The senses justified the facts of science the rules of language, the facts of mathematics and logic. Our system of knowledge and belief, they argued, is a building resting on secure foundations. Although members of the Vienna circle suffered many points of disagreement, they were like-minded to the extent that their goal was a form of philosophy adequate to the demands of modern science. It is a book that served to express the movement that came to be known as logical positivism, or logical empiricism, a congeries of doctrines associated with the Vienna circle, and figures such Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, Hans Hahn, Victor Kraft, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, and Friedrich Waismann. Ayer published Language, Truth, and Logic in 1936. Skeptical about truth, and sensitive to shifts in culture, society, and history, they thought of words as tools, and believed that vocabularies survive because they enable us to cope, to meet our goals. They denied the existence of unmediated or innocent observation, and were dubious about the distinction between facts and values, the analytic and the synthetic, the mind and the world. Philosophical postmodernists emphasized the possibility of different perspectives on things, or different interpretations of them. Familiar figures have, by now, become infamous: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Frederic Jameson, Douglas Kellner, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. Whatever postmodernism is in the arts, I am concerned with its philosophy of language, its view of truth. This view of postmodernism as an intellectual villain is very common. Writing in the otherwise staid European Molecular Biology Organization Report, Marcel Kuntz affirmed that “postmodernist thought is being used to attack the scientific worldview and undermine scientific truths a disturbing trend that has gone unnoticed by a majority of scientists.” 2 Our anxieties are cultural, the widespread sense that a number of philosophical theories have escaped the academic world, and, in the wild, are doing great harm.
Truth was under attack by politicians and their propagandists. Well before the advent of tweets and trolls, George Orwell expressed the fear that “the very concept of objective truth fading out of the world.” 1 Orwell’s anxieties were political.
I f anxiety about truth is very much in the air, it has been in the air for a very long time.
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