2024.09.9 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Chase Wrenn, The True and the Good: A Strong Virtue Theory of the Value of Truth, Oxford University Press, 2023, 187pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192869500.
Reviewed by Timothy Perrine, Rutgers University
Chase Wrenn’s book is dedicated to describing and resolving a certain puzzle about true beliefs. On the one hand, we ordinarily think true beliefs are valuable: as individuals and communities we seek them; we let our tax dollars fund research to produce and promote new ones; and we criticize others (especially public figures) who lie and show indifference to what we all know to be true. On the other hand, we ordinarily think the truth of our beliefs is pretty simple: it’s a matter of corresponding to facts or—more simply, just believing things are as they are. What’s supposed to be puzzling here is that our ordinary thinking about what truth is—what it consists of—doesn’t say anything about it being valuable or otherwise normative. So…
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