Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Materialism and the possibility of truth
Vallicella's argument that if all things are material, there can be no such thing as truth (and therefore, materialism cannot be true). I linked to this before and no one responded.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
At best, it seems his argument says that materialism does not SEEM to be consistent with itself. But of course, it is obvious where the problem lies whenever you construct an argument that has "all things are material" as a premise and "materialism is false" as a conclusion. It means that we don't understand the truth and how it works, since materialism is taken to be true.
I see a plethora of problems with Vallicella's argument, but the most important is that he plays semantic games -- he defines truth in a way that is irrelevant to the worldview he is discussing, then dismisses the worldview because truth is irrelevant to it.
"Truth" is a hard word to define, but several standard theories of truth (such as correspondence theory) are completely compatible with materialism.
Post a Comment