6 Comments

Thanks for this D. The sociologist restates the obvious, which you have said here several ways and times: truth would seem always to be a collective project and process, like knowledge and language; in no “one’s” hands alone and always subject to constitutive affirmation and revision “on the ground” of its here and now collective making. Multiple truths then. Which is where we seem so clearly to be (but hardly “news “). Can democracy, for instance, survive that multiplicity and relativity? A real question it would seem. Those who carry it must want that to happen. I must go back and listen again.

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“We can’t be truth seekers until we decide to be good.”

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“The dynamism of truth lies in our capacity to grow.”

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Promise l’ll stop this run here. The deep anxiety “we” feel now, here, is whether “the center” will, indeed, “hold.” That center appears to be the very process or practice (it is both) that Appa reiterated and that “grounds” what they and we call Rajanaka. It is a way of “doing” the truth that DRB details: facts, evidence, black swans, transparency, all invited to the conversation, contingent in that very “conversation.” That the rejection or professed rejection (disingenuously held) of these foundational practices and a commitment thereto as a strategy of power or an alternate sort of power might in fact “win the day” makes us shudder, w reason. Thank you.

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“[O]ur task is to invite all to a process of truth.”

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Douglas,

I really appreciate how you make the exposition of truth a value proposition. True things are SAT, they are extant, thus true propositions mirror how things are in the world (Hi Wittgenstein!) but adding the value constraint, you move beyond truth as correspondence into a robust notion that meets our humanity with more nuance and grace.

Pranams.

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