This is a follow-up to my post Academic philosophy: my quixotic quest. I’d like to explain in a bit more detail why I think we don’t need a theory of truth and how this relates to what philosophers call “objective” truth, that is, truth independent of humans in some crucial sense. Here are a couple of quotes from my previous post:
The extraordinary efficiency of human communication is also its limitation. Almost everything we say abstracts in countless ways from the fine details. Isn’t a conversation a kind of rough draft? Our concepts don’t need to be fully formed, complete with universal rules, to be useful. I’m not sure why we need answers to questions such as what is truth? what is knowledge? what is justice?
I would be surprised if our concept of knowledge could be formulated with universal principles, as if it were a law of nature. This feels like philosophers imposing a faux order on what is disordered. Is there a good reason to think that our concepts are not inherently messy, haphazard?
For lack of a better word, I’ll use the term representation broadly in reference to things that we judge true or false, accurate or inaccurate: assertions, beliefs, descriptions, statements, etc. Already we encounter a problem with philosophical theories of truth, because accuracy and inaccuracy can come in degrees, and even “true” admits of comparatives, e.g, “truer,” “partly true,” but philosophers tend to treat truth and falsity as absolute and exhaustive. Although I think this issue is important, I’ll postpone discussion of it momentarily in order to clarify, as much as I can understand, the position(s) that I’m arguing against. What exactly do philosophers mean by objective truth?
Let me start by ruling out one interpretation. A distinction is commonly made between objective statements such as “the current temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit” and subjective statements such as “the current temperature is pleasant.” The latter is said to be subjective because different people consider different temperature ranges to be pleasant. However, I don’t think that's quite the notion we seek. After all, it’s possible for a person to lie about whether the current temperature is pleasant, perhaps out of politeness, or to exhibit equanimity. Thus, philosophers would say, even though pleasantness is relative to the individual, these so-called subjective statements can still be objectively true or false.
An attitude that I share with philosophers, and indeed with non-philosophers, is that our judgments about truth and falsity are inherently correctable. Nobody, with a few religious exceptions, is considered infallible. Where I disagree with most philosophers, as far as I can tell, is about whether something independent of us makes our assertions and beliefs—our representations, as I’ve called them—true or false, providing the ultimate basis for correcting or validating our judgments of truth and falsity. The truth-making relationship should not be understood as temporal, like cause and effect, but more like logical implication; in other words, our representations are true under certain specific conditions, their truth conditions, which may include facts about which we are ignorant. This notion is often, though not always, expressed as the correspondence theory of truth, i.e., truth is correspondence with reality. I think the theory is hopelessly vague, but our lack of knowledge about the details of the truth-making relationship doesn’t appear to deter philosophers, so I have to assume that the correspondence theory is a result of their commitment to the existence of some kind of objective truth-making, not the rationale for that commitment.
At this point, I’d like to take a detour to discuss a form of representation not usually considered in the context of objective truth: painting. I’m also going to return to the aforementioned issue of accuracy and inaccuracy. A painting, for example a portrait, can depict its subject with varying degrees of accuracy. Some paintings are extremely accurate, almost photographic in quality. Other paintings are much less accurate, either intentionally, for the sake of art (think Picasso), or unintentionally, for lack of skill by the painter. In any case, though, there’s no such thing as a perfect portrait, a portrait that’s perfectly accurate, in every way. The impossibility of creating such a portrait is not due to the imperfection of painters. Rather, the fault lies with the materials: canvas and paint. A painting is inherently different from what it represents. For example, needless to say, a person consists of flesh and blood, not canvas and paint! A painting is inanimate and flat, whereas a live person breathes, moves, and is somewhat round. Paintings and persons differ in countless ways, so when we look at a portrait, what does it mean for the portrait to be accurate? We choose to ignore many differences, considering them irrelevant, or at least unavoidable given the nature of painting, and focus on the similarities. Painting is a human activity, judged by human standards. A nonhuman, “objective” art critic does not exist.
Our most basic forms of representation are innate: the senses, such as sight, hearing, and touch. Our eyes tell us that the world consists of distinct, solid objects, usually separated by empty space, although if the light is just right, and you look closely, you can see dust floating in that space. And if the weather is just right (or just wrong), the solid objects are obscured by fog. Even fog appears somewhat solid, however. We can’t see individual water molecules, or hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms for that matter; we didn’t know that air consisted of such things until scientists discovered them. But that was not the end of the story, despite the fact that the English word “atom” derives from “atomos” in Greek, which means indivisible! Scientists later found that the atom was divisible into protons, electrons, and neutrons, and that was not the end of the story either. The question is, how can our ordinary discourse about visible solid objects and our scientific discourse about invisible particles (or waves, as the case may be) both be true, if indeed they are true?
From my perspective, all representation—including our languages, including our formal (logical) systems, including our science—is analogous to painting in the sense that representation is a human activity judged by human standards, our representations inescapably abbreviated, imprecise, and idiosyncratic. How much can we really say about the world in a 6-word sentence, for example? Or take a whole paragraph if you like! We call something “true” when we consider it true enough, for our purposes, in the current context. This is not a definition or theory of truth but rather a behavioral observation about our judgments.
Representation of the world is an essential activity, a matter of life and death, which is why we, the survivors of natural selection, possess innate senses. To an extent, our eyes already know what they’re looking for before we open them for the first time. It wouldn’t be particularly helpful for us to see individual atoms: a single human cell contains trillions! We would get completely lost in the details, missing the forest for the trees, as it were, or missing the predators for their microscopic parts. That’s why our senses are largely oblivious to these details. Our vision divides the world into a relatively small number of objects, small enough that we can reasonably formulate plans of action regarding those objects: eat this, run away from that.
The act of representation is inextricably tied to the concepts of accuracy and truth, because the purpose is to present something real, not a fantasy or invention. Our judgments of accuracy and truth are constrained and influenced by the reality outside of ourselves, and our judgments may change as we learn more about that reality, since nobody is omniscient. Nonetheless, nonhuman reality cannot render judgment on our representations, because it does not share our human purposes, our limitations, our compromises, or our conventions. For truth to be philosophically objective, essentially independent of humans, there would have to be something like a nonhuman critic of assertions and beliefs, with standards apart from and beyond “true enough for our purposes in the current context.”
I see no reason to believe that such an objective critic exists, and even if one did, how would the critic judge our ordinary, nonscientific beliefs and statements about macroscopic, solid objects? Suppose, as a thought experiment, that only the latest, greatest theories of physics—quantum mechanics?—were objectively true, and our prescientific beliefs were objectively false. In that case, we couldn’t even talk truthfully about ourselves anymore, because we are solid objects with identity over time, the type of things just declared false. Note that physics has no solution to philosophical problems such as the ship of Theseus and the paradox of the heap, does not even attempt to solve those problems. And if “we” as solid objects with identity over time are not “real,” then neither are our beliefs and statements, our representations, the very things that are supposedly true or false objectively. My rhetorical point is that our age-old conception of truth cannot be separated from our other age-old conceptions, and the philosophical desire to impose a rational reconstruction on truth quickly falls into nonsense. The only way to rescue the notion of objective truth from this reductio ad absurdum is to argue that both our ordinary discourse and scientific discourse can be objectively true. This is not to say that our current scientific theories must be true (although I think it’s ironic to suggest that our ancient “folk” beliefs are somehow less objectively fallible than our most advanced science), merely that whatever the ultimate scientific truth happens to be, it’s compatible with the objective truth of our ordinary discourse.
We want to say that a macroscopic object, a person for example, is composed of atoms, and I have no objection to that: it’s true enough, so to speak. But is it objectively true? Philosophers want to say that truths about macroscopic objects are somehow grounded or implied by more “fundamental” truths about microscopic objects. I consider this to be glorified hand-waving. I ask a philosopher, exactly which atoms constitute you, a person? They have no answer. They’re left speechless. Never mind the fact that atoms are constantly entering and leaving your body, greatly complicating an already complicated problem. Philosophers may fall back to the position that a truth about a macroscopic object does not depend on one specific configuration of atoms in the world but only on a range (perhaps infinite in number) of possible configurations of atoms, any one of which, if actually instantiated in the world, would make some belief or statement about a macroscopic object true. I think that just trades one form of hand-waving for another. For any given truth, what exactly is the range of possibilities, and how do our representations magically pick out one specific set of possibilities out of all possibilities? Philosophers who believe in objective truth appear to be committed to the existence of some kind of precise mapping between truths about macroscopic objects and truths about microscopic objects, even if they can’t ever specify the mapping. At best, they’ve presented only the vaguest outline of a theory of the structure of a mapping. In other words, more hand-waving.
My view, in contrast, is that our ordinary discourse and our scientific discourse are just two forms of representation, both attempting to describe the world, both valid perspectives in some contexts, for some purposes, yet only vaguely related to each other and not interchangeable for all practical purposes. Something is always lost in translation. That doesn’t mean there are two different worlds, parallel realities! It just means that every representation of the world is incomplete, due to its inherent limitations and our inherent limitations, and different forms of representation may be incomplete in different ways, focusing on some aspects of the world, necessarily ignoring many others.
Representation is an art. It’s fundamentally creative, because the world does not provide us with a blueprint or manual for itself. We humans are on our own in the world. Much of our representation, including much of science, is simplification, cutting the world into bite-sized chunks for easy digestion. Simplification is a necessity for mere mortals, who are not omniscient, not omnipresent, not omnipotent. Art is not opposed to science: on the contrary, the two can aid each other. The skill of a painter is enhanced by knowledge of the physical properties of the medium, as well as the physics of light and color. And a physicist may employ fanciful thought experiments in pursuit of a theory; this was famously a common practice of Albert Einstein.
The rejection of objective truth does not imply the acceptance of relativism. I don’t intend to replace the claim that truth is somehow independent of humans with the claim that truth is somehow relative to humans. Again, I’ve studiously avoided offering any theory of truth, which I think is a specious goal. Moreover, I can’t make much sense of relativism, except perhaps an extreme form of solipsism according to which truth differs for every person. I’m certainly not a solipsist, but I can at least entertain the idea, whereas so-called “cultural relativism,” the view that truth is determined by your culture and can differ between cultures, immediately falls short on the specification of cultures. Who exactly are the members of your culture, how is it constituted, what happens when cultures change or merge, and what about people who move between cultures? The theory of truth as correspondence with culture suffers the same kind of hopeless vagueness as the theory of truth as correspondence with reality.
The most pernicious kind of relativism is the Orwellian dystopia where truth is just what the Party tells you. Perhaps some people grasp desperately at the notion of objective truth out of fear of such totalitarianism, as a means of resistance. Although lies and propaganda are indeed real, serious problems, they’re neither scientific nor philosophical problems but rather social and political problems. You can’t simply point to something outside of yourself—objective reality—and then declare victory over your political opponents. That’s not how serious problems are solved. Nonhuman reality is not going to come to our rescue, objective truth acting as deus ex machina; if we are to be saved, we have to save ourselves. It’s a human struggle.
Truth-seeking, describing the world, is a collective endeavor. You wouldn’t get very far if you worked entirely alone, eschewing books, teachers, even the internet! No particular person or group directs the endeavor. There are people with fancy titles and fancy suits, in charge of particular publishers, universities, laboratories, and government agencies, yet there’s no Ministry of Truth for humanity. Practically everyone participates in truth-seeking, cooperating, sharing and receiving knowledge, often just by observing and talking. It’s like language itself, of which assertions, claims, descriptions, and statements are a part. Speaking a language is an activity open to anyone, of any age and background. For better or worse, the language pedants (I’m one of them!) are frequently disregarded. Slang arises from all corners and may ultimately become widely accepted and enshrined in dictionaries. Language is open-ended. I think of truth in this way too. It’s a kind of collective aspiration, though ill-defined. The propagandists are distinguished not by their opposition to objective truth but by their selfish motivations, their opposition to collective truth-seeking, aggressively undermining it via bad faith engagement.
I think it’s a philosophical mistake to treat truth like a completed whole, independent of us, as if nonhuman reality has already considered all of our beliefs, spoken all of our sentences, written all of our books, taken all of our measurements, calculated all of our formulas, drawn all of our diagrams, painted all of our paintings. We didn’t create the world, but we did create representations of the world. The non-sentient world doesn’t describe itself, nor does it care about our descriptions of it. The notion that it makes our descriptions true or false feels to me like anthropomorphism. Our representations are not special or meaningful except to ourselves, and our appeals to an outside arbiter will go forever unanswered.
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