Freedom Is The Recognition Of Contingency.

Open-mindedness Should Not Be Fostered Because, As Scripture Teaches, Truth Is Great And Will Prevail, Nor Because, As Milton Suggests, Truth Will Always Win In A Free And Open Encounter. It Should Be Fostered For Its Own Sake.

Truth Is A Property Of Sentences, Since Sentences Are Dependent For Their Existence Upon Vocabularies, And Since Vocabularies Are Made By Human Beings, So Are Truths.

The World Does Not Speak. Only We Do. The World Can, Once We Have Programmed Ourselves With A Language, Cause Us To Hold Beliefs. But It Cannot Propose A Language For Us To Speak. Only Other Human Beings Can Do That.

As Long As We Try To Project From The Relative And Conditioned To The Absolute And Unconditioned, We Shall Keep The Pendulum Swinging Between Dogmatism And Skepticism. The Only Way To Stop This Increasingly Tiresome Pendulum Swing Is To Change Our Conception Of What Philosophy Is Good For. But That Is Not Something Which Will Be Accomplished By A Few Neat Arguments. It Will Be Accomplished, If It Ever Is, By A Long, Slow Process Of Cultural Change - That Is To Say, Of Change In Common Sense, Changes In The Intuitions Available For Being Pumped Up By Philosophical Arguments.

To Say That Truth Is Not Out There Is Simply To Say That Where There Are No Sentences There Is No Truth, That Sentences Are Elements Of Human Languages, And That Languages Are Human Creations.~ The Suggestion That Truth~ Is Out There Is A Legacy Of An Age In Which The World Was Seen As The Creation Of A Being Who Had A Language His Own.