ABSTRACT
In his Truth and Truthfulness (2002), Bernard Williams recently argued that there is a tension, in contemporary society generally and academic society in particular, between the belief that truthfulness is an important virtue, and the seemingly contradictory doubt that truth is the sort of thing we can hope to access. Williams thinks he can resolve this tension by showing us that the truth is not as elusive as we have come to believe, and that, when it is diffi cult to fi nd, it is nevertheless crucial that we continue to search for it. He insists that we cannot do without Truth-with-a-capital-T. His goal is to stabilize the notions of truth and truthfulness, in such a way that what we understand about truth and our chances of arriving at it can be made to fi t with our need for truthfulness (Williams, 2002, p. 3). Williams’ concerns are pressing for those of us who are interested in the intersections of truth and deception; crucial to his account is what he calls the virtue of sincerity. Without a robust virtue of sincerity, he thinks, our usual way of understanding the virtue of truthfulness will fall apart. And without truthfulness, we lose the truth. We will be abandoned to a morass of self-deceptions, half-truths, and lies.
