Summary The dispute about positivism in German sociology dealt basically with the question, whether we can know what we ought to do or whether we must be content to decide what we want to do. Habermas questioned the distinction which positivists and decisionists draw between science on the one hand and ethics on the other. Later he proposed his own notion of knowledge about reality and along with it a notion of normative or ethical knowledge and he claimed the two (...) notions were comparable. He developed the first notion in the form of a consensus theory of the truth of statements and the second one in the form of a consensus theory of the rightness of norms and values. The consensus theories are examined and it is shown that both are untenable for various reasons. (shrink)

Tarski’s pioneering work on truth has been thought by some to motivate a robust, correspondence-style theory of truth, and by others to motivate a deflationary attitude toward truth. I argue that Tarski’s work suggests neither; if it motivates any contemporary theory of truth, it motivates conceptual primitivism, the view that truth is a fundamental, indefinable concept. After outlining conceptual primitivism and Tarski’s theory of truth, I show how the two approaches to truth share much in common. While Tarski does not (...) explicitly accept primitivism, the view is open to him, and fits better with his formal work on truth than do correspondence or deflationary theories. Primitivists, in turn, may rely on Tarski’s insights in motivating their own perspective on truth. I conclude by showing how viewing Tarski through the primitivist lens provides a fresh response to some familiar charges from Putnam and Etchemendy. (shrink)