"Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down." - Hector Berlioz

***

The Truth Wars

"Among the traditional theories, what is called ''correspondence theory,'' going back to Aristotle, encapsulates what is taken to be the common-sense understanding of truth -- that truth consists of correspondence in some form between thought or language and reality. This sounds trivially correct, but usually founders in attempts to say precisely what form such correspondence could take. It is partly as an extremist reaction to those difficulties in the idea of correspondence that postmodernist cynicism about the notion of truth has taken hold of a few intriguing, if misguided, intellectuals...

The enemies of truth, for example, often fall afoul of what the Australian wit and contrarian philosopher David Stove (who died in 1994) called ''the Ishmael effect.'' Melville's Ishmael in ''Moby-Dick'' quotes Job's ''I only am escaped alone to tell thee'' and then spins a tale of adventure nobody could have survived to tell. Just so, relativists must beware of claiming, among other things, that all beliefs are subjective, except the belief that all beliefs are subjective...

[Lynch] argues that caring about truth is necessary for happiness because of the roles in our lives of authenticity and integrity, and that valuing truth for its own sake is an essential part of democracy...

''The phrase 'it is true for me but not for you' is most often just shorthand for: 'I believe it, you don't, so let's talk about something else.' '' Saying that something is a matter of opinion, Lynch writes, may just be a way of getting out of a debate one doesn't want to be in...

Perhaps the saving grace of the sort of extreme relativism that some conservatives fear may sap our civilization is that it is so hopelessly daft as to be impossible to put into practice. Indeed, despite the apparent popularity of subjectivist and deconstructionist ideas in parts of the academy, it is hard to find a significant contemporary controversy -- political, moral or environmental -- in which either side appears infected with such notions. People never think there is no truth of the matter; rather, they think the other side is wrong."