This unique work on truth is a study of the paired concept of truth and truthfulness using a Nietzschian style of genealogy in moral philosophy. Williams utilised an unusual blend of analytic moral philosophy, classical study, and historical perspective which produced a work that is richly densed in arguments, concepts, and details. His prose is learnt and densed, but precise and elegant. This is a book that may need a second reading to sufficiently grasp Wlliams wealth of concepts.

Williams suggest there is almost a dilemma existing between truth and truthfulness in the modern era. On the one hand, there is a demand for truthfulness as almost a reflex against deceptiveness while on the other hand, there is a suspicion whether there is such thing as truth.  There seems to be a paradox in a demand for truthfulness while questioning if there is truth. His project is to stabilise the apparent opposition of the two concepts. In using the Nietzschian genealogical approach, a genealogy is a narrative that attempts to explain a cultural phenomenon  by describing the way in which it came about, could have come about, or might be imagined to have come about. Williams uses a fictional genealogical narrative instead of real history which is an imagined developmental story that helps to explain concepts, values, or institutions by showing how they could have come about in a simplified environment containing human interest, capacities, and stories which is a "state of nature". Hence this  genealogy serves the aims of naturalism by explaining human culture as a part of nature. The naturalism in genealogy is not for promoting reductionism but to help provide explanations. In using a fictional genealogy, it helps to provide a "functional" explanation of the concept, reason, motivation or other aspect of human thought and culture. A functional explanation reveals the various  possibilities of the concepts, reasons, and motivations in a culture.

To examine the issue of truth and truthfulness, Williams offers a study of the two virtues of truth, sincerity and accuracy. Sincerity is critical to truthfulness because it is a Grician cooperative principle in communication which is the most fundamental principle that makes communication works. But any social system does not only consider maximal cooperation in communication. There are other various considerations to limit how much information is to be shared between parties due to various considerations. Sincerity bears on trustworthiness, and the framework of trustworthiness varies from time to time and culture to culture.  The cultural variation of values requires real history in genealogy over mere fictional genealogy to bring in real cultural determination of sincerity and trustworthiness.

With regard to the notion of accuracy, it is more than the capacity to acquire and communicate information and to know how to make wise "investigative investments", I.e., strategic decision on what information and source that are worth collecting. Accuracy relates to the aim of acquiring truths which involves two aspects. The first one is the investigator's attitude to pursue truths and to avoid wishful thinking, self deception and fantasy. The second one involves the investigator's methods being actually reliable to collect truths.

Included in this work is a study of the seminal work of the scientific approach to record history by Thucydides and Herodotus. The discussion involves Thucydides' introduction of historical time to provide a temporal structure of the past events to be separated by mythical accounts though both together are the real historical genealogy of a given culture. Also included in this rich work is the truth virtue of "authenticity" featured in Rousseau and Diderot. They offer an account of conflicting human dispositions and motivations to be authentic, which are to be steadied by society, life experiences, and interaction with people. For application of Williams discussion of truth and truthfulness, the work also shows how they apply to liberalism in politics. Truthfulness is expected of government because it is charged with exercising power to provide security for its people and to avoid tyranny from improper use of power. Another way in which truthfulness is important because it pertains to the liberal institution of free speech. Free speech in the market place of ideas should be moderated by sincerity and accuracy to insure the quality of the information exchanged.

Overall this last work of Williams covers so much ground with so much depth that it requires work and focus from the reader but with enlightened reward at the end.

Rather than direct engagement with the philosophical literature on truth, Williams addresses the essential role of truthfulness in relationships and society. He effectively charts a practical path between some of the more unreasonable claims of enlightenment arrogance and the extremes of postmodern cynicism.

(Review from 2nd time reading)

This was an extraordinary read. Williams is very innovative and insightful; his literary style is rhetorically powerful and yet rigorous and precise; and reading this inspired me to go off on ideas and enabled me to develop my thinking in a way that the vast majority of philosophy things I read fail to do. This is my second time reading this book after a year and a half; either I barely remembered much from my first read, or now I'm equipped with questions that enabled me to actually get the substance out from this book, or Williams is such a delicate writer, with such condensed prose, and it takes multiple reads in general to get at his ideas. The only downside of the book is how condensed the prose is; there are many ideas packed into his sentences, and Williams rarely outlines for the reader what his main argument is, which can make it difficult to know what the main thread is at times.

Here is my summary of the book from this time around. Williams sets out the problem he'll be dealing with. There is a tension between two basic impulses in our (post-modern?) world: We aim to see behind ideologies and get at the true motives beneath those. And yet we also skeptical of the idea of truth itself; some thinkers say that anything asserted as truth simpliciter is just a "meta-narrative" or something like that. Williams aims to defend that we can and ought to talk about the truth simpliciter, and this doesn't boil down to power or social interaction or human history. He defends this not, however, by giving any traditional metaphysical or epistemological arguments for how we can possibly know the world in itself, or how we ought to think about truth so that we are indeed capable of getting ahold on it.

Instead, Williams gives two kinds of argument. First, he shows that we humans simply cannot do without caring about the truth; this is a sort of transcendental argument for that it is a necessary precondition for our thought and experience that we believe in truth. Even pragmatists and post-modernists who claim to do without truth turn out to be presupposing it all the time. Second, Williams argues that, socially and ethically, truth is an intrinsic value. He breaks truth down, at the social or ethical register, in terms of the virtues of Sincerity and Accuracy. Sincerity is a matter of not hiding from others what one knows. Accuracy is a matter of obtaining accurate or reliable information on the basis of experience. (These two kinds of argument do not exclude metaphysical and epistemological conclusions, however; if their conclusions are true, the world itself and our relation to it must be structured in certain ways for these conclusions to be possible. This isn't Williams's focus, however).

This second argument is particularly fascinating and innovate, and it and its implications and applications take up the bulk of the book. In chapters 2 and 3 Williams presents a sort of genealogical argument (inspired by or in the style of Nietzsche's regarding morality), or an imagined history of the emergence and evolution of the virtues of Sincerity and Accuracy. Williams defends this methodology; even though this history is not factually correct with respect to its particular details, it is consistent with or appeals to the general dispositions and structures of human psychology and society. Williams thinks this consistency is sufficient for an imagined history to provide us with insights into the nature of the social practice whose history is under analysis; this is because these general dispositions and structures are fundamental and counterfactually robust, so the particular details that are fictional in the imagined history are no less problematic than the different potential details that could've arisen in our actual world.

In this genealogical account of truth, Williams asks us to imagine a "state of nature" where some individuals in a community can communicate with one another. What happens? The fact is that by virtue of being distinct individuals, with distinct spatial positions, each will experience and know things that the others cannot. So for the survival of the community, it is in their interests to pool together their knowledge. To successfully do that, they need to be both sincere and accurate, in the ways I specified above. So it is natural for sincerity and accuracy to become regarded as virtues within the community; if you are sincere and accurate, you are being a good member of society and also help yourself in return.

In chapter 4, Williams directly addresses how he is defining truth. This requires examining assertions and beliefs, since truth is defined in close relation to those. Out of different kinds of linguistic expressions, assertions are supposed to be true. Distinguishing between true and false assertions is not just any classification among others; when we make any assertions at all (including this one about classifications), we aim for our assertion to be truthful. All assertions must necessarily occupy the status of being true or not, whereas it is not appropriate to the status of all assertions regarding other categories. According to Williams, our default is to express our beliefs sincerely; so sincerity basically is openness or lack of inhibition. So the essential function of assertions is to let knowledge be transmitted across a community, because speakers are generally taken to be reliable, and assertions are generally taken to be direct expressions of belief. How are we to understand truth in light of this? Truthful assertions are those that we take it that others can rely on for their own reasoning. So truth is connected to whether we're willing to assert something. Wishful thinking is a commonplace phenomenon, and asking ourselves whether we're willing to assert a piece of wishful thinking is a useful way to determine whether we really believe in something, which we wish for.

In chapter 5, Williams argues that truth, as a virtue or good, is not good instrumentally, for some further end. Rather, it is an intrinsic good. The value of truth can't be reduced to personal utility, because this opens the possibility that there is an alternative value that leads to better utilitarian outcomes. Instead, we should understand truth as connected to other things we value and to our ethical sensibility. If we treat truth as an intrinsic good, this suffices for it to be an intrinsic good. Williams investigates what these other things we value to which truth is connected are. Agents need to be reliable; and this requires that they be sincere (that they do not lie and mislead regularly). We fear being disgraceful in our own eyes and in others' eyes. We take it as intrinsically good to tell the truth, because this entails we are being sincere, which matters intrinsically to us, given our ethical sensibilities.

In chapter 6, Williams examines accuracy. Being accurate, as a virtue, requires us to think about whether it's worthwhile to put in a certain amount of energy in order to get certain truths out of this work, both for ourselves and for the community. It's a virtue because there are many obstacles to arriving at the truth (e.g., self-deception; imperceptibility of certain objects). Williams argues against the pragmatist that there are certain methods of arriving at knowledge that are objectively better than others; whether a method is valued as such or not is not merely a matter of ideology. A method is better than another if it doesn't tell us that a proposition is true and not true equally so. For example, the hypothetical method of believing in whatever we desire is bad, because different people will have different desires, and our own desires are changeable.

Williams, in this chapter, also addresses the question of what account of realism we are to hold. The idea of truth implies that there is a reality, in contrast to fantasy. How are we to make sense of reality? The commonplace empiricist idea to think of reality as consisting of objects that are resistant to our will; we cannot change reality by our desires and thoughts alone. Williams points out that this is an incomplete account; there are many parts of reality for which it'd be incoherent to form desires, since there are no actions we could take towards them that could count as trying. Logical truths are an example of this. Williams shows we can expand the basic empirical realist account. We can in fact form desires for reality itself to be other than it currently is; so we can desire for logical truths, for example, to be otherwise. So we can still understand reality as that which is resistant to our will, but in this expanded sense of the range of things towards which we could apply our will.

Chapters 7-9 take detours from Williams' central project, of articulating a way of thinking about truth and of defending the realism of it. These chapters may be understood as applications of his project. In chapter 7, Williams argues that our objective conception of time (i.e., that it consists in homogeneous magnitudes that extend infinitely across the past and into the future) is a modern invention. The invention of this is almost fated given our demands of accuracy; it is invented when ancient Greeks realized that questions that may be asked of any everyday event to ensure its reporting is accurate (e.g., "what time and place did it happen at?") could be asked also of events purported to have happened in the remote past. Before this, according to Williams, people compartmentalized two domains of events; the everyday world and the mythical, remote past. They didn't take the latter as fiction, but they also didn't take it as literally real; it simply didn't occur to them that they could evaluate it as either real or not real.

In chapter 8, Williams examines how the virtue of sincerity developed during the Enlightenment and romantic periods. He discusses two distinct conceptions of sincerity based in Rousseau and Diderot. Rousseau stood for a conception of sincerity on which one is sincere if one spontaneously makes known, to oneself and others, who one is and what one has done. The problem with this picture, which Diderot duly saw, is that we can deceive ourselves; even if we discover something about ourselves in a spontaneous, non-premeditated fashion, there can be deep-rooted desires that shape what we come up with spontaneously. Diderot's picture, in contrast, is that sincerity requires that we stabilize the self in accordance to social, ethical, and political demands. According to Diderot, the self is intrinsically unstable; our desires and impulses fluctuate, which tempt us into holding fluctuating beliefs which would vindicate our desires. To be sincere is to interact with other people and hold ourselves responsible to the ethical demand that what we tell them be truthful, so that the pool of communal knowledge may be a reliable source for everyone.

Williams goes into a very interesting account of self-deception and wishful thinking, at this point. He argues, inspired by Diderot, that our minds are constantly "awash with images, excitements, fears, and fantasies." Whenever we practically deliberate about what to do, this deliberation serves as a context under which such states may flow. A desire will be a state that may be regarded as potentially satisfied by action, under this context, whereas a mere wish does not have to meet this criterion. Sometimes we have the impulse for a wish to become a desire; when this happens, we are tempted to hold false beliefs that would paint the picture to ourselves that it is indeed possible to act upon this wish. In that way, the wish may become a desire. So mental states in themselves aren't always intrinsically delineated into wishes and desires, but have an indeterminate status between. It is deliberation that determines whether a state becomes a wish or desire; and this determination will also drive the acquisition of beliefs. This is why it is so easy for us to be self-deceived or hold false beliefs.

In chapter 9, Williams looks at the application of his account to understanding the value of liberalism. He argues why it's important for the government to be sincere to its people. Liberalism, as opposed to tyranny, demands that the government be sincere. So liberalism is a better ideology.

In chapter 10, Williams returns to the main project. He investigates what it means to make truthful claims about the past. Some may think that it is impossible for historical claims to be truthful; when we talk about the past, we construct narratives, and all narratives are necessarily subjective and partial. Williams argues, against this, that narratives can be more or less accurate. This is because historical events really happen independently of whether we try to tell narratives about them, and they are not totally indeterminate. Our beliefs and desires explain our actions because they are expressed in our actions; and we have determinate beliefs and desires. So human history, driven by action, has a determinate shape by virtue of the beliefs and desires of individuals.

Moreover, in actual practice, despite what the post-modernists say, we hold our historical claims up to standards of truthfulness. It is true that different narratives will seem more or less intelligible or true for different social groups. It is true that power is involved in changing social/political conditions so that only certain narratives will seem more intelligible to more people. Nonetheless in everyday practice we will hold contradicting narratives as impossible to both be true. We can try to imagine a broader context under which both could be true, but then we no longer construe the narratives as contradicting. This indicates that we take historical claims as subject to truthfulness. Williams concludes with the succinct point that captures his project as a whole: "the hope can no longer be that the truth... will set us free. But it is a lot more than the hope, merely, that the virtues will keep going"

I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who's been troubled by issues of relativism. Ought we to think that cultures that have practices that we deem to be unethical are in fact fine; would 'imposing' our moral norms on other cultures be solely an ugly power move, or could this be heeding to truth, which stands independently of any culture? Are scientific findings all "subjective" at the end of the day, because scientific paradigms seem to shift and be incommensurable with one another? Williams offers a new conception of the truth that allows us to vindicate objective truth, in the face of all the various observations that might tempt us towards relativism.

Some side notes: Williams's discussion of reality v. fantasy in chapter 6 was especially inspiring for me. It evoked the question: What features may a fantasy possess which make it more likely for that fantasy to become a belief for a given individual? Williams suggests that if the fantasy comes in "determinate and focusseed" features, it is more likely to turn into a (false) belief. I wonder whether the determinacy and focussedness of a mental state are solely phenomenological features, or whether they are also to be understood as based in causal or metaphysical facts about the state (e.g., whether the state is actually connected to past experiences).

When I asked myself this question, my tentative thoughts are that a fantasy is more likely to become part of one's experienced reality depending on how badly one wants it; how closely related it is to one's past experiences; and how possible it is for the fantasy to actually become true. Fantasizing can happen in imagination without language use, or it can also happen in terms of or in conjunction with inner speech. These preliminary thoughts suggest that the imagination is related to desire, memory, and judgment, and examining these relations may help shed light on whether a given content of imagination will show up as part of reality, or as mere fantasy. (This isn't saying much; obviously imagination would be related to desire, memory, and judgment; and what does it mean even to single out these as discrete capacities or faculties? This is a minimal starting point).

This may be extended to examining language use more generally; when we say things to one another, or to ourselves, the sense we make of utterances may be presented to us via imagination. Not everything we say to one another or to ourselves will show up as true, even if it is in fact true and the speaker intends for it to be conveyed as a truth. So perhaps examining wishful thinking and self-deception has connections with examining how we construct what we take to be reality with one another (via language/communication) and independently within our own thought.

I recall enjoying this in grad school, but when I went back to it years later it reminded me why I quit grad school.

Normally when you read a professorial apologia for one side of a polemic, you become convinced of that side. (e.g. Shakespeare identity theories) But after reading this tedious, point-missing opus by Williams, I've gone from fence to firmly in Rorty camp.

The truth is, philosophy is really dry. This book is a prime example of that fundamental problem. It takes almost two hundred pages to say nearly nothing. Despite its short length it took me forever to read. By contrast I've read 1000-page novels in a few days; this took me several months to drag myself through to the end.

Having said that the book has some content that I found interesting, like about how "history" came into existence. Overall I think the book could have been boiled down to about 40 pages and not lost any of its import.

llibre per a ètica a la ku leuven; no m'ha desagradat, però bastant repetitiu i apartats sense gaire contingut interessant o rellevant.

Profound, rich, and serious about the right things—all too untimely

Williams is best known for his witty and insightful - if often perplexing, frustrating, and slippery - essays on practical reason, relativism, blame, utilitarianism, and other diverse topics. He is not exactly known as a systematic philosopher. Indeed, the idea of a "system" tends to appear as a target of excoriation - consider his acerbic criticism of "the morality system" (a very Nietzschean rebuke). Nonetheless, in Truth and Truthfulness he gets close as he ever does to articulating a "system" of moral philosophy - albeit a system only in the loosest sense of the term. My interpretation, here, is strongly influenced by my NYU colleague Miranda Fricker's recent excellent pair of 2024 Harvard Whitehead lectures on "Bernard Williams’ Historical Self-Consciousness" (available on YouTube). Her lectures, together with my own reading of this book, have convinced me of the value in reading (late) Williams as a coherent and semi-systemic thinker.

The plan for the book - that Willliams dutifully executes - is summarized in the following passage: "The subject of this book is truthfulness: various virtues and practices, and ideas that go with them, that express the concern to tell the truth—in the sense both of telling the truth to other people and, in the first place, telling the true from the false. My aim is to explain the basis of truthfulness as a value, and to suggest ways in which we can think about the forms that it has taken, and elaborations that it has received, in different historical circumstances." He subdivides truthfulness into two subsidiary virtues - Accuracy and Sincerity - that stand for the punctilious commitment to truth-seeking and the pro-social commitment to truth-telling. This is a marvelous construction that manages to systematize his thinking without forgoing its subjectivism. As behooves a thinker who sees history as continuous with philosophy, Williams derives his system - or at least systematic insights - from his erudite reading of past and present thinkers. He sees ethical concepts, reasons, and motivations, but also the rise and fall of moral systems, as products of historical, cultural, and anthropological causes. Common sense beliefs, empirical observations of the world, and a priori truth of reason all have their role to play in this analysis, but ethical problems and solutions are always analyzed genealogically, i.e., in relation to their origins and transformation in historical, cultural, and ethical reflection. His indebtedness to Hume in philosophy and Thucydides in history is obvious (and remember that Hume was no less a historian). But it is Nietzsche who takes centerstage. The subtitle "An Essay in Genealogy" is a nod to Nietzsche (and perhaps also to Foucault). Indeed, the very idea of Truthfulness as an ethical problem owes its origins to Nietzsche, as he emphasizes. "Mellow, Oxbridge Nietzscheanism" is a slightly unfair but eminently useful characterization of Williams's genealogical, perspectival approach. This constitutes a powerful epistemic lens and conceptual framework.

There are several reasons why this book feels so systematic. First, it is the result of a lifetime of learning and reflection. It shows that Williams had a relatively stable set of powerful philosophical commitments - an internal view on practical reason, ethical subjectivism, a genealogical approach to morality and culture, opposition to moral systems and moralizing attitudes, celebration of ethical individualism, moderate relativism (of distance), etc. - that are carried over from his early essays, like "Internal and External Reasons" (1980), up to this magnum opus. This kind of implicit systematicity was, in fact, always there, if one knew where to look. But secondly, specific to this work, the concept of Truthfulness provides a solid backbone to the book, both thematically and methodologically. All this increases the systematizing power of its argumentation. Since Williams does not always spell out his argument in a step-by-step, logical form, it is incumbent upon the reader to engage in a bit of imaginative reflection and guesswork to piece it all together.

For the most part, Williams straddles the line between perspectival illumination (which is always partial and incomplete) and systematic analysis (which can aspire to be more) in an admirable way. But when Williams applies his perspectival, semi-systematic method to some of traditional "Big Topics" in moral and political philosophy, such as "state of nature" theorizing, the method screeches to a halt. Perhaps Williams hesitates because he does not dare to embrace its own discoveries at the risk of becoming dogmatic? Although his analysis opens to door to thinking about truthfulness, accuracy, and sincerity as pro-social virtues conducive to human survival and basic sociability - a familiar topic to natural law theorists, utilitarians, and contractarians - he shies away from the normative implications of this analysis because it points away from relativism. A half-hearted commitment is the best he can do - for perfectly understandable reasons internal to his commitments! But this means that his analysis of the conditions of human sociability predictably fails to impress much anyone who has read Grotius, Hobbes, Hume, Rawls, or Gaus. A half-hearted, semi-detached commitment to state of nature theorizing and reflective analysis will not do as a basis for approaching a real alternative to, say, the neo-Rawlsian imagination. The relativistic failure to stabilize the preconditions of reflective equilibrium analysis defeats the whole enterprise. (If I cannot know what state of nature analysis allows, I cannot rely on it.)

So, much like the postmodern and neo-pragmatist irony of people like Rorty that Williams disparages, his own genealogical method, at its worst, prematurely diffuses the force of the argument before it reaches its productive climax. At the same time, at its best, the simple but powerful concept of truthfulness allows Williams to shed new light on the past, present, and future ethical imagination, the possibilities of convergence, and the tragic inevitability of conflict and pluralism. The book perfects his philosophical project, illuminates many important questions, and its each chapter is a real treasure trove of ethical, epistemic, and psychological insight. His argument culminates in a powerful plea for the enduring value of liberalism, the importance of perspectival humility, and a scarily prescient warning against the danger posed by new digital communication technologies to the virtues of truth and truthfulness. Although Williams's style remains flawed and frustrating, and he never quite manages to escape the critical-negative mode of analysis, Truth and Truthfulness combines some of the most powerful dogma-solvents and anti-moralist prophylactics of contemporary analytical philosophy with a systematic vision of a free, ethical, post-absolutist culture committed to truth, accuracy, and sincerity. Impressive, Sir Bernard!

n  n   

‘we simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd.’
n  n

What is refreshing about Williams’ book is that what is discussed here is not merely an epistemic quibble, but something close to our life and politics, something with a lot more spirit to it. After all, philosophers who want to nail down our ideas and fancies to the board of reality itself are still lumbering around with their hammers and tools and such, but Williams’ aims to locate truth in us. Nietzsche might be right that we might not have an organ for ‘truth’, but we could have virtues of truthfulness. And Williams discusses precisely two here: Sincerity and Accuracy.


Williams offers us a genealogical account: an account that is some parts history, some part fiction with the fiction part added for the sake of deriving value from speculative psychology and to fill in some blanks about human nature important for the completeness of this genealogical enterprise. Williams constructs out of our social interactions the virtues necessary for truth, these virtues are perhaps the same virtues that we would look for before trusting one another is no coincidence. But, Williams is not happy with this. He wants the value of these virtues to be intrinsic and not merely instrumental. To what extent did he succeed in this endeavor ? I would say not much.


The book moves from creating a genealogy for these virtues to meditating on history and how these virtues find themselves in Thucydides and from there to Diderot and Rousseau and their conceptions of truth and one's self image. Williams is concerned with the ‘intellectual irreversibility of Enlightenment’ and part of this irreversibility is our insistence on these virtues of truth and I believe that the reason Williams’ wants to eternalize these virtues into intrinsic values is because he believes insistence on truth is one the things that we inherited from the Enlightenment and to merely sweep this aside as something instrumental is a mistake.


Link to a Rorty’s brilliant review of this book.

Interesting, but a bit of a slog at times.

Dry but interesting.