from PART III - INTERPRETATION OF KEY TOPICS
The differing commitments and interests of the analytic and continental traditions emerge especially clearly with respect to truth and realism, in part because of explicit critique across the traditions on this point. Notwithstanding the influence of pragmatist and coherence understandings of truth, the analytic tradition has a broadly objectivist understanding of truth, which backs analytic concerns with the (alleged) anti-realist tendencies in continental philosophy. In this chapter, we compare the two traditions' respective understandings of truth and its association with metaphysical realism. We shall argue that the distinction between these two traditions follows largely from the primacy of the proposition in analysis. The modern account of truth is seen within analytic philosophy as hardily won from a pre-existing fog of confusion, in which use is confounded with mention, sense with reference and the semantic with the epistemic. Truth is to be sharply (categorically) distinguished from satisfaction, obtaining or existing, and is standardly conceived of either as a semantic property of some kind (on much the same level as provability, or significance), or as a predicate that picks out no property in the world. We shall outline the development of this view of truth within analytic philosophy, and then consider contemporary concerns with the relation between accounts of truth and metaphysical realism. The analytic perspective will be contrasted with the more ontological (historical) and sometimes constructivist account of truth typical in continental philosophy. We conclude by considering the frequent accusations of relativism levelled at continental understandings of truth, and the charge that continental philosophy, from phenomenology to poststructuralism and beyond, remains committed to forms of idealism.
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