The Appeal of Absurd Theories of Truth
After my last post about truth (https://fakenous.net/?p=2725), I thought a little more about theories of truth. Some smart and important philosophers have held what I would describe as complete non-starter theories about “truth”. (These theories are so far off that I refuse to recognize them as actually being about truth; hence the quotation marks.) For example, “truth is what is useful”.
This is roughly what I mean by a complete non-starter theory: In my view, the most likely way for such theories to be correct would be something like this: I’m a brain in a vat, and in the world outside my vat, the word “true” is used in a completely different way from how it is used in my vat-simulation.
What makes people say stuff like this? William James and C.S. Peirce do not in general seem like trolls. And the concept of truth is pretty simple and basic. Do they actually not possess this concept?
The Trivial Account of Truth
Sometimes people say things. When you say things, sometimes stuff is the way that you say it is. Other times, it isn’t. When stuff is the way that you say it is, we call your statements “true”. When stuff is not the way that you say it is, we call your statements “false”. For instance, if you say that all cats are green, then your statement is “true” if and only if all cats are green.
That’s it. I told you it was a simple and basic concept. I shall call this the Trivial Account of Truth.
(The parallel account of what it is for a belief to be true is obvious. For simplicity, I’ll just talk about statements from here on.)
It’s hard to believe that some famous thinkers couldn’t understand this simple idea, when they use much more complicated ideas all the time. I bet James and Peirce could learn calculus, which is way harder to grasp than the idea of stuff being as you say it is.
How might one object to the Trivial Account of Truth?
I see two possibilities:
1) Rejecting the concept
I guess someone might reject the very idea of things being the way we say they are – they might think this concept doesn’t make sense or contains false presuppositions.
How could one think this? Maybe by thinking that no one ever says anything? Or people sometimes talk, but when talking, we are never talking about anything? Or when we talk about things, we never say anything about them? Those would all be objections to the concept of the way that we say things are (“the content of an assertion”).
Alternately, someone might object to the concept of the way that things are. Perhaps by thinking that nothing exists? Or at least that none of the things we talk about ever exist? Or that if anything exists, it is never any way – it never has or lacks any characteristics, never stands in or fails to stand in any relationships to anything, and never does or fails to do anything?
Those are all the alternatives I can think of. They all sound absurd to me, and not like anything anyone could believe. They also verge on incoherence – if you think that nothing is ever the way anyone says it is, that implies in particular that nothing is the way that you say it is. Including, say, in your own theory of truth.
But those are the only ways I can think of to object to the concept of things being as we say they are. If you don’t think any of those things, then, as far as I can tell, you should accept that, at least sometimes, there is a way that we say things are, and there is a way that things are. If so, then the way that we say things are can either be the way that they are or not be the way they are.
2) Semantic disagreement
Here is the more coherent but less interesting possibility: people who reject the Trivial Account don’t have any problem with the concept that the account defines; they just don’t think the word “true”, in English, expresses that concept. I.e., they disagree about how “true” is actually used.
If this is what is going on, then rival theorists of truth should submit their disagreement to tests of linguistic usage. We should try to think of examples where the rival theories of “truth” would make different predictions about what ordinary speakers would say.
For example, the Pragmatic theory predicts that ordinary speakers should find the phrase “useful falsehood” nonsensical. They should disagree with T-schema sentences (e.g., “‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.”) They should judge that “Is it useful to believe what’s true?” means the same as “Is it useful to believe what’s useful to believe?” They should be happy with changing the standard courtroom oath from “I solemnly swear to tell the truth…” to “I solemnly swear to say what is useful…”
You can extend that list indefinitely. It looks to me like none of these things come out the way pragmatism would predict. There is no way that I can think of in which the Pragmatic Account does better at explaining the actual usage pattern than the Trivial Account.
Now for some confused objections …
3) But how can we know about objective reality?
Sometimes people reject the correspondence theory of truth because they think it’s impossible for a person to have knowledge of the real world.
If you want to know more about how we know the external world, see my book Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0742512533/). I’m not going to talk more about that here, though, because it isn’t actually relevant. In giving a definition of “truth”, I didn’t make any claims about what we know or don’t know. “Truth”, in English, refers to the situation where things are the way you say they are, regardless of whether we ever actually know that things are the way we say they are. If we never know how things are, then we never know whether our statements are true. But that’s still what “true” means.
4) What about other uses of “true”?
Jordan Peterson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2InA4FS84mY) says that the correspondence notion of truth isn’t the original notion. He thinks the original usage of “true” is as in sentences like “The arrow flies straight and true”. There, “true” doesn’t refer to correspondence with reality; it refers to the property of heading to one’s goal. This is nice for the Pragmatic theory of truth.
Reply:
a) No, that’s not true. The usage of “true” for “straight to the target” appears to date from circa 1800. The earliest meaning (from Old English) appears to be along the lines of “faithful, trustworthy, honest” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=true). So that’s not as nice for the Pragmatic theory.
b) Anyway, this is an example of the genetic fallacy. Almost every word in the language originated in a word having some very different meaning, so you can’t determine the current meaning by looking at the original usage. If we did that, we would conclude that “right” means “straight”, “phenomenon” means “appearance”, and “free” means “beloved”. The current actual use of “true” that we’re talking about is the one in which you say that a statement or belief is true, and you say this when things are the way the statement says they are or the way the believer believes they are.
5) Rejecting classical logic
Some people object to bivalence (the principle that every assertion is true or false) or the law of excluded middle (the principle that things always either are or are not a particular way). One might support this by citing vague statements or paradoxical statements such as “This sentence is false”.
However, this really isn’t an objection to the Trivial Account of Truth. The Trivial Account doesn’t say that everything has to be either true or false. It just says what it means for a statement to be true. All you need to accept is that it makes sense in principle to talk about something being as someone says it is.
What’s really going on here?
Thinking about it more, I don’t think the Pragmatists, or other partisans of nonstarter theories of truth, are really engaged in the same activity that I am. It just doesn’t make sense – they can’t be that bad at this activity.
This is what I think is happening. First, I think that people don’t like the Trivial Account as a “theory of truth” because the Trivial Account is too simple and obvious. Indeed, that’s why I call it “the Trivial Account”. We assume that “What is truth?” is a profound question, and a theory of truth must state some profound, life-altering insight that you could build your whole belief system around. The Trivial Account so completely fails to do that that many people viscerally reject it despite its obvious correctness. It’s not as though people are explicitly going through this reasoning (“The correct theory of truth is profound; the Trivial Account isn’t profound; therefore, the Trivial Account is incorrect”). I think it’s more like people have a negative emotional reaction to the Trivial Account because it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing they were expecting.
In reality, the truth about truth just isn’t very interesting. So to make the question more interesting, people implicitly reinterpret it. Instead of taking “What is truth?” as just asking what the word “true” literally means in English, they treat it in something like the way you treat metaphors. They treat it as asking something vaguely in the neighborhood of “what beliefs do you approve of?”
Another possibility is that people confuse the idea of the meaning of “truth” with the idea of a criterion for telling when something is true. Hence you get coherence or ideal inquiry theories of truth.
I’m fine with asking these other questions. “What beliefs do you approve of?” and “How can you tell when something is true?” are better discussion questions than “What is truth?” But you shouldn’t just reinterpret the latter question as meaning one of the former. Making huge confusions like this just makes it hard to get the right answers to anything. If you want to answer one of the more profound questions, instead of claiming to be giving an account of truth, just say, “Look, the nature of truth is a boring question. Instead, let’s talk about what beliefs one should approve of …”