Experientialist v Objective truth

Question

Background

In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live By (Wikipedia, Chicago Press Edition 1981). In Chapter 24 "Truth", they write:

We understand a statement as being true in a given situation when our understanding of the statement fits our understanding of the situation closely enough for our purposes.

And,

A theory of truth based on understanding is obviously not a theory of "purely objective truth." We do not believe there exists such a thing as absolute truth, and we think that it is pointless to try to give a theory of it.

They negate a correspondence between statements and a real objective world: truth arises through our human understanding, and it's not objective. The way we understand a situation is dependent upon being humans, having bodies (bounded, two-sided), and so on. This isn't about difficult statements, but any.

Given that our conceptual structure mediates between the world and us, we can't talk about objective truths, but only about truths as relative to us.

Even scientific truths aren't objective in this sense. To an extent, I wouldn't expect science to have gotten so far given my own current understanding of Lakoff and Johnson definition. It does seem to be held by some scientists, and even derive from Wittgenstein (and maybe Husserl and others.)

Note that this doesn't make scientific truths irrelevant; but science is just one way in which we engage with the world.

They also write that people with different conceptual systems may understand the world different to how we do, and have different bodies of truth and reality.

Questions

• Is the interpretation about scientific truths correct?
• Is the experientialist theory of truth widely held by philosophers currently?
• Does it have any specific downsides?

Answer 1

There is some agreement with Lakoff and Johnson in Heidegger's On Time and Being (page 69) but also something else ...

Insofar as truth is understood in the traditional "natural" sense as the correspondence of knowledge with beings demonstrated in beings, but also insofar as truth is interpreted as the certainty of the knowledge of Being, ...

So as well as correspondence "close enough for our purposes", there is the certainty of the intuitive understanding of existing – not that it can be demonstrably explained. I think this gets the meaning:

To Dasein’s Being, an understanding of Being belongs. Any understanding [Verständnis] has its Being in an act of understanding [Verstehen]. ...

That wherein Dasein already understands itself in this way [in involvements] is always something with which it is primordially familiar. This familiarity with the world does not necessarily require that the relations which are constitutive for the world as world should be theoretically transparent. B&T 85-6

Furthermore, to try to better sketch this slippery idea.

Pure νοεΐν is the perception of the simplest determinate ways of Being which entities as such may possess, and it perceives them just by looking at them.³ This νοεΐν is what is 'true' in the purest and most primordial sense; that is to say, it merely discovers, and it does so in such a way that it can never cover up. This νοεΐν can never cover up; it can never be false; it can at worst remain a non-perceiving, άγνοεΐν, not sufficing for straightforward and appropriate access. B&T 33

I think this idea of perception—immediate understanding—is still on the track of "certainty of the knowledge of Being".