So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Pontius Pilate's question is always an indication of bad faith. 'Is this true?' is fine. 'Can we define truth?' is not. As a rhetorical move, it is always dishonest. The purpose of our conversation is to discover what we should count as true. We cannot predict what we might find.
Within that conversation, some particular things must count as true, or it becomes unintelligible (and so not a conversation). In other words, the question 'Is this true?' must, occasionally, get a unanimous 'yes' from all participants. And we cannot entertain certain doubts about what the participants are doing when they say 'yes' without also doubting the quality of their engagement.
('What is truth?' is like 'We may all be engaging incompetently or dishonestly.' And we should ask: Even when we say that? If Pilates's question was honest, he would not know what to do with the answer. Of course, it plays a complex role in that particular narrative and it's exegesis...)
So who is participating in this conversation? I don't know, of course. I sit here tapping away, doing something that works in other 'conversational' contexts, but I do it on my own.
We think by imagining interlocutors, but they are only other versions of ourselves.
(It's a curious thought that our ability to talk to one another, and then to imagine conversations, might have displaced a more 'native' cognitive engagement with the world. Maybe we're not as clever as we think ...)
