Truisms about Truth
The Conversation-stopper
Ask someone what truth is and you are apt to be greeted by either puzzled silence
or nervous laughter. Both reactions are understandable. Truth is one of
those ideas-happiness is another-that we use all the time but are at a loss
to define. This is why the question “What is truth?” is so often treated as
rhetorical.
One of the reasons truth seems so difficult to describe is that we have conflicting
beliefs about it: we sometimes think it is discovered, sometimes created,
sometimes knowable, sometimes mysterious. When we use the idea in
ordinary life-as we do when we agree or disagree with what someone has
said-it seems a simple matter. Yet the more we stop to think about it, the
more complicated it becomes.
It would be nice if we could sort out, once and for all, everything we
thought about truth-to find out the whole truth and nothing but the truth
about the truth, as it were. Nice, but practically impossible. The thesis of this
book is much simpler. Of the many things you could believe about truth,
there is at least one that you should believe: truth matters. Truth, I shall try to
convince you, is of urgent importance in both your personal and political life.
The idea that truth matters actually sums up four claims. Together, these
truisms, as I’ll call them, explain what I mean by “truth” and what I mean by
its “mattering.” Accordingly, I begin by introducing these truisms about
truth, with an aim toward convincing you that they are just what I say they
are, obvious truisms. This doesn’t mean that everyone agrees with them. As I
already noted, some of us are confused about truth-we have contradictory
beliefs about it. So we may believe these truisms but also believe something
else that undermines our belief in one or all of them. Moreover, nothing is so
obvious that someone hasn’t proclaimed it to be false, misguided, naive, incoherent,
impossible, or corrupting for the young. And lots and lots of folks,
as we’ll see, continue to say as much about these four ideas.
Wittgenstein once remarked that the job of the philosopher was to “assemble
reminders”-to point out to us what has been right there in front of our
face all along. While this isn’t all that a philosopher does, there is a lot of sense
in this point. The very familiarity of something can make us forget, or even
deny, its importance. When that happens, we need to be reminded of its role
in our everyday life. This is what we need in the case of truth.
Truth Is Objective
If I know anything, it is that I don’t know everything and neither does anyone
else. There are some things we just won’t ever know, and there are other
things that we think we know but don’t. Grant this bit of common sense, and
you are committed to the first truism about truth: truth is objective.
Early on in Shakespeare’s most celebrated play, Hamlet and his rather bookish
friend Horatio see the ghost of Hamlet’s dead father. Not surprisingly, Horatio
has a hard time coming to grips with the fact that a dead Danish monarch
is haunting the castle battlements. Hamlet’s response to Horatio’s worrying
is brusque: there are more things in heaven and earth, he says, than dreamt of
in Horatio’s philosophy. Hamlet’s point is to remind Horatio that he doesn’t
know it all because the universe is bigger than we are.
Not only, like Hamlet, are we sometimes ignorant; we also make mistakes.
People once believed that the Earth was flat. Most of us now regard this as a
rather silly idea. But imagine for a moment living in a time before advanced
mathematics, before long-distance sea voyages, before airplanes, before photographs.
Would you believe the Earth was flat? Of course you would. Just
look at it, you would say, gesturing off toward the (flat) horizon.
Even well-supported scientific theories can be wrong. Seventeenth-century
chemists, for example, noted correctly that something similar happens when
metal rusts and wood burns. Undergoing both processes results in a loss of
mass. According to the very best science of the day, the common cause was
the release of an invisible gas, “phlogiston,” into the atmosphere. Since this
gas took up space, had weight, and so on, its loss explained why both metal
and wood got smaller after rusting and burning. It is easy to snicker at the
phlogiston theory nowadays, since while there is a gas involved in both processes,
it is actually oxygen, which is gained, not lost, by the relevant system.
Phlogiston doesn’t exist. Yet the phlogiston theory was a very reasonable hypothesis
at the time. It was highly confirmed by the standards of the day. The
most knowledgeable scientists believed it. Yet it was mistaken.
The ever-present risks of ignorance and error underline the fact that whatever
else it may turn out to be, truth is objective. Just because we believe it
doesn’t mean it’s true, and just because it is true doesn’t mean we’ll believe it.
Believing, as we say, doesn’t make it so. The truth of Mt. Everest being the
tallest mountain, for example, has nothing to do with whether I believe it or
not. What matters is whether Mt. Everest really is the tallest mountain, and if
it is, then presumably it would be even if no one had ever been around to see
it. Of course, if there weren’t any language-users around, then Mt. Everest
wouldn’t be called “Mt. Everest,” since it wouldn’t be called anything at all.
But it would still be there, just as it would if we had called it something else,
like “Mt. Zippy.”
Voltaire once quipped that “let us define truth, while waiting for a better
definition … as a statement of the facts as they are.” Voltaire meant this as a
joke, but as working definitions go, it is pretty good. And Voltaire himself was
probably thinking of a famous remark of Aristotle’s that “to say of that which
is, that it is, and of that which is not, that it is not, is true.” This is even better.
When we say something true, the world is as we say it is. And when we believe
truly, the world is as we believe it to be. It is the way the world is that matters
for truth, not what we believe about the world.
In this sense, the objectivity of truth isn’t, or shouldn’t be anyway, controversial.
As I’ve indicated, it is a consequence of accepting what everyone already
does (or should) admit: we don’t know everything and we can make
mistakes.
The idea that truth is objective is sometimes put by saying that true beliefs
correspond to reality. And that is fine, just so long as we realize that this phrase
leaves room for disagreement about the nature and extent of what “correspondence”
and “reality” amount to. Some hold that beliefs can’t be true unless
they correspond to mind-independent, physical objects like mountains, electrons,
battleships, and barbers. On these theories, truth is always radically
objective, since what makes our beliefs true on such accounts is always their
relationship to real physical objects. This is obviously a matter of high philosophical
theory, however, and not a truism. You don’t have to believe it in order
to believe that truth is objective in the minimal sense I’ve been describing.
We don’t have to know everything about something to be able to talk about
it. Take, for example, the hard drive of my computer, which (I blush to confess)
I know next to nothing about. I don’t know what it is made out of (little bits
of metal and plastic probably), I don’t know where it is exactly, and I don’t
know really how it gets its job done. But I do know what that job is: it acts as the
main information-storage facility for my computer, where it keeps the various
programs and files. For most purposes, this working description of a hard drive
is good enough. It picks out what we generally mean when we talk about such
things. Indeed, a lot of our ordinary concepts are like this, and it is a good
thing too. This is why we can talk about something like gravity in a meaningful
way before we know its real underlying nature, or even if we never learn
about its real nature. We know what gravity does before we know what it is.
Our basic belief in truth’s objectivity is like my basic idea of my computer’s
hard drive. We know the job of true beliefs, even if we don’t know exactly how
they get that job done. True beliefs are those that portray the world as it is and
not as we may hope, fear, or wish it to be.
Truth Is Good
Nobody likes to be wrong. If anything is a truism, that is. And it reveals something
else we believe about truth: that it is good. More precisely, it is good to
believe what is true.
Why do we find it so obvious that it is good to believe what is true? One reason
has to do with the purpose of the very concept of truth itself. Humans
tend to disagree with each other: we squabble, spat, form different opinions,
and construct different theories. Yet the very possibility of disagreement over
opinions requires there to be a difference between getting it right and getting
it wrong. When I assert an opinion on some question, I assert what I believe
is correct. You do the same. And when we disagree, obviously, we disagree
about whose opinion is correct. So if there is no such thing as reaching one (or
none, or even more than one) correct answer to a given question, then we
can’t really disagree in opinion.
My point is that we distinguish truth from falsity because we need a way of
separating correct from incorrect beliefs, statements, and the like. In particular,
we need a way of distinguishing between beliefs for which we have some
evidence, or are endorsed by the Pentagon, or denounced by the president, or
make us money, or friends, or simply feel good, and those that actually end up
getting it right. It is not that we can’t evaluate beliefs in all those other ways-of
course we can. We can, and should, criticize a belief for not being based on
good evidence, for example. But that sort of evaluation depends for its force
on a more basic sort of evaluation. We think it is good to have some evidence
for our beliefs because we think that beliefs that are based on evidence are
more likely to be true. We criticize people who engage in wishful thinking because
wishful thinking leads to believing falsehoods.
So a primary point of having a concept of truth is that we need a very basic
way of appraising and evaluating our beliefs about the world. Indeed, this is
built right into our language: the very word “true” has an evaluative dimension.
Part of what you are doing when you say something is true is commending
it as something good to believe. Just as “right” and “wrong” are the
most basic ways to evaluate actions as correct or incorrect, so “true” and
“false” are our most basic ways to evaluate beliefs as correct or incorrect.
Indeed, the connection between belief and the truth is so tight that unless
you think something is true, you don’t even count as believing it. To believe
is just to take as true. If you don’t care whether something is true, you don’t really
believe it. William James put this by saying that truth “is the good in the
way of belief.” Others sometimes say that truth is the aim of belief. This is not
literally so of course. Beliefs don’t literally aim at anything. But both expressions
get at the idea that truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have.
Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief
and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property
that makes a proposition good to believe. In believing, we are guided by
the value of truth: other things being equal, it is good to believe a proposition when
and only when it is true. Since what is good comes in degrees, we can also put
this “norm” or rule by saying that other things being equal, it is better to believe
something when and only when it is true. Or more loosely: it is better to
believe what is true than what is false. I don’t mean that it is necessarily
morally better. Things can be better or worse, good or bad in different ways.
Clear writing is an aesthetic good; tasty food is a culinary good; and believing
true propositions, we might say, is a cognitive or intellectual good.
Truth Is a Worthy Goal of Inquiry
Values guide action. The value that, other things being equal, it is good to
keep my promises implies that I ought, other things being equal, to try to
keep my promises. The goodness of keeping one’s promises gives me a reason
for acting in some ways rather than others. So too with truth: it is good, other
things being equal, to believe what is true, and intuitively, this gives me a reason
to do certain things; most obviously, I should, other things being equal,
pursue the truth. The goodness of believing what is true means that having
true beliefs, like repaid debts or kept promises, is a goal worthy of pursuit.
That true belief is a goal worthy of pursuit does not mean that we pursue this
goal directly. The pursuit of truth is in fact always indirect. This is because belief
isn’t something we have direct control over. We can’t believe on demand.
If you doubt this, command yourself to believe right now that you have a blue
flower growing out of your head. Of course, you can straighten up, deepen
your voice, and chant the words “I’ve got a blue flower growing out of my
head,” but that alone won’t get you to believe it, for the fact is (at least I hope
it is a fact) that you don’t have a blue flower growing out of your head.
Nonetheless, we certainly do have indirect control over what we believe,
and this is control enough. I can affect what I believe by putting myself in certain
situations and avoiding other situations. That is, I can control how I go
about pursuing the truth, by paying careful attention to the evidence, giving
and asking for reasons, doing adequate research, remaining open-minded,
and so on. In short, in saying that truth is a worthy goal, we imply that you
ought (other things being equal) to adopt policies, methods, and habits of inquiry
that are reliable, or that are likely to result in true beliefs. We ordinarily
think that it is good to give and ask for reasons, good to be open-minded,
good to have empirical evidence for one’s scientific conclusions, because
these are methods of inquiry that lead us to the truth. If we didn’t value true
beliefs, we wouldn’t value these sorts of activities; and we value these sorts of
activities because we think they will, more often than not, lead us to believing
truly rather than falsely.
So we pursue true belief via engaging in inquiry. I am using the word “inquiry”
here in a very general sense. I mean by it not just the methods for acquiring
true beliefs I just mentioned, but all the various processes, practices,
and activities we engage in when both posing and answering questions that interest
us.
Continues…
Excerpted from True to Life
by Michael Lynch Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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The MIT Press
ISBN: 0-262-12267-7
