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I'll give it a go. You'll have to forgive me if I say anything frightfully dim, though - my memory is not what it was.
So, the proposition:
but it might mean that access to those truths is functionally impossible, as it would require either total understanding or total consensus
Let's take as a theoretical entity a statement like, say, "the sky is blue". Is this an absolute, i.e. non-relative and complete truth? Clearly, no, it isn't. For starters, it's in English, and so would fail to describe accurately the experience of the sky in non-English speakers. Latin, for example, splits up the colour specctrum differently, and would thus, even in translation, possibly understand "blue" as conceptually distinct. Second, it is clearly not the case that the sky is always blue at a particular place - sometimes it is cloudy, sometimes it is dusk, sometimes it is night. And, of course, "blue" relates to a complex system of reflection/refractions of light through water droplets that gives it a different set of qualities from, say, the statement "the bucket is blue". And "blue" is itself merely a shorthand for a particular set of physical rules, perceived in action in a certain way. Therefore, if we state "the sky is blue", how can we know that we are stating something correct, or that we are communicating something correct.
Answer, we can't. Unless a) we understand (and, if necessary, can express) all the possible pieces of information implied by the concepts "sky" and "blue", and the verb "to be". In that case, our own correctness in our statement will be absolute, and we will be expressing an absolutely correct statement - a description, that is, of a "true fact".
Alternatively, b) if the communication between myself and my interlocutor is perfect, then when I say "the sky is blue", our understanding of what I mean - the time, the place, the physics- is mutually perfect, and the meaning is communicated perfectly, even if actual comprehension is not complete. This would therefore be an act of "true communication". The thing I am communicating may or may not have a connection to what is actually going on, but that's another element.
Now, it seems unlikely that I will ever have the knowledge to express a statement *completely*, because at its furthest extension it might involve its contingent relationship to everything since the beginning of the universe and everything to the end of the universe. It seems reasonably unlikely that I will meet somebody whose communication with me is so perfect that we never need to confront the incompleteness of the picture we are painting.
To deal with this inadequacy, the construction of language as mechanism for communication has a certain amount of embedded data. So, "the sky is blue" I can interpret according to context as describing the perceptival effect of a particular interaction of physical laws going on at that moment in that place, or as a general but not complete description of a certain aspect of the physical universe.
Now - that embedded data certainly depends on an awful lot of things, and the prevailing mode of thought is moving towards the idea that there is no such thing as an "absolute" reality, or that if there is it is either not comprehensible or not expressible. This idea, approximately, is first attributed to Gorgias, but we can see a more modern hack at the idea of the "scientific" universe and its descriptions in the work of Charles Pierce.
However, consensus is as consensus does. "There is a war in Iraq" and "there is a genocide in Iraq" can both be seen as treatments of an ur-phrase, such as "there is fighting in Iraq", and consent can be given to one or the other, or withdrawn. One could choose not to consent to "there is fighting in Iraq", or "there is a country called Iraq", or "there are such things as people", and in each case the lines of consent and communciation woudl be redrawn - Lupus withdraws consent from the phrase "George Walker Bush is at this moment, March 31st 2003, President of the UNited States of America", because the term "George Walker Bush" fails to fulfil his demands for the terms "President". The further consensus shrinks, the more important communciation fo sense becomes.
*However*, you are also trying to make two different things the same thing. "The sky is blue", "the Earth is round" or "George Bush is president" can be inappropriate, or inaccurate, or incomplete - the Earth, after all, is not round, it as spheroidal, and Galielo, Copernicus and Bruno all made incomplete and inaccurate measurements or claims about astronomy. Bruno, in fact, appears to have pissed people off no end with his atronomical ignorance - he gave the round Earth faction a bad name. How-ever. These are nonetheless statements that, of you accept the existence of an external universe approximating to your percetions thereof, can be identified as true, false, incomplete and so on. This is not quite the same thing as statements where consent is given or withdrawn when the perceptions on which the statements are based are not necessariy; *physically* different. "15,000 US Marines have encamped outside Basra" - "15,000 oil mercenaries have encamped around Basra" describe the same set of prevailing consensual physical conditions in a way that "the Earth is flat" and "the Earth is round" do not.
Forgive the incompleteness of this answer - I leave it in the capable hands of the Barbelith beta testers. |
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