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2020 - Volume 4 - Number 1

Guardians of the Possibility that Claims Can Be False

Susan T. Gardner * sgardner@capilanou.ca * ORCID: 0000-0001-6740-8105
Capilano University, Philosophy Department, Vancouver, CANADA

Open Journal for Studies in Philosophy, 2020, 4(1), 11-24 * https://doi.org/10.32591/coas.ojsp.0401.02011g
Received: 7 June 2020 ▪ Accepted: 14 August 2020 ▪ Published Online: 28 August 2020

LICENCE: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

ARTICLE (Full Text - PDF)

ABSTRACT:
It is difficult to be a philosopher in this postmodern era. This is so because philosophers, who heretofore have been the archetype of persons eager to engage in reasoned discourse, regardless of their differences, suddenly seem unable to talk to each other, primarily due to claim by postmoderns that non-postmoderns are naïve in their blindness to the fact that truth the claims cannot be true in any objective sense, and that claims to objectivity have been used maliciously throughout the ages to wield oppression. After exploring some of the seductive arguments of the post-modern position, and suggesting a re-working of the non-post-modern position, this paper will conclude that philosophical educators carry a heavy responsibility for limiting the real-life damage that has been produced by this philosophical truth-storm by siding firmly with its less contentious opposite by becoming guardians of the possibility that claims can be false.

KEY WORDS: post-modern, truth, regimes of truth, realists, falsification.

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR:
Susan T. Gardner, Capilano University, Philosophy Department, Vancouver, CANADA. E-mail: sgardner@capilanou.ca.

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