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 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.

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.

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.

The Role of Stories in the Ethics of Virtual Worlds

In a previous post, I cited Marshall McLuhan's famous, and yet apocryphal quote "looking to the past to understand the future is like driving by looking in the rear view mirror." A rapidly changing technological base creates a path into the future with a lot of twists and turns, in which the future comes at us with increasing rapidity. The question is - how do we get a headlight into the future that will allow us to look forward instead of backwards in order to make decisions about what we need to do. The answer, I believe, is stories. Stories provide a headlight into the future, a way to explore possible worlds and possible outcomes.

My favorite example of this kind of story is Micheal Crichton's Jurassic Park. This cautionary tale is an attempt to explore the ethics of bio technology in a narrative form. Crichton's argument is that if you have unregulated bio tech research and have scientists working primarily for profit or fame, then all hell will break loose and nature will strike back at you. This book is a masterpiece of writing technique and makes a compelling narrative argument. But, it is only one possible narrative argument.

I teach a class in writing stories to explore the ethcis of technology, and, in this class, I have students find a flaw in Crichton's argument and provide a narrative alternative. Consider, for a moment, some of the stories that have swayed public thinking in a major way. These include: The Jungle, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hard Times and Frankenstein; just to name a few. Each of these stories has presented one single narrative argument, one possible world. What we really need is to have authors take on more sides of the argument and allow us to see a variety of possible worlds.

In the same way that scientific debates lead to a better understanding of what is true, narrative debates can allow us to acheive a better understanding of what is good or what is desirable. And, here we are back to writing again. In Plato's Republic, he dismissed the poets to focus on rationality. Perhaps, now, in the 21st century, we will realise that rationality isn't everything and invite the poets back in.