Pondering Truth

When we speak of “truth” do we describe some single entity or quality in the world?  Or is “truth” hypostasized to simplify a complex of relationships between the inner and outer worlds that we do not (cannot?) understand?

Is “truth” an operational concept?  There is no operational difference “now” between a justified belief and a justified true belief (a.k.a. “knowledge”, at least in many philosophers’ systems).  I make the same choices, take the same actions either way.  But there may be an effect on the outcome (or not).  Is “truth” operational in evaluating outcomes, and therefore, perhaps improving the reasons for future beliefs?

Even in evaluating the outcome of past choices, I still don’t “possess truth”.  I only formulate, and attempt to justify, further beliefs (e.g., beliefs about my past beliefs).  In Dewey’s terminology from Experience and Nature, truth does not seem to be something we can “have directly”.

There is a state of the world, and there is a state of my mind (or yours), which is, itself, part of the state of the world.  The state of my mind includes a simplified, impressionistic “image” (in some neural/synaptic medium) of the state of the world – to the extent it is accessible to my imagination.  In that image, the state of my mind figures under such rubrics as “reasons” and “beliefs”.  Based on my state of mind (at any given time), I will make certain choices, and take certain actions.  Partly because of such actions, at some future time the state of the world, and the state of my mind, will be different.  By comparing the current state of my mind (and especially its world-image) to my memory of its prior state, I make judgments about the truth of my previously held beliefs.  I formulate (reasoned) beliefs about my prior beliefs.

Is “truth”, then, just something we invent to explain our relative satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the outcomes of our past endeavors?  The trouble with that idea is that our feeling of satisfaction may be connected to aspects of the outcome which some mythical unbiased observer would be unwilling to call “truth”.  For instance, a racist may desire to join an organization of like-minded individuals.  His belief that African Americans are genetically inferior to “Aryans” may help him in that endeavor, and thereby lead him to be satisfied, but we would not want to call his belief “true” on such grounds.  Then there is the growing body of psychological research indicating that our brains have evolved so as to readily adopt certain beliefs which are adaptive, but not (necessarily) “true”.  An example is the “confirmation bias”, where by our minds tend to disproportionally accept data that confirms what we want to believe, and reject data that disconfirms it.  Another example is the “hyperactive agent detection” that Daniel Dennett discusses in Breaking the Spell (among other places).  Other examples can be found in various papers in Naturalizing Epistemology (Hilary Kornblith, ed.)

It seems there is something actual about the relationship between our mental states and the world state that we are trying to capture with the concept “truth”, which is related to, but not simply reducible to, our degree of satisfaction with outcomes.  I admit, at this point in my life, to be still wondering (persistently) about exactly what it is.

Postscript on Confirmation.  As with many of the musings on Persistent Wondering, this one pretty much starts “where I am” and doesn’t make much of an effort to relate to an audience that may not be starting at the same place.  I apologize for that… but after all, I am portraying myself as a “wonderer”, and making no claims to be a teacher.  (Lame excuse.)

In this essay in particular, though, it seems to me that many people may wonder why I would feel – at all – that “truth” is not directly accessible.  In many (most?) of our everyday interactions with the world, confirmation of our beliefs is direct and immediate, and seems incontrovertible.  I believe I left my keys on the kitchen counter.  I go downstairs – I either find them there, or I do not.

Other “facts” are not so easily confirmed or disconfirmed, though.  There are the challenges of philosophical skepticism.  How do I know I am not dreaming?  Or hallucinating?  Or a disembodied brain kept alive in a vat, with my neural inputs manipulated by alien scientists?  Then there is the question of “modeling”.  Complex physical or social systems cannot be grasped by our minds in their complete and detailed totality.  We need to abstract from them, simplify them, in order to understand them.  Do concepts like race, class, culture, the national income “truly” conform to some real world objects, and if so exactly what and how?  How do we indubitably confirm or disconfirm them?  Theoretical physics provides examples, also.  Do the objects of modern theoretical physics – quarks, bosons, photons – “really” exist, or are they just a convenient (not necessarily unique) way of mathematizing experimental results?  Are the relatively abstract and indirect confirmations of physics experiments really of the same class as our confirming (by looking) that our keys are on the counter?

But really, ALL of our knowledge involves some such modeling (abstraction and analysis).  All the objects we conceive involve some level of abstraction – focusing on certain aspects of experience and ignoring others.  Something of this is suggested by Heraclitus’s statement thousands of years ago that “You can never step into the same river twice.”  What exactly is a river?  Is it the specific water molecules?  But they start out in a glacier and end up in the ocean.  Is it the banks?  But they shift with time as soil particles are removed and deposited.  Is it some abstract (fractal?) pattern that encompasses changes over time?  What is the “truth” of the matter?

Our mental states (beliefs and so on) consist in synaptic patterns, roughly, stable-yet-changing patterns of chemical interactions between neurons.  The state of the world consists in the interplay of forces amongst patterned matter and energy, extending strongly or weakly between the various points of the entire universe.  It is not clear that some unique and transparent correspondence can be established between those two things and unambiguously labeled “truth”.  On a conceptual, theoretical level, the question of the truth of our beliefs, their confirmation or disconfirmation, is not at all a trivial one.  Although on the pragmatic level of day-to-day actions, it very often is.

Episteme

I have two fundamental epistemological premises: that the evidence of my experience is the best available (really only available) data I have for learning about the world, and that most people who study, think, speak and write about the world are not intentionally lying. These seem to be pragmatically a minimal set. I don’t see how one can practically set forth on the project of learning without them.

Note that the use of the words “most” and “intentionally” in the second premise imply two corollaries: some people are lying, and some people may be unintentionally stating mistruths. (In fact, I might argue that we are all unintentionally stating mistruths to a greater or lesser extent, but that would be more of a theorem than a premise.) Also, saying experience is the “best available” data doesn’t imply that it yields infallible insight.

The two premises do not form a complete (i.e., sufficient) set. All they really say is that I can trust what I experience, and what people tell me about what they experienced (including second or third hand, etc. reports) – but with a grain or two of salt. They don’t say anything about how to come up with that grain of salt, or to know how many grains to apply. They don’t, in other words, tell me how to distinguish the veracity of conclusions I draw from these sources, or how to distinguish between competing theories. They don’t specify any rules of inference, at all.

I’m afraid all I can say about making distinctions is, “It’s ad hoc.” I am no Descartes, to offer a single unified answer to the question of how to distinguish true ideas from false ones. Certainly, I do not believe that because I can hold some idea “clearly and distinctly” that it must be true (although it might suggest truthfulness prima fascie). Instead, it’s more a matter of how well does an idea “fit in” with the other body of ideas I have constructed, over time, from the same evidence. “Consistency”, in a word. But how do I decide if an idea is consistent? Certainly not the idea of the excluded middle. I am quite convinced that it is possible for a thing to be both A and not A. The clearest examples come from human emotions: do I want to spend a month’s vacation in Venice this year, even though the press of work before and after will be terrible, it will cost a lot of money, my Italian is rusty, and I will have to find a house-sitter and/or worry about my pets and everything else in my house? I do, but I don’t. Fuzzy logic may offer better (if inherently less certain) models. But I am convinced that real antinomies can also be supported, as matters of fact (at least as humans perceive fact) in the real world, as well. Or at least, I’m not convinced that they can’t.

Ad hoc. I know it when I see it. Maybe. More or less. (I do, but I don’t.) Kind of like Descartes, perhaps, except I substitute “vague and fuzzy” for “clear and distinct”?

This could be depressing, if, like many philosophers past, I desired the nature of my mind (or soul) to approach some ideal of perfection – to make me like a god. But I don’t believe in gods. Rather than being depressed at failing to approach a fictional divinity, I prefer to celebrate the humanness of it all. Because this messy, ad hoc, but often very effective process of distinction is the stuff of life, after all, and quintessentially human, if only because humans, by and large, do it exceptionally well. Not that we do it infallibly – there are a lot of people in the world who are dead certain of things about which I am certain they are dead wrong. But by and large, in the billions of tiny, every day distinctions and decisions we make over the course of our lives, we do mostly pretty well.

We do this, of course, because we’ve been programmed that way by natural selection. Our brains have evolved to do a job, and they do it rather well (just as flies fly very well, and frogs do an excellent job of catching them). We have certain decision making processes built into our equipment. By studying our thinking in a natural scientific sort of way, it is possible to get clues as to what they are. Philosophers, I think, who have tried to set rules of thought start with some biological rule and then codify it – so clarity and distinctness counts, biologically, as evidence, and so, on some level, does the excluded middle. But we can’t stop there. We move on to fuzzy logic, paradigmatic categories... and who knows how far beyond?

My guess is that, as in most things, the brain works by having a bunch of rules, without any necessary regard as to whether they are consistent in any a priori theoretical sense. Different rules are stimulated by a particular experience, others suppressed, memory of past experience and feedback loops are brought into play, until the system “settles” in some state (“settles” is a relative term for a system that is constantly in motion), and we feel that this “makes sense” or doesn’t. This is what I mean by “consistent” with the rest of my body of knowledge. It is, in fact, the biological basis of, in a sense the definition of, “consistency”. The rules exist because, at some time in the past, they have been found helpful in negotiating the world – they have been empirically proven. They may be “hard coded” rules, proven in the dim historical past of our heritage, but, again like most things in the brain, the “hard coded” rules can be modified, and new rules created, by our individual experience. And such learned rules may be passed on to subsequent generations via the “Lamarckian” evolutionary process represented by our culture and its systems of education.

Thinking in this natural historical way about distinction and rules of inference, etc., may not “prove” validity, in the sense that philosophers have traditionally sought such proofs. But it may give pretty damn’ good evidence of empirical functionality. And, I would argue that this empirical, matter-of-fact kind of “proof” is most suitable to our real-life existence as human beings in a material world, even if it fails for some fictional existence as souls aspiring to a divine one. If philosophy is the pursuit of the “good” and if good must be good for something, then this is the kind of knowledge and truth that is “good for humans”.