What is Truth? | Episode 1405 | Closer To Truth

I want to know truth. Everyone wants to know truth. But what is truth? People argue about truth. Argue opinion truths, which football team is best. Argue value truths, justice or mercy. Argue ultimate truths, does God exist? But people also fight about truth. What's the best political system? Which is the true religion? Over these truths, tragically, much blood has been shed. Truth is serious stuff. I want to know truth, especially ultimate truth. But first, what is truth? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and closer to truth is my struggle to find out. If I want to know ultimate truth, capital T truth, then I should start with the essence of truth, small t truth. Truth may seem obvious as a general concept, even while any particular truth may be not so obvious. I'd like a simple, basic definition of truth. But is there a simple, basic definition of truth? I go to Cambridge, England, to ask a distinguished philosopher of mind and language, a former editor of the journal Mind, Simon Blackburn. Simon, philosophers tell me that this concept of truth is really not so simple. Why? Well, the standard thing that everybody starts by saying about truth is that truth is correspondence with the facts. And that's true. That's a good thing to say. The problem is it's not quite as illuminating as one might hope. And part of the trouble is with the notion of a fact. So, for example, to make that problematic, you might ask yourself whether, for example, there are any negative facts. Take the fact that there's no rhinoceros in this room. What makes that true? The absence of a rhinoceros? What's an absence? It's not a thing that you can touch or weigh or whatever. And there are other things, too. There are hypothetical facts. Conditionals are true, we say. But is there a truth of the form that if one thing, then another? There are general propositions whose truth is mysterious. And then, of course, there are particular mysteries, like the mystery of mathematical truth or the mystery of moral truth. The majority of philosophers these days probably subscribe to a thing called deflationism, which is fundamentally the idea that there's nothing abstract to say about truth. Pontius Pilate asked the famous abstract question, and the deflationist says the right answer to Pontius Pilate wasn't to start on a philosophical treatise about the nature of truth, but was to say, what are you interested in? And if Pilate then gives you the answer, I'm interested in whether this chap's guilty, let's say, well, he's got an inquiry to conduct. We know how to conduct inquiries into whether somebody's guilty. That's an empirical inquiry. You could use the police, whatever else you've got. So what you've got to do is, as it were, come down from the abstraction to any particular thing you're interested in. And then asking whether that's true is actually asking a question that can be framed without the notion of truth. Because it's true that this man's guilty just means this man's guilty. So Pilate's question should have been, is this man guilty? And that's a question which you can ask without involving any notion of truth. So deflationism is the, as it were, the flavour of the month in the philosophy of truth. So are you a deflationist when it comes to truth? I am a deflationist about truth, yes. I think it's right. It left a residual problem, which I think is capable of a nice solution, which is, first of all, why do we think truth's so important? Why do we think it's got what philosophers call a normative force? That is, there's oughts in the offing. Your beliefs ought to be true. Your statements ought to be true. Why so if truth is deflationary? And another residual topic is, why is truth so important when it comes to explanation? You know, we think that our science, for example, offers us good explanation of things because our science is true. It's got the world right. And can we say that as deflationists? Well, the recipe is the same. You get down from the abstract heights. As far as explanation goes, sure. You know, your GPS works because science says that the speed of light is x, y, z, and the speed of light is x, y, z. That's all. And so for any particular example of a norm or of an explanation, a deflationist is very happy with it. And then what he says is that truth is just a device of generalisation. It just pulls together all the things like, you ought to say that somebody's guilty only if he is guilty. You ought to say that somebody's sitting down only if they are sitting down. But the generalisation has minimal value. Yeah. The generalisation itself has minimal value. Simon is a deflationist about truth. Truth only makes sense in particular cases, he says. Specific statements are true or not true, but there is little value or even sense to truth in general. It'd be a letdown. I'd feel deflated. I'd rather have truth writ large as reality's hidden treasure of great worth. Yet mirages, however stunning, vanish. I'd want none of ultimate truth if it were not real. So can truth be re-inflated? I seek a truth anti-deflationist. I head to London to visit Raymond Tallis, a public intellectual pursuing philosophical foundations of big truths. Ray, I'm only going to ask you this because you're my good friend. What is truth? No good friend would ask such a difficult question as that. I'm just about to wash my hands. But anyway, it seems to me that the whole notion of truth has gone through a very rough period. Ramsay, the great Cambridge philosopher who died young, famously said, to assert that P and to assert that P is true is to assert the same thing. So the little predicate is true is entirely redundant. So he was the father of the minimalist approach to truth, that there's nothing in truth at all. Of course, there are much older conceptions of truth. Correspondence theory, the most easy way of thinking about truth is of the correspondence between assertions and states of affairs out there. That's always difficult because the assertions and the states of affairs are not clearly separate. Those states of affairs are picked out by the assertions. That's what made people pretty anxious about the correspondence theory of truth. The other theory is a coherent adherence theory, the idea that a particular proposition is true if it coheres with other propositions. And that scientific truth, for example, is a great mountain of coherent propositions of larger and larger generality. And the third notion, of course, most famously from your own country, is pragmatism, the notion that truth is that which essentially works. And that's been picked up by evolutionary theorists as well, that basically our conceptions of truth are simply things that help us to survive, help us to plug more comfortably into our environment. Well, all of these seem true in their own way. I think they are. And I think the truth about truth is very complex, namely that correspondence probably is one of the fundamental building blocks of truth. But clearly coherence is another part. Correspondent truths have to cohere. And that clearly what truths we pick out depends on what we're interested in. So to some extent pragmatism also has a part to play. But of course the minimalists are right as well. Because if you think of truth as a stuff, or there being a single truth to which all propositions converge, or if you think of truth as a predicate, then you're going to be very disappointed. The people who have got it completely wrong are the relativists, those who say there is no such thing as truth. Because, as has been pointed out endlessly, although they'd never noticed, that essentially they are undermining their own position. The assertion that there is no truth is obviously a general truth, or a claim to a general truth, which is greater than most of the truths most of us can actually subscribe to. Those attacks on relativism by it being internally inconsistent or contradictory, I think it's a cheap shot. Because it's something you can say about a lot of things. The argument of the relativist is that because we can only know things through our senses and our brains and ourselves, that we are arrogant to assume that what we are sensing about the world is the world in reality. Let me pick up one of your observations. We can only know things through our brains. What's the status of that truth? Generally a materialistic world view, that unless you're getting something logically or through your senses, we really can't know anything about it. And I would like to ask you, how do we know that, that we know things only through our brain senses? Where do we get this sense of only from? The burden of proof is on the other side, because the brain and our senses are all that we see through. I mean, it's self-evident. And if that's not the case, then it's up to you to show me why. But I have no problem that if you took away my body, I wouldn't be in receipt of much information. All of that I'm perfectly happy about. But I'm not sure how you can conclude from that that we cannot arrive at objective truths. Because what the relativist says is that because we are using our mental capacity to discern the world, we are bringing to that world our own biases and prejudices. And the simple demonstration of that is look at visual illusions that you see on paper, where you see it two different ways, and it flips around. And the paper is not changing. There you go. Our brains are interpreting it in different ways. So if the outside world is not changing, but we see it, doesn't that make us be a little bit humble in terms of our seeing absolute objective truth on the world? But the fact that we can see that an illusion is an illusion, and that, for example, I don't think you sitting in front of me is an illusion, whereas if I saw two of you, because I had taken some tablets, then clearly I would think it was an illusion. So in other words, most of our experiences are not illusory in that sense. The argument from illusion that because some experiences are illusory means that all experiences are illusory, I think, can be easily refuted. As Gilbert Ryle said, you know, you cannot have counterfeit coins if you don't have a coin you produce in the proper way. You also use the word bias. The very concept of a bias shows that we're able, as it were, to recover from our narrow perspective to the point where we actually have a science that's built up a set of statements that actually looks quite different, sees the world quite differently from the data we get from our sense perception. Ray introduces four theories of truth. Correspondence theory, coherence theory, pragmatism, evolution, in addition to minimalist or deflationary truth. I like the variety. Truth should be viewed from diverse perspectives. How else to push and probe truth? Can the essence of truth be discerned by distinguishing allied ideas, such as knowledge and belief? I go to Oxford to meet a philosopher who teases apart subtle concepts, the Wainfleet Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, John Hawthorne. John, I want to know what's true. I like to have knowledge. Which most people do. These terms can get very fuzzy, though. If I tell you it's going to rain tomorrow, and it's a total guess on my part, and if it rains, I was right, and if it doesn't, I was wrong. But does that mean my knowledge now is the same? If you're guessing whether it's going to rain, in the intuitive sense, then even if you're right, you didn't know that it was going to rain. That's a paradigm case of true belief that isn't knowledge. At least one thing's clear, it seems, that there's more to knowing something than truly believing it. It seems that it needs to be true, but it's not enough that it's true. I think one place to go is to get a feel of what sort of situations you think do count as knowledge. A situation in which someone just guesses and gets lucky, they definitely don't know. But it gets more tricky figuring out. In other cases, if you've got a lottery ticket, you don't know whether it's going to win or lose. That seems right. Even though it's very probable that it's going to lose, you don't know that it's going to lose. But once we start on that track, there seem to be ways to generalize that to the conclusion that we don't know very much at all. Similarly for the great heart attack lottery. A few unfortunates are going to die in the next few hours without any real warning of ill health, of a sudden unexpected heart attack. If you buy the lottery thought, a natural way to generalize it is to the conclusion, we don't know whether or not we're going to live or die in the next hour. If you don't know whether you're going to live or die in the next hour, doesn't that mean that you don't know anything about your future? Because it's weird to think that you could know that you were going to the pub tonight if you didn't know whether or not you were going to die in the next 10 minutes. It's very hard to give a cogent reason for saying why you know in the one case but you don't know in the other. I find that very puzzling. Is this a descent into what's called skepticism where you can't say you know anything? Well, it's heading that way, isn't it? Yeah, but I mean, just on a common sense, everything in existence is a matter of probabilistics. Yes, but it appeals to common sense cut in two directions. I mean, also it's common sense that we know all sorts of stuff like, you know, we've got hands, we're talking to each other. I mean, that's common sense too. But the trouble is that the various aspects of common sense when you think them through start to collide with each other and then common sense can't just rest content with itself, as it were. How do you deal with religious knowledge or claims for, even more general than that, claims for knowledge beyond the normal? I think you can break it down in a few ways. I mean, even if there is a God, take the best case scenario for the theist, as it were. There is a God. God made the world. God appeared to Moses. Moses wrote some stuff down. Supposing that's all right, all true, should we conclude people in the good case scenario know that there's a God by, say, reading the bits of Scripture? And even assuming all that is quite a delicate question. I mean, if we go to a more mundane setting, I mean, suppose a sports reporter watches a game and then, you know, filters through the newspapers. Interesting thing to ask yourself is, well, do you know there's not a misprint there? I mean, supposing in fact there isn't, it's the good case scenario, it's still not straightforward to answer the question does the recipient of the newspaper know that there isn't a misprint? Because it looks like that if they can know the sports score, that they can know there isn't a misprint. But it's really wacky to think they can know there's not a misprint. So, I mean, I think that's the sort of end of things where the philosopher might have something to say. Of course you're not going to convince skeptics that you know. I mean, that's asking for too much always. So you shouldn't be thinking, how do I show to the skeptic that I know? You should be thinking, how do I satisfy myself even in the good case scenario? That I'm rational. That I'm rational or that I know. But you can justify it to yourself that you are rational? Well, that's the lesser ambition. Can you at least produce defensive moves against arguments that show that you're irrational? I mean, there are some arguments designed to show that even in the good case scenario, you're irrational. I mean, if I have a box and there's a beetle in the box and you can't see in the box, you'd be irrational to believe that there's a beetle in the box, even if it's right. Even in the good case scenario, when there is a beetle in the box, if you believe there's a beetle in the box, when the beetle's hidden in the box, then you're, like, a bit weird, you know? So one line of thought is, well, even in the good case scenario, as a god for all intents and purposes... I'm not endorsing... God's like a beetle in the box, and so even if he's there, it's irrational to believe in him. So I think the thing that a sort of religious philosopher, theist should be doing is try to show how, in the good case scenario, things are very different to the beetle in the box scenario, and it would, at least in the good case scenario, be a case of knowledgeable belief. John follows truth's multidimensional paths. He differentiates knowledge from belief, then questions, in a world of probabilities, how we know anything. As for God, the beetle hidden in a box, John sets the hurdle of knowledgeable belief. John forces me to think hard about how I know all truth in general before I can ask about any truths in specific. For me, the truth I'm ultimately after is the truth of ultimate reality. Though I do not expect to find it, I am determined to pursue it. Must ultimate truth be objective truth, if there be any objective truth? Can ultimate truth be relative truth? Are interpretations? I go to Birmingham to visit a philosopher of religion who privileges interpretation, the legendary John Hick. We meet in his home. John, what is truth? Is there an objective truth? How do we address those kinds of questions? There are certain objective truths, such as the truths of mathematics. 2 plus 2 equals 4 is an objective truth because it's true by definition. I mean, ultimately, the system of mathematics is a definitional system, but everything else involves our own interpretation. By everything else, I mean everything we perceive. This is the critical realist principle. The human mind is all the time interpreting. When I see you as a solid object, I'm interpreting memory. I'm drawing upon memory of the past. I've found in the past that I go behind things and find that they were solid and so on. And in religion, I would say that by faith, we mean the interpretative element in our religious awareness. In our religious awareness, there is interpretation of our experience. This is faith. That is to say, it's not capable of proof. It's how our minds function and what we do. We interpret all the time. If that's the case, if we are interpreting all the time, that certainly reflects the neuroscience of how we exist, should that make us more humble in our declarations of what we believe to be true about almost anything? I think it should, yes. Well, that's a little scary. Well, yes, but then the more one thinks about things, the more scary they are, don't you think? So if we have this interpretative aspect to us that is so critical to what we have, the more we go into things like religion, the more powerful that becomes. Yes, indeed, yes. How then can I believe anything, especially in religion? Yes, well, ultimately it all comes back to religious experience and the transformation of experience in a very, very vivid way, which causes one to take a religious view. Well, I guess I'm out of luck then because I haven't had one. No, I know. Well, that's just too bad. I appreciate John's concern, but is it too bad that I've not had a religious experience? Perhaps not, I think. A religious experience might overwhelm rational thought. Anyway, I'd probably not trust my own feelings. My biggest fear is fooling myself. But if I cannot rely on even myself, then from where does our perception of truth come? What kind of truth can human beings know? I asked the publisher of Skeptic magazine, historian of science Michael Shermer, who stresses evolutionary explanations. I think from an evolutionary perspective, the correspondence theory of truth is probably the best match, in the sense that our brains evolved to solve certain problems in the physical and social environment. And it's modular, so it has lots of different neural networks doing different things to try to solve different problems. Sometimes they come into conflict, so that's why we sometimes are hypocritical and so on. But in terms of just pure survival, the closer you are to matching reality, corresponding to reality, then the more likely you are to survive. So you're a hominid on the plains of Africa three and a half million years ago and you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator or is it just the wind? Well, if you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator, turns out it's just the wind, you've made a type one error. False positive, it's kind of a superstitious type thing, but no harm. But if you make the other kind of error, you assume that the rustle in the grass is just the wind, turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch, right? So there's a selection process for getting it right more often than getting it wrong in a certain direction. So I think our brains actually are fairly good at getting it right most of the time, but not always. But that's as good as it gets until science. Without science, some kind of systematic, reliable method, we're going to make a lot of mistakes. Are there areas of truth that can be discerned independent of the scientific method? Well, somebody might get it right by accident, but for you and I to understand how we got it right and what the process is and communicate it, we have to have some language. And science is the language that we've developed with technologies and techniques to get at that. And so, I mean, it's one thing for you to say, well, I had this personal experience, I just know there's a God because I talked to him. That's nice, but how can I, you know, get in on that? We have to have some way of communicating, and science is a consistent language. Is then truth totally scientifically based? Well, I would prefer, I don't like the word truth. Maybe truth with a small t, provisional truth. I think the idea that there's some ultimate truth that's above our brains thinking about it. I'm a very pragmatic philosopher of science in that sense. Truth is what, you know, we end up finding some evidence for and talking about, and stuff that doesn't generate anything, well, it's not of interest. Truth is the foundation of existence. Here are my five questions for truth. One, to know what specific things are true, must we first have a general concept of truth? Or should truth be deflated? Two, must truth be anchored by reasons? Must we rely on a theory of truth, a deep mechanism by which things are made true? Or is truth only meaningful in particular cases and instances? Three, are there absolute truths accessible to rational inquiry? Or is all truth relative and fuzzy, the result of our biological brains or social cultures? Four, how did the human capacity for knowing truth arise? Blind evolution? Or via some kind of teleology, a goal direction? Five, are there non-secular truths, truths beyond the natural world? These questions, even without answers, get us closer to truth. For complete interviews and for further information, please visit closertotruth.com