You keep on using the word ‘truth’ as if it were some sort of decisive weapon, or even a reasonably clear idea. History is persuasive speculation, it’s fabulation. What can we know about ‘what really happened’? Literature invents the past, that’s why it’s so important, it must go on inventing the past that the present needs!

ACASTOS

You make it all sound like lying!

MANTIAS

It’s bound to be what you call lying, I want it to be useful purified lying.

DEXIMENES

‘Purified lying’ – that’s good!

MANTIAS

Art isn’t like nature, even ‘realism’ isn’t, words can’t express things, they can’t go out and touch them, words aren’t names –

SOCRATES

Wait a moment. You say we can’t know the past, we can only make up useful stories about it. Now you’re talking about language generally. You mean words can’t picture reality at all?

MANTIAS

That’s what I mean!

SOCRATES

How do you know? Do you look at words and then at reality and–

MANTIAS floundering

I mean – really there’s no such thing as ‘reality’ or ‘nature’, it’s not just sitting there, we make it out of words – ideas –concepts –

ACASTOS

So language doesn’t refer to the world?

SOCRATES

Wait, we must see what Mantias is up to, what he really wants, metaphysicians usually want something or other. Of course words are not just names, the operation of language is very complicated, we use all sorts of conceptual tricks to relate to our surroundings, we often disagree about how to do it. It certainly does not follow from this, that there is no independent world such as common sense takes for granted.

DEXIMENES knocking a table

Of course there’s an independent world.

SOCRATES

Not a bad argument!

MANTIAS

It’s a stupid argument, as you perfectly well know. Language has meaning through internal coherence, it’s not like a window we look through.

SOCRATES

Well, sometimes it’s like a window, and often it’s not coherent. Perhaps you are thinking of mathematics or of some language used by the gods. Our natural mortal language is a much more messy business and very difficult to theorise about. Let us say that your hypothesis is interesting but rather far-fetched! Our language is being broken and tested and altered all the time in relation to something else which certainly seems to be ‘just sitting there’, quite pleased with itself, and indifferent to our ingenuity and our wishes! This is our most evident and primary experience. Of course it is mysterious, consciousness itself is the most mysterious thing of all, and philosophers feel challenged by mysteries. But philosophy can’t always say something systematic and universal and marvellous! Faced with something so very – difficult –I think we should be careful and modest and hold onto common sense and our ordinary conceptions of truth. Reality resists us, it is contingent, it transcends us, it surprises us, language is a struggle, we live on a borderline –

ACASTOS bursting in