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.

Truth, knowledge, skepticism, and stuff…

A standard philosophical definition of knowledge goes as follows:

(I know A) <=> (I have a justified belief that A) and (A is true)

As I write this essay, I’m in the middle of reading Robert Nozick’s discussion of knowledge and skepticism in Philosophical Explanations.  Nozick uses a very specific concept of “truth tracking” which leads to some very interesting results, but is essentially (it seems to me) just a particular approach to defining justification, one that leads to a coherent (I think), but sometimes quite peculiar conception of knowledge.  I find myself working around a rather different rejection of philosophical skepticism.  What follow are musings, not intended to represent a complete expression of a developed idea.

If some particular skeptical scenario (SK: SK => not-A) were true, then A would be false, and I would not know A.  However, A, so not-SK, and I do know A.  The skeptic’s objection fails, because SK is not true.

Truth is outside my direct experience.  It is not something I have direct access to.  To use Dewey’s language from Experience and Nature, it is not something I “have directly”.  All that I have directly is justification (evidence, inference rules, trusted sources, etc.)  There is no way to operationalize truth; I can only operationalize justification.  One reason that theories of knowledge remain so problematic is that knowledge, vs. justification and belief, has exactly zero influence on our behavior at time t = now().  We try to justify our beliefs, and to act on justified beliefs.  Later, we may come to believe that our prior beliefs were not (properly) justified, i.e., were false.  But at any given moment (outside of certain contexts of philosophical inquiry) the question, “Are my beliefs true, or merely justified?” is never a useful one.  The question, “Is this belief justified?”, however, is (always?) an important one.  Operationally, the question of “truth” always devolves to:  from perspective B (perhaps a later one), do the beliefs held to be justified from perspective A still appear justified?

There is no way to operationalize (general, philosophical) skepticism at all.  Skepticism places all logical possibilities on an equal footing.  All available evidence is discounted, and there is no way to distinguish one possibility from another, to prefer one over the other.  Skepticism cannot give any positive plan of action.

Philosophical skepticism of the sort I am referring to (what Hume referred to as Pyrrhonism) must not be confused with a critical evaluation of our methods of justification.  Critical evaluation of our methods of justification is completely operational and is critical to ensuring that they track truth as closely as possible.

P.S.  Nozick, I think, expresses an insight similar to mine above about truth and experience when he says (p. 232 in my paperback copy) “We have said that knowledge is a real connection of belief to the world, [which we call] tracking, and… this view is external to the viewpoint of the knower, as compared to traditional treatments, [though] it does treat the method he uses [to track truth] from the inside, to the extent it is guided by internal cues and appearances.”

P.P.S.  Anticipating certain gleeful but misguided reactions to my rejection of “skepticism”, I want to point out a deviation between a common vernacular use of the word “skeptical” and philosophical skepticism, to wit, the phrase: “Skeptical about God.”  Disbelief in God (or even just doubt) is usually based on a belief that you can trust the evidence to lead you to true conclusions about the world.  Doubt about God stems from observing the lack of positive evidence, and disbelief from observing that the available evidence is incompatible with the God hypothesis.  These methods of justifying belief are exactly antithetical to philosophical skepticism, which holds that no amount of evidence is ever sufficient to justify a belief.  Theists, in fact, often (mis-)apply a skeptical argument when they claim that “You can’t prove a negative result,” not realizing that, if true, this argument merely puts their God on exactly the same footing as being a brain in a vat manipulated by alien scientists in the Alpha Centauri system.

P.P.P.S.  (9/7/2013)  I need to correct my statement that Nozick's concept of "tracking" is just a special case of justification.  (He is at pains to distinguish them on p. 267, by which time I was in a position to realize what he meant.)  Tracking, like truth, is external:  our methods really do track truth.  Justification is internal: we believe our methods track truth, and are therefore reliable or justified.

Questioning “Cogito”

It seems to me that Rene Descartes’ famous “Cogito ergo sum” begged the question.  His premise “I think” depends on his conclusion, “I exist”.   

Certainly the stream of impressions he adduces in support of his conclusion demonstrate something – but what?  A more appropriate conclusion would be along the lines of “Experience manifests, therefore something is,” or, more succinctly, and tautologically (this is not a bad thing): “Experience is, therefore something is.”  Or, to once more in this space quote the words (if not, in this case, the meaning) of the X-Files’ Fox Mulder:  “There is something out there.”

To get to the “I exist” actually requires a number of additional premises, first of all that this experience means something – that it is rule-based – and possibly even that is connected to something we might call a “real world”.  Descartes makes this connection only after establishing “ergo sum”, and then he makes it only by reference to a perfect and benevolent God – a premise that seems as improbable to me as it seemed certain to Descartes.  My own preferred premise for the orderliness of Experience is the anti-skeptical one:  “If  I don’t assume some rule-based nature to Experience, then there is no point in going on further with analysis”.  This is a weaker premise than Descartes’, but it has the decided advantage of being not false.  There is also the empirical argument, that I can test the rule-based nature of Experience experimentally, and therefore demonstrate it.  While testability is important, its importance is sometimes overestimated, since I cannot possibly subject every needed rule about Experience to my own personal set of empirical tests. 

As for the “real world”, well that’s really definitional, isn’t it?  I.e., a term of convenience more than a necessary premise.  If I can predictably alter Experience by action, and if I can generalize the rules for doing so such that some person on the other side of the planet whom I’ve never met can apply them to some experience I’ve never had, and also alter Experience to conform to the predictions, then it may be useful to introduce the idea of a “real world”, but this concept can hardly can be constructed so as to be testable (hence meaningful) beyond the definition just given.

Of course, as I have implied elsewhere in this blog (“Starting from Zero”, May 30, 2010), I do not really accept the Cartesian method of applying radical doubt to build up a whole body of knowledge about the world from a bare minimum of assumptions, let alone “clear and distinct” (hence immediate and unquestionable) impressions.  We always come to any problem with a whole theoretical structure, which we can twist, bend and otherwise alter piecemeal, but which we can never throw out en bloc to start afresh.   

Nevertheless, it can be fun, and sometimes instructive, to play with the Cartesian approach as with a game.  And then, developmentally, we do, at some point in our lives sort of start to build a world view from experience upon a base of the biologically given.  So it seems perhaps some form of the Cartesian approach may have a certain psycho-historical relevance.  But this is only more or less.  Given that the biochemical environment in the womb begins to affect development even before the brain begins to develop, there are no clear limits between “experientially derived” and “biologically given”.   It’s a problem with inherently fuzzy boundaries.    It is worth noting, to, that the psychological “program” or world view starts to develop long before the wiring of the biological “machine” – the adult brain – is complete.  Starting from zero remains problematic – in this case, because it’s hard to define the zero point.

Considering the developmental problem, I have written, before (“The house I live in”, October 24, 2009) that I think our concept of “I” or self is not inbred, but is learned from experience, and not at a particularly early point, either, which also contradicts the primacy of Descartes’ “ergo sum”.

Another way it is interesting to contrast Descartes’ “Cogito...” with modern thinking is in the nature of the self, itself.  Descartes, of course, assumed some privileged level of granularity associated with the self.  As a Christian of his age, he could hardly have done otherwise – the individual self was the level at which the soul was allocated, the soul was essentially indivisible, and was in a sense synonymous with the self, so clearly an individual was a discrete, and in an essential sense indivisible unit.  A person could colloquially be of “two minds” about something, but that didn’t disturb the essential unity – one of those two opinions had to be the “true” one (at least in the sense of “true to oneself”), and the other false.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the unitary nature of the self came under attack philosophically, psychologically and neurologically.  One good book that includes a good analysis of the nature of the self is Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained.  The impression I drew from that book (consistent with others I’ve read, see note on references) is of a brain consisting of numerous centers, each evolved perhaps for one primary purpose, but co-opted to other uses, in other networks, by the opportunistic nature of evolution (see “Adaptation? Or Carpe Diem?”, November 30, 2010), with a conscious sense of self perhaps developing only rather late as a sort of supervisor circuit riding on top of this loose, collaborative network of parts.  In this analysis, to be of “two minds” about something may literally mean that two different parts of your brain produce differing explanations or predictions, or desire different goals.  There is no meaningful sense in which one of these is more “true” to your “essential nature” than the other.

But as I said in “The house I live in”, the constructed and non-atomic nature of my self doesn’t make it a useless concept.  As the wag said, and insofar as my day-to-day experience goes, I think I am, therefore I am, I think.

Useful references, cited or otherwise: Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, ch. 4; Gary Hatfield, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Descartes and the Meditations; Daniel C. Dennett Consciousness Explained; Stephen M. Kosslyn & Olivier Koenig, Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience; Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain; Joseph M. Schwartz, The Future of Democratic Equality; John Dewey, Experience and Nature.