Retortion and the Existence of Truth

Anthony Flood informs me that he has uploaded to his site an article I brought to his attention a couple of years ago: Retortion: The Method and Metaphysics of Gaston Isaye.  Whether or not you agree with Tony's politics, and I don't, you should agree with me that his site is an ever-expanding repository of valuable articles and other materials from often neglected thinkers.  The trouble with too many contemporary philosophers is that they are so bloody narrow: they read only the latest stuff, much of it destined to be ephemeral,  by a few people.  You've got young academic punks writing on free will who have never studied Schopenhauer's classic essay.  That's contemptible.  They suffer from a onesided philosophical diet as Wittgenstein said in another connection. Study everything! (But join nothing.) As I mentioned to Tony in an e-mail, retortion is a philosophical procedure that is fascinating but hard to evaluate.  It seems to work on some topics, but not on others.  It does seem to me to work when it comes to the topic of truth, as the following post explains:

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Retortion (also spelled 'retorsion') is the philosophical procedure whereby one seeks to establish a thesis by uncovering a performative inconsistency in anyone (any actual or possible rational agent) who attempts to deny it.   Proofs by retortion have the following form:

Proposition p is such that anyone who denies it falls into performative inconsistency; ergo, p is true.

If we agree that a proposition is ineluctable just in case it cannot be denied by anyone without performative inconsistency,  then the retorsive proof-strategy can be summed up in the conditional:

If  a proposition is ineluctable, then it is true.

Let us see if if we can use this procedure to establish the existence of truth, by which I mean the existence of truths. By the existence of truth I mean the existence of truth an sich, in itself, and apart from minds. Can it be proven by retortion that there are some truths that subsist independently of all minds? Can it be proven by this method that there must be some such truths?

Suppose one tries to deny that there are truths. One asserts: there are no truths. But to assert any proposition is to assert it as true. Of course, my asserting that The Arizona monsoon is upon us does not make this proposition true.  The point is rather that to assert a proposition is to assert it as true, as actually (as opposed to possibly) true.  That The Arizona monsoon is upon us is either true or false, but it cannot be asserted as false.   Assertion by its very nature is assertion-as-true.  Note that one can assert that a certain proposition p is false, but the content of that assertion is not p, but a distinct proposition q, namely, the proposition that p is false.  Clearly, to assert q is to assert q as true.  In sum, to assert is to assert as true.

 

So one who asserts that there are no truths is asserting it as true that there are no truths. The upshot is performative inconsistency: the act or performance of asserting 'contradicts' the content asserted.   The 'retortionist' -- to give him a name -- then infers the mind-independent truth of There are truths from the undeniability or ineluctability of There are truths.  The crucial move here is the move from a proposition's ineluctability to its being true independently of any mind and its operations.  This is the metaphysical move par excellence, harking back as it does to Father Parmenides' 'identification' of Being and Thinking.

Performative inconsistency ought to be distinguished from strictly logical inconsistency. The latter is a relation between propositions, which for present purposes we can think of Frege-style as the senses of indexical-free sentences in the indicative mood. Two propositions, p, q, are logically consistent just in case they can both be true, and logically inconsistent just in case they cannot both be true. Performative inconsistency, however, is not a relation between propositions, but one between a mental-linguistic performance, a speech-act, or else an episode of unverbalized judging, and a proposition. Thus the very act of asserting, or of judging to oneself, that there are no truths 'contradicts' the propositional content asserted or judged, namely, that there are no truths.   The sneer quotes signal that this is not a logical contradiction, strictly speaking.

There can be logical inconsistency even if there are no thinkers or speakers. All you need for that are two propositions, one the negation of the other, and the other the negation of the one. But there cannot be performative inconsistency unless there are 'performers,' i.e., thinkers and thoughtful language-users. This fact allows for skepticism about the probative reach of retorsive arguments such as the one given above. One can imagine a skeptic giving the following speech:

Your retorsive argument for the ineluctability of truth rests on the contingent fact that there are thinkers and language-users. Thus at the very most it establishes that truth is a transcendental presupposition of thought, discourse, and inquiry. Your argument from performative inconsistency does not establish that truth exists in itself, apart from beings like us. You have not excluded the possibility that truth depends for its existence on beings like us, and is merely something the presupposing of which we find unavoidable. So if the existence of truth is its existence apart from minds, then you have not established that truth exists.  Why should the unavoidability of our presupposing of truth  be taken to show that there is truth independently of us?  You are attempting the classically metaphysical move from Thought to Being, but have you really shown that you have attained Being Itself?

The skeptic is saying in effect that the following propositions are logically consistent:

1. There is no truth in itself apart from us.

2. It is impossible for us to deny that there is truth.

If (1) and (2) are logically consistent, then (2) does not entail the negation of (1). The skeptic's point is that the ineluctability of truth for us, the unavoidability of our presupposing it, has no tendency to show that there must be truths whether or not we exist. If so, then our retorsive thinking above does not reach reality; at best it reaches a transcendental condition of our thinking about reality.

But are (1) and (2) logically consistent? If they are then it is possible that (1). But if it is possible that (1), then it is possibly true that there is no truth in itself. But this is a logical contradiction. For it cannot be possibly true that there is no truth in itself.  The point is that logical consistency cannot be defined without recourse to the concept of truth.

So although it seems that a skeptical wedge can be driven between truth-as-transcendental-presupposition and truth-as-existent-in-itself, this is a mere appearance. Truth, absolute and existent in itself, is not only undeniable by us, it is undeniable in itself.

Indeed I will go so far as to say that not even God can deny the existence of truth in itself. Suppose God were to assert

1*. There is no truth in itself apart from Me!

Asserting (1*), God is asserting that it is true that there is no truth apart from him. But then there is a truth apart from him, namely, the truth that there is no truth apart from him. The content of the divine assertion 'contradicts' God's asserting of it. So not even God can deny the existence of truth in itself.

If I am told that the divine aseity cannot allow for God's being subject to anything external to him, not even the absolute truth in itself, then a classical reply would be that God is the absolute truth in itself. In God, truth-as-transcendetal-presupposition and truth as existent in itself are one and the same. God's inability to deny the truth in itself is then his inability to deny himself.

Talk of the divine aseity and simplicity, however, brings us to the brink of the Mystical, where all discursive operations must cease.  "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent." (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus #7)