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.