"It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are"
About this Quote
Fish lands a neat double jab: first at metaphysical comfort, then at our vanity. He concedes what the realist wants to hear - sure, maybe there is an absolute truth "of the matter of things" - and then removes its practical value. A truth you can never cash out, publicly demonstrate, or settle on procedures for verifying is, for civic purposes, indistinguishable from no truth at all. The sentence is engineered to do that deflationary work: the stately phrase "absolute truth" swells with authority; "unfortunately" punctures it; "none of us" widens the failure from the ignorant to the entire species.
The kicker is the parenthetical: "although we all think that we are". Fish isn't just skeptical about truth; he's diagnosing a social habit. The line exposes how appeals to certainty often function less as epistemic claims than as power moves - a way to end argument, claim moral high ground, or smuggle in ideology under the banner of the obvious. His target is the reflex that treats conviction as evidence, and the institutional incentives (politics, academia, media) that reward sounding definitive.
Contextually, this is Fish at home: the anti-foundationalist critic of "neutral" principles. He’s not saying reality is a hallucination; he’s saying that access to reality is always mediated by interpretation, and interpretation is always situated. The subtext is bracing: if you can’t finally escape perspective, then the honest work isn’t hunting for a view from nowhere. It’s owning the arguments, stakes, and communities that make any claim to truth legible in the first place.
The kicker is the parenthetical: "although we all think that we are". Fish isn't just skeptical about truth; he's diagnosing a social habit. The line exposes how appeals to certainty often function less as epistemic claims than as power moves - a way to end argument, claim moral high ground, or smuggle in ideology under the banner of the obvious. His target is the reflex that treats conviction as evidence, and the institutional incentives (politics, academia, media) that reward sounding definitive.
Contextually, this is Fish at home: the anti-foundationalist critic of "neutral" principles. He’s not saying reality is a hallucination; he’s saying that access to reality is always mediated by interpretation, and interpretation is always situated. The subtext is bracing: if you can’t finally escape perspective, then the honest work isn’t hunting for a view from nowhere. It’s owning the arguments, stakes, and communities that make any claim to truth legible in the first place.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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