Harold Pinter acknowledgement speech

[Chaerophon]

If I am correct that inverted commas are here used to indicate that a word is not meant to mean what it means (inverted commas indicating intended irony), then how should one be expected to construe the phrase “truth vs. ‘truth’”? Is this construction rightly intended to mean truth vs. not-truth? The understanding of a word sandwiched between inverted commas as not meaning what it means confronts one who would know what a thing is, and not merely one element in the list of what a thing is not, with obvious dilemma in immediate application: What then is moral ‘truth’? Does this perhaps mean moral not-truth?

Quite the word puzzle that you've got there...

You are not correct to assume that the inverted commas are used with that purpose. What I mean to say is that, in many cases, moral "truths" are only empirically verifiable in context. Quite simply, what is a moral truth - as embodied in behaviours that are morally permissable and even encouraged - in one societal context may not be so in another. Even modern Kantians (Rawls et al) can usually accept that this is the case. Although they may wish to assert that theirs is a "better" or "more just" articulation of the standards that ought to guide moral behaviour, it would be foolish for them to deny that different cultures possess different standards of moral behaviour and that in any such situation, it is true that a given set of behaviours is morally permissable or encouraged. In this sense, such a moral code and the contextual moral "truths" that it contains for a given set of people are correspondently true in that they do exist; however, the contents of the specific code are, arguably, not true for all people equally (This is where the correspondence analytics start to get antsy).

When discussing issues of morality, it is impossible to identify any one correspondently true set of beliefs since morality is, itself (at least in part), a constructed artifact. What is popularly held to be a moral "truth" in fundamentalist Pakistan may not be so in suburban America.

You seem to take issue with my position that what is held to be morally "true" in one context is not so in another. I don't see this as problematic.

What might be problematic is my claim that no particular set of moral claims is or could be justifiably said to be the single, absolute, correspondently true set - not in this world where so many people hold such radically different beliefs. With that being said, one might be able to reason that certain types of moral reasoning are superior to others. However, at the very least, even if there is a "true set", how could we positively distinguish it so as to claim with justifiable confidence that it is correspondently true to those who believe otherwise? On what basis would we do so? Perhaps you have an answer?