Truth Matters: Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion

362 Pages·2014·1.95 MB·English

by  Lambert Zuidervaart

TRUTH MATTERS
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preface iii
Truth Matters
Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion
EDITED BY
Lambert Zuidervaart, Allyson Carr,
Matthew Klaassen, and Ronnie Shuker
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca
iv preface
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013
isbn978-0-7735-4270-9(cloth)
isbn978-0-7735-8997-1(epdf)
isbn978-0-7735-8998-8(epub)
Legal deposit fourth quarter 2013
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest
free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free.
The publication of this book is supported by generous grants from the
icsCentre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics, the Calvin Centre
for Christian Scholarship, and the Priscilla and Stanford Reid Trust.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the
Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also
acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Truth matters : knowledge, politics, ethics, religion / edited by Lam-
bert Zuidervaart, Allyson Carr, Matthew Klaassen, and Ronnie Shuker.
Based on a conference held at the University of Toronto in August 2010.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
isbn978-0-7735-4270-9(bound).– isbn978-0-7735-8997-1(epdf).–
isbn978-0-7735-8998-8(epub)
1. Truth. I. Zuidervaart, Lambert, author, writer of preface, editor of
compilation II. Carr, Allyson, writer of introduction, editor of compi-
lation III. Klaassen, Matthew, writer of introduction, editor of compila-
tion IV. Shuker, Ronnie, editor of compilation
bd171.t82 2013 121 c2013-906770-1
c2013-906771-x
This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13Sabon
preface v
Contents
Preface
Lambert Zuidervaart vii
Introduction
Allyson Carr and Matthew J. Klaassen 3
PART ONE TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE
1 How Not to Be an Anti-realist: Habermas, Truth, and Justification
Lambert Zuidervaart 23
2 Radical Constructivism, Education, and Truth as Life-Giving
Disclosure
Clarence W. Joldersma 46
3 The Jelly and the Shot: Laying down the Law for Pragmatism
in Quantum Physics
Matthew Walhout 66
4 Cognitive Diversity, Conceptual Schemes, and Truth
Olaf Ellefson 83
PART TWO TRUTH AND POLITICS
5 Exposure and Disclosure: The Risk of Hermeneutical Truth in
Democratic Politics
Darren R. Walhof 103
6 Truthfulness, Discourse, and the Problem of Pluralism
Adam Smith 122
vi Contents
7 A Comparative Ethics Approach to the Concept of Bearing
Witness: A Practice in Christian Theology and Journalism
Amy D. Richards 138
8 Narrative Truth in Canadian Historical Fiction:
In between Veracity and Imagination
John Van Rys 155
PART THREE TRUTH AND ETHICS
9 Truth, Truthfulness, and the I-Self Relationship
Gerrit Glas 175
10 Does Truth Matter to Ethics? Kierkegaard, Ethics, and the
Subjectivity of Truth
Jay A. Gupta 195
11 Theories of Concepts and Moral Truth
John J. Park 211
12 Educating for Truthfulness
Doug Blomberg 225
PART FOUR TRUTH AND RELIGION
13 Truth Unveiled: Balthasar and the Contemplation of Christian Truth
Gill K. Goulding 245
14 Truth as “Being Trued”: Intersections between Ontological Truth
in Aquinas and the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion
Pamela J. Reeve 263
15 Bedevilling Truth: “What Have I to Do with Thee?”
Jeffrey Dudiak 283
16 A Concept of Artistic Truth Prompted by Biblical Wisdom
Literature
Calvin Seerveld 296
Bibliography 313
Contributors 339
Index 345
preface vii
Preface
This book arises from Truth Matters, an interdisciplinary and inter-
national conference held at the University of Toronto in August 2010.
The conference program spells out our motivation:
We live in an age of skepticism about the idea of truth. Contem-
porary skeptics question the nature and value of truth and the
concomitant virtue of truthfulness. Skepticism about truth is not
restricted to popular culture. It occurs within the academic world,
where deflationists have argued that the idea of truth is not a sub-
stantive notion and some poststructuralists have portrayed it as
primarily the scene of struggles for power. Such skepticism is sur-
prising, for truth and truthfulness have been central to Western
civilization and the academic enterprise. Given both contempo-
rary skepticism and the centrality of truth, the conference organiz-
ers believe it is time to reconceptualize truth and to reclaim truth-
fulness for the academic enterprise.
Other motivations lie behind the conference and this book. Both
intend to expand the scope of work on truth at the Institute for Chris-
tian Studies (ics), which hosted the Truth Matters conference. Both
aim to continue an animated dialogue about faith and scholarship
among the conference’s co-sponsors. Both also help launch a new ven-
ture at icscalled the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics
(cprse).
ics is an independent graduate school for interdisciplinary philos-
ophy affiliated with the Toronto School of Theology (tst) at the Uni-
versity of Toronto. Each year ics’s master’s and phd students take an
viii Preface
interdisciplinary seminar co-taught by ics’s faculty members. In the
two years preceding the Truth Matters conference, these seminars
studied the topic of truth: first truth in contemporary thought and
then truth in the history of Western thought. The seminars asked
whether a new approach to thinking about truth is needed and what
such an approach would look like. ics envisioned the Truth Matters
conference as an occasion to welcome a wider range of disciplines and
scholars into this discussion. This book has a similar aim.
icswas founded in the 1960s by a dedicated group of Dutch immi-
grants who wished to establish a North American university in the
Reformed tradition along the lines of the Vrije Universiteit, now
known as the vuUniversity Amsterdam (or vufor short). Most of ics’s
founding faculty received their doctorates at vu, where they appren-
ticed in the “reformational” tradition of philosophy established by
legal theorist Herman Dooyeweerd and philosopher Dirk Vollen-
hoven. Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven regarded philosophy as an inter-
disciplinary enterprise whose insights should contribute to the trans-
formation of culture and society, and they insisted that education and
scholarship are not religiously neutral. From its beginnings, ics has
been inspired by this reformational vision, at the heart of which lies a
dynamic conception of truth. Several chapters in this volume offer
glimpses into what a reformational conception of truth might imply.
As a faculty member at ics, the director of the Truth Matters con-
ference, and the senior editor of this book, I have a personal stake in
working out such a conception. Indeed, that is my current research
project, and it has received impetus from ics’s interdisciplinary semi-
nars, from the conference, and from essays such as those by Joldersma
and Glas in this volume that take up my first attempts to offer a new
and comprehensive conception of truth. I wish to acknowledge with
thanks these generative contributions.
ics’s partners in putting on the Truth Matters conference included
not only vu but also Calvin College and Dordt College in the United
States. These four schools share an ethnic and religious heritage that
stems from a neo-Calvinian social movement in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century led by the Dutch educator, journalist,
politician, and religious leader Abraham Kuyper. The Kuyperian move-
ment has inspired two traditions of thought in North America: the
reformational tradition, already mentioned, and Reformed epistemolo-
gy, which is associated with such prominent analytic philosophers as
Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Since the early 1980s, ics,
Preface ix
vu, Calvin, and Dordt have co-sponsored several “quadrilateral” confer-
ences to promote dialogue among their faculties on issues of faith, life,
and scholarship. Given both the religious affinities and intellectual dif-
ferences between reformational philosophy and Reformed epistemolo-
gy, it is not surprising that the first of these conferences, held at ics in
1981, brought together scholars from both traditions, as well as from a
Scots Presbyterian background, to examine “Rationality in the Calvin-
ian Tradition.”1 Subsequent quadrilateral conferences have examined
the role of worldviews in the social sciences (Calvin College, 1985), ten-
sions between universal norms and particular contexts (vu, 1987), con-
troversies concerning traditional conceptions of creation order (ics,
1992), the role of the arts in a democratic society (Calvin College, 1995),
and different ways of knowing (Dordt College, 1998).2 Always in the
background of these conferences, and sometimes explicitly in the fore-
ground, were questions of truth: What is truth, and why does it matter?
The most recent quadrilateral conference, in 2010, made these ques-
tions a central topic.
The Truth Matters conference would not have happened without
substantial funding from ics, Calvin College, Dordt College, and vu.
Moreover, icsand Calvin College have provided publication subsidies
for this book via ics’s Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social
Ethics, directed by Ronald Kuipers, and the Calvin Center for Christ-
ian Scholarship, directed by Susan Felch. The editors, all of whom
helped organize the original conference, are very grateful for this
institutional support. I also wish to mention with gratitude the gen-
erous grants the conference and this book have received from the
Priscilla and Stanford Reid Trust.
The publication of Truth Matters is among the first fruits of ics’s
new research centre. Founded shortly before the Truth Matters con-
ference took place in 2010, cprse promotes philosophically primed
and religiously attuned interdisciplinary research on leading ques-
tions of life and society. It has done so to date by establishing a new
Toronto Interfaculty Colloquium for cross-disciplinary discussion
and debate among faculty members at ics, tst, the University of
Toronto, and other schools; hosting public seminars on monographs
authored by icsfaculty members and graduates; and organizing cross-
sectoral conferences for academics, professionals, and the wider pub-
lic,such as Social Justice and Human Rights (Toronto, 2012) and an
upcoming conference on Economic Justice (Edmonton, May 2014).
Truth Matters is the first book to emerge from cprse’s work. Specifi-