The Nature of Truth
Is truth absolute? Is truth just opinion?
Truth as a predictive model
It should be made clear from the onset that the sort of
truth we are talking about in this discussion is not some sort
of idealized dogmatic or universal truth of the type sometimes promoted
by
religious or political zealots. While truth is an extremely valuable
concept, things are usually not totally true or totally false, and we
may or may not be able to judge
the truth of a statement with much confidence. Still, some things are
very true and others are very false, and it is often important that we
can make good
judgments about which is which and when we don't know.
Sometimes problems come up as to whether truth is real
or well-defined. Part of the problem is that the contexts where we talk
about truth can vary dramatically. Consider the following statements:
- Julius Caesar was the first emperor of Rome.
(historical statement)
- The football game starts at 1:00. (statement of
specific detail)
- Energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
(statement of great generality)
- Pavarotti is a better singer than Elton John.
(statement involving taste)
- We are all one with the universe. (untestable
statement)
- You shouldn't steal things that belong to other
people. (moral/ethical statement)
- Two plus two equals four. (mathematical statement)
The first three statements (historical, detail, generality)
involve the
most common sort of truth. I think it is good to look at them as models.
They construct a description of some aspect of reality. The words
represent parts of reality and it is implied that the relationship
between the corresponding real things is the same as the relationship
implied by the statement. For the truth of a statement to be
meaningful, it should be predictive in some way. If we say the football
games starts at 1:00, that implies that witnesses in the appropriate
place will observe a football game going on shortly after 1:00 but not
before 1:00. If a statement doesn't predict anything, it is hard to
imagine how the statement could be of any use to us.
It may seem odd that a historical statement would be
predictive, but this is still reasonable since it does predict that
evidence we observe will be consistent with this statement. It predicts
that copies of ancient writings and engravings on unearthed tablets and
any other consequences of the identity of the first emperor of Rome
will be consistent with the model that this person was Julius Caesar.
The principle of physics that energy cannot be created
or destroyed is more typical of what we consider a predictive model,
and scientists design experiments to see if such predictions are
confirmed.
The issue of whether we are all "one with the universe"
does not make any prediction as far as I can see. It is hard to see how
evidence could be evaluated for or against such a statement. In such a
situation the truth of the statement is effectively meaningless, so
there is no point in debating whether it is true or false.
The question of whether Pavarotti is better than Elton
John presents a special problem because there is no agreed upon
definition of what makes a singer better. We might agree about who can
sing a higher note or hold a note longer, but if one person prefers
Pavarotti and another prefers Elton John, there is no way we can show
that one is right and the other is wrong. Unfortunately there is a
tradition that experts in an area like music sometimes regard their own
preferences as a "truth" that one thing is better than another, and
those of us who are not experts may believe them because we feel
unqualified to question their opinions. In modern times some might
challenge such arbitrary choices by saying "It is true for you that
Pavarotti is better but it is true for me that Elton John is better."
This leads to the idea that there are different
"truths" for different people. This might be fine for evaluating
artists, but it gets us into big trouble when talk about the
conservation of energy or when the football game starts or whether
there is a cement truck heading toward our car at high speed. The
problem of truth involving preferences is better resolved by saying
that it is true that you prefer Pavarotti and that I prefer Elton John
(this is a hypothetical example by the way).
The problem of moral and ethical statements is similar
in that there is no agreed upon rule for how to determine whether they
are true. The method above for truths involving preferences could be
employed, but it isn't very satisfactory. If we say "Stealing is wrong
for you but it's not wrong for me," people aren't going to be very
happy. Many individual questions might be resolved if the people
debating the question agree on the ultimate purpose they want to
achieve. For example, virtually all moral and ethical systems agree
that we should try to avoid killing people, so a debate about which of
two possible military actions is most ethical might be resolved by
gathering and analyzing evidence as to which would cause the fewest
deaths.
Unfortunately, many of the most serious disputes such as
abortion, sexual morality, and demands for particular forms of
religious worship cannot be addressed this way because they involve
fundamental differences in the definition of morality. By considering
the basic nature of morality it might be possible to make some progress
on such issues; otherwise we might hope a rational examination of how
each of us arrived at our moral beliefs would help people realize that
their own basis is not guaranteed to be more valid than someone else's.
This would hopefully reduce the chances of bitter confrontations with
people who make different moral assumptions.
The case of the mathematical statement is special
because, unlike scientific statements, the truth of such statements
follows totally from the definition of terms and axioms, and not on any
observation of the real world. Generally truths involving the real
world involve measurements that have some degree of inaccuracy and
generalizations for which exceptions may be found in the future. In
mathematics (which includes formal logic) it is reasonable to consider
some statements to be perfectly true and those which are not
perfectly true to be utterly false. We should be careful to recognize
that real world statements tend to become useless if they are held to
such an extreme standard, since few things are totally true or totally
false.
Definition vs. substance
If there is a question about the truth of a statement, it
might be
because there is a misunderstanding about the meaning of the words, or
it might be because there is a disagreement about the predictions
implied by the statement and what evidence would tend to confirm or
deny it.
If, for example, you claimed that Fred was a heavy drinker, and I
claimed that
he wasn't, it might seem that we have differing opinions about how much
drinking
Fred does. On the other hand, we might agree on how much he
drinks, but we
disagree on what is meant by a "heavy drinker".
It is important to recognize when a dispute is about
definition rather than substance in order to avoid a great deal of
irrelevant debate.
Philosophical attacks on the idea of truth
Some philosophers, particularly those identifying themselves
as
"postmodernists", assert that truth is not absolute, but depends upon
the individual point of view. They regard truth as political - what's
true depends on your political ideology. Science is regarded as just
another belief system. I don't see this as a viable point of view. If I
tell a blind man that it's safe to cross the street, and he gets hit by
a truck, it isn't valid for me to say "it was true for me that it was
safe for him to cross the street." He was depending on a kind of truth
that is more than just a point of view.
Postmodernists' views seem more reasonable when applied
to things like art and morality, where there are no widely agreed on
ways to determine what is true. Even in these areas, we can benefit by
gaining a better understanding so issues of truth are better defined.
In traditional scientific areas, postmodernists correctly point out
that there is always an element of opinion and bias in scientific work.
While this is so, scientific methods are carefully designed to keep
such biases to an absolute minimum, which would not normally be the
case when using emotional or political or religious methods to reach
conclusions.
Vagueness & information content
True statements contain information. It can be useful to
consider the amount of information contained in a statement, and this
subject is considered in detail in the study of information theory. In
general, vague statements, like blurry pictures, contain less
information than precise statements. Unreliable statements
(those with a significant probability of being false) can be considered
to contain less information than reliable ones. Other factors affect
the value of information, such as how useful it is and whether it is
already known to the recipient.
Probability
We can consider all knowledge as having a probability
associated with
it. Do I know that the floor of my house will support my weight,
because it has in the past? I feel that is extremely probable, but
there is some tiny possibility that something has recently undermined
it. I am very confident that the world is roughly spherical. I am
pretty sure that eating fatty foods increases my risk of heart attack.
We often think of probability as only applying to the future, but as
long as we have some doubt about the answer to a question, the concept
of probability can apply to the past and present as well. If we deal
one card from a deck of playing cards to a friend, the probability of
it being an ace would be 4 in 52. As far as we are concerned, the fact
that the card has already been determined does not affect our
judgment of the probabilities. If we then also deal a card to ourselves
and see it is an ace, the chances of our friend having an ace is
now 3 in 51 (three out of the 51 cards we cannot see are aces), while
if we don't have an ace
the probability would be 4 in 51. When we learn more about a situation,
the probabilities of certain facts change accordingly.
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