Wrestling With The Truth

Why do popular philosophical theories of truth deliberately deflate truth’s value? They argue that there is no difference in saying,  ” It is true that Trump colluded with the Russians."   and,  "Trump colluded with the Russians."  They argue that the concept "truth"  seems to be redundant, because it isn't saying  more than what the statement says without it.    The deflationists want us to believe that there is nothing much to "truth",  that it doesn't add anything to our assertions unless we are generalizing about multiple statements, as in "What Mueller said was true."

 If truth is nothing more than a logical connective, why do people everywhere feel so passionate about it?  Why is it so important that we get to hear what’s really in the Mueller report? Why do we want to know what really happened during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign?   Doesn’t knowing what really happened, or who a person really is, matter critically to what we need to do next, going forward?

 Why is it important to know whether humans are causing global warming?  Does it matter that some people deny this?  Does it matter that many of the people who deny this are closely connected to the fossil fuel industry?  Truth matters to our very existence.

  It is no coincidence that when people don’t care about the truth, we very quickly end up with a serious lack of trust in each other and in our social and political institutions. We want to avoid a tipping point, where if trust is too much absent, we all become caught in a downward spiral of fear and paranoia.   This points straight to the problem of conspiracy theories and to a dangerous tendency for any system of inquiry to exist inside a bubble,  where it can be insulated from competing forms of inquiry, even insulated from contradictory facts.

 A 9/11  “truther”  can lay out all the conflicting and messy evidence of that disaster, and claim it justifies 9/11 being an “inside job”.  Try and convince her otherwise. The stronger your counter-argument,  the more she will dig in her heels.  As Travis View, a researcher and podcaster on the QAnon conspiracy said, “..failed predictions and misplaced expectations haven’t damaged the size or enthusiasm of the QAnon community....  Some QAnon followers even claim that failed predictions are irrelevant, because dates that pass without incident serve the purpose of tricking the evil “cabal” they imagine they’re fighting.”,   “that belief system eventually becomes an absurdly byzantine, Occam’s-razor-defying mess that can barely be understood by its own supporters. The deeper they dig into disconfirmed beliefs, the harder, and more painful it is to get out.”  “The Mueller Report is In, Get Ready for the Conspiracy Theories,” Washington Post, March 26,2019.

Christopher French, in “Why do some people believe in conspiracy theories?”, Scientific American, Mind   26 72,  July 2015, claims, plausibly, that conspiracists are not really sure what the true explanation for a surprising event is.  What they are sure about is that the “official story” is a cover-up.  In fact, he indicates, people who are strongly inclined toward conspiracy theories are also more likely to be believe in contradictory stories. For instance, if they believe that Bin-Laden died years before he was said to have died,  they are also more likely to come to believe that Bin Laden is still alive.

Conspiracy theories are a classic case of Confirmation Bias.  This is our universal human tendency to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs and give less weight, and even ignore evidence which contradicts what we believe.

Now, take the well-known Quine- Duhem thesis in philosophy, which roughly states that sentences by themselves are not true or false, because they are always part of a web of belief. So, any observation that disconfirms a sentence in a theory can always be reinterpreted or neutralized by changing other sentences in the theory to fit the observation.  By jove! Quine and Duhem seem to have inadvertently described the fundamentals of building and maintaining conspiracy theories!  And it also seems to me that what Quine and Duhem were really doing, independently of each other, was developing a new explanation for the metaphor of Induction.

Karl Popper, probably the most influential philosopher of science in the twentieth century, has argued that when “scientific” theories are immune to criticism they are not actually scientific. He was, at the time, in the early part of the twentieth century, concerned with the status of Marxism and Psychoanalysis, and he perceptively argued that the reason these theories were bad theories is that they were constructed to be immune from criticism. If no observation makes any difference to the truth or falsity of a theory, the theory isn’t really about reality, it’s equivalent  to metaphysics, a branch of philosophy whose practitioners are suspected of permanently keeping their heads in the clouds.

  Popper explicitly rejects induction as a viable inquiring system. He thinks scientific knowledge grows by conjectures and refutations, not by our inductively confirming our theories.  Let’s consider induction as perhaps a misleading metaphor, the equivalent of the  Confirmation Bias that I mentioned earlier. And, if induction  is an inaccurate description of scientific practice, as Popper maintains, this suggests that epistemological theories of truth like coherentism and pragmatism overvalue coherence and undervalue the importance of falsification.  The idea that knowledge grows by induction imagines a world where knowledge grows by adding truths, when in fact, knowledge grows by our continuing to recognize and correct our mistakes.

There is an asymmetry between truths and falsehoods.  Discovering that an expectation has been falsified is  often a clear mark that we have to change direction and revise our expectations.  We should let observations and results which falsify our expectations give us that vital feedback.  This is something that  we will not get from simply accumulating coherent facts.  The problem with induction is that you will not be looking for mistakes, you will be looking for confirmation - you have to go far out of your way to find these contradictory observations, and nothing about induction, per se, requires you to do so.

 Conceiving of truth as the end of inquiry seems obvious, which is what motivates both coherence and pragmatic theories of truth.  After perception, most of what we learn about the world comes from inquiry, does it not?    But isn’t it true that there are forms of inquiry that compete with each other?  Science contra Theology, Behaviorism contra Psychoanalysis, etc.   Are we then, staring into the abyss of Relativism, where what is true for a Marxist Economist is not necessarily true for other kinds of Economists?  Or, does it all reduce down to physics and logic as the Deflationists would have it?

One can try and solve this problem by avoiding the use of the word “truth” and replacing it with “warranted assertability” or “justified knowledge”, which is what the pragmatists Dewey and Rorty end up doing, but this is just kicking the can further down the road.  Rorty is infamous for arguing that we don’t actually need the concept of "truth" at all.  But, against that road, I think we should first agree that “truth”  is an idealization.  Since inquiry is ongoing, and no body of knowledge is settled, we cannot “know” the truth objectively.  But then, if that is the case how can we use truth as an ideal?  In order for any kind of  idealization to work you have to  use it, believe in it, and see it as an ideal.

One can think of inquiring systems as model-building.  Like the first philosophers, we try to use rational explanations to understand reality.  Our  explanations then become a model of the system that we are trying to understand. We first build a model, then we test it over and over again by subjecting it to observation, experiments, and peer criticism.  Over time our models become bigger and more sophisticated.  They can explain and predict more things with more accuracy.  This is the ideal.

I featured, in a longer essay on  truth,  a discussion of  Plato’s parable of the cave.  I did this for a number of reasons, one of which is that it shows that even  Plato, truly a giant in Philosophy, couldn’t really figure out a rational explanation for how we come to know the  truth.   In this “noble lie” of Plato’s,  The Truth flows one way, from the Sun or “the Good” to the escaped prisoner - from more divine to less divine.  It’s hierarchical, and based on authority.  It reflects the idea of the enlightened master passing on his “divine” wisdom to his disciples.  It’s a closed Inquiring system that rejects experiment, observation, and peer criticism.  It is more like a cult, or like conspiracy theories;  observations that contradict the theory are “shadows” and false images;  observations that support the theory are “clear and distinct ideas”.

Mythical stories can be aesthetically beautiful, but, like Plato’s “noble lie”, they exist to lull people into ignorance and superstition. They are like drugs that can make you temporarily happy by helping you withdraw from the rest of the world, giving you the illusion that you are entirely self-contained.

Unfortunately Plato was so successful that it is almost impossible to think about normative concepts such as “truth” and “good” without imagining a “higher power”  from which they are derived.  In other essays, I've argued  that  truth is an important means of regulating human conduct that emerged from human collective agreement and not at all from any putative divine source.  This is a natural explanation but not a reductive explanation.  It does not explain truth according to physical forces or particles.   I believe that the question concerning the origins of normativity is the basic question concerning human nature.  Answer this question with a natural explanation, and you have the beginnings of a science of human nature.

 However, the closer that human knowledge comes to uncovering the nature of what  distinguishes humans from other animals, the more it tugs at our sense of identity.  The more we focus inquiry on human nature, the more potential our findings have to disturb us.  so we might not like what we hear, and since it is about us, we are highly likely to dispute any evidence that contradicts our most cherished self-images.  In some sense these dangers exist in constructing any natural explanation, but acutely so with questions of human nature.  These are theories and concepts that touch on our strongest feelings about who we are and why we are here.

Take the question of human-caused global warming.  Scientific climatological inquiry has uncovered this connection, but a substantial segment of civilized people who recognize the authority of science still cannot bring themselves to believe in it.  Why is that?  It is because this issue deeply challenges our very identity as human beings.   The idea that we need to be accountable for how our actions impact on our greater environment, and the idea that our lifestyles and economies need to change to incorporate this new understanding is a serious challenge to the way we see ourselves.   And, apparently, it is too much of a challenge  for some.

The Ten Commitments

                         

When life first formed, a little less than four billion years ago, it only formed because it made The First Commitment - To Multiply. This may remind you of a certain book, but unlike the account in the Bible, this form of life we now call Bacteria.  Bacteria and their allies are single celled organisms that multiply and multiply and multiply by Splitting into identical copies of themselves.   

One and a half billion years ago is our next milestone, when plants and animals become separate creatures and both abandon splitting in favour of  The Second Commitment - Sexual Reproduction.  Lets call this the Sexual Reproductive System,later to become - “the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees.”  

 As for us animals, unlike most plants,  we committed to The Third Commitment: to eating Food and this leads to both the Digestive System and the Predator/Prey System.

Food is important to this story and we will visit it again when we get to cooking.  But, for now, let’s note that ever since it came into being, the Predator/Prey System is one of the main drivers of evolutionary change.  

Nothing much happens for one and a quarter billion years, (only a couple of mass extinction events, and the arrival of dinosaurs...) and then 250 million years ago smallish creatures that we call the first Mammals arrive.  The mothers of these furry little critters stop laying eggs and instead give birth live.  These mothers give birth to The Fourth Commitment: to the Care, Protection, and feeding of their infants.  Baby mammals are warm and cuddly and they cry when they are in distress.  Baby snakes and lizards are not so cuddly and they are silent, because nobody is going to protect them once they’re out of the Egg.  

The Maternal Caring System  is a very important player in this story as I hope to make apparent to you. Mammal mothers have mammary glands that produce milk.  The hormones that are involved in the release of milk - Prolactin and Oxytocin are triggered by close physical contact between mother and baby.  These hormones contribute to the sense of pleasure and attachment between babe and mom.  

The close contact, the period of helpless infancy, the Attachment Bond between mother and child - these are all important, because they will help facilitate development outside the womb, making possible larger brains, greater learning capacity, and more behavioural flexibility than would ever be possible by a creature that comes out of an egg.  

The Fifth Committment that mammals, as well as some other kinds of animals committed to - Living in a Group.  Growing up and living in a group helps protect individuals from predators, and, just like having a mother, it makes longer infancy and more social learning possible.

65 million years ago a group of mammals called Primates made the Sixth Commitment - Living in Trees.  Why live in trees?  To get away from predators and to facilitate access to fruits and other good things.  By living in trees, primates, such as monkeys, evolved better hand-eye coordination compared to other mammals, and this will be important when we get  to Tools.

20 million years ago Apes have evolved from monkeys.  Apes are bigger and stronger than monkeys.  Male apes are able to cooperate enough to successfully maintain The Seventh Commitment -Collective Defence of the Group against predators, such as boa constrictors big cats, and male outsiders.

About six million years ago our ancestors broke with the trees and made The Eighth Commitment - Walking or: Standing on Their Own Two Feet.  Being primates they had already benefited from improved hand-eye coordination,  so it wasn’t long before they learned to walk long distances, and then to make Stone Tools, such as knives and axes.

Now, you may or may not have noticed that for the last 250 million years, all this time that mothers were caring for their infants, there is little or no evidence of fathers’ commitment to care.   Two million years ago this would all change when the first humans came on the scene.  And here’s why:

Do you remember those maternal hormones that worked so well to create a mother child bond - Prolactin and Oxytocin?  These are produced in male bodies as well, because males and females share most of the same genetic material.  And you may have noticed that humans don’t have nearly as much body hair as apes.  In fact, without clothes we look pretty naked.

 Anyway, my point is that skin-to-skin contact can lead to the release of oxytocin in both males and females and this can facilitate falling in love and Pair Bonding, which is otherwise rare in primates, and doesn’t happen when apes live in groups.   Pair bonding in Chimpanzees is usually prevented by the dominant male who will try to monopolize all the females when they are in estrus.  

Homo Erectus, our hominin precursors, looked a lot more like us then previous Hominins.  It was during their two million year stay on Earth that they were the first to control Fire, and the first to walk out of Africa.

Remember those stone tools we talked about.  They were first used for preparing food, just as knives are today.  They were also used as Weapons.  And here’s where it gets interesting. We note, that in human history, when better weapons are first developed they sometimes have a powerful effect on Social Systems. 

 Stone knives  would have had a Levelling influence, undermining the rule of the strongest male. They would also have led to social disruption, because now there  would be a continual free fight over women. Previously the dominant male would have controlled this problem, but stone knives may have eliminated his role.

Easy access to knives would have made it a free-for-all until the group as a whole agreed to a system that limited violence and provided stability.  That agreement was the basis for human nature.

 Two million years ago agreements were not about peace, order, and good government.  The agreement had to be simple, it had to be comprehensive, with no exceptions.  Our ancestors had the right hormones to facilitate pair-bonding, but they didn’t have the right social systems until the Invention of stone knives forced their hands.

 Because the dominant male kept order,  that function needed to be filled by something else.  That function, of allocating women and resources,and controlling violent public behaviour, had to be replaced by a special type of collective commitment. Thus the Ninth Commitment - the commitment to Monogamy and Morality. Today, in almost every human society the vast majority of men and women live in monogamous relationships, which means that somehow, and I think it was two million years ago, we established  monogamous social systems.  Thus males and females committed to living in and supporting long-term relationships.

Animals do most things from self-interest. Humans choose to follow rules that can directly oppose their own self-interest.   This is most obvious in morality.  In morality we have lists of Dos and Don'ts.  We all internalize these rules and we often enthusiastically judge those who break them. Justifying your behaviour by saying that you acted in your own interest doesn’t cut it morally.  Everyone is on the lookout for people who violate moral rules, and if they are  caught, they are punished by various means.

We all can and do feel judgemental about people who have affairs. We realize that they are doing it out of powerful desires, but judge these people for not constraining their desires. The fact is that if people didn't actively constrain themselves, monogamy would be a joke. The only thing natural about monogamy is that it reflects the pair-bond, the deep mutual attachment that can form when two people fall in love. But the trouble is that, in many cases, love doesn't last, and it can be overridden by new attractions. That's why the group had to come together and make a collective commitment, simultaneously creating the social institution of monogamy and the first moral system. My guess is that initially it was simply an agreement to control violence, and allow for pair-bonding and social stability, and the initiators had no idea of the positive consequences that would ensue.

In a single stroke monogamy would have led to fathers being more assured of the paternity of their children, the inclusion of in-laws, and thus, the effective enlargement of groups; the division of labour between males and females, and the sharing of resources among the nuclear family.  In effect, monogamy led to camp fires, cooking, and fatherhood.

At some unknown time, perhaps 100,000 years ago, by increasing social stability and encouraging sharing, monogamy made Language - The Tenth Commitment possible.

Female mammals committed to maternal care; most mammals committed to living in groups; male baboons and apes committed to collective protection of the group; humans first committed to a monogamous social system and then committed to using language.  The trend in all of these commitments is towards the facilitation of longer childhoods, greater learning flexibility, bigger brains,  and more effective and complex forms of cooperation.  Humans have the longest period of childhood, the greatest ability to learn new things, and are by far the most cooperative.  

Remember the camp fire:  Sharing stories, sharing food, singing songs together, facing the darkness together.  Almost everything we do as humans involves sharing: talking, singing, eating, playing, working, building, caring, and loving.  This is what separates us from the animals.