Truth, Politics, and Self-deception by Bernard Williams

1 HERE are social practices and virtues which, if we are to characterize them, require us to mention the truth. This is not the same as mentioning what other people hold true (their beliefs), or just mentioning what we regard as true (our own beliefs). We may contrast in this respect two different virtues of truth, which may be labeled sincerity and accuracy. Sincerity (at the most basic level) merely implies that people say what they believe to be true, that is, what they believe. Accuracy implies care, reliability, and so on in discovering and coming to believe the truth. Among other questions that involve mentioning the truth, there are those concerning the properties of various methods of belief formation. Thus, if one is interested in the probable success of some military venture, augury is not a good method of acquiring true belief about it. It seems that there is a genuine property which some methods of inquiry have and others (such as augury) lack, that of being (roughly) truth-acquiring. It is dubious, though, that there is any interesting and non-trivial description of this property in general, as opposed to the form that it may take in particular sorts of cases. It may be suggested that we can say at least this much: that no method will have the desirable property if its efficacy in generating the belief that P would extend equally to generating