When Truth Is at Stake: The Case of Contemporary Legends

Carlos Renato Lopes

Paulista University, Brazil
Truth is the name we give to the choices to which we cling.
If we let go of them, we would emphatically say they
were false, for we respect the truth so much.
Paul Veyne (1983: 127)
Introduction
Unsuspicious moviegoers and pay phone users are being stung by HIV-tainted
needles strategically planted as a means of revenge or out of sheer cruelty. Club scene
habitus are getting doped at parties and waking up the next morning immersed in a
bathtub surrounded by ice just to find that their kidneys have been snatched for the
purpose of international body parts trafficking. Innocent fast food diners are being
exposed to the risk of contamination from all sorts of unthinkable ingredients
deliberately added to their happy meals. Schoolgirls (and boys) are terrified of going to
the school bathroom by themselves in case they bump into the ghost of the bloody
bathroom blonde (in Brazil, the loira do banheiro): an ex-student whose unreturned love
for a teacher led her to suicide in the premises. All-too-frequent cell phone users are
suddenly fearing for the health of their brains, which might well be exposed to the risk
of long-term damage, or even cancer. Are any of these stories true? Are we justified in
dreading them?
Just a whole bunch of myths, some will say. Contemporary legends, or more
popularly named, urban legends1. That is all this is about. A (not so) modern form of
mythology which, at most, serves the purpose of symbolically recycling the same old
fears and apprehensions involving contamination, violence, death But is that all there
is to it? Are contemporary legends simply a matter of believe it at your own will?
1

The terms urban and contemporary are both commonly used in folklore bibliography. But they both
present problems. The former has become popular partly due to the American scholar Jan Harold
Brunvands collections and encyclopedias published since the early 1980s. Some authors, however, reject
the term claiming that the stories are not restricted to an urban context. In turn, contemporary, the term
preferred by authors such as Bill Ellis and Gillian Bennett and ratified by the International Society for
Contemporary Legend Research which was created in the early 1990s (Fine 1992: 1) , could lead to
the false impression that the stories are always recent, when actually many of them are rooted in longlasting traditions. Still, in favor of this latter term there is the idea that any narrative is perceived as
contemporary in the time it circulates (Ellis 2001: xiii). I use both alternatives along this article but I
privilege the latter, despite its limitations.

In this article I wish to argue that contemporary legends are texts just as worth
bringing into the language class as other semi-fictional, semi-factual narratives that
have become staple didactic genres. My experience with students of English as a foreign
language particularly those with a greater familiarity with Internet pop culture
shows that these narratives elicit a great deal of controversy and debate. However, these
hardly take place in a critical manner, since the discussions often get polarized into a
dispute of whether the facts do or do not actually occur. I believe that a Critical
Literacy perspective would have a lot to contribute to these discussions in the sense that
it would provide both teachers and students with a practice through which they would
be able to question their own naturalized conceptions of culture and truth. It would help
us think of the power relations, discourses, and identities being constructed and
reinforced through these texts (Shor 1999). It would eventually help us see those texts
as embedded in broader meaning-making practices in which the fear of Others in our
social relations can take on many forms, and that contemporary legends is just one of
those forms (a potent one, I would say) whereby received interpretations and
stereotypes of alterity are enacted. We might then be able to recognize that since texts
are constructed representations of reality and of identities, we as critical readers have a
greater opportunity to take a more powerful position with respect to those texts to
reject them or construct them in ways that are more consistent with [our] own
experiences in the world (Cervetti et al. 2001: 8).
In order to shed a light on and begin to question the assumptions that
underlie the commonplace discussions on contemporary legends such as I have been
able to observe in my own teaching practice, I draw here upon some philosophical and
critical theory grounding on the problem of truth that should allow us to understand why
such debate is so pervasive. It is my hypothesis that by critically looking into this
moving force of the debate we may be able to better understand how and why those
stories keep being reinvented, then sent and re-transmitted, over and over, whether or
not they are perceived as having actually taken place somewhere, at some point in time.
My focus will be, then, on this powerful if elusive thing called truth.
When one looks at contemporary legends one cannot actually avoid the issue of
truth that surrounds them. It may appear explicitly in the very proposition of the
narrative, in which the narrator claims she will tell something that really happened
not to herself but, typically, to someone known by someone else she knows. It may also
be read into the reactions of listeners or readers of such narratives in the form of

incredulity, doubt or perhaps straightforward belief. And it may, of course, be detected

in the struggle of commentators who aim at establishing the scientifically, technically
attested falsity or at least, implausibility of such reports. No matter how plausible
these might seem.
I would join Foucault (1971/1996; 1976/1999; 1979/1996) on the belief that
every discursive practice has the capacity to generate effects of truth which are more or
less potent and enduring. Such possibility of the creation of truth effects in and through
discourse is due to an inescapable element to the subjects of this discourse: the will to
truth. It would seem that the question of whether contemporary legends are true or false
cannot be answered adequately or at least not beyond a mere factual investigation in
terms of this one actually took place versus this one actually did not unless we
consider the fact that legends are transmitted within socially and historically situated
practices in which certain programs of truth are at stake.
Speaking of programs of truth implies letting go of a traditional conception of
truth according to which a cognoscent subject, free from power relations, can accede to
a truth that is rational and universally validated. In the history of philosophy, we could
trace the climax of that belief back to Enlightenment with Descartes at the forefront. It
is only in the late 18th century that this view will begin to be seriously questioned; and
later with Nietzsche, and throughout the 20th century, systematically challenged. A short
genealogy of this reviewed approach to truth in philosophy is what I set out to do in the
following sections. For that task, and to back my claim on the relevance of reading
contemporary legends, I turn to three major currents of critical thinking themselves
discontinuous regimes of (philosophical) truth which share the aim of deconstructing
the belief that truth is one and unique. The three currents are, namely: Heideggers
theory of truth as non-truth (errancy), Nietzsches and Foucaults view of truth as will to
power (and hence will to truth), and the pragmatist conception of truth as a language
tool, proposed more recently by Rorty. Finally, we relate these three currents to the
concept of programs of truth employed by Veyne in connection to his analysis of the
different approaches towards myth.
Heideggers Ontological Truth Versus the Metaphysical Tradition
The search for truth is, to a certain extent, co-extensive to the very history of
Western philosophy, or at least to a long established metaphysical tradition of doing

philosophy. From Plato to the 20th century American pragmatists, we will hardly find a
school or current of philosophical thought which has not, to a higher or lesser degree,
examined this issue.
Let us begin to unravel this web by drawing on one of its many possible threads:
Heideggers view of being and truth. In Time and Being (1927/1995), Heidegger starts
off by proposing the concept of Dasein (the being there) to account for his project of
describing the mode of existence of the being-in-the-world. The Dasein is a construct
which projects itself, so to speak, towards the understanding of the Being in its totality.
For the German philosopher, the metaphysical inclination of an entire philosophical
tradition beginning with Platonism led to a gradual abandonment of the specificity of
the Being (in capital letters), favoring a split between entity and being and the eventual
erasure of the latter. From Plato to Nietzsche with Aristotle, the Romans, Descartes
and Kant in between philosophical thought would posit one form of metaphysics
which gradually constructed the entity as an essence, or the only category by which
existence and truth could be measured, be it in an idealistic or rational-scientific sense.
Plato, the father of all metaphysics, set the ground for the tradition that places
the being in a world of ideas, favoring it over the concrete living entity. Aristotle, in his
turn, apparently a materialist unlike Plato, also needed to take that supposed divide for
granted. It was the time when the idea of truth was established as one of
correspondence to things an adjustment of the eye to the object, that is, of the way of
seeing to the nature of things. In the Roman period, characterized by the rise of the
concept of empire, Platonism began to give way to the notion of correction. Being
truthful meant having the correct, fair view of reality. From modernity, fundamentally
with Descartes, the entity was hoisted up to the condition of cognoscent subject, the
supreme being to whom all knowledge and all truth were conditioned. Truth then
became a subject-object relation, a central one in our very conception of epistemology.
Finally, Nietzsche, by categorically denying any essence to the being the entity being
all that was left from metaphysics stood out as the last of the metaphysicians,
according to Heideggers reading.
Looking retrospectively at this tradition, without leaving himself outside it,
however, Heidegger proposes a sort of step back in the direction of the pre-Socratics,
with whom an initial understanding of the non-separation between being and entity
came to place. Heidegger does that not in nostalgia, but rather as a sort of revelation of
the aborted fate of the understanding of Being as the fundament of existence a fate

which metaphysics set out to obscure to the full, forgetting that it forgot the Being. In
sum, metaphysics abandoned the being as there is (a spark, a force, a revelation) and
embraced the being as is. Hence the paradox: the entity is, but the being is not.
In order to recover the Being in its specificity, that is, the ontological nature of
existence, we must let go of the most immediate perception we hold of ourselves, a
perception which is grounded on dichotomies such as subjectivity and objectivity, mind
and world, empiricism and idealism. As Jonathan Re (1999: 2) points out, the view that
Heidegger wishes to distance himself from is woven into the very fabric of Western
philosophy, throughout its history, and is enmeshed into our quotidian self-knowledge.
Man is already born with a certain call for ontology, alternating between the
understanding he has of himself as being part of a universe of things ready-at-hand
things which only exist because they serve a function or which relate to man in an
instrumental way and the opening up to a set of more abstract questions that
accompany him throughout life, including: What does being mean? and What is
truth?. What occurs is that man is so absorbed by everydayness that he tends to abstract
things as lost in an impersonal collectivity, acting as a mere being-among-things and
moving away from authenticity.
When man is immersed in this everydayness (and this is a point which more
closely interests us here), he engages in inauthentic activities, such as curiosity,
ambiguity and idle talk (rumors included), which are, according to Heidegger, modes of
corrupted discourse, common sense forms of evading the self-knowledge of Dasein.
The attachment to those forms reinforces the trivial impersonality of the being-amongothers mundane world. When everything becomes accessible to all, in an indifferent
and shapeless factuality, the things-at-hand become more and more instrumental, which
leads to an opacity in the relation between the entity and its beliefs.
But what does being authentic actually mean for Heidegger? It is certainly not a
question of searching for an essential, subjectivized, isolated Being face to face with its
own individuality. Rather, it is a question of comprehending the authentically
incomplete and fragmented nature of the Being in its totality, since the Being is marked
by a constitutive flaw of the very being-in-the-world. To be authentic, the being needs to
open up to the freedom of letting-be, letting things reveal themselves as they are. The
being needs, paradoxically, to find itself as inescapably inauthentic, living immersed in
an universe of ready-at-hand things. Thus, inauthenticity is not merely an error or moral
flaw, but an integral part of authentic existence.

It is actually in the opening towards revelation as discovery, unveiling that

the question of truth2 comes to place. To Heidegger, truth is inseparable from the Being
that unveils it. It exists necessarily as a function of Dasein, for once man searches for
self-understanding, he opens himself up to the unveiling of truth.
It might seem at first that Heidegger hardly moves away from an idealist view of
truth a truth to whose sublime realm we need to ascend via transcendental awareness,
letting go of our individual peculiarities, ridding ourselves of our ordinary
everydayness. However, it is not in those terms that Heidegger puts the question. On the
contrary, for Heidegger the origin and anchor of all knowledge is fundamentally
ontological, that is, it is bound to the category of Being as being-with, being-amongothers. Relational being. Awareness, for the philosopher, is not of a subjective nature,
but rather the listening of a possible place of authenticity, a possible place of opening
to an unveiling which, already by constitution, presents itself as veiling due to the very
mode of the being-in-the-world that is inherent to Being.
But Heidegger goes deeper into the problematic of truth when he talks about
non-truth and errancy as inseparable from truth, and not merely as its logical opposites.
If, as we have seen, truth is unveiling, it is because it is already born as veiling its
totality. The fact that we are all invariably subject to this veiling (or dissimulation)
makes it a presupposition and fundament to the very unfolding of the being-in-theworld. As Waelhens and Biemel summarize:
The unveiling is always partial, particular. It takes place against a
backdrop of veiling which it helps to dissimulate by force of its own
progress. That which is known about an entity in particular casts to a
shadow the entity in its totality; the very success of that unveiling implies
the dissimulation of that which is necessarily occult. (Waelhens and
Biemel 1948: 47, my translation)
Such a conception has clear implications for mans attempt to impose himself as
the measure of all things, since he is blind to that forgetting. As Ernildo Stein points out,
in the modern tradition, the subject has always been the measure of truth a condition
of possibility and as such, the human being presents him/herself as the yardstick for
all propositions referring to contingent situations where there is truth or falsity (Stein
2

Heidegger uses the concept of aletheia, the word used by the Greeks mythical-poetic tradition to refer
to truth, which literally means unveiling.

1993: 191, my translation). In fact, for Heidegger, it is in technology and in the modern
knowledge of science that the zenith of that metaphysics occurs, whereby the entity is
taken to be the reference for all things.
It is thus that the entity errs. And it has always done it. In other words, it is
condemned to errancy understood not as the mere accidental or isolated mistake, but
rather the domain of the history of those entanglements in which all types or errors get
caught (Heidegger 1930/1961, section 7). And this errancy and the dissimulation of the
dissimulation or forgetting constitute the anti-essence of man, something that, from
within the original essence of truth, and belonging to that essence, is opposed to it.
We may then conclude that truth, at its root, is always-already non-truth not in
the sense of a logical opposite to truth, but rather in the sense of deprivation, an
incompleteness, since it operates dialectically, through historical mans errancy that is,
through the manifestation of the dissimulation/veiling of its totality in the errancy of
everyday life.
Even then, in one more demonstration of this dialectical thinking which looks to
eliminate the facility of binary logics, Heidegger reminds us that if man can experience
this errancy as errancy, and not simply let himself be absorbed by it, he may guide
himself towards essential truth3.
So, as we have seen, Heidegger tries to break away from an epistemologicalmetaphysical tradition by recovering the Being and truth in their ontological nature.
Nevertheless, it must be made clear that such rupture just cannot take place from
outside that tradition, as if the concepts which are being subject to revision could be
erased in all their extension, and by some voluntary decision. That is what Derrida
claims when he speaks of trace. For him, there is no sense in abandoning the concepts
of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics, since we do not possess any language
that is strange to this history. [W]e cannot enunciate any destructive proposition that
will not have been forced to slip into the shape, the logic and the implicit postulations of
that which it itself would like to contest (Derrida 1967/1989: 152). Each specific
borrowing brings to surface (or bears the trace of) a whole web of meanings from
which it is taken. It is in this sense that Heidegger, although denying the possibility of
the discovery of an absolute truth, is still talking about an original truth. It is in this
3

Waelhens and Biemel (1948: 55) point out that dialectics is a hallmark of Heideggers philosophy. But
unlike Hegels dialectics, which aims at subsuming the oppositions into a higher synthesis, Heideggers
dialectics presents the oppositions as definitely unresolvable which, in any case, does not mean a
destruction of the unit of his thought. Rather, we might say, as Derrida would do later (1972/2001), that
this is a deconstruction.

sense that, while speaking of truth and non-truth as dialectically constitutive elements of
that essence of truth, he is still talking about truth in terms of presence.
Nietzsche and Foucault: Truth as Will
One of the hallmarks of Nietzsches philosophy is the idea that there is no truth
as knowledge of the world as it is. He was opposed to the idea of a possible
apprehension of reality by means of language, since there would not be a pre-existing
delimited universe of things to know. In fact, the German philosopher proposed that
we abandon once and for all any attempt of knowing the truth. For him, we should
give up on the idea that language is capable of covering and representing the whole of
reality a reality that is supposedly determinable and whose truth we could unveil.
How does knowledge work, then? Nietzsche tells us that knowledge is mans
invention, that is, it is not something which is absolutely inscribed in human nature just
waiting for a revelation. At its root, knowledge, rather than arising as the result of an
impulse towards identification, an affection or passion for its object, is the fruit of a will
to power which mines its object and seeks to annihilate it in all its menacing potential.
It is as if one needed first to reject the object only then to bring it back to ones domain,
already tamed, already molded. This implies that each and every form of knowledge,
including science and technology, becomes necessarily perspective, partial and oblique.
Thus, if this knowledge, which is the outcome of a historical will, leads to what
we call truth, truth is, according to this reasoning, nothing more than the result of
contingent human relations to which we seek to ascribe universal status by means of a
will to truth. Nietzsches classical definition, proposed in the essay On Truth and Lie in
an Extra-Moral Sense, perfectly synthesizes this thought:
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have
been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,
and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a
people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what
they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power;
coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no
longer as coins. (Nietzsche 1873/1977: 46-7)

For Nietzsche, then, truth is interested knowledge, the brainchild of a will which
creates its own opposition between true and false: its own effect of truth. It appears in the
fashion of arbitrary metaphors, which are nonetheless made to become literal, taking on a
conventional and naturalized form throughout history. The original intuitive metaphors
are therefore taken for the things themselves.
But man forgets it. He forgets that he has created his own truths, since he has
built himself and things within a paradigm of rationality. He believes that he builds up
from an essence and that language serves merely as a transparent conduit for that
essence. He believes that he can look into the real from the outside. And that is what
allows him to think of science and philosophy in terms of discovery of truths. As Arrojo
well observes, the perspective proposed by Nietzsche leads us to the conclusion that
man does not discover truths independently from his will to power or his survival
instinct; he rather produces meanings and hence knowledge which is established through
the conventions that discipline man in social groups (Arrojo 1992: 54, my translation).
The production of solid and naturalized meanings, however, does not take place
in a rational dimension only; it also occurs in mans relation with myth and art. Man
allows himself to be tricked by the illusion of finding an ever-reinvented, particular form
of relating to the world of dreams. As long as it does not cause him any visible harm, he
will be charmed when he listens to epic tales be told as true, when he sees an actor
play a king more regally than the king himself and, why not say it adding an example
to the ones Nietzsche proposes , when receiving and transmitting urban legends over
the Internet.
The Nietzschean notion that truth does not exist as a pre-existing absolute fact of
reality, but that it may exist as an effect even if necessarily illusory points to the
utilitarian nature of truth. Nietzsche claims that knowledge, inasmuch as it presents itself
as a set of truthful and reliable beliefs, may serve certain purposes, but not others, and
that certain things can be described as useful to certain kinds of people but not to others.
Which only reinforces the authors refusal of the idea of truth as correspondence. That is,
instead of corresponding to a factual reality that is independent from human beings, truth
is proposed by Nietzsche as a way of meeting human desires, needs and uncertainties. It
is a value among values.
If for Nietzsche, then, every form of knowledge and, consequently, every form
of truth is necessarily perspective, it becomes impossible to aspire to an absolute and

definite apprehension of reality. As Mos summarizes: by affirming that truth is a value,

Nietzsche wishes to desacralize this evaluative principle, revealing its condition as a
human invention: truth is an idea, a construct of thought, it has a history (Mos 2005:
31). It is, therefore, inescapably partial.
But is Nietzsche contradicting himself as he has often been accused of by
proposing another truth when truth itself is nowhere to be found? I would argue he is not.
He could be defended against that claim when he affirms that, in order for us to go on
living, we must preserve certain classifying categories (which language consolidates) not
because they correspond to the nature of things, but simply because they give us the
necessary illusion of knowledge. It is from this point of view that we can interpret, for
instance, the universal truths of the will to power and the eternal return not as a
(contradictory or self-refuting) recovery of metaphysics, but rather as a proposition for a
rediscovery of a creative nature, which would occur as the result of an explicit account of
the metaphorical origin of words and truth (Mos 2005: my translation) or, in other
terms, a proposition for a rediscovery of [those] attitudes towards life which help one
to live life in the most life-affirming way possible (Olson 2001: 6). Finally, in keeping
with Nietzsche perspectivism, we might say that his ideas can in fact sound
contradictory, but this can only be affirmed from a certain point of view or program of
truth one which seeks in the very Nietzschean project some kind of universal truth.
Another important thinker sees the contradiction in Nietzsche as vital, and not
self-refuting. I refer now to Foucault. Directly influenced by Nietzsche, the French
philosopher finds here the inspiration for one of his most fundamental themes: the
relation of interdependence between power and knowledge. Let us examine how this
interdependence is viewed in connection to Foucaults approach to truth.
According to Foucault (1971/1996: 13-21), truth is an important external
exclusion procedure in the order of discourse which operates by means of the true/false
opposition. When one looks into a discourse, at the level of the sentence or proposition,
such opposition is neither arbitrary nor violent. It does not vary, either: the proposition is
always true or always false. But when it comes to identifying what has been, historically,
the will to truth that pervades our discourses and what sort of separation rules it, then
truth presents itself as a historical and institutionally sustained system of exclusion. Great
transformations which our societies have undergone over the centuries, including
scientific discoveries, can, to a certain extent, be interpreted as being the result of always

new wills to truth which were gradually imposed on a number of institutional practices,
such as pedagogy, empirical research, or the exploitation of technological resources.
But something very peculiar occurs with true discourse: by presenting itself as
freed from desire and power, it simply cannot recognize the will to truth that pervades it;
that is, in order to establish itself as true, discourse cannot help but disguise itself as a
product of that will. Thus, what we are allowed to see is a truth that would be rich and
fertile, a sweet and insidiously universal force, and not the prodigious machinery
designed to exclude all those who, time after time in our history, have tried to evade that
will to truth and to question it against truth (Foucault 1971/1996: 20, my translation).
It can already be noted that truth is not produced as an autonomous mistake-free
organism, hovering over human errancy, independent from the institutional mechanisms
of social action and control, or from human desire. Truth is definitely attached to those
mechanisms and, therefore, to power. Foucault reminds us that in any society the
multiple power relations which characterize the social body cannot be established or
function outside a regime of truth, that is, without being sustained by true discourses. In
the authors words:
There is no exerting of power without a certain economy of true
discourses which function in, from, and through that power. We are
subject by power to the production of truth, and we can only exert power
by producing truth. (...) After all, we are judged, condemned, classified,
obliged to duties, destined to a certain way of living or to a certain way of
dying as a result of true discourses that carry with them specific power
effects, truth effects. (Foucault 1976/1999: 28-9, my translation)
Foucault concludes that the will to truth, originated from the historically
constructed division between right and wrong, or true and false, is nothing more than
the excluding will to power. True discourse is no more than a necessary illusion for
subjects to struggle for power. And it is important to understand that this struggle takes
place from inside the very discursive practice: we cannot reach the truth, for we are
always-already assigned a circumscribed subject position the moment we enter
discourse.
The author proposes that in order to analyze the will to power (and knowledge)
in discourse we must gradually build and define our analytical tools in a practice he

calls genealogical. That is done in keeping with demands and possibilities designed
by concrete, contextualized studies (Foucault 1997). Bringing our object of study into
that perspective, I believe we ought to better investigate and understand how the
discursive practices around contemporary legends often point to the issue of veracity vs.
falsehood of the stories as being the key to those legends as if the accounts
depended exclusively on scientific-objective verdicts for permanence. Such investigation
would imply the analysis of discursive practices in their local knowledge dimension.
On Internet discussion lists dedicated to the transmission and discussion of
contemporary legends4, a great number of posts refer specifically to the issue of truth
in/of/around the legends. We can often observe how the different interlocutors struggle,
by means of argumentation and supposedly legitimate scientific references, to debunk
the rumors or proto-legends, and re-establish the factual order as soon as those texts
hit their e-mail boxes. It is as if proving the stories false were the raison dtre of the
discursive practices the moving force of the debate, as I suggested earlier. Indeed,
one must carefully examine how those narratives build on the tension between the local,
discontinuous (in Foucaults terms) and unverified knowledge, on the one side, and the
hierarchical force of true knowledge on the other true knowledge that, once available
to all by means of the rational-logical apparatus of science, is taken for something
revealed or explained by the discourse of those select few who possess it.
But, at this point, we had better not lose track of Foucaults reminder that there
does not exist a mere division between admitted and excluded discourse, or between
dominant and dominated discourse. There is no discourse of power on the one side, and
discourse against power on the other. Rather, in a given discursive practice, we often
observe a co-relation of forces, a multiplicity of different power/knowledge strategies
that co-exist. And it is that distribution of forces which we are to detect in the analysis:
the play between the things that are said and those that are unsaid or banned from
discourse; the variables and distinct effects depending on whoever speaks, when, from
which subjective/power position, and within which institutional context; the relocation
and reformulations of identical forms for opposite reasons.
We must, after all, acknowledge the existence of a complex and unstable play
in which discourse can be at once instrument and effect of power, and also obstacle,
anchor, point of resistance and point of departure for an opposite strategy (Foucault
4

I am particularly considering here the discussion forum hosted by the site www.snopes.com, which
provided most of the corpus of my doctoral thesis on contemporary legends (unpublished).

1976/1999: 96, my translation). That would allow us to explain the fact that there can be
distinct and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy, or even discourses
that circulate unchanged amid opposite strategies.
Rorty and the Pragmatist Approach to Truth
We move now to our next stop on our journey through the realm of philosophical
truth: pragmatism. Pragmaticians are philosophers of a predominantly Anglo-Saxon
tradition to whom knowledge is a tool, an instrument that must be put to the service of
the conditions of experience. One of the basic principles of pragmatism shared by its
major representatives, from William James to Richard Rorty, with John Dewey and
Donald Davidson in between is antirepresentationalism: the idea that there is not a
world out there, a reality independent from thought which might be represented by
language in a relation of correspondence or correctness. An idea which, as has been
pointed out, was already present in Nietzsche.
The same holds for the notion of truth, which, already with the first
pragmaticians, appears as dissociated from the idea of representation of things of reality.
The focus here is on experience, the way people relate to reality. According to this line
of thought, truth cannot be correspondence to reality, but rather the contingent product
of relations that humans establish with each other through usage or, in Wittgensteinian
terms, language games. In other words, being true is not a property which is
external to language, a predicate of things in the world out there, but rather a
fundamentally linguistic device, a predicate of phrases, sentences or propositions.
Richard Rorty, the most outstanding name in current pragmatist philosophy,
formulates the questions in the following terms:
To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that
where there are no sentences, there is no truth, that
sentences are elements of human languages, and that
human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be
out there cannot exist independently of the human mind
because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The
world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.
Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The

world on its own unaided by the describing activities of

human beings cannot. (Rorty 1989: 5)
This reflection leads Rorty to wonder whether truth even deserves philosophical
inquiry as a relevant and unquestionable concept in itself. He questions the utility for
human society of insisting on formulating a theory of truth, a consistent body of
thought that might account for a concept which, after all, pervades all the
transcendental-metaphysical-epistemological problematic, from Plato to Heidegger, and
which continues to confound and obscure philosophers. Instead, Rorty claims,
philosophical thought should set out to describe the conditions in which the true
presents itself in linguistic behaviors, that is, in contingent practices where people do
things with language.
What Rorty values the most in the pragmatist tradition is his precursors
vocation notwithstanding their differences and divergences to shift the focus away
from questions like What in the world is true to questions like How is the word
true used? (Rorty 1991: 132) or, simply, to consider the issue of truth in language in
performative terms, highlighting the necessarily public and hence social nature of language.
That is how, rather than proposing a theory of truth, Rorty sets out to identify
the linguistic uses of the words truth and true, thus establishing the following
criteria (Rorty op. cit: 128):
1) Endorsing use: that in which speakers explicitly evaluate their speech as being true,
or as expressing something they consider to be true through markers such as its
obvious that, thats true, certainly, no doubt, etc.
2) Disquotational use: that in which the words of others are not necessarily endorsed by
the speakers it involves acknowledging the voice of the other, but putting it between
quotation marks.
3) Cautionary use: that which takes into account the distinction between truth and
justification something may be justified (for example, a government has no right to
steal peoples money), but not true. For Rorty, it is not a difference in degree between
a more profound (or hidden) truth and an apparent, superficial one. It is
actually a question of equivalence: truth exists as long as it is justifiable, although, of
course, the justification may always be another, or several others, depending on the
historical moment, the locus of enunciation, etc.

These criteria allow Rorty to more explicitly formulate his view of truth as
contingent and contextualized. In a sort of radical minimalism, what Rorty is telling us
is that everything that can be said about X is what X is, there not being to X an occult
or intrinsic side which eludes the relational apprehension of X through language. For
Rorty, truth cannot be discovered, for that would be admitting that truth depends on
what the world is like in the sense of causal relations rather than descriptive acts.
Broadening this view towards a more specifically political formulation, Rorty
claims that, in an ideally liberal and democratic society, the notion of truth as
correspondence to reality should be replaced by an idea of truth as what one comes to
believe over free and open encounters. For the American philosopher, truth appears as a
historical contingency, and not as a convergence or a rational and universally valid
(even if uncoerced) communicative consensus, such as defended by the likes of
Habermas (Hoy 1994). But does that mean one should take Rortys view as reducing
truth to a mere pact, a fragile and capricious agreement between language players?
In this connection, the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman could be called on to
our aid. He aligns himself with the pragmatist view whereby truth, rather than
symbolizing the relation between what is said and a determined non-verbal reality,
stands in our usage for a certain attitude we take, but above all wish or expect others to
take, to what is said or believed (Bauman 1997: 112). However, he insists on pointing
out that, in certain beliefs, what is at stake is something more than the use of truth as an
endorsement something that goes beyond mere approval. What is at stake is the way
these beliefs reach such a degree of certainty and confidence that any alternative or
opposing point of view is rejected.
According to Bauman, there is no sense in speaking of truth if not in a situation
of dissent. Truth only comes up as an issue when different people hold on to different
beliefs, making it the object of dispute on who is right and who is wrong. Truth
comes up when one claims the right to speak with authority, or when it becomes
particularly important for an adversary to prove that the other side of the dispute is
wrong. The struggle for truth represents, then, the struggle for establishing certain kinds
of beliefs as systematically superior, under the excuse that they have been reached at
through a reliable procedure, or one that is vouched for by the kind of people who may
be trusted to follow it (Bauman op. cit.: 113).
The way I read him, Rorty would put this issue in other, maybe less
ideological, terms. By explaining the relation between truth and justification related

to the cautionary use of truth discussed above the philosopher claims that the need to
justify our beliefs and desires to others and to ourselves subjects us to certain norms,
the obedience to which produces a behavioral pattern which we must detect in others
before we can confidently attribute beliefs to them (Rorty 1998: 26).
In other words, we enter the language game with certain beliefs, and we know
that those we play with possess, on their side, their own beliefs. But we must attest to
the existence of those beliefs performatively, from within the linguistic exchanges, and
not take them as givens. What Rorty does not believe, perhaps unlike Bauman, is that
the rules of the linguistic game necessarily imply obeying an additional norm the
commandment to seek a [final] truth (Rorty op. cit.: op. cit.).
Reading Legends, Reading Myths: The Lessons Theory Teaches Us
Bringing our contemporary legends back into focus, we could but only begin, in
a tentative exercise of critical reading, to reassess the issue of truth as it manifests itself
in the practice of transmitting and commenting those narratives. Rather than taking to
the facile opposition between veracity versus falsehood, which would imply a view of
truth as correspondence to a self-standing order of reality (i.e. the facts, the truth out
there), we would do best by using the lessons our philosophers have offered us and
eventually applying them in our language classes in an attempt to reassess our
common sense interpretations and view the discursive practice with different eyes.
We could perhaps appreciate Heideggers lesson that everydayness or rather,
situatedness is the only social space we can be inhabit. If we live inauthentically,
negotiating our meanings through idle talk, ambiguity and curiosity, that is the only site
from within which we may eventually open ourselves up to a different, more
democratic, truth. Becoming aware of the very space we speak from sounds like a
basic move, but it is definitely a first step (sometimes a very difficult one) that we as
mere entities can take towards critically reading our cultures artifacts legends,
rumors, fictions, and objective truths all included.
We could certainly retain Foucaults critique of truth, particularly as it is
formulated in the following passage by Barry Allen, one of his commentators: [f]or
truth-value (and associated values like reference, translation, relevance, implication,
identity, and objectivity) to be determinate in any case depends on the effectiveness of
historically contingent practices of evaluation, and on nothing else (Allen 1995: 110-

1). This amounts to claiming that the difference between true and false cannot be
established by external, context-free parameters. It does not exist apart from a local
practice, in which these values are produced and evaluated, and statements circulate as
true, presenting themselves in the form of facts, news, legends (legenda, i.e. what is
to be read). Allen continues: Only here have statements currency, the capacity to
circulate, to penetrate practical reasoning, to be taken seriously, to pass for the truth.
These practical conditions situate truth amid all the major asymmetries of social power,
undermining its status as a common good (Allen op. cit.: 4). Common good it is not,
then. Rather, it is a space for potential dissent, in which power relations will battle their
way towards either debunking or reaffirming the different stakes of the game.
Contemporary legends, more particularly the practical conditions in which
they are perpetuated, function as the stage where a number of partial truths gain their
currency. In other words, they are the space where different regimes, or programs of
truth, are enacted. Believing or not in certain accounts in this or that version of a
specific contemporary legend implies more than a one-track pursuit of factual truth. It
more likely involves a permanent shift between modes of belief a shift that is not
unlike the one Paul Veyne (1983) identifies in the complex relation the Greeks held
with their myths.
Belonging to a time long gone, in all its wonders, its accounts of gods and
men and fantastic creatures that one does not come across walking on the streets, at
least not in the present , myth offered itself to the Greeks as an integrally truthful
reality, one that transmitted collective memories which could not have been simply
invented lies. As Veyne points out, believing in that body of narrative as a plausible one
means still being within the true, but in analogical terms. Myth is inherited
information. It is an accepted tradition. And it is respected. Once the story is over, we
can shift to another mode of truth that of real life and then back and forth, in an
analogical operation.
One may criticize myth from within a historians program of truth rejecting
the chronological incoherences and the improbable cause-and-effect propositions but
one may also be compelled to read allegorical truths into it. To the rationalist
condemnation of the imaginary as false, the apologetic of the imaginary replies that it
conforms to a hidden reason. For it is not possible to lie (Veyne 1983: 62). By
claiming that truth and interest which I equate with (ever-partial) interpretation are
inseparable concepts, Veyne echoes Foucault. Both would agree that in the process of

attempting to fix the meanings of a practice in a regime/program of truth, contingency

becomes a necessity that keeps justifying itself. And, as we have seen with Rorty,
justifying is one more language game one plays with truth.
In that sense, could contemporary legends be some sort of modern-day myth, as
has been hinted at in our Introduction? I would argue that just as it is impossible to lie
about myth, it may be impossible to lie about urban legends. The resonance that a
legend may have in a certain interpretive community tends to be higher than the
evidence that contests its veracity. Whether or not the narrative is trustworthy, the
impact that the force of its message may cause is not necessarily greater or smaller. As
Whatley and Henken well point out:
[T]he evidence countering the veracity of a legend rarely carries the
weight that the legend does. (...) The impact a legend has on those telling
or hearing it may have little to do with whether the story is believed. ()
What may be more important is the truth that folklore conveys about the
attitudes, fears, and beliefs of a group, which in turn shape and maintain
the identity of that group. (Whatley and Henken 2001: 4-5)
So, our students may not believe, for example, that someone could have planted
an HIV-infected needle on their theater seats, but this will not necessarily stop them
from double-checking before sitting. Equally, they may not believe that the long-lasting
use of their cell phones poses any risk of explosion, but still they will turn off their
devices when pulling into a service station. That is to say, the most relevant aspect to
this kind of narrative may not be its objectively attested implausibility, but rather the
truth it reveals about the beliefs and values of the communities in which it circulates.
Finally, we might stick with a lesson that Veyne indirectly teaches us about the
myths of our present time, and that somehow paves the way toward a more critical
understanding of our object in point. What he says about myth serves just as well for
contemporary legends: in order to engage those narratives we would do well by sorting
through the heterogeneous programs of truth that constitute our imagination programs
that tell us what we are or are not allowed to believe at different moments in history;
programs that intersect or even contradict each other in our everyday, ever-shifting
contingent practices of being in the true. And so, at each moment, nothing exists or
acts outside these [space-defining] palaces of the imagination... They are the only space
available (Veyne 1983: 121).

This Elusive Thing Called Truth

It is my belief that beyond the irreconcilable differences between them, the
different theories of truth reviewed here provide some points of reference for our
discussion of contemporary legends particularly in regard to the question of why truth
is such a central issue in the discourse of and about those narratives. Perhaps the
perspective I have been trying to adopt in the very writing of this article brings it closest
to the pragmatist approach, whereby knowledge is just as good as we can make a useful
application of it. From this point of view, we could say that Heidegger, Nietzsche,
Foucault, Rorty and Veyne complement each other not in an evolutionary manner,
as in a continual progressive line from one author to the next, but rather as in an
intersection of certain common points across different philosophical programs of truth
on truth.
In retrospect, all theories propose the abandonment of the notion of truth as
absolute correspondence between the world and its representation, between words and
things. We will also find that the question of truth is inseparable from a reflection on the
(human) practices of daily life, in which people do things with language. These
practices may be seen, with Heidegger, as a form of errancy or, with Nietzsche, as an
illusion. They may be seen, with Veyne, as the enactment of a program, or
constitutively imaginary frame of mind, where different beliefs play out in analogical
operations. They may also be seen, with Foucault, as struggle and resistance practices
within a regime of truth which mobilizes knowledge and engenders power. Or they may
be seen, with Rorty, as a forum for the creation and consolidation of contingent beliefs,
resulting from open and democratic free encounters. But all of them will agree that such
practices are necessary, in that they constitute the very mode of human existence.
Thus, erring, according to Heidegger, is being immersed in a universe in which
the ready-at-hand things, inasmuch as they are apprehended in their relation with man,
become instrumental. Sure, Heidegger sees there the very operating mode of the entity
in its forgetfulness of Being. But it is precisely this immersion in half-blind, always
partial everydayness that interests us here, more than a supposed forgotten essence.
In Nietzsche, for his turn, it is the illusion of taming reality through language
language that is always-already metaphorical, but which stalls the flow of metaphor

through forgetfulness, thereby letting it perish that allows men to survive in their
illusion of identity and rationality: their belief in lasting truths.
Along the same lines, Foucault tells us that discursive practices produce a sort of
rarefaction: inasmuch as discourse proliferates, it is subject to a regime of truth which
restricts it, limiting its chance occurrence and thus wearing it thin. Discourse affirms
itself as truthful, but it only does so within a (practical) order that encourages its
proliferation just as it simultaneously detains its expansion, in a mechanism that is
characteristic of and necessary to the correlation of power/knowledge forces.
Finally, Rorty (and in a similar fashion, Veyne), by desacralizing the idea of truth
as something intrinsic to things, places his bet on things that humans do with language,
in the contingent use of vocabularies which may only affirm themselves as truths as a
result of historically and socially situated practices.
By now, agents and advocates of Critical Literacy will surely have identified in
all those discussions one of the tenets of their own belief system, summarized by
Cervetti et al. (2001: 10) in these terms: Reality cannot be know definitely, and cannot
be captured by language; decisions about truth, therefore, cannot be based on a theory
of correspondence with reality, but must instead be made locally. Locally in the
different interpretive communities we claim membership to; locally in our classrooms,
as we and our students learn to rethink the often deeply ingrained assumptions we hold
on the meaning of truth, and on what can or cannot be true about the stories we are told.
To conclude our journey, then, we might just add that in view of our theoretical
(and practical!) grounding the search for the truth of/in contemporary legends leads us
along the routes of two intersecting tracks. The first one shows us that we cannot
possibly learn all the facts and hence all the truth narrated in these stories. That
is, we cannot know with absolute certainty what is a technically, scientifically attested
(or even plausible) fact and what is merely an insisting rumor or piece of
misinformation and I think here particularly of the abundant narratives surrounding
the mysterious powers of (not so) new technologies, or the risks of (as of yet)
uncontrollable diseases. We simply err; we cling to our most essential and mundane
truths: that we are all exposed to too-close-to-home risk, and that someday we will all
die. The second track teaches us that, albeit incomplete, controversial or merely
plausible, facts only make sense insofar as they belong to an itinerary of truth. They
are mediated by a regime of discursive practices that have narrative as a privileged form
of manifestation narratives of a particular type, dispersed and mutable, such as

contemporary legends, but also other narratives of a particular type, those claimed by
the legitimized institutions of power/knowledge that go by the name of science, politics,
education, the media, etc. In short, all those narratives that make up the fabric of our
everyday engagement with reality.
So as to make the most out of these reflections in a critical stance towards
contemporary legends, we could perhaps draw the map of those two tracks in the form
of a dialectic sway: one by which the will to truth in legends simultaneously constitutes
a form of social regulation and fictional reinvention, via narrative, of the fears and
anxieties of daily life. Positioning ourselves as teachers and learners who can perceive
and critically read this dialectics will hopefully have been the result of a dialogic
practice: a continual, ever-transitory but not a bit elusive exercise in critical literacy.
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