https://philpapers.org/archive/SHAT VO-2.pdf "A Troll�

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https://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf

"A Troll’s Truism is a mildly ambiguous statement by which an exciting falsehood may trade on a trivial truth. A typical example of a Troll’s Truism is the statement that anything constructed could be
constructed differently. This particular truism I think of as being, for postmodernists, the
ur-truism from the ur-troll. On this postmodernists have built what they have taken to be a
radical critique of rationality. The exciting falsehoods that can trade here are the notions
that what we know, what the truth is, and how the world is, are constructed by us and so
arbitrary: the trivial truths merely that we construct our beliefs, we construct meaning and
act on the world on the basis of our beliefs. Prescinding from the question of truth bearers,
obviously, which statements are true depends on what the sentence used in an utterance
means, which in turn depends on how we have constructed meaning. As postmodernists
have proved, there is plenty of room for manipulating meaning tendentiously, but we are
not thereby manipulating the world. There also comes the point at which having constructed a meaning differently we have no longer constructed the same thing. Of
course, we can use the same word, but we are no longer speaking of the same thing.

When used thus to assert social constructivism the truism insinuates the notion that
there is no objectivity without ever arguing for it, yet permits a retreat to the trivial truth
whenever pressed by an opponent on the exciting falsehood. A beautiful example of this
is Stanley Fish’s defence to the exposure of postmodernist nonsense in the Sokal affair. In
his paper Sokal asserted explicitly a number of standard doctrines of postmodernism.
Social constructivism denies that there is “an external world, whose properties are
independent of any human being and indeed of humanity as a whole” (Sokal 1996). In the
book “The Sokal Hoax” Stanley Fish performs the retreat to the trivial truth as follows:

'What sociologists of science say is that of course the world is real and
independent of our observations but that accounts of the world are produced
by observers and are therefore relative to their capacities, education,
training, etc. It is not the world or its properties but the vocabularies in
whose terms we know them that are socially constructed – fashioned by
human beings – which is why our understanding of those properties is
continually changing. (Fish 1996)'"

is he, dare I say it, correct?