Author Description

"Together with a group of Finnish colleagues, I have since 1999 been involved in writing and revising a series of philosophy textbooks for high-school students, published by a Finnish publishing house specializing in textbooks and non-fiction. In an introductory volume published in 2005, we included a brief discussion of "the pragmatist theory of truth" in the context of a more general exploration of the concept of truth. As textbooks usually, our books also include plenty of pictures, hopefully keeping their young readers alert. For the truth-theoretical section, we decided to use a photograph of Donald Trump, picturing him with his bestseller, How to Become Rich. In those years, Trump was not at all well known in my home country Finland, although he was already at that point a famous celebrity in the United States. I cannot remember who decided to use the picture in the book; I certainly had no idea whatsoever who this guy in the photograph was, and I had never heard of him before. The point of the photograph was obvious: by using it we asked our prospective readers whether the sentences of Trump's books are true if they make their author (or, possibly, their reader) rich and if they in that sense pragmatically "work". Getting rich would then be their concrete "cash value""--