Hilary Lawson asks if pursuing the truth is a mistake. Should it be at the center of our account of meaning? Is this a mistake and could error instead be at the heart of language and adventure.

Hilary Lawson: Let me begin with truth. We have a strange relationship with truth. On the one hand we appear to know so much; if we don’t know it then just a click away on the internet we can find someone who does. And yet a few thousands years of human puzzling and are we any closer to answering the big philosophical questions? Is there a chance that someone just round the corner is going to pen something which is going to outline the key questions about the universe and our lives? You already know the answer, its not going to happen.

You only have to imagine the situation that such a thing occurred to realize it’s implausible. Imagine if someone tomorrow a scientist writes the grand unified theory of everything which describes how everything has come to pass, what do we do then? We close down the Large Hadron Collider, we close our cathedrals and churches because we know the truth now and so we just contemplate the absolute truth for the indefinite future. It’s not going to happen. So how is it that we find ourselves in the situation that we appear to know so much and yet in a sense we get no closer to arriving at those ultimate objective truths?

So what is going on here? I want you to imagine that you find yourself in a labyrinth. It’s made up of hundreds of corridors and it runs indefinitely linking to other corridors. Rather like the Tower of Babel, the walls of the labyrinth are made of knowledge, walls of books. The inhabitants of this labyrinth wander through it searching for the ultimate corridor, the one that would somehow tell us everything about how all of the others came to be. Of course they have never found it. If you look closely in the corridors, you can find cracks. If you get up close to a crack you can glimpse through and as you glimpse through it becomes more of a gap. It is said you can glimpse through the corridor into the world beyond. Nobody has been able to tell us of this experience.

This is because moments after they walk into the gap and through to the world beyond, new corridors arrive on both sides and they find themselves in another space lined with books of knowledge. Those corridors sometimes link back to the labyrinth from which they came in the first place. I want to propose to you that we are operating in a space something like that. That is something like our relationship to the ultimate questions that lie beyond our corridors.

Philosophers have tended to be more interested in truth than in error. And yet the rigorous attempt to arrive at the truth has most typically uncovered its failure. Analytic philosophy is just one such example. Irritated with the failure of philosophy to make any progress in thousands of years, Russell wanted to put the subject on a sound footing; making it a science and allowing for piecemeal advance. He was going to do this by grounding philosophy on logic and analysis to provide a solid foundation on which to build; it was a great vision.

But here we are 100 years later. Has agreement broken out between the analytic philosophers?