Product Description

The academic world has been plagued in recent years by scepticism about truth and knowledge. Paul Boghossian, in his long-awaited first book, sweeps away relativist claims that there is no such thing as objective truth or knowledge, but only truth or knowledge from a particular perspective. He demonstrates clearly that such claims don't even make sense. Boghossian focuses on three different ways of reading the claim that knowledge is socially constructed - one as a thesis about truth and two about justification. And he rejects all three. The intuitive, common-sense view is that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective. Difficult as these notions may be, it is a mistake to think that recent philosophy has uncovered powerful reasons for rejecting them. This short, lucid, witty book shows that philosophy provides rock-solid support for common sense against the relativists; it will prove provocative reading throughout the discipline and beyond.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #253794 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 148 pages

Simon Blackburn, Times Literary Supplement, 1 September 2006
'a thoroughly professional contribution'

Review
If only Boghossian's eminently reasonable book were required reading for every freshman considering entrance into the humanities... (Ars Disputandi )

...lucid and effective ... (Times Literary Supplement )

This is a great book for a seminar or discussion group. And its about time that someone wrote it. Happily, it was someone with Boghossians clarity, verve, and panache. (Graham Priest, Review of Metaphysics )

...this is an important book that should be widely read. (Philosophers' Magazine )

This is a book that can be read in an afternoon and thought about for a lifetime. (Wall Street Journal )

...a tour de force: subtle and originalbut accessible enough to be read by anyone with an interest in the subject. (Wall Street Journal )

In both subject matter and execution, this book promises to become a small classic of philosophical analysis. (Choice )

For all its sophistication and erudition, the writing is remarkably clear, free of specialized jargon, and accessible to nonspecialist readers. (Choice )

...the book does a fine job of assessing in brief compass the sort of relativism/constructivism advocated by Rorty and his fellow travelers, and Boghossian's sophisticated and careful arguments against that Rortian view are often ingenious and invariably telling. (Harvey Siegel, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 25/07/07 )

Duncan Pritchard, Philosophers' Magazine
"this is an important book that should be widely read."

Customer Reviews

Good Counter to Specific Formulations of Relativism and Constructivism
I read this book a couple of years ago, and as such apologize for any oversights that may result from this. In an objectivist counter to constructivism about facts, justification and rational explanation, Boghossian has provided an excellent counterbalance to the constructivist and relativist theories of knowledge taught or assumed in many English Literature and Sociology classrooms, and at the same time the specific arguments he makes will be of interest to undergraduates in Philosophy with an understanding of contemporary epistemology. The text is clear and doesn't presuppose very much knowledge of the subject, while containing a central argument and setting the bar high enough in defense of this argument to differentiate it from an introductory text.

Most of the problems I had with this text only arose from closer analysis, and in defense of the author this made it more interesting to grapple with and is most likely a result of the same short length that made it so readable in the first place. Occasionally it feels like the restricted positions that Boghossian argues against could be confused by the reader for the only formulation of constructivist or relativist positions. For example there are very obvious combinatorial positions that can be constructed, such as the acceptance of objectivism about facts, relativism about justification (relationalism) and objectivism about rational explanation. Because Boghossian sets up the argument from the fact-relativist position from which he argues justification-relativism emerges, it is too easy to slip into the assumption that relativism about justification cannot be justified independently of the first position. This is a problem since it is not clear that all the thinkers cited by the author (Kant, Wittgenstein and Putnam for example) accept the latter on the basis of the former, or even that they accept the former at all. An example of this is given on pg. 84 where the epistemic relativist is supposed to accept that there are 'no facts by virtue of which our particular system is more correct than any of the others', however this is not necessary for a weaker formulation of relativism that accepts only B or perhaps B and A of the positions given in this section, and to do so takes much of the sting out of the proceeding arguments. The reader could also assume that the 'equal validity' thesis is accepted by epistemic relativists and motivates their position when this is often not the case. These issues may seem trivial and merely the result of the necessary assumption of a particular set of relativist positions (where everything else is treated as non-relativism to avoid confusion), but since contextualism and the plethora of apparently 'tamed' relativistic positions in epistemology are becoming more dominant it is important to note that the counter-arguments Boghossian applies to the stronger formulations of relativism in this text often fail to apply to many of the more mainstream positions in contemporary analytic philosophy. This is because many of his arguments presuppose that one accepts all or at least most of the theses of relativism he lays out, rather than treating them as quite separable positions.

The obvious advantage of this is that Boghossian's focus highlights many of the core problems with the particular positions he is examining, and these positions are by no means irrelevant. Indeed, they are often treated as an unspoken assumptions by students from various disciplines and as such deserve to be heavily scrutinized. As an undergraduate I can't give anything like an expert opinion on the book, but it was refreshing to read after years of these assumptions being made unquestioningly in course texts, and has remained interesting and useful secondary reading since then. I believe it would make an ideal addition to the reading list of courses where there is a predominance of the kind of 'equal validity' views outlined in the opening chapters- exposing students to a rigorous critique this assumption.

With such enemies, who needs friends?
A clearheaded critique of certain social constructivist tendencies would be a welcome contribution to the philosophical debate; unfortunately this book does not provide it. It consistently overstates the importance or relevance of some of the more outlandish ideas of individual 'relativists' and/or 'constructivists', thereby neglecting the bulk of the literature proposing entirely reasonable forms of 'social constructivism' (though they are rarely advertised under this label). Lack of familiarity breeds contempt, and so it should come as a no surprise that Boghossian makes little attempt to give the positions he criticises a charitable interpretation. What is more worrying, however, is that some of Boghossian's arguments are outright sloppy. (In some cases, he exploits an equivocation between an assertion of entailment and one of identity in order to force an argument to work -- hardly an argumentative move worthy of a philosopher of Boghossian's standing...) In the preface, Boghossian writes that he tried to make the book accessible beyond the narrow circle of academic philosophers. While this is a laudable goal, I am doubtful whether it suffices to justify (to mention but one example) delegating to a mere footnote problems with, e.g., the tripartite definition of knowledge (p. 16) -- when it is the stalemate arising from just such problems which has prompted many philosophers to seek a departure from traditional epistemology, e.g. along the lines of social epistemology (and for this one need not turn to Latour, Boghossian's favorite bogeyman, but to figures such as Edward Craig...) Finally, the timing for Boghossian's book is awkward. Any discerning observer of contemporary epistemology should by now have noticed that there is considerable rapprochement between different philosophical traditions, an increased awareness of the role of values in epistemology, new constructive uses of history in philosophy, all of which contributes to the project of philosophical inquiry rather than detracting from it. In summary, to paraphrase Bernard Williams, a work in philosophy may be unimaginative not because it fails to be clever but because it misses the point. Boghossian's book is a clear instance of that.

Excellent
Boghossian does an excellent job of dispersing a few popular but entirely gaseous philosophical ideas, exposing the fallacies or sheer lack of argument underlying much of them. There is a certain amount of technical language but that shouldn't prevent non-philosophers from following the argument.