Truth & Truthfulness, Ch. 7

We began, as usual, with questions about the chapter.  (Also, where did our questions about other chapters go?

* What does BW mean by progress?
* How does the distinction between local/objective time reflect the antiquity/modernity distinction?
* What criteria are used in local/objective conceptions of time?  (Why does BW excavate the local conception of time in the State of Nature?  Why does he excavate the objection conception of time through real history?)
* What is the relation between fictional genealogy and historical truth?
* How are literacy and historical time related?
* What 'kind' of history is BW doing here?  Intellectual history, rather than social history or political history, right?
* In footnote 31 BW refers to MF.  Can MF agree with BW that truth itself is invariant, but that what changes is what is taken to be true?  Does MF need to historicize truth itself?  Or can MF be agnostic about whether 'truth itself' has a history and just focus instead on the history of what comes to be true?

* Is BW saying that there is no history before the notion of historical time?

Discussion then turned to...

What is BW's conception of the relationship between modernity and antiquity?  Are antiquity's notions of accuracy and sincerity transformed into modernity?

What are the criteria for differentiating historical versus local time?  "The difference is that the objective conception insists that it is a truth-condition of a statement about a real past event that it occurred some determinate temporal interval before now, while the local conception does not insist on this" (p. 57).

• "Local time" is a time for situating "plain truths" -- and we would only need state of nature capacities for dealing with that
• "Objective time" is something more complicated and involves the idea situating past events in "determinate temporal interval[s] before now" (57) -- and it is important that this determinate order can be indexed to the now or the present ("the principle serves also, and indispensably, to link past with present") -- we would need historical genealogy rather than state of nature story because at this point the disposition of Accuracy has a specific content
• Objective time involves determinate temporal intervals, and
• Objective time is related to the present, and
• Historical time is "not audience-relative" (165)

Thucydides's history resolves an anxiety/tension/problem in Herodotus's account? (p. 161)

Thucydides expands Accuracy to now extend its reach to the past.

• But why is Accuracy by itself enough?  Because it is "intrinsically valuable" (for Williams).