Wrestling With the Truth
Why do popular philosophical theories of truth deliberately deflate truth’s value? They argue that there is no difference in saying, ” It is true that Trump colluded with the Russians." and, "Trump colluded with the Russians." They argue that the concept "truth" seems to be redundant, because it isn't saying more than what the statement says without it. The deflationists want us to believe that there is nothing much to "truth", that it doesn't add anything to our assertions unless we are generalizing about multiple statements, as in "What Mueller said was true."
If truth is nothing more than a logical connective, why do people everywhere feel so passionate about it? Why is it so important that we get to hear what’s really in the Mueller report? Why do we want to know what really happened during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign? Doesn’t knowing what really happened, or who a person really is, matter critically to what we need to do next, going forward?
Why is it important to know whether humans are causing global warming? Does it matter that some people deny this? Does it matter that many of the people who deny this are closely connected to the fossil fuel industry? Truth matters to our very existence.
It is no coincidence that when people don’t care about the truth, we very quickly end up with a serious lack of trust in each other and in our social and political institutions. We want to avoid a tipping point, where if trust is too much absent, we all become caught in a downward spiral of fear and paranoia. This points straight to the problem of conspiracy theories and to a dangerous tendency for any system of inquiry to exist inside a bubble, where it can be insulated from competing forms of inquiry, even insulated from contradictory facts.
A 9/11 “truther” can lay out all the conflicting and messy evidence of that disaster, and claim it justifies 9/11 being an “inside job”. Try and convince her otherwise. The stronger your counter-argument, the more she will dig in her heels. As Travis View, a researcher and podcaster on the QAnon conspiracy said, “..failed predictions and misplaced expectations haven’t damaged the size or enthusiasm of the QAnon community.... Some QAnon followers even claim that failed predictions are irrelevant, because dates that pass without incident serve the purpose of tricking the evil “cabal” they imagine they’re fighting.”, “that belief system eventually becomes an absurdly byzantine, Occam’s-razor-defying mess that can barely be understood by its own supporters. The deeper they dig into disconfirmed beliefs, the harder, and more painful it is to get out.” “The Mueller Report is In, Get Ready for the Conspiracy Theories,” Washington Post, March 26,2019.
Christopher French, in “Why do some people believe in conspiracy theories?”, Scientific American, Mind 26 72, July 2015, claims, plausibly, that conspiracists are not really sure what the true explanation for a surprising event is. What they are sure about is that the “official story” is a cover-up. In fact, he indicates, people who are strongly inclined toward conspiracy theories are also more likely to be believe in contradictory stories. For instance, if they believe that Bin-Laden died years before he was said to have died, they are also more likely to come to believe that Bin Laden is still alive.
Conspiracy theories are a classic case of Confirmation Bias. This is our universal human tendency to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs and give less weight, and even ignore evidence which contradicts what we believe.
Now, take the Quine- Duhem thesis in philosophy, that sentences by themselves are not true or false, because they are always part of a web of belief. So, any observation that disconfirms a sentence in a theory can always be reinterpreted or neutralized by changing other sentences in the theory to fit the observation. By jove! Quine and Duhem seem to have inadvertently described the fundamentals of building and maintaining conspiracy theories!
Karl Popper, probably the most influential philosopher of science in the twentieth century, has argued that when “scientific” theories are immune to criticism they are not actually scientific. He was, at the time, in the early part of the twentieth century, concerned with the status of Marxism and Psychoanalysis, and he perceptively argued that the reason these theories were bad theories is that they were constructed to be immune from criticism. If no observation makes any difference to the truth or falsity of a theory, the theory isn’t really about reality, it’s equivalent to metaphysics!
Popper explicitly rejects induction as a viable inquiring system. He thinks scientific knowledge grows by conjectures and refutations, not by our inductively confirming our theories. Let’s consider induction as perhaps a misleading metaphor, the equivalent of the Confirmation Bias that I mentioned earlier. And, if induction is an inaccurate description of scientific practice, as Popper maintains, this suggests that epistemological theories of truth like coherentism and pragmatism overvalue coherence and undervalue the importance of falsification. The idea that knowledge grows by induction imagines a world where knowledge grows by adding truths, when in fact, there is no growth if we don't recognize and correct our mistakes.
There is an asymmetry between truths and falsehoods. Discovering that an expectation has been falsified is often a clear mark that we have to change direction and revise our expectations. We should let observations and results which falsify our expectations give us that vital feedback. This is something that we will not get from simply accumulating coherent facts. The problem with induction is that you will not be looking for mistakes, you will be looking for confirmation - you have to go far out of your way to find these contradictory observations, and nothing about induction, per se, requires you to do so.
Conceiving of truth as the end of inquiry seems obvious, which is what motivates both coherence and pragmatic theories of truth. After perception, most of what we learn about the world comes from inquiry, does it not? But isn’t it true that there are forms of inquiry that compete with each other? Science contra Theology, Behaviorism contra Psychoanalysis, etc. Are we then, staring into the abyss of Relativism, where what is true for a Marxist Economist is not necessarily true for other kinds of Economists? Or, does it all reduce down to physics and logic as the Deflationists would have it?
One can try and solve this problem by avoiding the use of the word “truth” and replacing it with “warranted assertability” or “justified knowledge”, which is what the pragmatists Dewey and Rorty end up doing, but this is just kicking the can further down the road. Rorty is infamous for arguing that we don’t actually need the concept of "truth" at all. But, against that road, I think we should first agree that “truth” is an idealization. Since inquiry is ongoing, and no body of knowledge is settled, we cannot “know” the truth objectively. But then, if that is the case how can we use truth as an ideal? In order for any kind of idealization to work you have to use it, believe in it, and see it as an ideal.
One can think of inquiring systems as model-building. Like the first philosophers, we try to use rational explanations to understand reality. Our explanations then become a model of the system that we are trying to understand. We first build a model, then we test it over and over again by subjecting it to observation, experiments, and peer criticism. Over time our models become bigger and more sophisticated. They can explain and predict more things with more accuracy. This is the ideal.
I featured, in a longer essay on truth, a discussion of Plato’s parable of the cave. I did this for a number of reasons, one of which is that it shows that even Plato, truly a giant in Philosophy, couldn’t really figure out a rational explanation for how we come to know the truth. In this “noble lie” of Plato’s, The Truth flows one way, from the Sun or “the Good” to the escaped prisoner - from more divine to less divine. It’s hierarchical, and based on authority. It reflects the idea of the enlightened master passing on his “divine” wisdom to his disciples. It’s a closed Inquiring system that rejects experiment, observation, and peer criticism. It is more like a cult, or like conspiracy theories; observations that contradict the theory are “shadows” and false images; observations that support the theory are “clear and distinct ideas”.
Mythical stories can be aesthetically beautiful, but, like Plato’s “noble lie”, they exist to lull people into ignorance and superstition. They are like drugs that can make you temporarily happy by helping you withdraw from the rest of the world, giving you the illusion that you are entirely self-contained.
Unfortunately Plato was so successful that it is almost impossible to think about normative concepts such as “truth” and “good” without imagining a “higher power” from which they are derived. In other essays, I've argued that truth is an important means of regulating human conduct that emerged from human collective agreement and not at all from any putative divine source. This is a natural explanation but not a reductive explanation. It does not explain truth according to physical forces or particles. I believe that the question concerning the origins of normativity is the basic question concerning human nature. Answer this question with a natural explanation, and you have the beginnings of a science of human nature.
However, the closer that human knowledge comes to uncovering the nature of what distinguishes humans from other animals, the more it tugs at our sense of identity. The more we focus inquiry on human nature, the more potential our findings have to disturb us. so we might not like what we hear, and since it is about us, we are highly likely to dispute any evidence that contradicts our most cherished self-images. In some sense these dangers exist in constructing any natural explanation, but acutely so with questions of human nature. These are theories and concepts that touch on our strongest feelings about who we are and why we are here.
If truth is nothing more than a logical connective, why do people everywhere feel so passionate about it? Why is it so important that we get to hear what’s really in the Mueller report? Why do we want to know what really happened during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign? Doesn’t knowing what really happened, or who a person really is, matter critically to what we need to do next, going forward?
Why is it important to know whether humans are causing global warming? Does it matter that some people deny this? Does it matter that many of the people who deny this are closely connected to the fossil fuel industry? Truth matters to our very existence.
It is no coincidence that when people don’t care about the truth, we very quickly end up with a serious lack of trust in each other and in our social and political institutions. We want to avoid a tipping point, where if trust is too much absent, we all become caught in a downward spiral of fear and paranoia. This points straight to the problem of conspiracy theories and to a dangerous tendency for any system of inquiry to exist inside a bubble, where it can be insulated from competing forms of inquiry, even insulated from contradictory facts.
A 9/11 “truther” can lay out all the conflicting and messy evidence of that disaster, and claim it justifies 9/11 being an “inside job”. Try and convince her otherwise. The stronger your counter-argument, the more she will dig in her heels. As Travis View, a researcher and podcaster on the QAnon conspiracy said, “..failed predictions and misplaced expectations haven’t damaged the size or enthusiasm of the QAnon community.... Some QAnon followers even claim that failed predictions are irrelevant, because dates that pass without incident serve the purpose of tricking the evil “cabal” they imagine they’re fighting.”, “that belief system eventually becomes an absurdly byzantine, Occam’s-razor-defying mess that can barely be understood by its own supporters. The deeper they dig into disconfirmed beliefs, the harder, and more painful it is to get out.” “The Mueller Report is In, Get Ready for the Conspiracy Theories,” Washington Post, March 26,2019.
Christopher French, in “Why do some people believe in conspiracy theories?”, Scientific American, Mind 26 72, July 2015, claims, plausibly, that conspiracists are not really sure what the true explanation for a surprising event is. What they are sure about is that the “official story” is a cover-up. In fact, he indicates, people who are strongly inclined toward conspiracy theories are also more likely to be believe in contradictory stories. For instance, if they believe that Bin-Laden died years before he was said to have died, they are also more likely to come to believe that Bin Laden is still alive.
Conspiracy theories are a classic case of Confirmation Bias. This is our universal human tendency to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs and give less weight, and even ignore evidence which contradicts what we believe.
Now, take the Quine- Duhem thesis in philosophy, that sentences by themselves are not true or false, because they are always part of a web of belief. So, any observation that disconfirms a sentence in a theory can always be reinterpreted or neutralized by changing other sentences in the theory to fit the observation. By jove! Quine and Duhem seem to have inadvertently described the fundamentals of building and maintaining conspiracy theories!
Karl Popper, probably the most influential philosopher of science in the twentieth century, has argued that when “scientific” theories are immune to criticism they are not actually scientific. He was, at the time, in the early part of the twentieth century, concerned with the status of Marxism and Psychoanalysis, and he perceptively argued that the reason these theories were bad theories is that they were constructed to be immune from criticism. If no observation makes any difference to the truth or falsity of a theory, the theory isn’t really about reality, it’s equivalent to metaphysics!
Popper explicitly rejects induction as a viable inquiring system. He thinks scientific knowledge grows by conjectures and refutations, not by our inductively confirming our theories. Let’s consider induction as perhaps a misleading metaphor, the equivalent of the Confirmation Bias that I mentioned earlier. And, if induction is an inaccurate description of scientific practice, as Popper maintains, this suggests that epistemological theories of truth like coherentism and pragmatism overvalue coherence and undervalue the importance of falsification. The idea that knowledge grows by induction imagines a world where knowledge grows by adding truths, when in fact, there is no growth if we don't recognize and correct our mistakes.
There is an asymmetry between truths and falsehoods. Discovering that an expectation has been falsified is often a clear mark that we have to change direction and revise our expectations. We should let observations and results which falsify our expectations give us that vital feedback. This is something that we will not get from simply accumulating coherent facts. The problem with induction is that you will not be looking for mistakes, you will be looking for confirmation - you have to go far out of your way to find these contradictory observations, and nothing about induction, per se, requires you to do so.
Conceiving of truth as the end of inquiry seems obvious, which is what motivates both coherence and pragmatic theories of truth. After perception, most of what we learn about the world comes from inquiry, does it not? But isn’t it true that there are forms of inquiry that compete with each other? Science contra Theology, Behaviorism contra Psychoanalysis, etc. Are we then, staring into the abyss of Relativism, where what is true for a Marxist Economist is not necessarily true for other kinds of Economists? Or, does it all reduce down to physics and logic as the Deflationists would have it?
One can try and solve this problem by avoiding the use of the word “truth” and replacing it with “warranted assertability” or “justified knowledge”, which is what the pragmatists Dewey and Rorty end up doing, but this is just kicking the can further down the road. Rorty is infamous for arguing that we don’t actually need the concept of "truth" at all. But, against that road, I think we should first agree that “truth” is an idealization. Since inquiry is ongoing, and no body of knowledge is settled, we cannot “know” the truth objectively. But then, if that is the case how can we use truth as an ideal? In order for any kind of idealization to work you have to use it, believe in it, and see it as an ideal.
One can think of inquiring systems as model-building. Like the first philosophers, we try to use rational explanations to understand reality. Our explanations then become a model of the system that we are trying to understand. We first build a model, then we test it over and over again by subjecting it to observation, experiments, and peer criticism. Over time our models become bigger and more sophisticated. They can explain and predict more things with more accuracy. This is the ideal.
I featured, in a longer essay on truth, a discussion of Plato’s parable of the cave. I did this for a number of reasons, one of which is that it shows that even Plato, truly a giant in Philosophy, couldn’t really figure out a rational explanation for how we come to know the truth. In this “noble lie” of Plato’s, The Truth flows one way, from the Sun or “the Good” to the escaped prisoner - from more divine to less divine. It’s hierarchical, and based on authority. It reflects the idea of the enlightened master passing on his “divine” wisdom to his disciples. It’s a closed Inquiring system that rejects experiment, observation, and peer criticism. It is more like a cult, or like conspiracy theories; observations that contradict the theory are “shadows” and false images; observations that support the theory are “clear and distinct ideas”.
Mythical stories can be aesthetically beautiful, but, like Plato’s “noble lie”, they exist to lull people into ignorance and superstition. They are like drugs that can make you temporarily happy by helping you withdraw from the rest of the world, giving you the illusion that you are entirely self-contained.
Unfortunately Plato was so successful that it is almost impossible to think about normative concepts such as “truth” and “good” without imagining a “higher power” from which they are derived. In other essays, I've argued that truth is an important means of regulating human conduct that emerged from human collective agreement and not at all from any putative divine source. This is a natural explanation but not a reductive explanation. It does not explain truth according to physical forces or particles. I believe that the question concerning the origins of normativity is the basic question concerning human nature. Answer this question with a natural explanation, and you have the beginnings of a science of human nature.
However, the closer that human knowledge comes to uncovering the nature of what distinguishes humans from other animals, the more it tugs at our sense of identity. The more we focus inquiry on human nature, the more potential our findings have to disturb us. so we might not like what we hear, and since it is about us, we are highly likely to dispute any evidence that contradicts our most cherished self-images. In some sense these dangers exist in constructing any natural explanation, but acutely so with questions of human nature. These are theories and concepts that touch on our strongest feelings about who we are and why we are here.
Take the question of human-caused global warming. Scientific climatological inquiry has uncovered this connection, but a substantial segment of civilized people who recognize the authority of science still cannot bring themselves to believe in it. Why is that? It is because this issue deeply challenges our very identity as human beings. The idea that we need to be accountable for how our actions impact on our greater environment, and the idea that our lifestyles and economies need to change to incorporate this new understanding is a serious challenge to the way we see ourselves. And, apparently, it is too much of a challenge for some.
- Originally published April 2019.
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