Dear Marion,

In your recent letter you wrote:

> To live life in a cogent manner,
> I am anxious to distinguish what's true from what's not. 
> Of course this is laughable, impossible in an absolute sense. 
> Yet propositions vary in their level of consistency,
> corroboration, reliability (having been tested). 
> Essential to developing a foundation of knowledge and understanding,
> is having ways of sorting assertions
> into the more or less likely to be true (accurate).
> I give my qualified credence
> (qualified because of the impact of theory)
> to the assertions supported by empirical evidence,
> while trying to remain ever conscious of the limitations
> of the evidence (including Goethe's dictum). 
> So most important for me is which propositions
> to consider relatively true,
> even though there is no such thing as a culture-free,
> theory-free proposition.

I interpret the foregoing as an essay on truth,
entailing two distinct concepts: a) truth as consistency. 
and b) truth as reliability.

a) With respect to truth as consistency, I might comment
that such truth strikes me as a logical-mathematical issue,
very important, but limited in scope. I interpret logical
truth as a reflection of the correspondence or coincidence
of words or verbal propositions with each other. The validity
of logical truth derives from the nature of language; its
consistency is the expression of psychological, or if you
prefer, neurological function.  I interpret mathematical
truth as a highly sophisticated demonstration of the intrinsic
characteristics of human thought. I'm not sure that I can
trace truth as consistency beyond the sphere of logic and
mathematics.

b) Truth as reliability seems to me to refer to:
i) the reliability of my own experience, and 
ii) the reliability of communication with other human beings.
These two facets of truth seem to me to be very different
one from the other.

i) Truth as reliability of my own experience harks back to the
Greek word for truth: aletheia, that which has not been forgotten.
Truth as aletheia, therefore, is the reliability of my memory in
giving me an account of what I have experienced in the past. Altheia
is essentially historical truth, which enables me to learn from
experience, to recapitulate realities and to avoid errors which
I have recognized in the past.

ii) Truth as the reliability of communication with other human
beings harks back to the conventional notion of one person
"telling the truth" to another person as a matter of mutual
fidelity. Speaking the truth is in essence being true to another
person.

Insofar as epistemological investigations presuppose the
validity of that which is known, the concept of truth strikes me
in reference to the theory of knowledge, as redundant or tautologous. 

======================

Thank you now for your most recent letter, "Chez Meyer".
Margrit is here indeed. Her discharge from the hospital was
delayed from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., because regulations require
that she be discharged by a physician, and subsequent to her
operation six days preceding she had never been seen by a staff
physician, only residents, interns, medical students, nurses,
nurses aides, orderlies, laboratory technicians, cleaning
ladies, and discharge planners. Come to think of it, her
surgeon has never talked to her, has never faced her except
when she was under general anesthesia.  Margrit is very
resilient, and insists on ignoring, as she always has, the
diverse limitations of her existence. It makes life interesting.

Thank you also for the Happy Halloween card you sent to Margrit.
Halloween is indeed the feast that we are celebrating. Margrit
has now been back from the hospital for 24 hours. She seems calm
and contented and is convalescing slowly.

You wrote in your last letter:

> What I have resisted in your perspectives
> on the untrustworthiness of public knowledge,
> is when you seemed to use this to class all of history,
> all of science as so hopelessly compromised
> that it is a fool's errand to try to make sense of it. 
> This I think is going too far.
> We do have tools to appraise and test
> the propositions of history and science. 
> It's worth doing, it enriches our consciousness,
> even though our efforts to discard falsehoods and distortions
> will remain incomplete.
 
Your statement that I consider "public knowledge" to be compromised
is correct, but not your surmise that the compromise is so hopeless
as to make it "a fool's errand to try to make sense of it".
I agree that it's very much worthwhile "to appraise and test
the propositions of history and science", and that the effort
to do so enriches our consciousness. If I understand correctly,
you assume that such efforts serve to rehabilitate that which
is compromised, while I have concluded that "to appraise
and test" the imperfections of knowledge far from ameliorating
demonstrates them to be inescapable.

You write further:

> Regarding "someone for whom the Holocaust is real,
> someone for whom the Holocaust is integral to his existence",
> he will know only a miniscule fragment
> of what happened in the Holocaust
> if he doesn't talk with others about their experiences
> and consult descriptions of the history of the period.
> Admittedly one's personal experiences are more powerful and vivid,
> more precise than the narratives of others
> or the descriptions of news reporters and of historians. 
> Yet a concentration camp survivor would have
> a rather constricted view of the Holocaust, I think,
> if he didn't avail himself of evidence
> beyond what he experienced personally. 
> I suppose it's a kind of spiritual question, really,
> whether the personal experience of a Holocaust survivor
> is so much more essential, comprehensive, reliable
> as to make public knowledge about the Holocaust trivial,
> even though it would be more wide-rangeing.

I believe I understand, and I very much respect your thoughts
concerning these difficult and painful issues. The manner in which
each of us comes to terms with them is an expression of his or her
personality. Inasmuch as you and I are very different, it is 
inevitable that we should have different feelings and different
interpretations. I have described mine at some length in the 
18 page long Chapter Seven of my novel, Die Andere:
http://home.earthlink.net/~ernstmeyer/andere/K07.TXT
The German is dense and may well give you problems; once you
deciphered what I wrote, you would most likely be puzzled or
offended, or both. Nonetheless, if you venture to read this
chapter, I will translate and or explain to any extent you might
wish. I'm also not offended, if you think we should change the
subject.

Unavoidably, my sister's illness has distracted me. That's why
I haven't gotten around to inventing the story of what happened
in Maximilian Katenus house that weekend after Mengs and Joachim
returned from their encounter with the hooligan girls on the
beach. I'll try again.

Jochen