Abstract

In this dissertation I use recent developments in the philosophy of science and in moral philosophy to show that we are committed to two quite different conceptions of truth: the objective truth of science, which is based on the "meta-paradigm" of scientific realism, and the subjective truth of morality, which is based on the self's attempt to remain true to itself. ;In the first part I begin by giving an ontological grounding to the central claims of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn claims there that "scientists working under different paradigms live in different worlds," yet he admits he does not know what such a locution would mean. I turn to Division One of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time to give an ontological ground to Kuhn's claims about scientific practice; this leads to a rethinking of scientific truth as "discovering." ;But the Kuhnian-Heideggerian analysis of science cannot do justice to the sense in which we take scientific practice to be different from "everyday" practice. Thus scientific practice must be itself an articulation of a deeper "meta-paradigm" of objectivity: this paradigm establishes the meaning and place of "scientific activity" as a way to discover the truth. This means that we are committed to "scientific truth": it is neither necessarily nor simply contingently true that science discovers the truth about "the external world." ;In the second part of the dissertation I show that our commitment to "subjective truth" in morality need not isolate us from others. Drawing on readings of some of Soren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works I propose that moral truth is located in the situation of confession, where we share, with others, the stories of our lives. It is there where we see whether we live up to the stories we tell about our lives; it is there where we see whether we are "in the truth." ;The phenomenon of confession cannot be understood as merely an attempt to establish the "objective truth," however, and so our commitments to truth are bifurcated. The dissertation thus aims at establishing that we have no unified concept of truth: the drive for scientific truth and the pathos of moral truth lead in different directions