Truth contingent

Metaphysical realism is the view that assumes a position similar to the external observer watching the waterfall and the painting about it. On the one hand, there is the world. On the other hand, there are our representations and descriptions of it. These may be thoughts, sentences, mental pictures - for our purposes it does not matter. The world is independent of the representations. It would have existed and would have had the same characteristics even if no representations had ever been prepared. A representation is true if it matches the segment of the world it is a representation of. Whether a representation is true is completely independent of what its maker believes about it. It is also independent of the techniques the maker of the representation uses to check how good the representation is, i. e. it is independent of the verification procedures. The verification procedures are useful, but they are linked to truth only contingently. So truth is one thing, verification is another. 

On the internal realist view there cannot be a mismatch. The real structures are the structures our recognition abilities and justification conditions identify. The real boundaries coincide with the boundaries we draw, since the former are identical with the latter. Something is a dog, if the sentence This is a dog is justified when it is applied to it, for the very kind DOG owes its existence to the justification conditions. As a result, at least some of our sentences are bound to be true, namely, those simple sentences whose justification conditions are responsible for drawing the boundaries. So truth cannot completely diverge from justification. There are sentences for which to be true is to be justified. Consequently, there is a conceptual connection between truth and justification. The connection is not purely contingent. Truth is then not completely non-epistemic. 

No wonder Johnston uses here the Deleuzian term minimal difference . . . when we pass from the notion of crisis as occasional contingent malfunctioning of the system to the notion of crisis as the symp-tomal point at which the truth of the system becomes visible, we are talking about one and the same actual event—the difference is purely virtual, it does not concern any of its actual properties, but only the way this event is supplemented by the virtual tapestry of its ideological and notional background. ... 

The fact net is an interconnection of inputs and innate ideas constructed by means of a given set of relations and operators, it is a network of contingent truths. 

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