Senanu, K.E.2013-12-092013-12-092013-12-09http://197.255.68.203/handle/123456789/4587In agreeing to have my article ‘Truth as Experience’ re-published among the collection written by current members of the Department of English, I am keenly aware of how out-of-date a piece written in the 1970s would be in the context of English studies in the early 21st century. For ‘Truth as Experience’ was written in implicit response to ‘Truth as Opinion’ (published in UNIVERSITAS Vol. I Number 3 (New Series) March 1972) by my colleague in the Department of Philosophy, Johnson Wiredu, now Professor KwasiWiredu of the University of Tampa, Florida, U.S.A. I will not attempt to summarize Johnson’s argument here except to say that for him, at that point in time, “to be true is to be opined; which is to say, for anything whatever to be is to be apprehended.” By “opinion”, of course, he meant “considered opinion”. ‘Truth as Experience’ then was an indirect attempt at a rebuttal of the subjectivist theory of reality which undergirded Johnson’s carefully argued point of view. An overt rebuttal of that point of view would have been the presentation of an objectivist theory of reality as that which exists independently of apprehension. But, of course, the argument of my piece acknowledges apprehension– the experience of personal subjects (both writer and reader)– as crucial to any apology or rationale for English studies. In fact, I did consider the title: ‘Truth as Experienced’ but rejected it for obvious reasons. For what, I hope, I succeeded in doing was to argue that successful imaginative creations of the writer, although personal, are not subjective. Their objective truth consists both in their adequate and coherent grasp of a reality that is independent of the writer and reader, but brought to awareness by the creative writer’s successful use of the medium of language. That grasp– call it apprehension– is done in a language that is metaphorical, minted afresh, and yet embedded in historical usage. Put that way, my argument is in danger of landing in the lap of the late 20th century and early 21st century post-modernists: the progeny of Jacques Derrida who claim that language is the human resource for constructing reality. For them also, there is no objective reality, natural or social. It is all the creation/ construction of language and amounts to games played by writers. A scientist friend of mine remarked the other day with surprise that one of my past students who holds the trade union card of a professor, is of the view that writers and teachers of literature make no truth claim for what they write or profess. I told my friend that was a cynical position I do not share. ‘Truth as Experience’ tacitly accepts a correspondence theory of truth, although it concentrates on the complementary truth requirements of consistency and coherence. The two words are used in my piece and need careful pondering. But what is the correspondence theory of truth that I assume in ‘Truth as Experience’? The correspondence view of truth holds that any statement is true if and only if it corresponds to or agrees with factual reality. Sentences about facts express propositions. For example (from George Herbert’s poem Vertue) ‘Sweet rose Thy root is ever in its grave’ is a proposition which describes a state of affairs which agrees with objective reality. Propositions make truth claims; they stake out a chunk of reality linguistically. The correspondence theory of truth asserts that linguistic statements which correspond to the facts out there are not simply the subjective effusions of the speaker but refer to objective reality. The genuine creative writer is the one whose use of language enables us to experience true reality. I believe with this brief introduction, it is time to dip into ‘Truth as Experience’, 1973.enArticle