Is There a Truth about Truth?

7/29/2019 Is There a Truth about Truth?

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Is There a Truth about Truth?

by Gabe Czobel

Abstract:

The short answer to this question is, no well, maybe. And that's about as committal as I will get,preferring instead to examine the various perspectives that have been bandied about since the dawn ofphilosophical ruminations, and hoping to sort out a sensible, workable viewpoint. We know languagecommonly contains such words as true and truth, but just exactly what do they mean, if indeedthey mean anything at all exactly?

Philosophers have wrestled mightily with the concept of truth since ancient times and continue to doso right up to the present, without reaching anything that may be considered to be a consensus. Ideashave certainly proliferated and reached ever greater levels of subtlety, but clearly not to the satisfactionof all involved in the melee.

Going back to the time of Plato and Aristotle, we have such pronouncements, intuitively sensible to us,as Plato noted, The true one states facts as they are ... And the false one states things that are otherthan the facts [1] . Aristotle in turn asserted, To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is,is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true [2]. In more recenttimes, a variety of complex, formal theories of truth have been proposed in an attempt to pin down,with some methodical precision, the nature of truth and how one would arrive at it and determine itprecisely and unequivocally in all instances where it was in question. Now, being theories, of coursethis begs the question if any one of them can somehow be shown to be determinedly true, which is alittle bit like a snake chasing its tail. This particular quandary gives a small hint of just why the issue oftruth can be so elusive.

It is appropriate at this point to briefly raise the question of why truth matters at all. Clearly, it doesmatter, as evidenced by the tremendous amount of intellectual effort expended over great spans of timein attempting its clarification. But I will hint in this regard, to be expanded on later, that why truthmatters may actually hold a key to better understanding its nature as a human functional concept.

In considering why truth matters, it needs little emphasis that truth is generally valued and falsehoodscorned when it comes to personal beliefs, what our senses tell us, what other people communicate tous or of what they try to convince us, and so on. No one willingly wants to be fooled, bamboozled, ordeluded. We also want others to know and abide by the truth in general matters important in socialintercourse such as politics, law, health, engineering, science, and the like, so that society functions as

smoothly, beneficially, and as safely as possible. This is simple self interest. Highly technical areassuch as logic, mathematics, the sciences, philosophy, or generally any academic realm, would quicklyunravel without due regard for the centrality of truth. All this is self-evident. Now let's see of whatvalue the various theories of truth, developed in philosophy, have in satisfying our concerns about whytruth matters.

Theories of TruthThere are a number of common notions that these theories try to address in general:


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1. Of what things in the world can it be said that they are true, that is,possess the property or valueof truth? These are called truth-bearers. Truth-bearers are most commonly statements,propositions, and beliefs.

2. What makes these things true? These are called truth-makers.3. Are true and not true (false) the only options in all cases? The affirmative answer to this

question is called bivalence.

Without any attempt to be exhaustive or engage in evaluation, these are very brief summaries of themost common theories of truth, just to give a flavour of what the main players are in this arena:

1. The correspondence theory has it that truth-bearers bear some relation, or correspond to,particular facts or the way things are in the world. Thus, it is this relation to the world thatmakes the truth bearers true and the absence of such a relation to anything in the world makesthem false.This theory brings with it a commitment to a reality of facts existing independently of anyobserver or perhaps even beyond any possibility of observation. Hence, objectivity is providedby this means.

2. The coherence theory has it that truth is determined by a coherence relation of some truth-bearer in question to a set or system of other truth-bearers that are already considered coherentand consistent among themselves. That is, it fits the set.There is no commitment to a reality existing independently beyond the system itself.

3. The pragmatic theory holds a broad set of attitudes regarding truth inpractice, as opposedsimply to abstract truth, while accepting some reliance on an independently existing reality andverification. The attitudes are expressed variously as, the ultimate outcome of inquiry in thelong run, that which is good, useful, and expedient, warranted assertability, leading toconsistency, stability, and flowing human intercourse, and so on in the same vein ofpracticality.

4. Deflationary theory forms an umbrella for various specific theories that consider the notion oftruth to be dispensable, redundant, utilitarian, an opaque primitive, insubstantial, and generallynot to be anguished over in great metaphysical detail as is done in the correspondence andcoherence theories.

5. The semantic theory was developed by Alfred Tarski in an attempt to grapple with certainparadoxes that may arise in natural languages, such as the Liar paradox [3]. His highly technicalformal theory is intended to apply to formal languages and produced the iconic schema, 'Snowis white' is true in English if and only if snow is white.

All of these are marked by the fact that detractors have pointed out, at great length, variousshortcomings that would negate labeling any of these as final, universally effective or even coherent,while supporters have, in turn, come up with what they consider valid, and equally complexcounterarguments. It is impossible to detail these exchanges here on account of their breadth andcomplexity. See Grayling [4] for a very cogent overview. Suffice to say that truth remains, in thephilosophical arena, a hotly contested concept.

And this is exactly as it should be this should surprise no one! One need only consider, as a startingpoint, that truth and its cognates true and false, along with the same concepts in other languages,are simply words in natural language. If we take it for granted that natural languages are not fixed,eternal features of the world, but would have arisen from scratch, probably bit by bit rather than as acomplete whole, and evolved along with humans in the course of human history, it would make sense


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that individual words would have also arisen at various times along the language's evolutionary time-line. We certainly know that such a thing is still going on, evidenced in the form of neologisms. We canalso take it for granted that language primarily fulfills a need of communication and social interaction,which are clearly strongly facilitated by the use of language.

Philosophy would have then followed upon, in time, this process of linguistic evolution, as philosophy

primarily takes the form of a narrative activity outlining ruminations about salient concepts that we find surprise in language! The words true and truth, as commonly and mundanely used in thelinguistic forum, without a great deal of thought being given to them, then come under microscopicscrutiny by philosophically inclined individuals, since they simply beg for such examination, being socentral to harmonious social exchange and in giving warrant to our various world-views.

I'll return to words and linguistic evolution shortly, but I first want to shed some light on what I feel aremissteps in the broad philosophical approach so far.

Truth as a Property

Perhaps one of the greatest impediments that stymies philosophical inquiry into this area is the viewthat truth is an inherentproperty of something, namely the truth-bearers, such as sentences,propositions, and beliefs. The very expression truth-bearer implies something that carries, holds,supports, or possesses another, separate thing, namely truth.

With regard to sentences and propositions, these typically stand apart from any individual who uttersthem since we may not know who actually stated a particular sentence, when, and in what context, andwe do not need to know it for it to have objective properties. For instance, the number of words in asentence, or even the particular language in which it was written or uttered, are observable, objectiveproperties. Sentences similarly stand apart from the possible prospective interpreters of those sentences.Hence, sentences are viewed as independent things bearing independent properties. The humancommunicators are detached from this picture.

The aspect of truth, as something held to be an inherent property, confers the intuitive notion that sucha property is somehow fixed, objective and detectable by some independent, empirical means, such ashow we can detect the mass of an apple, the malleability of gold, the velocity of a bullet, and so on.This is so, at least when applied to sentences and perhaps to propositions, although a little harder forthe latter. Beliefs, being mental phenomena, are more problematic still in bearing properties which arepublicly, objectively observable, unless the beliefs are translated and uttered as sentences; which thentakes us back to objective properties of sentences. It is presumed that a belief, held to have the propertyof truth, would be expressible, in principle, by sentences that have the same truth value, the sameproperty of truth. Even those holding a personal belief may still need to articulate it in sentences inorder to clarify to themselves just exactly what it is that they believe.

This whole approach implicitly grants an independent, objective, metaphysical status to truth. It makesit appear to be something that is detached from humans and human activity, as something that isindependently out there, discoverable by some means or other. The point being made here is not theone about some presumption of an independently existing reality giving credibility to humanutterances, but rather that truth itself is somehowpartof that independent reality. We have theappearance of assertions such as, The truth is out there. Truth is reified and it attains some Platonicstatus.


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One can easily see a problem with such a perspective of truth as a metaphysical property of things byexamining a sentence such as, The British left waffles on Falkland Islands. Some, taking a literalview, may see this sentence as a remark about certain food items left behind on specific islands bysome inhabitants deriving from Britain. Others, more correctly in the context, will see this as a remarkabout British groups of a particular political leaning being equivocal in their opinions about a historicalevent. It is clear that there is a possibility that the sentence may be true in one case, where the

mentioned food items were actually left behind, and false in another, where the groups mentioned didnot, in fact, equivocate. But how can the same sentence have a single property with contradictoryvalues? This is much like saying that the sentence consists of six words and also of ten words. This isnot the way we like to have our metaphysics. The same problem applies to sentences whose truthdepends on context and time, such as, I have the flu. Today this sentence may be true but next monthnot true. This makes it clear that it may lead to confusion to view truth as a simple, distinct property ofa specific sentence viewed as an objective collection of words.

And propositions as truth-bearers fare no better since the link between sentences, as collections ofwords in some natural language, and the equivalent abstract propositions is still a matter of inference.The truth of a sentence, as we usually conceive it, arises out of an interplay of the string of words,which form the sentence, and the mental machinery that extracts the semantics of the sentence.

Truth as Reference

There is a commonality among many of the theories that makes truth, in some sense, contextual, inreference to something apart from the truth-bearer itself. This is simply intuitive since it would be hardto conceive a sentence, for example, to have a correctness or epistemic value that is, to be true -- incomplete isolation from , or absence of, some presumed reality beyond the sentence itself. It would justbe a detached string of words. There would be no truth-makers. One exception to this would be self-referential paradoxes, such as the Liar mentioned earlier, but these are rarely found in commonexchanges.

There are two broad categories of truth-makers:

1. Some reality.2. A system of other truth-bearers.

On closer examination, these two categories are seen not really to be distinct and independent. Even inthe case of the most extreme solipsism, there is the assumption that something exists and persists. Atthe bottom, this is the essence of what is held to be the notion of reality. More commonly though, theset of things that exist and persist is held to be vastly larger than the self, although the devil is in thedetails. So a reality of some sort is not in dispute on pain of contradiction. Hence, truth-bearers havingsome type of conformity with whatever type of reality is the case, is the most essential, intuitive notionof the concept of truth for purposes of pragmatic self-interest, as will be outlined further on.

If we focus on category 2 above, coherence with a system of truth-bearers, it is inescapable that such asystem is also part of some greater reality. The system would need to exist and persist to be of any useas reference, although existence does not need to be manifestly material. If we question how such asystem of truth-bearers comes into existence, noting that the members of the system are typicallymental ideas, theories, beliefs, assertions, etc. -- communally held and possibly recorded, the mostreasonable scenario, beyond a grand, wholly formed revelation, is that the system grew piecemeal.There had to be the first considered truth-bearer. The question then arises, with respect to what was that


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truth-bearer held to be true, since there was not yet a system. The what had to be from category 1, areference to some reality itself.

Even most mathematical axioms and postulates are formed because their truth is intuitively self-evidentwithout proof, given our view of reality being as it is. That is, they conform to what we take as realityand we could not conceive of them being otherwise, given that our conceptual faculties are a product

of, and embedded in, that reality. If some axiom, that is not intuitively self-evident, leads to someconclusion contradicting manifest reality, it is discarded as an axiom.

Hence, category 2 rests entirely on pillars grounded in category 1. Taking coherence with some systemas an arbiter of truth is merely expressing a laziness to trace the support all the way down to the pillars.In this view, systems in category 2 are simply a part of the vast network we take to be reality.

The gremlins pervading this structure arise from disagreements regarding the actual pillars andregarding the validity of the coherence within the systems. This leads to one of the most commonattacks on the coherence theory of truth, that one can still forge systems in which the pillars are lackingor dubious and yet still have a self-consistent, coherent system. As Bertrand Russell noted, coherencetheory cannot distinguish the truth from a consistent fairy-tale. Of what value to communicators woulda truth be when established by coherence with such a system?

On the other hand, the rejoinder to the notion of truth being a reference to some kind of a reality ofcategory 1 is that we have no direct access to all possible aspects of the purported reality, so we do notknow its full extent and nature. Even the parts of reality that we have access to have to be filteredthrough fallible senses and such data processed by fallible mental machinery. These concerns, taken toextreme, could leave one completely cynical as to what reality may actually be like. So how could we,in good faith, take truth to be some reference to it?

At best, what we could do is to survey what we take as reality manifestly accessible to us there arepeople, animals, the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, air, and so on to form a manifestly credible system ofpropositions held to be true on account of this survey, which is provisional at any point in time onaccount of new discoveries, and take truth to be that which coheres with this system of truth-bearers.This would then take us back full circle to category 2 as the arbiter of truth, even if it is acknowledgedto be subsumed by category 1 in principle.

But this will not do either from a practical point of view. The individual possible range of facts whichwe could add to this system is vast beyond imagination even for the manifest reality accessible to us.For instance, we could add to the system the number of microbes in a particular teardrop at a particulartime, assuming we have the means to clearly see and distinguish them. The truth of such a propositioncould not be established by coherence alone with any practical system, and truth, as it is valued by us,is ultimately a practical matter, as we shall see further on.

To establish the truth value of a proposition concerning the microbes in the teardrop, we have littlechoice but to contact that part of reality, while at the same time assuming that that particular contactwith it will yield the information to a reasonable, credible level of accuracy upon which we may placesome value.

In summary then, we cannot but assume some existing, persistent reality, of whatever nature, as astarting point. On the assumption that we have, based on simple experience, the capacity to establishcontact with at least parts of this reality, in a stable, consistent, largely successful manner, we may form


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systems of beliefs, or propositions grounded, as firmly as possible within our means, in such contacts.We may then provisionally establish some later propositions to be true in reference to such systems,given that the effort to trace back the truth of such propositions to the system's original contacts withreality may be prohibitive. Any practical system of coherent propositions would be too lean to establishthe truth of all possible propositions, and many, perhaps most, propositions, sentences, and beliefswould need to be established by some attempts at direct contacts with reality, with the recognition of

various assumptions.

The foregoing is not to imply that establishing truth, that is, imbuing utterances and beliefs with acertain type of value, becomes a simple matter, once we admit both correspondence and coherence intheir proper place. There will always be questions about assumptions regarding the nature of reality andour access to it, and there will be questions about the validity of any purported systems of coherenttruth-bearers. There will be many statements whose actual semantic content is too vague or obscure.There will be sentences that present paradoxes due to self reference. These latter may be bestapproached by more technical means such as Tarski's semantic theory, or axiomatic theory, or revisiontheory, to name a few.

But both coherence and correspondence are fundamentally functional in providing value to humanutterances and beliefs. And this brings us back to language and the words which comprise it.

Truth is just a Word

We often find that words in natural language are notoriously slippery and imprecise when subjected todetailed examination, even though we have little problem using them in the normal arena of verbalintercourse. I think this should not come as a great shock, however. Words, being the Lego blocks ofcommunication, are individuated to each serve some unique purpose in that practice of communicationwhich functions to transmit information between or among communicators. And this exchange needs tooccur with rates of information transmission that fall within a certain range to fit a large variety ofcontexts where communication may take place. That is, human communicators can formulate andreceive information meaningfully only within a certain range of transmission rates on account of thelimitations imposed by our cognitive machinery as well as by the medium of speech which originallycarried most information. If the rate is too high, no human can speak fast enough nor understand whatis spoken, and if the rate is too low, communication lags too much behind other sequences of events inthe world to make it practical in a broad range of contexts.

Consequently, individual words have to carry enough information to come near some optimal range ofinformation transmission in a great variety of contexts, from leisurely, casual conversation, to moreexacting exchanges carried out in highly organised social enterprises found in civilisations, to tersesituations of great stress and perhaps danger such as brute hunter-gatherer survival and conflict. It ismost likely under the latter conditions that the most basic words of language took shape in man's earlyhistory where brute survival took precedence. The words of a language have to be optimised such thatmost of them will work to successfully transmit the intended information correctly, most of the time, inall these possible range of contexts.

In any form of information transmission there is always some likelihood of information loss due tosome combination of faults of the transmitter, the medium, or the receiver. Human communication isno different. Information loss generally needs to be kept just small enough to make mostcommunication, in all contexts encountered in the early development of language, count as successfulto the outcome desired under that context. If a member of a group of hunter-gatherers tries to warn the


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group of the threat of approaching dangerous predators, and the words used don't transmit theinformation at a quick enough rate, yet with enough clarity to the situation, so that most of the listenershave a good probability of quickly understanding the intended message, the probable bloody outcomewould attest to the large information loss and lack of success of the communication. Repeat suchsituations often enough and we can see that such sub-optimal words will likely not flourish, in fact dieout, in the evolution of language, to be displaced by more optimal words that enjoy greater probabilities

of success in more contexts.

There are trade-offs to be made in considering words as being broadly optimal in their informationcontent. If too little information, specificity, and precision is packed into a word, communication is tooslow. This would be like having to say plant-flower-spring-bulb-colours-one-per-stem ... instead oftulip. If too much information is packed into a word, communication would be difficult to follow, onaccount of too high a rate of information transmission. Too many words would be needed in the lexiconbecause each word would be too specific and precise for most situations, thus taxing human memory.This would be like having a different word for each different coloured tulip of different lengths anddifferent species. The precision of such words would be great but not practical.

So the words that would survive such a refining process to form a language would be those that packjust enough information and precision to convey the concept that they represent with a reasonableenough level of probability of successful transmission in most of the varied contexts under whichhuman communications take place. Optimal information content of words would be attained over timeby the survival of successful words.

Note well that there is no requirement here for perfect information transmission, always successful inall contexts at all times, where the understood meaning received is precisely that intended by thetransmitter. Such perfection is just not needed in normal, mundane human intercourse. Our cognitivemachinery is well equipped to deal with errors in transmission and deductions from context, and suchperfection is simply unattainable in a practical manner. Hence, there is no reason to expect that words,which serve well in natural language, will have a great deal of inherent precision in structure orboundary. In fact, just the opposite works quite well as we see polysemous words such as bank andeven ones that may play multiple successful syntactic roles, such as play.

The rough outline painted here of words of a language being objects of a largely undirected processwhich is clearly evolutionary in nature is, of course, mere speculation based upon feasibility andbackward extrapolation from the written record of languages over historical times. Nevertheless, theoutline given above is quite feasible and well within reason, and hence, carries some weight in beingheld as a credible provisional position for the purposes of examining the word truth. But even moreto the point, it provides a credible explanation as to why we can take the word truth as notnecessarily in need of a precisely structured and bounded meaning in order to still function quite wellin most areas of verbal interaction with a good probability of success. Thus, we have a hint as to whymany words in natural language, such as truth, are often found to be slippery and imprecise withoutany severe impact on communication in a great variety of contexts.

Now, enter the philosophers who, buoyed by some small successes in making some simpler parts of theworld perspicuous, believe that they should be able to pick apart and eventually precisely pin down thenature of the concept that, as I contend, largely undirected evolution of language embedded in the wordtruth. And, if such attempts to date are any indication, to do so with theories each based on a single,simple overarching mechanism to account for all cases. If, in fact, the word truth does notstand infor a clearly bounded, perspicuous concept and mechanism, applicable across the board, then it is no


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wonder that the detractors of the various theories of truth have such an easy time of it to point outconfounds, failings, and weaknesses in each case. As Bertrand Russell had noted, Everything is vagueto a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

The travail we see in the philosophical examination of the concept of truth is somehow reminiscent ofthe situation described in the poem called The Blind Men and the Elephantby John Godfrey Saxe [5].

Each of the blind sages in the poem takes the elephant to be no more than the particular anatomicalfeature he first happened to encounter, the tail, the trunk, the ear, and so on, and fixes his attentionstrictly on that feature as representing the essence of the whole elephant.

The lesson to be taken away from Saxe's parable in conjunction with my musings on linguisticevolution is that we may need to view truth not as an elemental, tightly bounded metaphysical structurein the vein often taken by philosophy, but as a complex, a Swiss Army knife of heuristic semantic toolsthat we use in facilitating communication and in forming a world-view. The various theories of truth,viewed in this light, all have something to contribute, depending on context, and best not applied withtoo stringent enthusiasm, splitting hairs ten different ways. There is no need to discard meter sticks justbecause they are of little value in measuring the thickness of a hair in one context, or measuring anglesfor that matter, in another.

It may be that a more comprehensive theory regarding the word truth, as opposed to a theoryregarding some metaphysical conceptof truth, would turn out to be a complex algorithm incorporatingcorrespondence and coherence, among other things such as context, probability, information loss,mental attitudes, just to name a few. Aristotle has some words of wisdom to offer in this regard withthis observation.

The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in thefact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, buteveryone says something true about the nature of all things, and while individually they contribute littleor nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed. [6]

Truth as an Attitude

The bottom line is that no single theory devised to date will work across the board to reach what wevalue in the notion of truth. Some broadly encompassing algorithmic process, as alluded to above,would be much more likely to be fruitful, along with the acceptance that any truths so discovered oradjudicated would be provisional the best we can do -- at any point in time, and not absolute. Thebest we can aim for, considering our human limitations and the vast complexity of all we see about us,is a level of confidence and credibility in some proposition, the data of our senses, our beliefs, and soon.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, instead of viewing truth as a fixed, inherent property of something, itwould be more fruitful to view the notion of truth as expressing an attitude that we have toward alltypes of information coming in through our senses and even our internal introspections impinging onour consciousness dreams, visions, beliefs, sensations, conversations, reading, etc. All these couldbe, in some sense or other, credible and valued, or untenable and scorned.

Such an attitude is motivated by a pragmatic notion of value. We place value on that to which we attachthe characteristic of true as simply more likely, based on experience, to lead to successful outcomesin the course of life. Conversely, we scorn that which we characterise as false as more likely to lead


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to unsuccessful outcomes. More succinctly, truth matters!

This can be made amply clear in an extreme case, for instance, where we may find a bottle of clearliquid bearing a label Nitroglycerine that has been crossed out and Water written over it. Whichmessage do we take as credible where, though dying of thirst, even picking up the bottle to remove thecap could be deadly? Which theory of truth or which approach is best applied in this context to lead to

the most probable successful outcome, which is mostly what we're really interested in as a speciesmanifestly motivated in any situation by our own self-interest and survival, or the interest and survivalof varying proximal layers of kin and social groups?

Notes:

[1] Plato, Sophist, Section 263b. tr. Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press;London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921.[2] Aristotle,Metaphysics, Book IV, Part 7, tr. W. D. Ross, 1924.[3] This statement is false.[4] Grayling, A. C.,An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, Blackwell Publishing, 1997.[5] Saxe, John Godfrey, The Blind Men and the Elephant, The Poems of John Godfrey Saxe, 1880.[6] Aristotle,Metaphysics, Book II, Part 1, tr. W. D. Ross, 1924.

2013 by Gabe Czobel

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Is There a Truth about Truth?