Why Truth Matters reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement

There is a school of thought which says that Aristotle stole his philosophical ideas from a library in North Africa. Unfortunately for those committed to this thesis, the library was only built after his death. In Why Truth Matters, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom succeed in describing, debunking and uncovering the philosophical grounds of claims such as the above, to show how the relativistic excessess of postmodernism have contributed to an acceptance of the distortion of truth in many parts of society. Starting from the sceptical tradition within philosophy, they show how it developed into forms of postmodern relativism where truth is not something we discover through investigation but generate ourselves or attribute to perspectives regardless of evidence. The "message is everything", which the objective truth-value of the message loses its importance.

As the authors note, while "truth radicals" argue for such claims in their academic work, they often lapse, in defending their arguments, into the commonsense understanding of truth, so that "the real puzzle...about the doctrines of skepticism and relativism is that nobody really believes them. Not in their bones." Benson and Stangroom effectively uncover the way academic institutions and cultures can generate pressures to create more and more elaborate "Theory": scholarship that emphazises linguistic and conceptual gymnastics and eschews a responsibility to truth. They take us through the ways in which truth can be distorted, and give good descriptions of the pressures that lead to those distortions - in the ivory towers of academic departments and institutions, in cigarette companies' nefarious co-opting of scientists and social constructivism's lopsided attitudes to scientific research, in the "wishful thinking" of Marxism and liberal thought.

Their message is that "truth matters", though they are not always successful in explaining why. The fact that we are the only species we know of able to discover the truth is not a reason that we should do so; on the other hand, Stangroom and Benson are right that proper enquiry, of the sort scientists engage in, requires us to value truth both as an aim and as a source not of cold life-robbing demystification but of "new mysteries".

Review by Jack Darach, TLS (October 20 2006).

Return to Reviews