I want our discussion of truth to continue because I will profit from hearing other points of view. So I'm going to post again on a view of truth (or perhaps it's better to call it a bunch of related theories about truth) that is genuinely contemporary. In addition it spans the Analytic/Continental divide.
Deflationary theories of truth say that truth doesn't really mean anything at all. It is a word that has a function,but it's function is not to describe the statements or beliefs being called "true". Minimally a deflationary theory can claim that to say "What Mary said was true" is just to repeat what Mary said in fewer words. So "true" is just a kind of abbreviation, the way that I will use a pronoun. As in when I say a person's name in my first sentence and then use "he" or "she" instead of the name.
This simple deflationary view has its good points. "True" does seem to work like this to some extent at least. A related theory says that we use "true" to mean "warranted assertibility." So what I really when when I say "That's true" is "we have good reason to believe or say so." Again to some extent "true" seems to work like this.
However, this doesn't seem right to me. Having a good reason to believe p implies, it me at least, that p is probably true. Moreover, I sometimes use true in circumstances that seem to definitely not mean "warranted assertibility." For example, I would say it might be true that intelligent aliens are observing human civilization right now. I don't mean that I might have adequate evidence to say this. I think the correspondance notion is at the core of what I am saying here. I think those aliens might be out there doing this totally undetectable by me.
Similarly for the "ditto" version of truth. When I would repeat what Mary said I do so because I think what she said was true. The presumption that people normally use assertive sentences only when they believe that the propositional content of those sentence is true is what makes "true" work like "ditto."
On the continental side it appears that deflationary theories often take on a "speaking truth to power" tone. "True" is used by the powerful to silence the powerless. It is "true" that capitalism is good for society just means "shut up, we are not going to redistribute the wealth!"
I agree that the powerful bully the powerless. I agree that the powerful have a disproportionate amount of control over sources of information and what gets said and what views are taken seriously. I see that power is used unjustly. But I am not convinced that it's a good theory of truth to say that the function of "true" is to silence the voice of the poor.
My reason for not going along with this is similar to my reason for rejecting the Analytic deflationary theories--I don't think they would work this way if there were not a correspondance notion of truth at the core. Imagine this. Rush Limbaugh or
Bill O'Reilly is shouting down someone who says that the rich don't pay enough in taxes. Instead of saying "That's not true!" he says "That offends the rich!" It just wouldn't work. To have any plausibility Rush or Bill must at least be claiming that there are objective facts on their side. To just nakedly say "I dislike what you are saying" falls flat.
So I'm saying that the rich do oppress the poor and that they use the word "true" as part of this, but that these facts can't be the basis of the theory of what "true" means.
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Okay, when we say anything at all, we generally mean that what we're saying is "true" in a correspondence sense. This implies that it will work in a natural-language use of if-then: that anything that depends on it being true is (thus-far, at least) possible--but that is just a functional implication; the meaning is not at all confined to functional considerations.
When we say something in a poetic, metaphorical sense... Our intention remains to say something true in a correspondence sense, although the literal meaning of our actual words may even be factually _untrue_. (Consider our normal use of idioms; an idiom, so far as I've considered examples, is generally a metaphor that became so habitual that people simply came to ignore its literal sense, instead accepting it as code for the normal meaning.)
A special case of metaphor... is what might be called "buzz-speak." This will typically be a fairly-new expression, shoddily-made to begin with and already showing a bit of wear, used by a person for whatever prestige points he hopes to score via using the current fashion of Newspeak. I used to hear a lot of it in city council meetings, reenvelopment district pagentry, etc. In that context it seemed to work as a sort of tacit assertion of power: "I don't need to think about the meaning of what I'm saying; I'm too busy to have time to think about what I'm actually saying, but the fact that I'm up here saying anything at all says something about the power relations in this room; the fact that I can lie up here and you can't call me on it says even more about that, and if I want to say anything that actually matters, you can be sure I'll put it in a way that doesn't actually say what I mean, or in fact, anything precise enough to hang on me at all!" (I was taping these meetings for a newspaper, so I could listen again at my leisure and verify, "Yep, he's talking pure Powerspeak." I used to clean it up just enough to have it make sense, while preserving the basic flavor; and then I was sometimes accused of making people sound bad. I did, at first, take a perverse delight in dissecting each ghastly specimen so voters could see how bad things got; I figured they ought to know. Oh well.) This sort of thing, while seeming to be an example of metaphoric speech, might instead be considered
'anti-metaphoric,' because the language is not being stretched to convey more, but to hide more.
There is an incantational use of truth claims (and of claims that there's no such thing as truth)--that is, a semi-magical use of such claims to assert one's own power to personally override the actual, observable truth via superior expertise, credentials, position in the disinformation flow... but this is simply passing a counterfeit of something real, something that actually is of ultimate value, even an aspect (facet) of God.
forrest,
It is certainly a fact that polticians and other powerful people often show little respect for the truth. Sometimes they boldly lie and defy people to call them on it. Other times they use words to make pleasant noises that convey no information. Sad, but that's the way it is.
So what should a philosopher say about that? One response is to go with it and say "see, truth has no meaning. It's all about power." I don't agree that this is what we should do. the other response is to insist that there is a difference between what is true and what is false. Insist that the truth matters. And then "speak truth to power" that is, to confront (nonviolently of course) those who disregard the truth. I think we are pretty much in agreemant about this.
Right.
In ancient times, the rulers of a place would claim that God (or some god, or the gods) favored them. Since most people have trouble verifying such claims, the rulers would claim a monopoly of divine favor so as to discredit any potential challenges from outside. We've got Biblical stories about the Assyrians (I think) besieging Jerusalem with the claim that the God of Israel was angry with his people, and favoring their invasion... and while this sort of claim can be a cynical psychological ploy, that's entirely different from denying the existence of spiritual realities or their power over the physical world.
Since the modern divinity is scientifically-verifiable factual truth, modern political authorities strive to claim a monopoly on that, without much concern for any validity behind it. They consider facts, like public preferences, as matters to be used if possible, denied or manipulated whenever they point inconvenient directions. So the post-modern effort to liberate people from such false truth-claims is analogous to ancient atheism... and suffers from the same inconvenience: that God, and truth, exist whether we see them or not.
If ~"The authorities can say anything they want, because there is no truth, and we can ignore their statements, because there is no truth," then they can do anything they want (as tends to be the be the situation anyway), but we aren't thereby freed to do anything we want; not only do they have the guns and the lawyers and the broadcasting stations to make their false claims stick, but we've deprived ourselves of the only defense we had, that certain things we know remain true no matter how insistently or casually or frequently or tacitly they choose to deny them.
We are in a position where the resources available to justify, rationalize, and disseminate official lies far outweigh most people's ability to argue back. It can take a lifetime of study to gain the background to clearly see just how utterly fallacious, unjust, or needlessly cruel any given official pronouncement may happen to be. So there's this tactical issue: "How may the Good Guys win, in such a situation?"
I think we're being inexorably driven to give up logical proof as our universal truth-test. It's written, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." But not, "You will have the truth proven to you, and the proof will set you free!"
But, then, how do we discern, what is true and what is not? I think there's a sense of truth/untruth, not infallible any more than any other sense... but reliable, trustworthy, capable of being refined with use. It's not, in principle, any different from our sense that something has just been proven logically, which can also be mistaken. But it's based on an intelligence deeper than our own personal, conscious self, which can be trusted to set us straight eventually... and here we are, once again approaching the "Quaker" end of "Quaker/Philosophy"!
forrest,
Thanks for being willing to continue the discussion. It's a blessing really.
Yes, I agree that abandoning the idea that there is objective truth does not protect us from abuse by the powerful. It is better to insist on sticking to the truths we know and not allow the powers that be to deny those truths. Every time they lie someone should say "That's false."
Of course it does not offer firm protection. The fact is that we are vulnerable and while we live in this world nothing with eliminate our vulnerability. Sticking to the truth did not keep Jesus from being crucified. The lesson I take from his example is that everyone is vulnerable.
While we should not give up on objective truth I think we should give up on absolute certainty. As you corectly note, the powers of this world claim that policies that support their continued power are backed by the truth, they sometimes claim that they are backed by scientific certainty. these claim to certainty can in good conscience be opposed.
I can say, "That's true", and I can also say, "I'm certain of that." The occasions for saying one seem precisely equivalent to the occasions for saying the other; but the meanings are not at all equivalent.
It might well be the case that everything I'm certain of is true; I might even manage to be certain of everything (known to me) that happens to be true; but these would be happy coincidences. I'm fairly skeptical about that first case, and pretty sure the second is false...
Does this mean "We should give up on absolute certainty"? First off, we can't give up what we don't have, and certainty is not the sort of condition that absolutely does or absolutely doesn't exist in anyone's mind; it's a description that fits the state of our thoughts about any given thing (or doesn't) more or less. Secondly, whether people think they should be certain (in general) is irrelevant to whether we are (in some particular matter) certain--much as disapproval of drinking is no conclusive proof that someone is sober. (We could conceivably strive to refrain from mental processes that lead to certainty... but most of these are precisely the things we're supposed to do for any valid judgment of what's true or not.)
Where I think we're going with this is that we probably should give up the quest for the Universal Truth Machine (where one inserts a proposition into the hopper, turns the crank, and if the little green light comes on, we have to believe it's true...) We do have true/false algorithms for some specific contexts, but for most of our real-time certainty/uncertainty needs we can expect to go on using heuristics, occasionally remembering that the result of an heuristic process won't always be a valid solution.
I don't see how anyone can (or should) give up believing that some set of propositions is in fact true, entirely apart from our ability ever to know whether they are or not. We've proved that about mathematical systems, in the sense that any reasonably complex system will have true propositions that can't be proven. It seems possible we could receive valid intuitions about any such proposition--but my point is that the issue of truth/falsity is in principle beyond the issue of humanly-knowable/unknowable. It's not easy being fallible... but why do we flap our little wings so, wishing so hard to fly above all that?
This has got me thinking (Sorry!) We talk about "truth" as a property of propositions, what it is that makes a fact a fact. Some people, at least some of the time, do want to be able to decide specific propositions as an instrument of power, whether that's power over their fellows or power over the phenomena involved.
But what we want most, I think, is understanding. If the truth is that we're bewildered by something, okay, we can (and often must) live with that. Quite aside from whatever personal points we might be scoring via coming to understand something better, we really get a moment of beauty out of seeing something fit into place in our temple of understanding. Whether it's a piece of scaffolding, a structural element, or just a nice decorative element, we really want to know: "Will this bear weight?"
We might well find some natural cave a better place to dwell... There are questions of beauty as well as structural integrity. But "Build me another flimsy hut, oh my soul!" just doesn't have the right ring to it, no matter how comfortable most people can be with that, for awhile.
forrest,
I think it would help to put talk of certainty into the context of justification. We believe many things and self-aware people stop to reflect on how justified their beliefs are. Justification comes in degrees. I believe some things on the basis of very good evidence that makes it extremely unlikely that my belief is false. For example, I believe that we did not get 2 inches of snow last night and my justification is that I've been out around town today and have seen no snow. Last night I believed that we wouldn't get 2 inches of snow. Since that was only justified by the weather forecast it wasn't so strongly justified. Nevertheless, it turned out to be true. Certainty is reserved for extremely high levels of justification. I might say that I am certain that we did not get 2 inches of snow last night.
Note that subjective feelings about how justified you are do not necessarily match up very well with objective justification. I am a contextualist in epistemology. That is I think that how strong the justification should be for something to count as knowledge or certainty varies with the context. Context includes things like how much we stand to lose by being wrong and what sorts of possibilities one is willing to consider in the circumstances.
Bottom line is that we shouldn't claim to have certainty when our evidence is shaky. But we shouldn't give up on making a distinction between what is true and what is false just because we are certain of much less than we would like.
I just watched the excellent documentary "Why We Fight." I was very struck by the way members of the Bush administration--Rumsfeld in particular-- would use the language of knowledge and certainty to describe what was going on. Rumsfeld in particular expressed not just verbally but nonverbally complete contempt for people would doubted the truth of his claims. Of course we now know that those claims were false and worse that the people making the claims in many cases knew that they were false. This is a concrete, real life example of what we've been talking about.
What I was going to say was on the order of: "Hey kid, where are you going with that idea?! Is it loaded? Does your mother know you've got it? Got a license? Where did you get that thing, anyway? What are you going to feed it? I hope you won't let it misbehave!"
I would say that we're usually certain of an idea because we really are certain of it, not because we've decided that we're justified in being so--although evidence for/against a proposition does affect people's certainty, if they don't simply dismiss said evidence via any rationale they can make up.
I used to be really annoyed with this fact, particularly because of the peculiar American notion that everyone has the right to be stupid and proud of it.
Your example shows how this notion, which looks to be a matter of "freedom", in fact provides a handle which political (and religious) leaders habitually use to enslave people. Not only can they go to sea in a sieve; they can take the whole country (and nations of innocent bystanders) with them!
But "justification" is a moral-sounding word, and I'm not sure its use is justified here. The word you really ought to be using is "valid." If an issue means life/death for vast numbers of people, we ought to have a really high probability that our ideas about it will hold up, for the same reason we try not to let airheads build bridges. But people don't work that way, you know.
This idea of 'justified' inference was playing with me in Meeting yesterday... and here's how it looks: Probably the minimal demand you'd want to place on any mental structure whatsoever would be self-consistency!
But for some reason you'll find creative people--I was thinking "Edison," but of course it was "Emerson", very much devaluing the virtue of consistency. Emerson was talking about consistency of speech and conduct (considered an essential for Quakers!)-- but consistency of thought, also, is something bright people occasionally over-ride (though not nearly as often as the bulk of normie fools with their "Right to my own opinion and I'm going to sic it on you right now!"
This looks like 'a bug' in the Human Mental Program, but I'm forced to recognize it as 'a feature.' It's essential for any intellectual progress or even for the ability to communicate with other alien beings!
Rather than an orderly, properly-trained crew of little thoughts, the typical human mind (Bleh!) is inhabited by small packs of loosely-bound ideas wandering about in their noble quest for table scaps. When a new idea tries to enter, these may immediately bristle and snarl at the intruder (In Southern California they're likely to roll over instead!) but after a little mutual sniffing the new idea will probably slip in where it can slink after some better-established pack and forage through their leavings.
Inconsistency at the gates! Worse, there's probably a jungle inside. But now some thought is available that's never been thunk before, in these parts! If the defenses have been particularly lax, there may even be more than one. They might get together and mate!
So long as matters remain in chaos, of course, there's no real progress--It's like a tv mind, too disconnected from the past for any clear sight of the present moment it claims to know, let alone any basis for extrapolating a future!
But add an drive to establish consistency--which has up until now been keeping an uneasy peace with too many thoughts that hadn't fit in--and suddenly a new pack may come together. Thoughts once dominant may have lost their fur, be waiting their turn at meals; a whole new organization is in power, peeing on synapses everywhere!
So here, once again, is that old familiar "fruitful tension between desirable opposites" at work, making us a little irrational-- but still functioning in environments where better-structured programs would have long ago crashed in confusion!
forrest,
I use "valid" and "justification" in their standard philosophical senses. To philosophers "valid" means the property of an argument that makes the conclusion necessarily true if the premises are true. And when we say a belief is justified we mean that under the circumstances a reasonable person would believe it. ("What would Socrates think?")
Of course philosophers don't own the English language and other people use these same words in different senses. This is just the way we talk.
You correctly note that ordinary people's thoughts are pretty chaotic compared to what people trained in logic are comfortable with.
I think there is much to what you are saying but I would approach it at the level of concepts and not the level of beliefs. It is the concepts that are the problem. They are too fuzzy to do much useful work. Arguing with someone who says "We had to invade Iraq to defend our freedom" is generally a waste of time because the person usually has such a confused notion of freedom that they haven't really said anything. We need to clear up the mess in people's thinking at the bottom (conceptual) level and not worry about the surface (belief) level.
Philosophy at its most creative and best is the art (not the science) of crafting new and improved concepts for people to think with. Philosophy has too often fallen into the trap of trying to prove things.
Who has "to clear up the mess in people's thinking at the bottom"?
In a figurative 'software engineering' framework, the way that people actually think is probably more functional than the way that anyone trained in logic would initially assume they should be thinking. But this tends to be a pretty low-level range of functioning, equivalent to a little robot that runs about underfoot in search of the next power socket.
In this modern context of a civilization faced with overwhelming challenges, this way of functioning is, as you're saying, disfunctional as it can get!
It seems to me that the way Philosophers have traditionally thought and spoken about the process of thinking... is not the best approach.
Efforts at persuasion, discouraging as that gets, are better than simply shooting the opposition--so if most people's concepts won't handle the load, we'd better seek some third alternative!
Doesn't this, again, send us back to the Quaker (and mystical) traditions of not relying overmuch on our own minds?
We should not rely overmuch on thinking. Our ability to think rationally is only part of what we are. Relying on the direct guidance of God is certainly more valuable.
I too think that persuasion is better than force, after all our peace testimony rejects the use of force.
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