This article expands on what Bernard Stiegler describes as “The Ordeal of Truth”. Through an evolutionary account of cognition and its exteriorization in human technology, I highlight a recurring tension in philosophy between the “as-if” (Kant, Vaihinger) nature of our models and representations, and the doubt that infects even our most stable understanding of the world. Truth is here associated to the process of metastabilization that characterizes the biological organism. The famous case of Clive Wearing’s severe amnesia, as well as the fictional treatment of amnesia in Christopher Nolan’s Memento, are recalled to highlight the connection between truth and memory, and more importantly the contingent character of the formation of thoughts (von Kleist), and the desperate nature of the construction of truths, through the evolutionarily conditioned “subjective necessity” (Hume) to link the before and the after, the cause and the effect. I show that this same ordeal is reflected in the philosophy of science in what is known as “pessimistic meta induction” (going back to Poincaré’s notion of the “bankruptcy of science”), which I put into dialogue with the growing pessimism about knowledge in contemporary technological culture known as “post truth”. Finally, a possible way out of this pessimism is briefly sketched: a compromise such that, without recourse to objective truth, and in full acceptance of an always already biased relation to the world, future technologies might be designed to incrementally reduce our biases, through an intrinsic mapping of the relative falsity of our models, rather than through some idealized extrinsic relation to an unattainable noumenal real.

本文扩展了伯纳德·斯蒂格勒 (Bernard Stiegler) 所说的“真理的考验”。通过对认知的进化描述及其在人类技术中的外化，我强调了我们的模型和表征的“好像”（康德、维兴格）本质与甚至影响我们最稳定的理解的怀疑之间在哲学中反复出现的张力。世界。真理在这里与表征生物有机体的亚稳定过程有关。克莱夫·韦林重度失忆的著名案例，以及克里斯托弗·诺兰的《纪念品》中对失忆症的虚构处理，都被回忆起来，以突出真理与记忆之间的联系，更重要的是思想形成的偶然性（冯克莱斯特），以及在绝望真理建构的本质，通过进化条件下的“主观必然性”（休谟）将前后、因果联系起来。我表明，同样的磨难也反映在科学哲学中，即所谓的“悲观元归纳”（回到庞加莱关于“科学破产”的概念）中，我将其与对知识的日益增长的悲观主义进行了对话。被称为“后真相”的当代科技文化。最后，简要概述了摆脱这种悲观主义的一种可能方法：一种妥协，即在不求助于客观事实的情况下，并在完全接受与世界始终存在偏见的关系的情况下，未来的技术可能会被设计为逐步减少我们的偏见，一个内在 映射我们模型的相对错误，而不是通过一些理想化的外在关系与无法实现的本体真实。