What I Expect to be Throwing Across the Room in Disgust Very Soon

Thursday, 12 December 2002

I've decided to give Felipe Fernando Armeste's irritating tomelet Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed one last chance to make sense before it's off to the second hand shop like last Christmas's unwanted puppy getting packed off to the Lort Smith Animal Shelter. For a short time Armeste's historical, anthropological, philosophical and every-other-thingical survey of the concept of truth, starting with "the truth that you feel", through "the truth that you are told", "the truth you think for yourself" to "the truth you perceive with your senses" seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people who really ought to know better, as the deepest work on major philosophical themes since The Tao of Pooh.

Armeste apparently is an Oxford don but reading the book and his frequent folksie remarks about how little he learned at school I sometimes suspect his major field of scholastic achievement has well-trimmed grass and chalk lines on it. When discussing thinkers like Kurt Godel and Werner Heisenberg he quite frankly admits that he doesn't understand most of the issues and it's far from endearing: the resale value of my copy would be much higher if he'd taken the time to do some reading and research instead of dismissing the whole topic as the sort of high-falutin' stuff that's only of interest to girlie swots who are no good at rugger.

The first time I tried to read Truth etc I gave up shortly after Armeste started getting stuck into post-modernism and relativism. There's a lot of relativism in his own historical treatment of the four types of truth and he shows a strong tendency to treat them as equally valid: as long as you have some concept of the truth it doesn't too much matter whether it's grounded in personal intuition, religious authority, right reason or empirical observation. In my view the classification is too restricted anyway: it ignores a lot of the other forms of truth that are common currency in modern society, such as the truth that is shouted in your face, the truth that you overhear on the bus, the truth that's just between you, me and the doorpost and Armeste's apparent personal favourite, the truth that is explained to you in condescending detail with a patronising sneer.