“There is no truth.” What could that mean? Why should anybody say it?

Actually, almost nobody (except Wallace Stevens) does say it. But philosophers like me are often said to say it. One can see why. For we have learned (from Nietzsche and James, among others) to be suspicious of the appearance–reality distinction. We think that there are many ways to talk about what is going on, and that none of them gets closer to the way things are in themselves than any other. We have no idea what “in itself is supposed to mean in the phrase “reality as it is in itself.” So we suggest that the appearancereality distinction be dropped in favor of a distinction between less useful and more useful ways of talking. But since most people think diat truth is correspondence to the way reality “really is,” they think of us as denying the existence of truth.

Our critics – the philosophers who agree that that is indeed what truth is – do not think that the useful-useless distinction can take the place of the old appearance-reality distinction. They believe that less useful ways of talking are descriptions of what only appears to be going on, whereas more useful ones are descriptions of what is really going on. For example: primitive scientists, or conformist members of a slaveholding society, describe what misleadingly appears to be going on. Modern physicists, like believers in universal human rights, know what is really going on. Our critics need the reality-appearance distinction to prevent the notion of “corresponding to reality” from being trivialized.