What does the renowned philosopher John Searle think about the postmodernist's antipathy toward the idea of objective truth?

"I think it's ridiculous," he says.  "The difficulty is that most of our discourse, and indeed most of our life, presupposes that we are dealing with an objective real world.  If you ask me how to get to the next town, or what time the plane leaves, or ask the doctor if you have cancer, or just ask me to pass the salt, there's no way that any of these utterances are intelligible without the presupposition that there is a real world.  This view-that there's a world that exists independently of us - is called 'external realism.'

But then the question arises: what kind of access do we have to the real world? Then we get into perception and language.  We normally encounter the world through perception and we describe it in language.  But again we can't make sense of our perception or language without the assumption of access to the real world. And once you've got this kind of access, the possibility of an objective truth is presented immediately.  If words refer and perceptions are for perceiving, then there must be real objects in a real world that we can have knowledge of.  Anyway, you can't make sense of your life or your relationships with other people without the assumption of objective truth.

"I think that different cultures do give you different points of view, and within our culture there are lots of different points of view.  The mistake is to suppose that objective truth requires no point of view at all.  Of course that's impossible.  I am a situated being in the world: I'm a child of a particular culture: I have access to the real world through my point of view, from the point of view of the culture in which I was brought up. But that does not prevent objectivity.  The earth is 93 million miles from the sun.  I couldn't state that fact if I didn't have a language or if I didn't have a system of measurement, but it is a totally objective fact.  I gleaned this fact from science, which is the most successful system that the human intellect has ever produced for getting knowledge of how the world works.  And, if we're talking about disciplines like physics and chemistry, science is absolutely transcultural - it's valid for any culture.  It isn't that hydrogen changes its chemical composition as we move from Africa to Asia: hydrogen atoms have one electron, and it doesn't matter where you are.

John R. Searle, the Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the pre-eminent philosophers of our time.

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