Through the River was written to popularize the work of Paul Hiebert. Having never read any of Hiebert's work, I am unqualified to judge whether they were successful in that goal. The book was very accessible.
Through the River takes a look at the subject of truth - what we mean by it and how we arrive at it. Through lots of analogies and stories, the Hirst's introduce the reader to three different epistemologies - or truth lenses, as they call them. They bring the reader to River Town, in order to tell the story of the Rock Dwellers, the Island Dwellers and the Valley Dwellers. These represent the truth lenses of positivism, instrumentalism, and critical realism.
This book frustrated me more often than not. In order to build up a case for critical realism, I felt the authors to often assumed things about the other two truth lenses that don't really follow from the epistemologies themselves. For example, the Hirst's seem to think that part of what it means to be a positivist is that you must be more concerned with the truth than with loving others. Now, I have no doubt that there are plenty of people in the world who do this, but that's not something that positivism entails. I would say similar things about their presentation of instrumentalism.
What this book does well is describe 3 different attitudes people can have towards truth. Over and over they talk about those who favor truth at the expense of relationships, those who favor relationships at the expense of truth, and those who try to balance truth and relationships. This is great, but where the authors go wrong is in suggesting that these groups correspond to positivism, instrumentalism, and critical realism (respectively).
Overall, I didn't think this was a great book and I probably wouldn't recommend it to others. A much better book on this subject was Esther Meek's Longing to Know. It is very readable and does a much better job at exploring the nature of truth and knowledge.
November 5, 2009
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2 comments:
Thanks for your review - very helpful as I'm considering reading the book. I'm not familiar with the Meek book you mentioned... have you reviewed it elsewhere or could you say more about it? In particular, do you feel it would be more or less accessible to the average reader that Through the River?
Hi,
I haven't reviewed Meek's book elsewhere. Her book is pretty accessible - she uses lots of analogies and stories. At the end of each chapter, she has a section entitled "For further thought and discussion" which includes some questions/exercises for the reader. I'd say both books would be accessible to those with little or no philosophical background.
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