It is not just religious maniacs who believe in the truth. It is deeply embedded in the world view of science, of common sense, and even fields of academic inquiry which see themselves as being hostile to what they perceive as science. The truth rules supreme everywhere, or so it seems.
But what is truth? When we say something is
true we usually mean, I think, that it corresponds to reality – the so-called
correspondence theory of truth. But what is reality, and how can human ideas
“correspond” to it? Surely human ideas are a completely different type of thing
from reality, so what sense does the idea of correspondence make? Perhaps what
we see as the truth is part of a dream, or part of a way of seeing the world we
make up in collaboration with other people – as the social constructivists
would have us believe? This latter perspective seems obviously true (whatever that
may mean!) to me - but this may just be the dream into which I've been
socialized.
However, let’s accept the idea of truth and
try to guess where it might have come from? If we accept the theory of
evolution by natural selection, the answer is simple: the idea of truth helped
our ancestors survive. A belief in the truth about lions and cliffs helped our
ancestors avoid being eaten by the former and falling off the latter. The idea
of a fixed reality, which we can apprehend and see as the truth, is obviously a
very powerful tool for living in the everyday world. People who did not believe
in the reality of lions and cliffs would not have survived to pass on their
genes.
This implies that the idea of objective
reality and the assumption that we can apprehend the truth about it is merely a
human convenience. Frogs or intelligent aliens would almost certainly view the
world in very different ways; what we see as truth and what they see as truth
would, I think, be very different.
Most statements in ordinary languages
presuppose the idea of truth. When I say that Sally was at home at 10 pm on 1
August 2014, I mean that this is a true statement about what happened. Further,
if Sally is suspected of murdering Billy 50 miles away at 10 pm on 1 August
2014, then if it's true that she was at home then it can't be true that she
murdered Billy. She can only be in one place at one time -
"obviously". Ideas of truth, and the "objective" reality of
objects in time and space, and the fact that one object can only be in one
place at one time, are all bound up in our common sense world view. It is
almost impossible to talk in ordinary language without assuming the truth of
this world view - it is just "obviously" true.
However the concept is truth is often taken
far beyond everyday comings and goings of everyday objects. So we might say
that it is true that God exists, that all water molecules comprise two hydrogen
and one oxygen atoms, that married people are happier than unmarried people,
and that the solutions of the equation x2+1=0
are x=+i and x=-i.
The difficulty is that, outside of the
realm of everyday experience, the notion of truth is actually rather vague, may
be difficult to demonstrate conclusively, and may come with implications that
are less than helpful. Short of taking the skeptic to meet God, demonstrating
his existence is notoriously difficult. We
can't "see" molecules of water in the way we can see Sally at home,
so the truth about water molecules needs to be inferred in other ways. Saying
that the married are happier than the unmarried is obviously a statement about
averages - there will be exceptions - and it also depends on what is meant by
"happier". And mathematical statements are statements about concepts
invented by mathematicians: applying the word true is obviously stretching the
concept considerably. It is all much less straightforward than the truth that
Sally was at home at 10 pm on 1 August 2014.
The idea of truth has a very high status in
many circles. Saying you are seeking the truth sounds unquestionably
praiseworthy. If you say something is true, then obviously you can't argue with
it. Truth is good so we like to apply the concept all over the place. I'll
refer to this assumption that the idea of truth, and the inevitably associated
idea of an objective reality with solid objects persisting through time, apply
to everything, as the cult of the truth.
This notion is rather vague in terms of the assumptions about reality that go
hand in hand with the idea of truth - but this is inevitable as the idea of
truth gets extended further and further from its evolutionary origin. Cults, of
course, depend on vagueness for their power, so that the cult's perspective can
be adjusted to cater for any discrepancies with experience.
Does the cult of the truth matter? Does it
matter that the idea of truth is extended far beyond its original focus? Let's
look at some different areas of knowledge.
Some of the conclusions of modern physics
contradict the implicit assumptions of the cult of the truth. At very small
scales things can be in two places at once, and reality only makes sense in
relation to an observation; for observers at high speeds measurements of
physical processes are different, and the notion of things happening at a particular time depends
on the motion of the observer. This all does considerable violence to everyday
assumptions about reality, but physicists would simply that these are outdated
and that their notion of reality is more sophisticated. It seems to me as a
non-physicist, that these theories have sabotaged the idea of the truth about
an objective reality beyond repair. I am reading Brian Greene's book, The hidden reality, about parallel
universes, but I can't take the idea of truth seriously in relation to
universes hovering out of reach which we will never, ever, be able to see in
any sense. The hypothesis that the book seems to be driving towards is that we
are living in a simulated world devised by Albert Einstein whose theory of
general relativity seems to underpin everything.
Does this matter? Probably not for physics.
The illusion of the quest for the truth about everything is probably necessary
to keep physicists motivated. But in the wider sphere it is worrisome if naive
and outdated ideas of physics underpin other disciplines.
The
idea of truth is best regarded as a psychological convenience - usually
necessary, often useful, but occasionally a nuisance. Am I claiming this
statement itself is true? Of course not! My argument obviously undermines
itself. But I do think it’s a useful perspective.
Beyond the rarefied world of modern physics
the cult of the truth does create problems. Perhaps the most serious is that
the status of truth (and science and the study of objective reality) undermines
important areas which can't easily be incorporated into the cult of the truth. The
ultimate aim of many social sciences is to make the world a better place in the
future. We might, for example, be interested in making workplaces happier. The
idea of truth fits comfortably with the obvious first stage of such a project -
to do a survey to find out how happy workers are at the moment, and what their
gripes are. The obvious things to do next would be to look at what the workers
want, at what they value, and try to design workplaces to fit these
requirement. This seems a more important part of the research than the initial
survey, but value judgments, and the design of possible futures, do not fit
neatly with the cult of the truth. So they are not taken as seriously as they
should be. Most of the thought and work goes into studying the past, and the
more important issues of working out what people want and how to design a
suitable future, tends to get ignored. OK, so the idea of truth could be
extended to include these, but only by bending it so that it gets stupid; the
cult of the truth tends to deflect our attention from the problem of designing
futures.
In fact the situation is even worse than
this because the truths studied in many social science tend to be of rather
limited scope. So we study how happy people are in particular organizations at
particular times. So what? Everyone knows the situation may be very different
elsewhere. The truths studied by physicists are assumed to apply everywhere
throughout time (although this can be challenged over billions of years or
light-years), but the truths of many social sciences are very parochial. The
cult of the truth restricts our attention to trivial questions, dismisses the
big questions as trivial because the idea of truth does not apply.
There are further unfortunate side effects
from taking truth too seriously. If we have one theory which is deemed true,
this may be taken to imply that other theories covering the same are assumed to
be false. This may be too restrictive: there could be different ways of looking
at the same thing, some of which may, perhaps be more aesthetically appealing,
or easier to learn about or use. Truth is not the only important criterion.
This is particular true of statistical truths, which may sometimes be so fuzzy
as to be almost useless.
So, to recap, truth is best treated as a
necessary illusion, often, but by no means always, necessary: it should not be
taken too seriously outside the realm of statements about the comings and
goings of everyday objects. The last sentence is itself close to asserting a
truth whose validity it denies: a fully coherent argument here is not possible,
but does this matter? Incoherence gives us more flexibility.
