Thoughts on Truth

The late Richard Rorty flippantly said that the truth is whatever your peers let you get away with. Whether your peers let you get away with something is a relevant consideration when it comes to judging what’s true, but it’s not a definition of truth. If your peers won’t let you get away with it, you should have some doubts. However, my peers’ permission to get away with saying or believing something is not an independent criterion. After all, one reason I consider some, but not all, persons my peers is that they agree with me about much of what I think is true.

In public discussion, I once said that the nature of truth is not an interesting philosophical question. This, despite being regarded as a truism in some philosophical neighborhoods, was received as a wild and crazy thing to say. My interlocuters saw the nature of truth as a profound philosophical matter. I ascribe their incredulity to a failure to pay heed to the difference between the question, “What is truth?” and the question, “What is true?” Often, in contrast to what is truth, what’s true matters a great deal. Suppose someone asserts “The cat is on the roof.” Then someone asserts, “It is true that the cat is on the roof;” it’s hard to see them as expressing two different ideas. The term “true” appears simply to be a device for economically saying again what has already been said. Suppose someone makes a long, complex statement, one it would be tedious to repeat. I want to express agreement, which I could do simply by repeating it. A preferable alternative is to say, “That’s true.” (In passing: something similar to this deflationary account of “truth” can be said of “fact.” I detect no difference between saying “The cat is on the roof,” “It is true that the cat is on the roof,” and “It is a fact that the cat is on the roof.” Unlike some, I think it’s a bad policy to use “fact” in an epistemological sense, though some understand “It is a fact that the cat is on the roof” as meaning “I know that the cat is on the roof.”)

While the question as to what truth is is not particularly interesting. this is not the case for some related questions. How the human mind can have thoughts, or have language. that represents, and sometimes misrepresents, reality, i.e., the question of intentionality, is a matter of intense philosophical, as well as scientific, concern. These are not questions about the nature of truth, but of meaning and of epistemology.

This deflationary account of what we mean when we call something true, does not exhaust the matter. We should go on to say that truth is “correspondence to reality.” For many, and for centuries, this has been thought of as a deeply mysterious idea. However, I think we should continue in a deflationary spirit. Something is true in virtue of corresponding to reality, but correspondence to reality is a pragmatic matter. Beliefs are like maps. A map is accurate just to the extent that it serves the navigational aims for which it is designed, enabling us to find our way around and to locate things we want to locate. That’s the test of the map’s accuracy. It corresponds to the mapped territory just because it serves the purposes for which we map that territory. There is no further fact as to what its correspondence to the territory amounts to. Beliefs (and statements that express them) are like maps in this regard, but they differ in that unlike maps, they do not say much--consider trying to translate everything a typical literal map shows you into a set of statements--and they do not have degrees of accuracy, but are either accurate or not, all or nothing, true or false. The invention of language is a simplification that serves the large purpose of creating things—statements and beliefs—that stand in inferential relations and thus making reasoning, in all its complexity, possible. It is, by the way, most likely that there is no "language of thought." Thought that is not subvocalized is not linguiform. The brain's representation of the world involves points, regions, and vectors in many higher -dimensional maps

An aspect of becoming educated, in contrast to being trained or indoctrinated, is acquiring a visceral sense of the difference between your subjective certitude and objective reality, the ability to take seriously that what you believe could be false. Lacking that, evidence against our beliefs, at least important ones, is essentially invisible, and we are deaf to arguments against them. Deference to truth is deference to the objective reality that lies beyond us. It’s acknowledgment that we are but creatures, part of this vast world and not its Maker. It’s important not to lose sight of this in a period when many have lost sight of the difference between what’s true about individuals’ personal experience—“my truth”—and what’s true of objective reality. What persons experience, and how they interpret their experience is sometimes of great interest and importance. Yet it’s a mistake to move uncritically from how things seem to a person to how things are. To do so is to accord that person power greater than human beings can safely be allowed, or could possibly have. It is to surrender the effort to penetrate beyond the bounds of subjectivity to objective reality. This is an era in which many miss the difference between neutrality and objectivity, and, seeing the impossibility of the former, mistakenly deny the possibility of the latter. We always come to the world with an indefinite and partly inchoate store of presuppositions; we are never neutral. Nor should we be. If Alice tells me she was born in the lovely seaside town of Neptune, New Jersey, while Bob tells me that he was born on the planet Neptune, I ought not to put aside my prejudices. Absent further evidence, Alice saying what she says is good enough reason to believe her, while what Bob says is nowhere near sufficient evidence to believe him. Here, neutrality would be irrational. But to eschew neutrality is not to abandon objectivity. We are appropriately objective when what we believe and say is open to public criticism in light of standards that can be publicly articulated, and if those standards are in dispute, they too are open to public criticism, and so on, recursively.

Allegiance to objective reality should be distinguished from the metaphysical doctrine that there can be a perfect fit of our beliefs and language to objective reality, and thus that there is one correct description of reality, “one way the world is.” Several years ago, while frequently commuting between Iowa and California, I often looked down on the seemingly endless basin and range country, wondering how many mountains there are in Nevada. I realized that there is no uniquely correct answer. The answer—though not what’s there, the desolate landscape 30,000 feet below—depends on and is constrained at the interface of our aims and reality. There is no one right answer, but some are better than others and some are no good at all. The same holds if, right now, you look around you and ask, “How many things are there in this room?” What’s in the room doesn’t depend on your answer, yet which answers are good or bad depends on what you decide to count as a thing: each molecule, chairs, the legs of chairs, each of the four walls, holes in the walls, shadows on them, your ideas of them, and so on, without end. Devoid of interests and a point of view, the question is empty. W. V. O. Quine once derisively asked, "How long is the Nile, not in miles, or kilometers, or inches, and so on, but simply in itself?" The length of the Nile is an aspect of objective reality, independent of us, but the right answer to the question about its length depends on how we measure it. There’s no one right way to count; that depends on your reasons for counting. There are many different, but equally true, descriptions of the world.

Insisting on there being an objective reality independent of us, we should not, on the other hand, lose sight of our insistent habit of projecting upon it properties that belong to our modes of apprehension. When I say that something is cute, disgusting, interesting, sweet, bitter, funny, vulgar, exciting, blue, beautiful, good, bad, right, or wrong, and so on and on-- no doubt, the final few are controversial--I refer not to properties that inhere in the thing in itself, but belong to it derivatively, in virtue of how it affects me. There is no route from this largely truistic fact to subjectivism, or idealism. For our disposition to, as David Hume put it, 'spread' qualities that are in us onto objective reality," and not generally notice that this is what we are doing, is at bottom a product of our evolutionary history, however culturally tweaked, Natural selection tracks only what exists in reality and has a positive bearing on inclusive fitness, so these dispositions are responses to genuine similarities and differences in the world beyond our minds.

Some find the denial of there being the one correct description of reality inconsistent with the idea that the world is God’s creation. They think there must be one true description of the world, the one in the mind of God. One place to find this expressed is in the slogan, widespread in Christian higher education, “All truth is God’s truth.” This serves a worthy purpose for students who have been taught that there is “sacred” truth that ought to occupy us to the exclusion of the truths of history, art, science, i.e., secular culture in general. To assert that all truth is God’s truth warns against locking our theological beliefs safely away in a separate compartment, untouched by whatever else we learn. The ideal of a coherent, comprehensive body of beliefs is one we should all pursue. However, there is a sense in which not all truth is God’s truth. Beliefs, or statements, are ordered n-tuples of concepts. “The cat is on the roof” combines the concepts cat, roof, and on. Each concept has rules of application; when they are followed, the belief or statement is true. “If it has wings, don’t call it a cat;” “If it has four legs, a tail, and meows, it’s OK to call it a cat.” Consider, though, concepts employed to derogate people. The slur “kaffir,” for example, has rules of application. If you apply it to a cat, or to a Swede, what you say is false, but if someone calls a black South African a kaffir, this is true. The concept is applied as intended. Nonetheless, we should resist the idea that this is God’s truth. Presumably, God rejects the concept and with it any truths in which it appears. It is a truth that is not God’s.

Some speak of a “God’s eye” point of view, a “view from nowhere,” in the sense of a perspective free of all interests and biases, a totally “objective” (really neutral) perspective not tied to who the viewer is. The viewer’s interests, purposes and commitments have no bearing. If we were to ask God how many things there are in the room he could supply us with the right answer to the exclusion of all others, the Truth. However, the God of Christian faith does not take a God’s eye point of view. God has his own point of view, shaped by his aims and interests, by what he cares about. God’s view on things is a matter of his commitment to those he has created. So, Christians’ proper aim is to take up God’s view on reality and make it their own, surely not to strive for a view from nowhere. From that perspective, there are no kaffirs and no meaningful statements, and thus no truths, about them.

Finally, these considerations may well lead us to be less dismissive of Rorty’s remark. One way to characterize one’s peers is as those with whom one shares a repertoire of concepts, and to this extent parse reality in the same way. The same catalogue of truths is available to them. Even though they need not agree on what is true, they agree on what can be true.