“There is no absolute truth” means that there is absolutely no truth and is therefore self-contradictory.
Gotta love this one. No telling how many words have been wasted on this bad boy. Might as well waste some more.
Let’s start at the “reading comprehension” level. We’ll take out the adjective “absolute” and replace it with any other adjective. And we’ll choose “red”. We then have “There is no red truth”. This does not imply that there is truth of any other color – it doesn’t imply anything, in fact, except that I have been unable to justify the idea that there are red truths. It does not imply that there is truth of any other kind or color, but only that there is no red truth. It’s not the contradiction of any claim except the claim that there are red truths, and it is the affirmation of no other claims about truth.
So, let’s move on to another adjective. We’ll try to find an adjective that presents a likely alternative to “absolute”. Here’s one – “There is no contingent truth”. Now, what could that mean? It could mean that there are no circumstances in which a truth can exist. But let’s take a look at the word “truth” to see if that makes sense.
What is a “true” fire hydrant? What would be a false one? Well, it wouldn’t be a fire hydrant. So, is there a difference between a fire hydrant and a true fire hydrant, with the possible linguistic difference that the latter expression can sensibly be used for emphasis? I don’t think so. So, it seems like adding “true” to “fire hydrant gets us nowhere. “True” does not convey any information in this context.
Which is why the word “true” should be applied not to things, but to statements (perhaps about things). So, we wind up with “There are no absolutely true statements about the existence of fire hydrants”. That is to say, “There is such a thing as a fire hydrant” is never absolutely true. But of course we already know this. We would accept the truth of the statement “There are fire hydrants” only if we either verify this ourselves, with direct observation, or if we rely on trusted testimony. Each is commonly used by most people as sufficient verification. In the end, we are trusted either our senses, or the senses of others and their honesty.
This would make the statement “There is such a thing as a fire hydrant” contingent indeed. And contingent is not absolute. Here, we are characterizing the nature of the claim to truth – we are further defining the word “truth” with the idea “contingent”. Which is implicit in empirical claims, at least for most people.
And people like me, who would make the claim that there are no absolute truths, are simply claiming that unverifiable truths do not produce meaningful statements, if those statements are about verifiable phenomena. I have left aside analytic statements that are derived from verifiable synthetic statements, but will address them if that produces any confusion. I do not see why it should.
But what about the unverifiable stuff? I’m not going to call them “phenomena”, because that perverts the meaning of that word. What of metaphysical objects? I will simply claim that whatever truth statements about them possess is of a very different kind that contingent truth. And I will further claim that in order to make the claim that “absolute truth” means anything, we must use a linguistic process that I will indifferently call reverse or viciously circular abstraction. Hence, any claim that there are no absolute truths is simply the claim that “absolute truth” is as meaningless as “red truth”. That is, that process ultimately fails.
The short version here is made by example – Plato’s Forms. This is abstraction to the point of meaninglessness. We can abstract the word cat from actual cats, but words are symbols. To abstract an entity from a symbol, in order to derive the metaphysical object “Cat” perverts the process and meaning of abstraction. It’s simple reification. Any statement derived from the metaphysical Cat is no longer even a candidate for verification. If we cannot at least eliminate verification as a way of determining the truth of such statements, either we cannot assign any truth value at all to those statements and/or those statements are vacuous.
My final formulation therefore is that “truth” is a word that has meaning only if it refers to statements, and only if those statements can be at least potentially verified. That is made clear, I think, because any metaphysical statement about Cat is also, by definition, about cats, which are verifiable phenomena. And so such a statement would also apply to statements about cats.
Here, we have that vicious circle, because empirical statements about cats would rely on an absolute and unverifiable truth, which is not the basis upon which we accept statements about cats. Capital-C Cat does not convey any information, in other words. And so neither does “absolute truth”.
So upon what is the initial claim contingent upon? The meaning of words. Some would say that it is therefore a trivial claim. But those who deny this claim are then being just as trivial. I would say that it is not trivial within the context of philosophy, given the errors in philosophy that it has produced.
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