ABSTRACT
The chapter argues that terrorism cannot be adequately understood without admitting that some values are objective. Richard Rorty and Thomas Kuhn served as examples of those who are skeptics about the possibility of objectivity, while C. S. Peirce's basic ideas served to illustrate how objective understanding cannot be abandoned in a serious philosophical position. A final note may be worth making about what 'objective' means when one speaks correctly about genuine knowledge or truth or reality. The chapter examines some of the recent attacks on the very possibility of objectivity, of our capacity to know the world and its various features as they are rather than as we may have been induced by various factors. The best characterization of human knowledge along these lines would be to see knowledge as contextual, not timelessly fixed. This reflects best the way the concept of knowledge is deployed in successful day–to–day instances.
