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'A sassy and profound response to [a] cascade of superstition and silliness ... Benson and Stangroom answer the clotted, barely readable sentences of the postmodernists with sentences so clear you could swim in them. There should be a law demanding every purchase of a Jacques Derrida "book" be accompanied with a free copy of this shimmering, glimmering answer.'

Postmodernism is often billed as attacking truth and science. This is how it is presented in the valuable little book Why Truth Matters, by the editors of the sceptical website butterfliesandwheels.com, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom. They mount a spirited counterattack, reminding us - in the way that Cambridge philosopher GE Moore was famous for doing - that if it comes to a battle for hearts and minds, basic convictions of common sense and science beat philosophical subtleties hands down. Where Brian King horrifies us with his liars, Benson and Stangroom reveal a parallel rogues' gallery of social constructivists, who look at how individuals and groups participate in the creation of their own perceived reality. These "rogues" include the feminist Sandra Harding and the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty, but the doyen must surely be the French philosopher of science Bruno Latour. Latour's confusion of words and things led him to the precipice of denying that there could have been dinosaurs before the term was invented. Presumably a similar argument would show that nobody before Crick and Watson had DNA. Why Truth Matters is an excellent example of philosophy done well but also, and not coincidentally, made accessible and exciting. Truth matters, it tells us "not in a dull perfunctory dutiful sense, but in a real lived felt sense - 'on the pulses' as Keats put it".

"British philosophers Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom array their immense talent ... in Why Truth Matters. What they're on about is a prevailing intellectual indifference to coherence, logic, rationality, and evidence. It's a world-view that holds that there is no historical truth and almost everything is a mere social construction. Discovery is conflated with invention, myth is elevated alongside empirical evidence, and no lines are drawn between fact and fiction....Most of us will get the main point Stangroom and Benson are making: truth matters because human beings are the only species capable of finding it out." —Straight.com, July 13, 2006

"As polemics go, it is short and adequately pugnacious. Yet the authors do not paint their target with too broad a brush. At heart, they are old-fashioned logical empiricists —- or, perhaps, followers of Samuel Johnson, who, upon hearing of Bishop Berkeley's contention that the objective world does not exist, refuted the argument by kicking a rock. Still, Benson and Stangroom do recognize that there are numerous varieties of contemporary suspicion regarding the concept of truth....They bend over backwards in search of every plausible good intention behind postmodern epistemic skepticism. And then they kick the rock." —Inside Higher Ed, June 2006

About the Author

Jeremy Stangroom is co-editor, with Julian Baggini, of The Philosophers' Magazine and co-author of Do You Think What You Think You Think? (Granta, 2006), What Philosophers Think and Great Thinkers A-Z. He and Ophelia Benson are co-authors of Why Truth Matters and The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense (Souvenir, 2004).Ophelia Benson is editor of www.butterfliesandwheels.com, deputy editor of The Philosophers' Magazine and co-author, with Jeremy Stangroom, of Why Truth Matters. She is also a frequent contributor to Free Inquiry.