I am embarking on a development effort to create quest based learning tasks in Second Life. This is a part of the vein of work that I have been pursuing with virtual worlds and video games. A question that faculty often have to deal with when pursuing their interests is - Well, that all sounds very interesting, but, is it research?
Business schools have an inferiority complex when it comes to research (and rightly so) leading the faculty to question such pursuits with regard to their validity as research endeavors. This is an incredibly important topic for business school faculty, so I thought I would digress a bit on this issue of research.
Business school research is, at best, a poorly defined concept, with definitions and criteria varying widely from school to school and among faculty members within a school. Under the most lax definitions, everything is research and under the most stringent, nothing is research. So clearly the concepts needs a little clarifying.
Wernher von Braun is credited with the oft cited observation "research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing". The original quote included the modifier "basic" which changes the meaning slightly. However, this is the version that you see cited most often.
If not knowing what you are doing is the criteria for research then business faculty across this great nation and around the world are doing a great deal more research than they are getting credit for. And their is some justification for this claim. Research is the process by which we create new knowledge. And if we already know what we are doing, then we are not creating anything new.
Plato struggled with this same problem. He wondered how you could recognize truth unless you already knew it was truth. This, in turn, led to his observation that you never really learn anything new, you just remember things you already knew. This is actually an astute observation on Plato's part. But, I will just make him look silly if I try to explain it.
Putting aside the philosophical subtlties regarding truth and knowledge, I think it is fair to say that when people do not know what they are doing, we should take it at face value. That is, it is not research. They simply do not know what they are doing. At the same time we do not want to completely ignore the fact that in order to do research you must step away from the things you know and discover things that you don't know. Just exactly how that is done can be very tricky at times.
Showing posts with label truth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label truth. Show all posts
Monday, October 12, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Truth Claims
The designation of true or false do not apply to most statements. For example, if someone were to say "there are parallel universes that we will never know about", this statement cannot be shown to be either true or false. The logical construction of this claim makes it impossible to resolve. Other statements, such as "people are basically good" are equally as unresolvable due to the ambiguity of the word good. In order for a statement to be a truth claim, it must be a claim that can, somehow, be refuted. If there is no way for a claim to be refuted, then it is not a truth claim and it can never achieve the status of truth.
The reason for this is that the body of assertions that we refer to as true are all assertions that could have been show not to be true if indeed they were but after repeated attempts at refutation have continued to hold up. This is the thing that all kinds of truth have in common. Whether we are talking about scientific truth, historical truth, journalistic truth or any of the varieties of truth we may encounter, they all follow a similar pattern. A claim is made that can, potentially, be refuted. We then try to refute it. More people jump into the fray attempting to refute it. As the claim continues to hold up after repeated and sincere attempts to refute it, we begin to believe it and the probability that it is a durable claim increases.
So, the key elements in the discovery of truth are: refutable claims, an agreed upon method for challenging them, and repeated attempts at refutation by people whose only concern is the veracity of the claim. This plays out very differently in different fields. Scientists conduct experiments. However, some sciences such as astronomy don't conduct experiments. Astronomers collect data. Journalists gather facts. Historian have to contend with the historical record. Writers of novels have to square with human experience. In each case a claim is made that must square with evidence according to an accepted method. The question, at this point is, can this approach be applied to moral truths or truths about the future?
The reason for this is that the body of assertions that we refer to as true are all assertions that could have been show not to be true if indeed they were but after repeated attempts at refutation have continued to hold up. This is the thing that all kinds of truth have in common. Whether we are talking about scientific truth, historical truth, journalistic truth or any of the varieties of truth we may encounter, they all follow a similar pattern. A claim is made that can, potentially, be refuted. We then try to refute it. More people jump into the fray attempting to refute it. As the claim continues to hold up after repeated and sincere attempts to refute it, we begin to believe it and the probability that it is a durable claim increases.
So, the key elements in the discovery of truth are: refutable claims, an agreed upon method for challenging them, and repeated attempts at refutation by people whose only concern is the veracity of the claim. This plays out very differently in different fields. Scientists conduct experiments. However, some sciences such as astronomy don't conduct experiments. Astronomers collect data. Journalists gather facts. Historian have to contend with the historical record. Writers of novels have to square with human experience. In each case a claim is made that must square with evidence according to an accepted method. The question, at this point is, can this approach be applied to moral truths or truths about the future?
Monday, April 6, 2009
Truth and Method
Francis Bacon said that method is more important than genius in discovering knowledge. He compared our pursuit of truth to a runner in pursuit of a destination. Method is the path and genius is the speed of the runner. A runner on the wrong path will get to the wrong place. If he happens to be a fast runner, he will get to the wrong place sooner. A runner on the right path will get to the right place. If he happens to be a slow runner, he will still get there. It will just take a little longer. So, method, according to Bacon will get us to the truth eventually. Genius will just get us to the wrong places faster.
Despite the variety of truth that we discussed a couple posts ago, they all have a similar method by which we arrived at them. Truth begins with a claim of some kind that we then attempt to determine the veracity of. Then we continue to test the veracity. Over time, if the claim continues to hold up as more and more people test the veracity, then we begin to accept the claim as true. This sketch of our method for discovering truth needs a little more fleshing out, but the essence holds up across different domains.
First, the claim cannot just be any willy nilly claim. It has to be a valid claim based on our understanding of the domain and clearly derivable from the things we know.
Second, the attempts to determine the veracity should be skeptical but not cynical. Skeptical means that we are trying to determine the truth rather than re-enforce what we want to believe. Not being cynical means that we have to accept evidence that is not 100% certain.
And, third, the motives of those who do repeated testing on the idea should be to determine the veracity of the idea and not some other agenda such as discrediting it. And, if the claim continues to hold up over time and under repeated challenges, then we accept its durability and accept it as the truth.
The next step is to show how this sketch of method holds up in the variety of areas we already discussed, revealing that scientific truth, literary truth, historical truth, and even moral truths have something in common. And we will see how this apporach applies to the use of stories in the pursuit of moral truth. Finally, just to push things to their limit, I will introduce a notion of truth about the future which I will call imaginary truth. Imaginary truth can and will be held to the same standards of durability as our other notions of truth. And, imaginary truth gives us a headlight into the future that we badly need as the future continues to come at us at an increasingly faster rate.
Despite the variety of truth that we discussed a couple posts ago, they all have a similar method by which we arrived at them. Truth begins with a claim of some kind that we then attempt to determine the veracity of. Then we continue to test the veracity. Over time, if the claim continues to hold up as more and more people test the veracity, then we begin to accept the claim as true. This sketch of our method for discovering truth needs a little more fleshing out, but the essence holds up across different domains.
First, the claim cannot just be any willy nilly claim. It has to be a valid claim based on our understanding of the domain and clearly derivable from the things we know.
Second, the attempts to determine the veracity should be skeptical but not cynical. Skeptical means that we are trying to determine the truth rather than re-enforce what we want to believe. Not being cynical means that we have to accept evidence that is not 100% certain.
And, third, the motives of those who do repeated testing on the idea should be to determine the veracity of the idea and not some other agenda such as discrediting it. And, if the claim continues to hold up over time and under repeated challenges, then we accept its durability and accept it as the truth.
The next step is to show how this sketch of method holds up in the variety of areas we already discussed, revealing that scientific truth, literary truth, historical truth, and even moral truths have something in common. And we will see how this apporach applies to the use of stories in the pursuit of moral truth. Finally, just to push things to their limit, I will introduce a notion of truth about the future which I will call imaginary truth. Imaginary truth can and will be held to the same standards of durability as our other notions of truth. And, imaginary truth gives us a headlight into the future that we badly need as the future continues to come at us at an increasingly faster rate.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Truth as a Durability Claim
We often believe, somewhat naively, that there is a thing out there in the world called 'The Truth'. We not only believe it exists, we also believe if we try hard enough, we can find it. This misconception, I believe, comes, in turn, from two other misconceptions.
The first of these misconceptions is that there is something 'out there': a stable, uniform, consistent reality upon which everyone can agree. I would refer back to my traffic accident example. Something happened, but what it was is up to dispute. Some elements of the traffic accident may be less disputed than others. Who was going north and who was going south might be largely agreed upon. However, which one swerved first or who took their eyes off the road may not be. Similarly, the properties of oxygen in the real world may be largely agreed up, while the properties of road rage may not be.
The second of these misconceptions is that whatever is out there, we can know it directly and objectively. How much of our knowledge comes to us directly by observation rather than through lens, films, books etc. If you hold up an X-ray picture of a broken arm, is that what the arm 'really' looks like? Most of our knowledge is brought to us via instruments. And those instruments are not just physical instruments like a telescope. Many are conceptual instruments like logic and statistics that help us to organize our knowledge. By the time we understand something, it bears little resemblance to the thing we were trying to understand.
So, if there isn't a thing called 'The Truth', what do we mean when we use the word 'Truth'. I think that the best way to look at it is to say that when we say something is 'The Truth' we are making a durability claim. That is we are asserting a low likelihood to the possibility that we no longer believe the claim in the future. What we mean by truth is that as you re-examine the evidence you are likely to come to the same conclusions. As other people re-examine the evidence, they are likely to come to the same conclusions. And as additional people in the future examine the evidence, they will also come to the same conclusions.
It is possible that people 100,000 years from now may see the world entirely differently. They may reject some, most or even all as what we see as the truth. However, we don't really care about that. If we believed in absolute truth, then this would be a serious problem. But when we see truth as a durability claim, it is not. Something is true if we are unlikely to change our minds about it in any time frame that we care about.
The first of these misconceptions is that there is something 'out there': a stable, uniform, consistent reality upon which everyone can agree. I would refer back to my traffic accident example. Something happened, but what it was is up to dispute. Some elements of the traffic accident may be less disputed than others. Who was going north and who was going south might be largely agreed upon. However, which one swerved first or who took their eyes off the road may not be. Similarly, the properties of oxygen in the real world may be largely agreed up, while the properties of road rage may not be.
The second of these misconceptions is that whatever is out there, we can know it directly and objectively. How much of our knowledge comes to us directly by observation rather than through lens, films, books etc. If you hold up an X-ray picture of a broken arm, is that what the arm 'really' looks like? Most of our knowledge is brought to us via instruments. And those instruments are not just physical instruments like a telescope. Many are conceptual instruments like logic and statistics that help us to organize our knowledge. By the time we understand something, it bears little resemblance to the thing we were trying to understand.
So, if there isn't a thing called 'The Truth', what do we mean when we use the word 'Truth'. I think that the best way to look at it is to say that when we say something is 'The Truth' we are making a durability claim. That is we are asserting a low likelihood to the possibility that we no longer believe the claim in the future. What we mean by truth is that as you re-examine the evidence you are likely to come to the same conclusions. As other people re-examine the evidence, they are likely to come to the same conclusions. And as additional people in the future examine the evidence, they will also come to the same conclusions.
It is possible that people 100,000 years from now may see the world entirely differently. They may reject some, most or even all as what we see as the truth. However, we don't really care about that. If we believed in absolute truth, then this would be a serious problem. But when we see truth as a durability claim, it is not. Something is true if we are unlikely to change our minds about it in any time frame that we care about.
Monday, March 23, 2009
The Varieties of Truth
Once of the problems in attempting to nail down the truth is that there are always a variety of different kinds of truth. Suppose that a huge explosion occurs in he center of a small town in the northeastern United States. And people ask "What happened?" There are many possible answers to this question, all of which has some claim on being 'the truth'.
You could explain the explosion in terms of the chemical reactions that caused the explosion to occur. You might say something like "chemical A in conjunction with chemical B in the presence of a trigger such as heat or shock caused a chemical reaction that expanded too rapidly for the space in which it was contained and the result was an explosion". This, assuming that the facts are correct, could be considered the truth. However, it is hardly satisfying.
A newspaper account might say that there was an explosion due to irresponsible dumping of hazardous chemicals into the sewage system, or perhaps a disgruntled political group was making a statement. Either of these explanations, assuming the facts to be correct, could also claim to be the truth.
Years later a social historian might claim that the explosion was merely an instance of a larger social trend in which corporations showed reckless regard for the environment. The damage done by the explosion, in this case, was part of the cost for that reckless behavior. Again this may very well be true.
Finally, an author might write a novel at some point which shows how human greed in the present often surpassed our concern for the future attempting to reveal some larger truth about the human condition. This, if the story were sufficiently compelling, might also be considered as the truth.
All of these statements have some claim on being 'the truth'. We can quibble about 'kinds' of truth and say the first is scientific truth, the second truth in journalism, the third a historical truth, and the last one a literary truth. But acknolwedging all these kinds of truth flies in the face of the notion that there is something called 'The Truth'. Different people probably have some preference for which variety of truth is the most important. However, these people probably also don't agree with each other, and since there is no way to resolve the dispute there is no way to get to the truth.
However, all is not lost. All of these varieties of truth have two things in common. First, is that claiming something is 'the truth' is a durability claim. And, second, that durability claim is enhanced by arriving at the claim through an agreed upon method. These two ideas will be taken up next.
You could explain the explosion in terms of the chemical reactions that caused the explosion to occur. You might say something like "chemical A in conjunction with chemical B in the presence of a trigger such as heat or shock caused a chemical reaction that expanded too rapidly for the space in which it was contained and the result was an explosion". This, assuming that the facts are correct, could be considered the truth. However, it is hardly satisfying.
A newspaper account might say that there was an explosion due to irresponsible dumping of hazardous chemicals into the sewage system, or perhaps a disgruntled political group was making a statement. Either of these explanations, assuming the facts to be correct, could also claim to be the truth.
Years later a social historian might claim that the explosion was merely an instance of a larger social trend in which corporations showed reckless regard for the environment. The damage done by the explosion, in this case, was part of the cost for that reckless behavior. Again this may very well be true.
Finally, an author might write a novel at some point which shows how human greed in the present often surpassed our concern for the future attempting to reveal some larger truth about the human condition. This, if the story were sufficiently compelling, might also be considered as the truth.
All of these statements have some claim on being 'the truth'. We can quibble about 'kinds' of truth and say the first is scientific truth, the second truth in journalism, the third a historical truth, and the last one a literary truth. But acknolwedging all these kinds of truth flies in the face of the notion that there is something called 'The Truth'. Different people probably have some preference for which variety of truth is the most important. However, these people probably also don't agree with each other, and since there is no way to resolve the dispute there is no way to get to the truth.
However, all is not lost. All of these varieties of truth have two things in common. First, is that claiming something is 'the truth' is a durability claim. And, second, that durability claim is enhanced by arriving at the claim through an agreed upon method. These two ideas will be taken up next.
Monday, March 16, 2009
What is the Truth, Anyway?
You would think that there is an answer to the question - what is the truth? Unfortunately, this is not the case. Like witnesses reporting the 'facts' of a traffic accident, different observers have very different perspectives.
There is a correspondence theory of truth that says a thing is true if it corresponds to the real world. This sounds pretty good but begins to fall apart when we ask what we mean by "corresponds to the real world". Since we organize our knowledge into categories and structures that certainly don't exist in the real world, this gets a little dicey.
Another view, called the coherence view, suggests that those categories and structures must provide a consistent and coherent view of the world and use coherency as the criterion for truth. That is, it needs to make sense considering other things we know.
While both of these provide useful ways of looking at the truth, they both address truth about the natural world. If we are seeking truth about the social world such as, how do we interpret and explain the human experience, or if we are looking for truths about the moral sphere such as, how should we behave as moral agents, then there is no place to look in the natural world for answers. Hints maybe, but answers - no.
This is to say that despite our reverence for science and despite the great reputation it has for bringing us closer to the truth about the natural world, science does not bring us one iota closer to truth about the social world or the moral sphere. What does bring us closer to truth about interpreting our experience as humans and how we should behave as moral agents? The answer, which I will get around to eventually, is - stories.
There is a correspondence theory of truth that says a thing is true if it corresponds to the real world. This sounds pretty good but begins to fall apart when we ask what we mean by "corresponds to the real world". Since we organize our knowledge into categories and structures that certainly don't exist in the real world, this gets a little dicey.
Another view, called the coherence view, suggests that those categories and structures must provide a consistent and coherent view of the world and use coherency as the criterion for truth. That is, it needs to make sense considering other things we know.
While both of these provide useful ways of looking at the truth, they both address truth about the natural world. If we are seeking truth about the social world such as, how do we interpret and explain the human experience, or if we are looking for truths about the moral sphere such as, how should we behave as moral agents, then there is no place to look in the natural world for answers. Hints maybe, but answers - no.
This is to say that despite our reverence for science and despite the great reputation it has for bringing us closer to the truth about the natural world, science does not bring us one iota closer to truth about the social world or the moral sphere. What does bring us closer to truth about interpreting our experience as humans and how we should behave as moral agents? The answer, which I will get around to eventually, is - stories.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Stories and Reality
In Plato's Republic the poets were ejected because their art compromised the search for truth. Since much of our modern distrust of stories finds its roots in Plato, it is worthwhile to revisit the issue there. Plato believed in absolute truth. A simple example will illustrate this. Consider the mathematical definition of a triangle. It is an abstract mathematical object with three sides. The sum of the internal angles is 180 degrees. That is a pretty good definition. It includes all triangles and excludes everything that is not a triangle. Further, with that precise definition we can deduce further truths about triangles without even having to consult individual triangles. But, this ideal form of a triangle does not exist in the material world. All the triangles we have are imperfect copies. So, where does this ideal triangle exist? Plato posited a World of Forms where all ideal objects reside. This World of Forms is the world of absolute truth. The material world in which we live is merely an imperfect copy. And herein lies the wrinkle with poets.
I am going to switch from using the word 'poets' to using the word 'writers' because our modern understanding of the word 'poet' is different and a little misleading. Writers construct imaginary scenarios from real experiences and through those imaginary scenarios explore questions regarding the meaning of our experiences as humans. So, writers, like philosophers, are concerned with a search for truth. However, from Plato's perspective, the material world in which we have our experiences is an imperfect copy of the ideal world and hence once removed from the truth. The world constructed by writers is an imperfect copy of an imperfect copy moving us, yet, further away from the truth. Due to their sins of imperfection and the dilution of the absolute truth, the poets and writers were banned from the ideal republic. The questions are - did Plato really believe this? and it is true?
First, the question of whether or not Plato actually believed this is unanswerable since Plato has been dead for millennium and we cannot interrogate him. However, looking at his body of philosophical work it would be hard to conclude that he really did believe this. First, his dialogues are all written in a story form. If he really believed that stories took us further away from the truth then why did he use stories to convey the truth. Second, within these stories are numerous mini stories used to illustrate specific points and subtlties. Again, if Plato really believed that stories moved us away from the truth, why did he rely so heavily on them in his pursuit of truth?
Second, the question of whether stories move us toward or away from truth is too big an issue to be taken up at the end. So, I will pick that up next time.
I am going to switch from using the word 'poets' to using the word 'writers' because our modern understanding of the word 'poet' is different and a little misleading. Writers construct imaginary scenarios from real experiences and through those imaginary scenarios explore questions regarding the meaning of our experiences as humans. So, writers, like philosophers, are concerned with a search for truth. However, from Plato's perspective, the material world in which we have our experiences is an imperfect copy of the ideal world and hence once removed from the truth. The world constructed by writers is an imperfect copy of an imperfect copy moving us, yet, further away from the truth. Due to their sins of imperfection and the dilution of the absolute truth, the poets and writers were banned from the ideal republic. The questions are - did Plato really believe this? and it is true?
First, the question of whether or not Plato actually believed this is unanswerable since Plato has been dead for millennium and we cannot interrogate him. However, looking at his body of philosophical work it would be hard to conclude that he really did believe this. First, his dialogues are all written in a story form. If he really believed that stories took us further away from the truth then why did he use stories to convey the truth. Second, within these stories are numerous mini stories used to illustrate specific points and subtlties. Again, if Plato really believed that stories moved us away from the truth, why did he rely so heavily on them in his pursuit of truth?
Second, the question of whether stories move us toward or away from truth is too big an issue to be taken up at the end. So, I will pick that up next time.
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