When Truth Seems Ever-Elusive: The Case of Contemporary Legends

Carlos Renato Lopes

Paulista University, Brazil
Truth is the name we give to the choices to which we cling.
If we let go of them, we would emphatically say they
were false, for we respect the truth so much.
Paul Veyne (1983: 127)
1. Introduction
Unsuspicious moviegoers and pay phone users are being stung by HIV-laced
needles strategically planted as a means of revenge or out of sheer cruelty. Club scene
habitus are getting doped in the middle of parties and waking up the next morning
immersed in a bathtub surrounded by ice just to find that their kidneys have been
snatched for the purpose of international body parts trafficking. Innocent fast food place
eaters are being exposed to the risk of contamination from all sorts of unthinkable
ingredients deliberately added to their happy meals. Schoolgirls (and boys) are terrified
of going to the school bathroom by themselves lest they bump into the ghost of the
bloody bathroom blonde (in Brazil, the loira do banheiro), an ex-student whose
unreturned love for a teacher led her to suicide in the premises. All-too-frequent cell
phone users are suddenly dreading for the health of their brains, which might as well be
exposed to the risk of irreversible damage, or even cancer. Are any of these stories true?
Are we justified in fearing them?
Just a whole lot of urban myths, some will say. Contemporary legends, or more
popularly named, urban legends. That is all this is about. A (not so) modern-day form of
mythology which, at most, serves the purpose of symbolically recycling the same old
fears and apprehensions: fear of death, fear of contamination. But is that all there is to
it? Are contemporary legends simply a matter of believe it at your own will?
In this article, of a rather theoretical order, I wish to claim that there are certain
regimes of truth which allow a society like ours to keep reinventing, sending and
transmitting such stories, whether they are perceived to have actually taken place or not,
somewhere and at some point in time. Actually, when one looks at contemporary
legends, one cannot avoid the issue of truth that surrounds them. It may appear
explicitly in the very proposition of the narrative, whereby the narrator claims that she
will tell something that really happened, not to herself, but, typically, to someone

known by someone else she knows. It may also be read into the reactions of listeners or
readers of such narratives, in the form of incredulity, doubt or perhaps straightforward
belief. And it may, of course, be detected in the struggle of commentators who aim at
establishing the scientifically, technically attested falsity or at least, the implausibility
of such reports. No matter how plausible these might seem.
I would join Foucault (1971/1996; 1975-6/1999; 1979/1996) here on the belief
that every discursive practice has the capacity to generate effects of truth which are
more or less potent and enduring. Such possibility of the creation of truth effects in and
through discourse is due to an inescapable element to the subjects of this discourse: the
will to truth. So it would seem that the question of whether contemporary legends are
true or false cannot be answered adequately or at least not beyond a mere factual
investigation in terms of this one actually took place vs. this one actually did not
unless we consider the fact that legends are transmitted within socially contextualized
practices, in which certain programs of truth are at stake.
Speaking of program of truth implies letting go of a traditional conception of
truth according to which a cognoscent subject, free from power relations, can accede to
a truth that is rational and universally validated. In the history of philosophy, we could
trace the climax of that belief back to the enlightening. It is in the late 18 th century,
though, that this view will begin to be systematically questioned. And a certain
genealogy of that history of the conception of truth in philosophy is what we set out to
do in the following sections. For that task, I draw upon three major currents of critical
thinking, themselves discontinuous regimes of (philosophical) truth, which are
nonetheless constitutively partial in that they aim at deconstructing the claim that truth
is one and unique. The three currents are: Heideggers conception of truth as untruth
(errancy), Nietzsches and Foucaults view of truth as will to power (and hence will to
truth), and finally the pragmatist view of truth as a language strategy proposed more
recently by Rorty. Finally, we relate these three currents to the concept of programs of
truth, employed by Veyne in connection to his analysis of the different approaches
towards myth.
2. Heideggers Ontological Truth versus the Metaphysical Tradition
The search for truth is, to a certain extent, co-extensive to the very history of
Western philosophy, or at least to a long established metaphysical tradition of doing

philosophy. From Plato to the 20th century American pragmatists, we will hardly find a
school or current of philosophical thought which has not, to a higher or lesser degree,
examined this issue.
Let us begin to unravel this web by picking up on one of its many possible
threads: Heideggers view of being and truth. In Time and Being (1927/1995),
Heidegger starts out by proposing the woking concept of Dasein (the being there) to
account for his project of describing the mode of existence of the being-in-the-world.
The Dasein is a construct, an instance which projects itself, so to speak, towards the
understanding of the Being in its totality. For the German philosopher, the metaphysical
inclination of an entire philosophical tradition which begins with Platonism has led to a
gradual abandonment of the specificity of the Being (in capital letters), favoring a split
between entity and being and the eventual erasure of the latter. From Plato to Nietzsche,
with Aristotle, the Romans, Descartes and Kant inbetween, all of them posited one form
of metaphysics which gradually constructed the entity as an essence, or the only
category by which existence and truth could be measured be it in an idealist or
rational-scientific sense.
Plato, the father of all metaphysics, set the ground for the tradition that places
the being in a world of ideas, as opposed to the concrete living entity. Aristotle, in his
turn, apparently a materialist unlike Plato, also needed to take that supposed split for
granted. It was the time when the idea of truth was established as one of a
correspondence to things an adjustment of the eye to the object, that is, of the way of
seeing to the nature of things. At the Roman period, characterized by the rise of the
concept of empire, Platonism begin to give way to the notion of correction. Being
truthful meant having the correct, fair view of reality. With modernity, fundamentally
with Descartes, the entity was hoisted up to the condition of cognoscent subject, the
supreme being to whom all the knowledge and all the truth were conditioned. Truth
becomes a subject-object relation, a central one in our very conception of epistemology.
Finally, Nietzsche, by categorically denying any essence to the being the entity being
all that was left from metaphysics stands out as the last of the metaphysicians,
according to Heideggers reading.
Looking retrospectively at this tradition, without leaving himself outside it,
however, Heidegger proposes a sort of step back in the direction of the pre-Socratics,
with whom an initial understanding of the non-separation between being and entity
came to place. Heidegger does that not out of nostalgia, but rather as a sort of revelation

of the aborted fate of the understanding of the Being as the fundament of existence a
fate which metaphysics set out to obscure to its maximum force, forgetting that it forgot
the Being. In sum, metaphysics abandoned the being as there is (a spark, a force, a
revelation) and embraced the being as is. Hence the curious paradox: the entity is, but
the being is not.
In order to recover the Being in its specificity, that is, the ontological nature of
existence, we must let go of the most immediate perception we hold of ourselves, a
perception which is grounded on dichotomies such as subjectivity and objectivity, mind
and world, empiricism and idealism. As Jonathan Re (2000: 8) points out, the view that
Heidegger wishes to distance himself from is incorporated into the very fabric of
Western philosophy, throughout its history, and it is enmeshed into our very quotidian
self-knowledge.
Men are already born with a certain call for ontology, alternating between the
understanding they have of themselves as being part of a universe of things ready-athand that is, things which only exist because they serve a function, or which relate to
men in an instrumental way and the opening to a set of more abstract questions
which accompany them throughout life, including: What does being mean? and
What is truth?. What occurs is that men are so absorbed by everydayness that they
tend to abstract things as being lost in an impersonal collectivity, acting as a mere
beings-among-things and moving away from their authenticity.
When men are immersed in this everydayness, and this is a point which more
closely interests us here, they engage in inautheutic activities, such as curiosity,
ambiguity and idle talk (rumors included), which are, according to Heidegger, forms of
corrupted discourse common sense forms of evading the self-knowledge of Dasein.
The attachment to those forms reinforces the trivial impersonality of the being-amongothers mundane world. When everything becomes accessible to all, in an indifferent
and shapeless factuality, the things at hand become more and more instrumental, which
leads to an opacity in the relation between the entity and its beliefs.
But what does being authentic actually mean to Heidegger? It is certainly not a
question of searching for an essential, subjectivized, isolated Being face to face with its
own individuality. Rather, it is a question of comprehending the authentically
incomplete and fragmented nature of the Being in its totality, since the Being is marked
by a constitutive flaw of the very being-in-the-world. To be authentic, the being needs to
open up to the freedom of letting-be, letting things reveal themselves as they are. The

being needs, paradoxically, to find itself as unescapably inauthentic, living immersed in

an universe of ready-at-hand things. Thus, inauthenticity is not merely an error or moral
flaw, but an integral part of authentic existence.
It is actually in the opening towards revelation as discovery, unveiling that
the question of truth1 comes to place. To Heidegger, truth is inseparable from the Being
that unveils it truth not being, therefore, a property which is independent from things.
All truth is relative to the Being of Dasein. Truth exists necessarily as a function of
Dasein, for since men search for self-understanding, he opens himself up to the
unveiling of truth.
Heidegger illustrates this proposition by taking Isaac Newtons laws as an
example. The discovery of such laws, according to the philosopher, is only possible as a
result of the projection of the historically situated existence of the Dasein, which may
unveil to us a permanent aspect of nature as it really is. In other words, when the laws
are discovered, they prove, as a result of the opening to truth operated by the Dasein, to
be entities which already existed. It is due to this opening that science becomes
accessible to us.
It might seem, at first, that Heidegger hardly distances himself from an idealist
view of truth a truth to whose sublime realm we need to ascend via transcendental
awareness, letting go of our individual peculiarities, ridding ourselves of our ordinary
everydayness. However, it is not in those terms that Heidegger puts the question. On the
contrary, to Heidegger the origin and anchor of all our knowledge is fundamentally
ontological, that is, it is bound to the category of Being as being-with, being-amongothers. Relational being. Awareness, to the philosopher, is not of a subjective essence,
but rather the listening of a possible place of authenticity, a possible place of opening
to an unveiling which, already by constitution, presents itself as veiling due to the very
mode of the being-in-the-world that is inherent to Being.
But Heidegger goes deeper into the problematic of truth when he talks about
non-truth and erring as instances inseparable from truth, and not merely as its logical
opposites. If, as we have seen, truth is unveiling it is because it is already born as veiling
its totality. The fact that we are all invariably subject to this veiling (or dissimulation)
makes it a presupposition and fundament to the very unfolding of the being-in-theworld. So Heidegger will then tell us that this veiling is itself veiled, since, inseparable
1

Heidegger uses the concept of aletheia, the word used by the mithycal-poetical tradition of the Greeks to
refer to truth, and which literally means unveiling.

from all truth, it impedes truth from being conceived as total unveiling, never coming to
be recognized by the being-there as radical deprivation. As Waelhens and Biemel
summarize:
The unveiling is always partial, particular. It takes place against a
backdrop of veiling which it helps to dissimulate by force of its own
progress. That which is known about an entity in particular casts to a
shadow the entity in its totality; the very success of that unveiling implies
the dissimulation of that which is necessarily occult. (Waelhens and
Biemel 1948: 47, my translation)
Such a conception has clear implications for mans attempt to impose himself as
the measure of all things, since he is blind to that forgetting. As Ernildo Stein points out,
in the modern tradition, the subject has always been the measure of truth. Measure as a
condition of possibility, and as such, the human being presents him/herself has the
parameter for all propositions which refer to contingent situations where there is truth or
falsity (Stein 1993: 191, my translation). In fact, to Heidegger, it is in the technique, in
the modern knowledge of science, that the zenith of that metaphysics occurs, by which
the entity is taken to be the reference for all things.
It is thus that the entity errs, and has always done it. In other words, it is
condemned to errancy. Errancy understood not as the mere accidental or isolated
mistake, but rather the domain of the history of those entanglements in which all which
all types or errors get caught (Heidegger 1930/1961, section 7, my translation). And
this errancy and the dissimulation of the dissimulation or forgetting constitute the
anti-essence of man, something that, from within the original essence of truth, and
belonging to that essence, is opposed to it.
We may then conclude that truth, in its origin, is always-already non-truth, not in
the sense of a logical opposite to truth, but rather in the sense of deprivation, an
incompleteness, since it operates dialectically, through the historical mans errancy, that
is, through the manifestation of the dissimulation/veiling of its totality in the errancy of
everyday quotidian life.
Even then, in one more demonstration of this dialectical thinking which aims at
eliminating the facility of binary logics, Heidegger reminds us that if men can
experience this errancy as errancy, and not simply let themselves be absorbed by it, they

may guide themselves dialectically, since one thing founds or is inside the other
towards essential truth2.
So, as we have seen, Heidegger tries to break from an epistemologicalmetaphysical tradition by recovering the Being and truth in their ontological nature.
Nevertheless, it must be made clear that such rupture just cannot take place from
outside that tradition, as if the concepts which are being subject to revision could be
erased in all their extension, and by some voluntary decision. That is what Derrida
posits when he speaks of double mark. To him, there is no sense in abandoning the
concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics, since we do not possess any
language that is strange to this history; we cannot enunciate any destructive proposition
that will not have been forced to slip into the shape, the logic and the implicit
postulations of that which it itself would like to contest (Derrida 1967/2002: 232).
Each specific borrowing brings to surface a whole web of meanings from which
it is taken. That is how Heidegger, although denying the possibility of the discovery of
an absolute truth, is still talking about an original truth. That is how, while speaking of
truth and non-truth as dialectically constitutive elements of that essence of truth, he is
still talking about truth in the terms of presence.
It would seem, however, that there is no escape from this play, to use the
Derridian term. Derrida himself, in his Platos Pharmacy (1972/2005), develops the
problematic of truth-as-presence already based on the discussion that Heidegger was
able to advance. He speaks of non-truth, that is, the disappearance of truth as presence
as being the very condition for the manifestation of truth. In a relation of
supplementarity. He says that iterability the possibility of repetition, of duplication
is the condition by which the present-entity can be unique, identical to itself. More
specifically: the true and the untrue are forms of repetition. And repetition is only
possible in the graphic of supplementarity (Derrida op. cit.: 121, my translation), that
is, replacing by adding. Derrida, then, relocates the issue: he builds his arguments on
terms that echo Heideggerian philosophy, but he does not necessarily overcome that
philosophy.
3. Nietzsche and Foucault: Truth as a Will
2

Waelhens and Biemel (1948: 55) point out that dialectics is a hallmark of Heideggers philosophy. But
unlike Hegels diaIectics, which aims at subsuming the oppositions into a higher synthesis, Heideggers
dialectics presents the oppositions as definitely unresolvable which does not mean a destruction of the
unit of his thought. Rather, we might say, as Derrida would do later (1972/2001), that this is a
deconstruction.

One of the hallmarks of Nietzsches philosophy is the idea that there is no truth
as knowledge of the world as it is. The German philosopher was opposed to the idea of
a possible apprehension of reality by means of language, since there would not be a preexisting delimited universe of things to know. In fact, Nietzsche proposed that we
abandon once and for all any attempt of knowing the truth. To him, we should let go
of the idea that language is capable of covering and representing the whole of reality
a reality that is supposedly determinable and whose truth we could unveil.
How does knowledge work, then? Nietzsche will tell us that knowledge is mens
invention, that is, it is not something which is absolutely inscribed in human nature, just
waiting for a revelation. At its root, knowledge, rather than arising as the result of an
impulse towards identification, an affection or passion for its object, it is the fruit of a
will to power, which mines its object and seeks to annihilate it in all its menacing
potential. It is as if we needed first to reject the object only then to bring it back to its
domain, already tamed, already molded. This implies that each and e very form of
knowledge, including science and technique, becomes necessarily perspective, partial
and oblique.
Thus, if this knowledge, which is the outcome of a historical will, leads to what
we call truth, truth is, according to this reasoning, nothing more than the result of
contingent human relations, to which we seek to ascribe universal status by means of a
will to truth. Nietzsches classical definition, proposed in the essay On Truth and Lie in
an Extra-Moral Sense, perfectly synthesizes this thought:
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have
been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,
and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a
people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what
they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power;
coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no
longer as coins. (Nietzsche 1873/1977: 46-7)
To Nietzsche, then, truth is interested knowledge, the brainchild of a will which
creates its own opposition between true and false, that is, the effect of truth. It appears in

the fashion of arbitrary metaphors, which nonetheless move on to become literal, taking
on a conventional and naturalized form throughout history. The original intuitive
metaphors are therefore taken for the things themselves.
But man forgets it. He forgets that he has created his own truths, since he has
built himself and things within a paradigm of rationality. He believes that he builds up
from an essence and that language serves merely as a transparent conduit for that
essence. He believes that he can look into the real from the outside. And that is what
allows him to think of science and philosophy in terms of discovery of truths. As Arrojo
well observes, the perspective proposed by Nietzsche leads us to the conclusion that
men do not discover truths independently from their will to power or their survival
instinct; they rather produce meanings and hence knowledge which is established
through the conventions that discipline men in social groups (Arrojo 1992: 54, my
translation).
The production of solid and naturalized meanings does not take place, however,
in a rational dimension only; it also occurs in mans relation with myth and art. He
allows himself to be tricked by the illusion of finding an ever reinvented, particular, new
form of relating to the world of dreams. As long as it does not cause him any visible
harm, he will be charmed when he listens to epic tales being told as true, when he sees
an actor play a king more regally than the king himself and, why not say it adding one
more example to the ones Nietzsche proposes , when receiving and transmitting urban
legends on the Internet.
The Nietzschean notion that truth does not exist as a pre-existing absolute fact of
reality, but that it may exist as an effect even if necessarily illusional points to the
utilitarian nature of truth. Nietzsche claims that knowledge, inasmuch as it presents itself
as a set of truthful and reliable beliefs, may serve certain purposes, but not others, and
that certain things can be described as useful to certain kinds of people but not to others
which only reinforces the authors refusal of the idea of truth as correspondence. That is,
instead of corresponding to a factual reality which is independent from human beings,
truth is proposed by Nietzsche as a way of meeting human desires, needs and
uncertainties.
As I discuss further below, such reasoning allows us to place Nietzsche next to a
pragmatist view of reality. It is here, however, that there seems to lie an apparent
contradiction in Nietzsches philosophical project at least as it is approached by those
commentators who aim at reconciling, on the one hand, the refusal of any metaphysical

aspiration to truth, explicitly posited in his first works and, on the other hand, the
investment in truths of a metaphysical vocation themselves, such as the eternal return
and the will to power presented in his later works (Clark 1990/1998). Those
commentators put the question in terms of a self-refutation: would Nietzsche be
denying himself, in his own terms, by proposing metaphysical truths when those could
not even exist in the first place? Would this actually be an irreconcilable paradox?
The answer to those questions does not seem so complicated when, once more to
our aid, Derrida (1972/2001b.) tells us that metaphysics is so intimately circumscribed to
language that it cannot be attacked without our using its very own concepts. It is
precisely through contradiction and apparent self-refutation that Nietzsche develops his
thinking for, when proposing his philosophical insights, he is not necessarily claiming
universal truths. The notion of a final transcendental truth is not necessarily attacked
when one posits, for example, that all truth is a function of the human exceedingly
human will to power. When he does that, Nietzsche is not fall in contradiction with his
anti-metaphysics. On the contrary, he is putting to practice another of his important
philosophical insights: that which claims that every form of knowledge and,
consequently, every form of truth is necessarily perspective, making it impossible to
aspire to an absolute and definite apprehension of reality. As Mos summarizes: by
affirming that truth is a value, Nietzsche wishes to desacralize this evaluative principle,
revealing its condition as a human invention: truth is an idea, a construct of thought, it
has a history (Mos 2005: 31). It is, therefore, inescapably partial.
One might also defend Nietzsche against the charge of contradiction by
evoking the affirmative nature of his project, that is, his move towards affirming life.
According to the philosopher, in order for us to go on living, we must preserve certain
classifying categories (which language consolidates) not because they corresponde to the
nature of things, but simply because they give us the necessary illusion of knowledge.
Nietzsche holds on to the notion that things exist in a flux, which language only puts
apart for practical and utilitarian purposes; but that putting apart does not necessarily
advance our understanding it just makes our lives easier by giving us an illusion of
comprehending (Blackburn 2006: 169). That is how we can interpret
It is from this point of view that we can interpret, for example, the universal
truths of the will to power and the eternal return not as a (contradictory or self-refuting)
recovery of metaphysics, but rather as a proposition for a rediscovery of the creative
nature, which would occur as the result of an explicit account of the metaphorical nature

of words and truth (Mos 2005: my translation) or, in other terms, a proposition for a
rediscovery of the attitudes towards life which help one to live life in the most life
affirming way possible (Olson 2001: 6).
Finally, in keeping with Nietzsche perspectivism, we might say that his ideas can
in fact sound contradictory, but this can only be affirmed from a certain point of view
or program of truth certainly not one which seeks in the very Nietzschean project some
kind of universal truth.
Another important thinker sees the contradiction in Nietzsche as vital, and not
self-refuting. I am referring to Foucault. Directly influenced by Nietzsche, the French
philosopher finds here the inspiration for one of his most fundamental themes: the
relation of interdependence between power and knowledge. Let us examine how this
interdependence is connected to Foucaults approach to truth.
According to Foucault (1971/1996: 13-21), truth is an important external
exclusion procedure in the order of discourse, which operates by means of the true/false
opposition. When one looks into a discourse, at the level of the sentence or proposition,
such opposition is neither arbitrary nor violent. It does not change either: the proposition
is always true or always false. But when it comes to identifying what has been,
historically, the will to truth that pervades our discourses and what sort of separation
rules it, then truth presents itself as a historical and institutionally sustained system of
exclusion. Great transformations which our societies have gone through over the
centuries, including scientific discoveries, can, to a certain extent, be interpreted as being
the result of always new wills to truth which were gradually imposed on a number of
institutional practices, such as pedagogy, empirical research, or the exploitation of
technological resources.
But something very peculiar occurs with true discourse: by presenting itself as
freed from desire and power, it simply cannot recognize the will to truth that pervades it;
that is, in order to establish itself as true, discourse cannot help but disguise itself as a
product of that will. Thus, what we are allowed to see is a truth that would be rich and
fertile, a sweet and insidiously universal force, and not the prodigious machinery
designed to exclude all those who, time after time, in our history, have tried to evade that
will to truth and question it against truth (Foucault 1971/1996: 20, my translation).
It can already be noted that truth is not produced as an autonomous organism, rid
of mistake, hovering over human errancy, independent from the institutional mechanisms
of social action and control or from human desire. Truth is definitely attached to those

mechanisms and, therefore, to power. Foucault reminds us that in any society the
multiple power relations which characterize the social body cannot be established or
function outside a regime of truth, that is, without being sustained by true discourses. In
the authors words:
There is no exerting of power without a certain economy of true
discourses which function in, from, and through that power. We are
subject by power to the production of truth and we can only exert power
by producing truth. (...) After all, we are judged, condemned, classified,
obliged to duties, destined to a certain way of living or to a certain way of
dying as a result of true discourses that carry with them specific power
effects, truth effects. (Foucault 1975-6/1999: 28-9, my translation)
Thus, Foucault concludes that the will to truth, originated from the historically
constructed division between right and wrong, or true and false, is nothing more than
the excluding will to power. True discourse is no more than a necessary illusion for
subjects to struggle for power. And it is important to understand that this struggle takes
place from inside the very discursive practice: we cannot reach the truth, for we are
always-already assigned a circumscribed subject position the moment we utter anything.
The author proposes that in order to analyze the will to power (and knowledge)
in discourse we must gradually build and define our analytical tools, in a practice he
calls genealogical. That is done according to demands and possibilities designed by
concrete, contextualized studies (Foucault 1997). Bringing our object of study to that
perspective, I believe that we need to better investigate and understand how the
discursive practices around contemporary legends frequently point out the issue of
veracity versus falsehood of the stories as being the key to those legends as if these
depended exclusively on a scientific-objective verdict for their permanence. This is
actually about an investigation which implies the analysis of discursive practices in their
local knowledge dimension.
On Internet discussion lists dedicated to the transmission and discussion of
contemporary legends3, a great number of the posts refer specifically to the issue of
truth in/of/around the legends. We can often observe how the different interlocutors
3

I am particularly considering here the discussion forum hosted by the site www.snopes.com, which
provided most of the corpus of my doctoral thesis on contemporary legends (unpublished).

struggle, by means of argumentation and supposedly authenticated scientific references,

to debunk the rumors or proto-legends and re-establish the factual order as soon as
those texts hit their electronic mailboxes. One must carefully examine how those
narratives build on the tension between the local, discontinuous (to use Foucaults
terms) and unverified knowledge, on the one side, and the hierarchical force of true
knowledge on the other true knowledge that, once available to all by means of the
rational-logical apparatus of science, is taken as something revealed or explained by
the discourse of those few who possess it.
But, at this point, we had better not lose track of Foucaults reminder that there
does not exist a mere division between admitted and excluded discourse, or between
dominant and dominated discourse. There is no discourse of power on the one side, and
that against power on the other. Rather, in a given discursive practice, we often observe
a co-relation of forces, a multiplicity of different power/knowledge strategies that
coexist. And it is that distribution of forces which we are to detect in the analysis: the
play between the things that are said and those that are unsaid or banned from discourse;
the variables and distinct effects depending on whoever speaks, when, from which
subjective/power position, and within which institutional context; the relocation and
reformulations of identical forms for opposite reasons.
We must, after all, acknowledge the existence of a complex and unstable play
in which discourse can be at once instrument and effect of power, and also obstacle,
anchor, point of resistance and point of departure for an opposite strategy (Foucault
1976/1999: 96, my translation). That would allow us to explain the fact that there can be
distinct and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy, or even discourses
that circulate unchanged amid opposite strategies.
4. Rorty and a Pragmatist Approach to Truth
Pragmaticians are philosophers of a predominantly Anglo-Saxon tradition to
whom knowledge is a tool, an instrument that must be put to the service of the
conditions of experience. One of the basic principles of pragmatism shared by the its
major representatives, from William James to Richard Rorty, with John Dewey and
Donald Davidson inbetween is anti-representationalism: the idea that there is not a
world out there, a reality independent from thought which may be represented by

language in a relation of correspondence or correctness. An idea which, as has been

pointed out, was already present in Nietzsche.
The same holds for the notion of truth, which, already in the first pragmaticians,
appears as dissociated from the idea of the representation of things of reality. The focus
is now on experience, the way people relate to reality. According to this line of thought,
truth cannot be correspondence to reality, but rather the contingent product of relations
that humans establish with each other by usage or, in Wittgensteinian terms, language
games. In other words, being true is not a property which is external to language, a
predicate of things in the world out there, but rather a fundamentally linguistic device,
a predicate of phrases, sentences or propositions.
Richard Rorty, the most outstanding name in current pragmatist philosophy,
formulates the questions in the following terms:
To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that
where there are no sentences, there is no truth, that
sentences are elements of human languages, and that
human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be
out there cannot exist independently of the human mind
because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The
world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.
Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The
world on its own unaided by the describing activities of
human beings cannot. (Rorty 1989: 11)
This reflection leads Rorty to wonder whether truth even deserves philosophical
inquiry as a relevant and unquestionable concept in itself. He questions the utility for
human society of insisting on formulating a theory of truth, a consistent body of
thought that may account for a concept which, after all, pervades all the transcendentalmetaphysical-epistemological problematic, from Plato to Heidegger, and which
continues to confound and obscure philosophical thought including that of his
precursors, like James and Dewey. Instead, claims Rorty, philosophical thought should
set out to describe the conditions in which the true presents itself in linguistic
behaviors, that is, in contingent practices where people do things with language.

What Rorty values the most in the pragmatist tradition is his precursors
vocation notwithstanding their differences and divergences to shift the focus away
from questions like What in the world is true to questions like How is the word
true used? (Rorty 1991/1999: 132) or, simply, to consider the issue of truth in
language in performative terms, highlighting the necessarily public and therefore social
nature of language.
That is how, rather than proposing a theory of truth, Rorty sets out to identify
the linguistic uses of the words truth and true, thus establishing the following
criteria (Rorty op. cit: 128):
1) Endorsing use: that in which speakers explicitly evaluate their speech as being true,
or as expressing something they consider to be true through markers such as its
obvious that, thats true, certainly, no doubt, etc.
2) Disquotational use: that in which the words of others are not necessarily endorsed by
the speakers it involves recognizing the voice of the other, but putting it between
quotation marks.
3) Cautionary use: that which takes into account the distinction between truth and
justification something may be justified (for example, a government has no right to
steal peoples money), but not true. To Rorty, it is not a difference in degree between a
more profound, or hidden, truth and an apparent, superficial one. It is actually
a question of equivalence: truth exists as long as it is justifiable, although, of course, the
justification may always be another, or several others, depending on the historical
moment, the locus of enunciation, the speakers, etc.
These criteria allow Rorty to more explicitly formulate his view of truth as
contingent and contextualized. In a sort of radical minimalism, what Rorty is telling us
is that everything that can be said about X is what X is, there not being to X an occult
or intrinsic side which eludes the relational apprehension of X through language. As
Ghiraldelli (2001: 118) points out, to Rorty truth cannot be discovered, for that would
be admitting that truth depends on what the world is like in the sense of causal
relations rather than descriptive acts.
Broadening this view towards a more specifically political formulation, Rorty
claims that, in an ideally liberal and democratic society, the notion of truth as
correspondence to reality should yield to an idea of truth as that which one comes to

believe in over free and open encounters. To the American philosopher, truth appears as
a historical contingency, and not as a convergence or a rational and universally valid
(even if uncoerced) communicative consensus, such as defended by thinkers the likes of
Jrgen Habermas (Hoy 1994). But does that mean that one should interpret Rortys
view as reducing truth to a mere pact, a fragile and capricious agreement between
language players?
In this connection, the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman could be called on to
our aid. He aligns himself with the pragmatist view by which truth, rather than
symbolizing the relation between what is said and a determined non-verbal reality,
symbolizes in our usage a certain attitude we adopt, but above all wish and hope that
others will adopt, towards what is said or believed (Bauman 1998: 142). However, he
insists on pointing out that, in certain beliefs, what is at stake is something more than
the use of truth as an endorsement, something that goes beyond mere approval. What is
at stake is the way these beliefs reach such a degree of certainty and confidence that
any alternative or opposing point of view is rejected.
According to Bauman, there is no sense in speaking of truth if not in a situation
of dissent. That is, truth only comes up as an issue when different people hold on to
different beliefs, making it the object of dispute on who is right and who is wrong. It
comes up when one claims the right to speak with authority, and when it becomes
particularly important for an adversary to prove that the other side of the dispute is
wrong. The struggle for truth represents, then, the struggle for establishing certain kinds
of beliefs as systematically superior, under the excuse that they have been reached at
through a realiable procedure, or that it is warranted by the kind of people who we trust
will follow those beliefs (Bauman op. cit.: 143).
The way I read him, Rorty would put this issue in other, maybe less
ideological terms. By explaining the relation between truth and justification related
to the preventive use of truth discussed above , the philosopher claims that the need to
justify our beliefs and desires to others and to ourselves subjects us to certain rules, the
obedience to which produces a pattern of behavior which we must detect in others
before we can confidently affirm that they hold this or that belief (Rorty 1998/2005: 14).
In other words, we enter the language game with certain beliefs, and we know
that those we play with possess, on their side, their own beliefs. But we must attest to
the existence of those beliefs performatively, from within the linguistic exchanges, and
not taken them as givens. What Rorty does not believe, perhaps unlike Bauman, is that

the rules of the linguistic game aim necessarily at obeying an additional order: the
command to search for the truth (Rorty op. cit.: 14)
What would Bauman be doing in his argumentation, then, if not rekindling the
flame of the will to truth, associated to the will to power, identified by Nietzsche and
Foucault? And, to keep to Rortian terms, what would those certain and reliable truths
be whose force Bauman warns us about, if not metaphors which, contingent at their
root, gradually grow literal?
5. The Lessons Philosophy Teaches Us About Contemporary Legends
Bringing our contemporary legends back into focus, we could but only begin, in
a tentative exercise of critical reading, to reassess the issue of truth as it manifests itself
in the practice of transmitting and commenting such narratives. Rather than taking to
the facile opposition between veracity vs. falsehood, which would imply a view of truth
as correspondence to a self-standing order of reality (i.e. the facts, the truth out
there), we would do best by using the lessons our philosophers have offered us in an
attempt to expand our common sense interpretation and see the discursive practice with
different eyes.
We could perhaps appreciate Heideggers lesson that everydayness or rather,
situatedness is the only social space we can be inhabit. If we live inauthentically,
negotiating our meanings through idle talk, ambiguity and curiosity, that is the only site
from within which we may eventually open ourselves up to a different, more
democratic truth. Becoming aware of the very space we speak from sounds like a
basic move, but definitely a first step (sometimes a very difficult one) that we as mere
entities can make towards critically reading our culture legends, rumors, fictions,
and objective truths all included.
We could certainly retain Foucaults critique of truth, particularly as it is
formulated in the following passage by Barry Allen, one of his commentators: [f]or
truth-value (and associated values like reference, translation, relevance, implication,
identity, and objectivity) to be determinate in any case depends on the effectiveness of
historically contingent practices of evaluation, and on nothing else (Allen 1995: 1101). This amounts to claiming that the difference between true and false cannot be
established by external, context-free parameters. It does not exist apart from a local
practice, in which these values are produced and evaluated and statements circulate as

true, presenting themselves in the form of facts, news, legends (legenda, i.e. what is
to be read). Allen continues: Only here have statements currency, the capacity to
circulate, to penetrate practical reasoning, to be taken seriously, to pass for the truth.
These practical conditions situate truth amid all the major asymmetries of social power,
undermining its status as a common good (Allen op. cit.: 4). Common good it is not,
then. Rather, it is a space for potential dissent, in which power relations will battle their
way towards either debunking or reaffirming the different stakes of the game.
Contemporary legends, more particularly the practical conditions the local
practice by which they are perpetuated function as the stage where a number of partial
truths gain their currency. In other words, they are the space where different regimes,
or programs of truth are enacted. Believing or not in certain accounts, in this or that
version of a specific contemporary legend, implies more than a one-track pursuit of
factual truth. It more likely involves a permanent shift between modes of belief a shift
that is not unlike that which Paul Veyne (1983) identifies in the relation between the
Greeks and their myths.
Belonging to a time long gone, in all its wonders, its accounts of gods and
men and fantastic creatures that one does not come across walking on the streets, at
least not in the present myth offered itself to the Greeks as an integrally truthful
reality, one that transmits collective memories which could not have been simply
invented lies. As the author points out, believing in that body of narrative as a plausible
one means still being within the true, but in analogical terms. Myth is inherited
information. It is an accepted tradition. And it is respected. Once the story is over, we
can shift to another mode of truth that of real life and then back and forth, in an
analogical operation.
One may criticize myth from within a historians program of truth rejecting
the chronological incoherences and the improbable cause-and-effect propositions but
one may also be compelled to read allegorical truths into it. To the rationalist
condemnation of the imaginary as false, the apologetic of the imaginary replies that it
conforms to a hidden reason. For it is not possible to lie (Veyne 1983: 62). By
claiming that truth and interest which I equate with (ever-partial) interpretation are
inseparable instances, Veyne echoes Foucault. Both would agree that in the process of
attempting to fixate the meanings of a practice in a regime/program of truth,
contingency becomes a necessity that keeps justifying itself. And, as we have seen with
Rorty, justifying is one more language game one plays with truth.

In that sense, could contemporary legends be some sort of modern-day myth? I

would argue that just as it is impossible to lie about myth, it may be impossible to lie
about urban legends. The resonance that a legend may have in a certain interpretive
community tends to be higher than the evidence that contests its veracity. Whether the
narrative is trustworthy or not, the impact that the force of its message may cause is not
necessarily greater or smaller. As Whatley and Henken well point out:
[T]he evidence countering the veracity of a legend rarely carries the
weight that the legend does. (...) The impact a legend has on those telling
or hearing it may have little to do with whether the story is believed. ()
What may be more important is the truth that folklore conveys about the
attitudes, fears, and beliefs of a goup, which in turn shape and maintain
the identity of that group. (Whatley and Henken 2001: 4-5)
So, people may not believe, for example, that someone could have planted an
HIV-infected needle on their theater seats, but this will not necessarily stop them from
double-checking before sitting. Equally, they may not believe that the long-lasting use
of their cell phones poses any risk of explosion, but still they will turn off their devices
when pulling into a service station. That is, the most relevant aspect to this kind of
narrative may not be its objectively attested implausibility, but rather the truth it
reveals about the beliefs and values of the communities in which it circulates.
Finally, we might stick with a lesson that Veyne indirectly teaches us about the
myths of our present time, and that somehow paves the way toward a more critical
understanding of our object here. What he says about myth serves just as well for
contemporary legends: in order to engage those narratives we would do well by sorting
through the heterogeneous programs of truth that constitute our imagination programs
that tell us what we are or are not allowed to believe at different moments in history;
programs that intersect or even contradict each other in our everyday, ever-shifting
contingent practices of being in the true. And so, at each moment, nothing exists or
acts outside these [space-defining] palaces of the imagination... They are the only space
available (Veyne 1983: 121).
6. This Elusive Thing Called Truth

Beyond the irreconcilable differences between the different theories of truth

reviewed here, I believe they all provide some points of reference for our discussion of
contemporary legends particularly in regard to the question: what is truth such a
central issue in the discourse of and about those narratives? Perhaps the perspective I
have been trying to approach in the very writing of this article brings it closest to the
pragmatist approach, according to which knowledge is just as good as we can make a
useful application of it. From this point of view, we could say that Heidegger,
Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty and Veyne complement each other not in an evolutionary
manner, as in continual progressive line from one author to the other, but rather as in an
intersection of certain common points across different philosophical programs of truth
on truth.
Looking retrospectively, all theories propose the abandonment of the notion of
truth as absolute correspondence between the world and its representation, between
words and things. We will also find that the question of truth is inseparable from a
reflection on the (human) practices of daily life, in which people do things with
language. These practices may be seen, with Heidegger, as errancy or as an illusion, as
by Nietzsche. They may be seem, with Veyne, as a sort of program, or constitutively
imaginary frame of mind where different beliefs find a place in an analogical operation
They may also be seen, with Foucault, as struggle and resistance practices within a
regime of truth which mobilizes knowledge and engenders power. Or they may be seen,
with Rorty, as a forum for the creation and consolidation of contingent beliefs, resulting
from open and democratic free encounters. But all of them will agree that such practices
are necessary, in that they constitute the human mode of existence.
Thus, erring, according to Heidegger, is being immersed in a universe in which
the ready-at-hand things, inasmuch as they are apprehended in their relation with men,
become instrumental. Sure, Heidegger sees there the very operating mode of the entity
in its forgetfulness of Being. But it is precisely this immersion in half-blind, always
partial everydayness that interests us here, more than a supposed forgotten essence.
In Nietzsche, for his turn, it is the illusion of taming reality through language
language that is always-already metaphorical, but which stalls the movement of
metaphor through forgetfulness, letting it perish that allows men to survive in his
illusion of identity, rationality: his belief of lasting truths.
Along the same lines, Foucault will tell us that the discursive practices tend to
rarify discourse: inasmuch as discourses proliferate, they are subject to a regime of truth

which restricts it, limiting its chance occurrence and therefore wearing it thin. That is,
discourses affirm themselves as truthful, but they only do so within a (practical) order
that encourages its proliferation just as it simultaneously holds back its expansion, in a
mechanism that is characteristic of and necessary to the correlation of power/knowledge
forces.
In common between Nietzsche and Foucault is the proposition that truth is not a
universal given ready to be revealed, but rather the result of human action: an
interpretive always partial construction of reality, which takes place via language
and in the form of a will to truth.
Finally, Rorty (and in a similar fashion, Veyne), by desacralizing the idea of truth
as something intrinsic to things, places his bet on things that humans do with language,
in the contingent use of vocabularies which may only affirm themselves as truths as a
result of historically and socially situated practices.
To conclude, we might add that, in view of these theoretical grounding, the
search for the truth in/of contemporary legends points to two interrelated aspects. The
first one is that one cannot possibly learn all the facts (and therefore all the truth)
narrated in these stories. That is, one cannot know with absolute certainty what is a
technically or scientifically attested fact and what is merely an insisting rumor or piece
of misinformation and I think here particularly of the abundant narratives surrounding
the mysterious powers of (not so) new technologies, or the risks of (as of yet)
uncontrollable diseases. Thus, we err; we cling to our most essential and mundane
truths: that we are all exposed to the pettiest everyday risks, and that one day we will all
die. The second aspect is that, albeit incomplete, controversial or merely plausible,
facts only make sense inasmuch as they belong to a program of truth, i.e., they are
mediated by a regime of discursive practices that have narrative as a privileged form of
manifestation narratives of a particular type, dispersed and mutable, such as the
contemporary legend, but also other narratives of a particular type, those claimed by
the legitimized institutions of power/knowledge known as science, politics, the media,
etc. So as to make the most out of these reflections in our critical reading of
contemporary legends, we could reconcile those two aspects in the form of a dialectic
tension: one by which the will to truth in legends simultaneously constitutes a form of
self-regulation and fictional recreation, via narrative, of the fears, anxieties and
apprehensions of everyday life.

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