weird kind of things out there, you're postulating a realm that seems to go well beyond the perceptual, and saying that what we call abstract entities, but in honor of Plato, first thought about this, we call them Platonistic entities, because they're abstract existing entities and numbers. I meant to read the classic example. Okay. So that is definitely a fascinating topic, which I love talking about, but it is a little bit off topic for our conversation. I'm very tempted to keep talking about that. Well, I probably can't say much more, because you can state the positions here, and then suddenly you go a bit dumb about what further account you can give. You can become anti-Platonistic. Sure, the stories you can tell there, but it's an interesting but difficult area. So let's go back to this notion of truth and relativism, and we'll tie it back to this idea of post-truth. So I've never seen the term post-truth before in the newspaper, never, nothing even remotely close to that. I find it really interesting that that kind of phraseology, which has deeply important philosophic implications, is now even in the general public. That's right. Yes. Well, I read about this in the newspaper, and there was an item which said the Oxford Dictionary, in the plural, there were several Oxford Dictionaries, apparently, had said that the word post-truth was their word for 2016. You remember a couple years ago, selfie, was a word that they acknowledged and put in the dictionary. Well, post-truth now is going to be in the dictionary. And they mentioned a little bit of history about this, and it goes back to some literary and social critics of about 15 or 20 years ago, they first used the word. So maybe think about what post-truth might be. And I was a bit puzzled because you think of post-truth as what comes after when you get to know the truth. You see, that's one kind of post-truth. And so you've discovered something, and then what happens when you discover that? I like that definition more. Right. But then there's the other thing which says we've gone post-truth when as the people who put this in the dictionary, they said, objective facts are less influential in shaping opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. And it struck me that that's a very old thing. Objective facts are not so influential. What's much more influential is your appeal to emotion and personal belief. And then, because I've studied some Plato, I realized he spoke about this at great length. And so you can say that, well, post-truth in this sense emerges when people are less willing to look for the truth and pay attention to the evidence for the claims that they make. But they're much more willing to take things because it's emotionally satisfying to believe them or it fulfills their wishes or it gives them power over others and so on. Now, this sort of thing has been said in philosophy from Plato onwards, that there are different ways whereby people can come to get their beliefs. And one way would be to look for evidence for claims so you take a reason or a rational approach. The other way would be to listen to some rhetorician who tries to convince you of some claim or listen to a lawyer who might be persuasive in a court who tries to get you to accept some claim. Now, these are kind of non-rational ways of picking up beliefs. Now, they could also convey things which are true, but they don't actually tell you what the truth basis is. They don't come with their evidence on their face, you see. So I could get someone to believe anything from science in a non-rational way, you know, like some child gets this, we ask a child whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth goes around the sun and they say, well, it's the sun that goes around the earth and you say, no, no, that's wrong. Stay behind and write it out 500 times that it's the earth that goes around the sun. Now, you could pick up that scientific belief that way. There's nothing wrong with that. It happens all the time. So what the post-truth stuff might be saying is that, well, there are truths around, but we can set the evidence for them and the fact that they're truths, we can set that aside. What I want to look at is the persuasive mechanisms that lead you to believe this that don't depend on evidence and truth. And then we're heading in another direction and I think all hell can break loose if you don't keep control of what are the rational grounds for believing. Now, when you give that explanation, it makes me think perhaps a better term than post-truth is something like political truth because in the sphere of politics that seems to be, especially as it relates to public discourse, that seems to be the area where you get the least amount of genuine reason to discourse. It's very much mudslinging and come from the States. So we just had this very loud election that took place where it was very much post-truth by that definition that nobody actually cared about the facts. Not to say that there's no truth in the theory of politics, but in politics in practice, it seems like there's not much to be found. Well, yes, I think that's an important distinction to make. So perhaps I wouldn't want to call this political truth so much, but politics is a domain where this will occur most readily. But it can occur in other domains like advertising is another good example. So political truth, I think I'd like to have a different qualifier other than political there. Post might do, but I guess deeply at the bottom, I think people are not going to agree with this. The difference is between rational grounding of beliefs versus non-rational or irrational groundings of beliefs. And people need belief. I mean, I think the thing that characterizes us as human beings is we have beliefs. Your cat or dog might have a small number of beliefs, but we humans seem to have developed brains that produce an infinite number of beliefs. And we need to sort of filter them out, which ones are right and which ones are wrong. But if you never do the rational filtering process, you're just left with these beliefs, however you got them in the first place. So I guess I'd like to stick with Plato's idea that there's a rational grounding for belief. And we're going to try to work hard to find out what that is in some cases and admit that sometimes, well, we don't have a rational ground and perhaps it's better to suspend belief at this point. Yeah, this is an excellent segue to the second thing that I wanted to talk to you about. So in my own background, I was brought up in a Christian evangelical household where my mother in particular was pretty good about saying, you know, there's truth. Let's use our reason to sort through things. But in that particular community I was a part of, there was, I guess, to just to use the terminology that we're using, not necessarily in a pejorative way, there was a lot of non-rational grounding for beliefs, specifically this idea of faith. That faith as some kind of anti-justification for a belief is not only okay, it's something that's admirable. So I was hoping I could get your analysis on kind of the epistemology of religious beliefs. Granted, I don't want to speak in too broad brushstrokes here because I think there is, I've talked to lots of people and I have some sort of religious beliefs. I think you can have plenty of rationally held beliefs about, let's say, the existence of God is not some self-contradictory idea. But in practice, maybe just like in politics, there's just this area of a huge amount of irrationality. Yes, well, I've been an atheist for as long as I can remember. But insofar as I had a religious upbringing as a child, it was Catholic. So I know a bit about Catholicism. I don't understand Protestants as a result of that. I don't understand why anybody would want to be one. But then I've lost my faith and I've been without it ever since. But yes, faith seem to be, it's quite often said to be accepting things on grounds that don't involve evidence. And so that goes against this idea that there's a rational basis for your beliefs. Now in some cases, you can't get the evidence. The evidence is gone. So you just make this leap of faith, as I said, and you accept it. Well, looking on the web this last month or so, something that I've never really bothered with, but should have, came up on several different occasions, namely, was there an actual Jesus Christ? Did he exist? And if you believe what is said by some of the commentators, there is no eyewitness evidence in the Gospels for Christ's existence. Now if you think about this in a court of law, if you don't have eyewitness people, the case has sort of ended, or you've got hearsay, and hearsay is only acceptable under very limited circumstances. So if this is right, most of what's in the Bible about Jesus Christ is hearsay. Now it would be a bit much to infer that therefore Christ didn't exist, but it means that you don't have very good evidence. And so the dispute goes on between those who insist on the existence of Jesus Christ as a strong matter of faith versus those who want to look at the evidence and find the evidence wanting. Now one thing I should have mentioned a bit earlier when we came up to the point of discussing scientific evidence is I rather like a theory that's called subject of Bayesianism or Bayesianism, which is a theory about probabilistic believing. And I think it's very important to try to work this out and employ it. And what it does, it sort of gets away from the picture of either we've got something you just believe 100% or it's certain, or you disbelieve it 100%, or you suspend belief. Now those are possible belief positions, but there's a lot in between. And you could say, well, what is my reasonable degree of belief in this proposition given the evidence that I've got? Now that's sometimes hard to work out and you've got to be super rational. But I've got interested now in this did Christ exist question, just looking at it from a point of view of saying, well, given the evidence that we've got, what degree of support does it actually give? And how admissible might it be, say, in a number of different circumstances like a court of law or a scientific context or a philosophical one. And this does get some discussion in the literature. So my overall stance is of somebody who's a Bayesian or a person who takes probabilistic believing quite seriously and tries to assess the degree of evidence that you've got. And this can alter over time. Some evidence may come in, you'd know about, or some stuff might get overturned, then come to know about. It's important to then keep your beliefs alive in this way in respect of the evidence that you've got. So I guess when it comes to the question of the specific one about the existence of Jesus, as far as I can tell at the moment of the evidence that there is, it's a low degree of belief. I can't actually say that he doesn't exist or never existed. So that would be an interesting example to apply the theory of probabilistic believing. And I think this goes all the way through the sciences as well. So when Plato talks about evidence and truth and so on, I'd like to put on there something he didn't really think about, mainly a probabilistic theory of reasoning. That's interesting. So would you say in terms of the kind of the methodology of faith as a process for coming to one's beliefs, would you say that, and understood in that way as kind of the absence of evidence or the absence of reason, would you say that there is this, they're like kind of diametrically opposed, you have faith on one end, which is belief without the evidence. Then you have rational analysis on the other and you just can't mix that they're almost categorical definitional opposites. Or is that too strong? Well you do try to bring them together in some way and sometimes the twain never meets. There's a kind of story that's said about the development of philosophy of religion in medieval period that some of the best philosophy of religion was actually being written by Muslims based on Greek texts. And so scholars in Europe got to know the Greek texts and they read the Muslims and they thought, well we need to give better arguments for our faith than what's just accepting what's in the scripture. So you get people like Aquinas who took his task to be, to give Christianity a kind of rational foundation based on lots of things that you would find in Aristotle and Plato, particularly Aristotle. So there you find someone who wants to get reason and faith to meet in some way. So when you use the term faith in that context you're kind of talking about the end conclusions versus a methodology. So the Thomistic approach would be let's have the rational method but apply towards these particular conclusions. That's right. In the info it didn't work out for Aquinas but you try to push the boundaries of rationality as far as they will go and he came up with all sorts of proofs about the existence of God. Five proofs are just some of them are the five ways. But there you find someone trying to do something you just don't find in the Bible. You don't find in the Christian tradition itself outside those influenced by by philosophy like much earlier on Augustine. So there are things in the Bible that people want to have accepted and maybe they know further grounds than faith which I think is the line adopted by St. Paul because he realized the big gap between what he was expected to believe and what the evidence was he had. And so the category of faith became very important for him. So with religious beliefs there's obviously a lot of different propositions that people analyze. The existence of Jesus Christ would be one. Did he is it a story? Was he an actual person? What did he actually say? How were the reliability of the text all the way through theological claims? Like love is something that's divine or there's a million different theological claims. So I know a lot of people like in my own personal progression I started with in the evangelical world. I discovered philosophy you might say or just discovered the rational methodology thought no this is the way to do things entirely as a function of that. I've lost my beliefs but just a few years ago I've kind of rediscovered not the theology and certainly not the method of faith but I've rediscovered some conclusions specifically about love. I think love is this really really big deal and then I find oh this is what Christianity not in terms of it as a historical text such and such happened but when you actually read what they're talking about about how important love is and why it's like the meaning of life for human beings essentially. Find a very persuasive just for purely rationalist arguments and what I have found all of these major religions seem to point at the same type of truth the same type of rational claims you know peace on earth and good will toward men something like that. Is that pointing at some ethical truths that you could say are actually do stand up to rigorous rational analysis? Well I think you know the injunction let's all try to be decent and nice to one another instead of horrid and nasty is a reasonable principle to adopt and I think atheists could endorse it just as much as believers might. I mean believers might want to reinforce those moral attitudes for various reasons because they tie them to belief in God but atheists would want to make a disconnection there and say well okay I mean you can imagine forms of life in which we're beastly and nasty to one another and there's enough of it around what are you going to prefer just as a matter of the kind of creature that you are what what you want out of life and you could give this a religious gloss or not as the case may be. Now there's a lot to be said for the kinds of things Christians want to talk about in the case of love and you've discovered some of it and so that's that's interesting to read but when I look at this I think well well atheists have not been around very long and only the last couple of hundred years have atheists been able to do their thing what what went on before it's a complex matter but atheists haven't really developed doctrines of love but they still want to talk about having good communities and good relationships between people and that's something that they could endorse and the ethics of it doesn't have to be tied to religion at all. So on that note something that I found interesting about this the post-truth discussion from my experiences just in the past decade or so the philosophic arguments about post-truth relativism seem to be coming almost exclusively from those individuals who were politically affiliated on the left of the traditional left right spectrum and that seemed to change very quickly this whole post-truth thing now the lamenting of the idea of post-truth seems to be coming largely from that same group of people like I know some philosophy professors and political theory professors who I feel like five years ago if we were talking they would essentially say yeah truth is relative there's no such thing as objective truth and now on a matter of a couple of months they're saying they're lamenting this idea that the general public has lost access to objective truth is that do you have you do you share the same perception I think that's a very interesting point about what happened because the kind of skepticism about truth is crept in was the 20th century I guess and it's progressed and even people on the left adopted skeptical positions on this if you read some of the theoreticians in this area they weren't skeptics about truth at all but anyway we won't discuss that but certainly there's a kind of lazy tolerance if you like where you're accepting of anything and you don't want to upset people and then you question the whole idea of truth and you become a relativist and and then tolerance comes along with it but I think that's quite wrong but of course your point is quite correct and now the now the post truth thing emerges and they're outraged but they've lost completely their view of what real truth is you see they so one has to start all over again with this that's why Plato is interesting he recognized that every generation you got to do this again and again and that's why Socrates as a teacher is so important because he talked to people and got them to discuss these issues so one has to um rejig the ideas of truth and actually say well some of the use of truth were just completely wrong and you shouldn't have adopted them so this little article I wrote about fake news and their post truth era I mentioned three philosophers um Richard Rorty who has a complicated idea about truth but he said some things that always outraged me and then there's Nietzsche who adopted a position of perspectivism but also said things like there are no facts and there are just perspectives and then I mentioned Michel Foucault the French sort of sociologist come philosopher who when you read his stuff he's very evasive I think towards the end he was heading in the right direction but I think in the middle period when he spoke a lot about knowledge and power and regimes of truth and so on that that stuff was outrageous yet all this is infected the academic world and I've always found that disturbing I wrote articles against Foucault and so on but I don't know who took much notice every once in a while I get a comment on them but I think all this has to be revisited and what these guys have said has to be deeply questioned now I have a friend in the United States who was a Nietzsche scholar and it was she who wrote a couple of very good short pieces on this post truth business and it got me going in this and what she wanted to do was to defend Nietzsche and while I quite liked what she wrote I thought well no defending Nietzsche is perhaps not the way to go here he needs to be criticized and there's there's there's no evading this point because it's quite central and important so even though I like what she's done I feel that I can't support Nietzsche in this not that I ever had but it's it's something that needs to be done over again I don't quite know how you do it but it needs to be done that was very interesting you I like the term lazy tolerance do you think again I can only draw from my experiences in conversation that I've had conversations that I have with people in the American university system but there does seem to be a very tight connection between the ideas that we don't want to upset people we want to be we want to tolerate people and therefore it is antisocial to say you're wrong you know there is objective truth and you've made a poor argument here and this is why so there's some so it is almost in a sense more socially tolerant and I don't know popular is not the right word but all inclusive maybe is the right word if you abandon the idea it's accepting it's accepting to be accepting perhaps when I use the word perhaps I shouldn't have used the word tolerance but this is what is said in the context of relative truth is that it helps promote tolerance yeah and that's something that I think is wrong but um it promotes acceptance that no the reason I think it was wrong is when you think about the notion of tolerance what what does it mean and I think it's got three components one is you seriously object to something but the second thing is you don't do anything about the stuff you object to you put up with it and then the third thing that's about the philosophy gets into the story is you need some philosophical justification of why you don't act against something you've got objections to but the thing about tolerance if you take this this this definition is you've got a strong objection but you don't try to suppress those who are who've got that view you you continue to live with them and deal with them so the kind of example I had in mind was um say the 1900 you next door is a homosexual couple you're going to call the police immediately you can't stand their their behavior 1950 um you become tolerant in the sense that there's this homosexual behavior going on next door you don't like it but you don't call the police you don't try to stop it in any way and then the year 2000 homosexuals next door you're accepting of the whole thing you've dropped your objection and so what tolerance requires is you have got some serious objection whereas accepting the homosexual couple next door it's not a matter of tolerance it's just accepting so I think you think about the notion of tolerance I need to modify carefully what I said about it but that's sometimes the word is used in the context of being being accepting but I think that's probably wrong but but I gave you that quick example of the homosexuals next door to show attitudes can change from being intolerant to being tolerant to tolerance not mattering it's it's something else is going on so do you think in regards to philosophy perhaps the mistake is going from tolerance to acceptance of poor ideas or relativism or or the idea that I will tolerate tolerate strict strict language poor argumentation but I will not accept it and do you think that that line has been blurred in a sense that it's not I think in the case of argumentation I wouldn't tolerate it but I think because you can you can redress the whole thing but I think in a social context where you've got objections to what others are doing you need to also take into account some other principles about freedom and and so on and the liberties of others to do do things even though you may have your objections and you've got to settle that somehow or other so so tolerant society is a complex one where there are things going on and that you definitely don't like but you hope that the liberal framework will survive it because you're willing to well now there's a word gotta be careful about respect except I have another thing about respect it's important I think but you you you still want to preserve a liberal framework whereas if you're going to be intolerant you're not accepting what they're doing and you're trying to stop it so I think those are complex things to think about perhaps to think about more carefully than I've expressed them now as part of the background politics of this but certainly I wouldn't want to employ relative truth as a way of indicating tolerance I think that's wrong I just want to say you know there are some things that on the basis of the evidence you've got what is there is just wrong okay well on that note I really appreciate the conversation this has been great well thank you very much the good questions and good to talk to you all right that was my conversation with Professor Robert Nola I hope you guys enjoyed it make sure to stay tuned next week I've got another really awesome interview for you and a cool story to share with you and like I said at the beginning of the show if you'd like to hear shorter form presentations that are about five minutes long me talking about issues that I haven't focused a great deal on on this podcast then go to youtube.com slash Steve Patterson and subscribe to my channel there I'm releasing weekly videos that if you're interested in philosophy you're guaranteed to enjoy all right that's all for today I'll talk to you guys next week