RELEVANT REALISM · Truth, Power, and Action for 21st Century Societies

Relevant Realism - Truth, Power, and Action for 21st Century Societies

Have postmodernism and poststructuralism paved the way for “alternative facts” by weakening our truth-concepts? This has been sustained by many. However, a naïve insistence on and return to “hard facts” seems not suitable as this endangers some of the major political successes of postmodern and poststructuralist theories which lie in seeing a value in and in taking account of the constant complexification of cultures and ways of living. This is especially pressing in a culturally diversified space like Europe. Therefore, the question arises: Do we really need hard-boiled truth and realism to counter fake-news? While there are many sides to this question, RELEVANT REALISM intends to address the semantic part and takes the current debate as an opportunity to reflect anew on how our words latch on to reality, what the concepts of reality and realism exactly consist in, and what we should think they consist in. Do our words relate to the world or only to other words? The overall objective of RELEVANT REALISM is to develop a way out of the current theory-crisis by providing conceptualizations of truth and realism which avoid both the current realist-backlash and the postmodern relativist trap. The project is collocated at the border between analytic philosophy of language and action and poststructuralist political theory. The two main objectives of the project are a) to interprete, elaborate, and further develop positions regarding objectivity which work beyond the realism-antirealism divide and b) to evaluate the political implications of this new conception. The main achievement of the research consists in drawing on an existing debate in philosophy of language between Rorty, Brandom, and Ramberg to formulate the concept “relevant realism”. The content of the concept can be summarized thus: a) there is no truth without reliance on the outer-world, but, equally, b) there is no politically relevant truth without peers and power mechanisms. A) justifies the use of the term “realism”, b) justifies the use of the term “relevant”. If language is a tool we use to communicate with other people then we need to take account of their agendas and the norms of the discursive realm we are communicating in and contributing to. At the same time, communication takes place in our common causal environment which inescapably impacts our ways of coordinating our actions by linguistic means. RELEVANT REALISM accounts for both sides by entrenching insights from analytic and continental philosophy.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз