Hans Vaihinger's Fictionalism as a Foundation for Scientific Truth in a Post-Truth Era (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Philosophy - Theoretical (Realisation, Science, Logic, Language), grade: 1.0, Saint-Petersburg State University (Institute of Philosophy), course: Seminar "Problems in Contemporary STS Studies", language: English, abstract: We need a strong meaning of truth in order to guide our actions as individuals and as a society. While lots of people tell us that we have to stop burning fossil fuels today in order to mitigate the effects of global warming, others tell us that global warming is nonsense. So how should we act, and who should we listen to, if we know that nobody can tell what the "real" truth is? It almost seems like truth is something that we desperately need but can not have.

I begin my search for answers by looking at two of the most fundamental theories of truth: the Correspondence Theory of Truth and the Coherence Theory of Truth. Those two can be considered "basic" or classical answers to the question of truth, while several others, like Tarski's Theory of Truth, Realism and Antirealism, Deflationism, and others either try to cope with the problems that arise in the context of those classical conceptions or state completely new ones.

Since I am ultimately interested in the notion of scientific truth, the second chapter is dedicated to the discussion of two modern theoretical approaches to the problem of truth, Steve Fuller's critical "Post-Truth" approach and the positive "Veritist" approach represented by Baker and Oreskes, that aim to explain how scientific truth differs from everyday truth and how scientists establish consensus among each other.

3As both approaches substantially differ in their interpretation of the problem, I discuss Hans Vaihinger's Fictionalist Theory of Truth in an effort to "sublate" ("aufheben" in Hegels words) both approaches in a synthesis afterwards.
Finally, I use the newly gained knowledge and apply it to the example of man- made global warming. My proposal is that it could be beneficial, if we would stop trying to establish global warming as a scientific fact and start seeing it as a socially constructed fiction, that can positively guide our actions.