Former Fellows

What do we do when we say "This is the truth!"? That is the leading question of this study. But since "truth" is an over-exploited term, it is important to specify how we approach this question: Here we will examine truth-telling as a wholly practical - everyday - gesture similar to "accountable actions" in Harvey Sacks's conversation analysis. Put in other terms, we will examine truth-telling as a specific performative in John Austin's sense: as a performative utterance made here and now in a situational and indexically-oriented context. That is to say, this project takes a maximally pragmatic and contextual approach to truth-telling in the spirit of ordinary language philosophy, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis.

Hence, our main task is to find the family resemblances in a number of different cases in which we "tell the truth"; that is, to find the typical ("primitive") meaning of performatives of the "This is the truth!" type - regardless of whether we use in them the word "truth," a derivative, a practical synonym (such as "actually," "in fact," or "indeed"), or insist on the truth with a gesture or tone of voice. Furthermore, we will treat truth-telling as an everyday performative: (1) Regardless of whether we are dealing with ordinary language, or with - actually also ordinary - usages of "truth" in the higher, institutionalized languages of science, law, religion, and so forth; and (2) Regardless of whether the truth-teller is repeating pre-given normative models and sociocultural standards, subverting them, or openly (through "parrhesia") speaking out against a given hegemonic regime of truth (Foucault 2001).

The comparison between performatives of the "This is the truth!" type and a particular type of commands - such as "Take as an example!", "Do this always!", or "Follow the rule!" - is distinctive and constructive for our analysis. It is through this comparison that we will try to find the basic meaning we are looking for: telling the truth is a practical gesture of providing an example, an instance, a sample, a model to be followed.

But unlike explicit commands, which usually indexically indicate the concrete situational circumstances as well as the speaker and addressee of the command, truth-telling hides the situational context in which such an utterance is made. Hence the need to demonstrate that truth-telling is a specific performative whose main function is to produce maximum de-indexicalization and, thereby, maximum generalization of what is declared to be true: it is a practical gesture of de-contextualizing the utterance, through which the utterance should produce an extra-contextual standard to be followed. This is the performative purpose of such utterances - their "pragmatic implication" in the sense of Stanley Cavell (1998: 9ff.).