Chapter 12

TRUTH

“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, or of what is not that it is not, is true.”

            - Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.), Metaphysics, Γ. 7.27.

            Our evaluations, our judgments that something is admirable or despicable, kind or cruel, worthy of pride or of contempt, involve our emotions in two ways. First, our actual emotions are the best evidence for our evaluative beliefs, better evidence than our pleasures, desires, or facts about our nature. Second, it is our emotional commitment to these evaluative beliefs that gives them their strength. Without emotional commitment, our evaluative beliefs would have no strength. They would be suppositions or imaginings, cognitive attitudes lacking the conviction of genuine beliefs.

            Being emotionally committed to our evaluative beliefs is not enough. We must make the right evaluations. Our evaluations must be the best they can be, formed in response to all the evidence. Our evaluations must be true. The quest for meaning is simultaneously a quest both for what matters to us and for what is true. It is a quest for what is truly valuable, worthwhile, or good. Still, the question arises: Can it be plainly true that anything matters for us?

            To answer this question, we must know something about what it means for a belief to be true. Two common answers are the relativist theory and the correspondence theory. Wishing to be open-minded, some people think that no belief is true universally; beliefs are only true for the person (or group, or culture) who assert them. Wishing to be scientific, other people think that beliefs are only true if they correspond to physical reality. On neither of these accounts could our emotional judgments be true. Luckily, neither account is correct.

Relativism

            Relativism is not a doctrine that anyone can defend. To defend relativism, someone must claim that relativism is itself true. But what does she mean by “true” in this context? On the one hand, if she means “true-to-her,” then she will not convince us. Just because relativism is true-to-her does not mean it is true-to-us. On the other hand, if she means “true universally” or “true-in-a-non-relative-sense,” then she is not being consistent. She is assuming her position is incorrect to argue that it is correct.

            What other people say, their views on what matters and why, are always evidence that we should consider regarding our own beliefs. We may eventually dismiss their opinions, but we must, at least, consider them. Their opinions are evidence to which our beliefs must respond, even if our response is to keep the same beliefs.

            Perhaps, though, the point of someone’s being a relativist is that she will not have to defend her position. Someone who believes that truth is all relative protects herself from having to respond to the views of others. Their views are true-to-them, but not true-to-her. Since their views are not true-to-her, she thinks she does not have to consider them.

            Relativism is analogous to what Sigmund Freud would have called a “defence mechanism,” or what Aaron Beck would call a “cognitive distortion.” It allows the relativist to deny or minimize the evidence of what other people say and believe. It rationalizes her ignoring of their views, protects her from the anxiety involved in confronting them about their beliefs, and insulates her beliefs from being threatened by their contrary opinions. The relativist fails to allow her beliefs about value to respond to all the evidence. Relativism is a failure of courage in the quest for truth.

            Similar points apply to a less extreme view such as cultural relativism, the view that truth is relative not to an individual but to a whole culture. Sometimes understanding why members of other cultures act, believe, and feel the way they do is difficult. Nevertheless, our new understanding will repay our efforts. We must expand our minds, open ourselves to the unfamiliar, allow our beliefs to respond to the culturally different, and integrate it into our own belief systems. (Misak 2000) Anything else is laziness, a failure of resolve, and a betrayal of the quest for meaning.

The Correspondence Theory of Truth

            Aristotle, in the chapter motto, formulates the common sense idea that truth consists in a correspondence between what we say and what exists. Our task, it follows, is to discover that nature of this correspondence relationship. A simple theory of the nature of correspondence goes like this: What we say or assert expresses what we believe. Our beliefs consist of ideas or mental images. These mental images picture the world around us. The world is a mind-independent reality. Our beliefs are true if our mental images are accurate copies of the world, and false if they are not.

            If we accept the correspondence theory of truth, then the answer to whether anything truly matters would be, No. On the correspondence theory, reality would need to contain properties that would make evaluative judgments true. Reality would need to contain properties like admirableness, despicableness, pitiableness, and so on. Such evaluative properties would have to be very peculiar ones. J. L. Mackie described these properties in the following way:

Plato’s Forms give a dramatic picture of what objective values would have to be. The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive; something’s being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it. (Mackie 1977:40)

The correspondence theory builds the mattering, the emotional engagement, or the normative force of value judgments into reality itself. Given what science tells us about the lack of purpose in reality, the truth of any value judgment would become very implausible.

            Luckily, the correspondence theory of truth, though an attractive metaphor, is an imperfect theory. Its central problem is to explain the notion of resemblance. The copy version might be more plausible if mental images were exact replicas of the reality to which they purportedly correspond. Of course, they are not. Mental images are fuzzy, often two-dimensional, incomplete, lacking detail. Mental images are, presumably, realized in neural circuits in the brain. Yet the neural pattern that realizes a mental image bears no resemblance to its original. The brain divides information about a face, say, and stores it in different areas of the cortex – the color of the hair in one place, the shape of the eyes in another, the line of the jaw somewhere else. All resemblance between image and object is lost.

            As well, many beliefs are more like sentences than like images. We do much of our thinking in language, talking to ourselves rather than remembering images of things. For example, we have no mental image to go with our belief that e = mc². A thought like this, a thought that is best expressed in language, does not copy, mirror, or resemble the world of which it purports to be true. At best, the various parts of speech can denote or refer to the world. ‘e’ refers to the energy contained in a given piece of matter, ‘m’ refers to its mass, and the belief that e = mc² is true if e is related to m in the way that the formula says it is. Now the correspondence theory must explain the relation of referring. Reference is not resemblance; the picture theory is no help here. Instead we need a linguistic theory in which reference is some sort of causal relationship that an advanced science of linguistics will specify.

Problems with Correspondence

            Nonetheless, we have true beliefs in several important areas where neither the picture theory nor the linguistic theory works very well:

            Mathematical beliefs can be true, but they are not true because they correspond to some abstract, mathematical reality. What sense can we make of a realm of abstract, mathematical objects? We believe that 2 + 3 = 5. Perhaps, as the picture theory suggests, we have a mental image of a two being added to a three to make a five. What mathematical realm does this image picture? Perhaps it pictures another image. Perhaps we picture an image of two fingers and three fingers and can see that we are imagining a total of five fingers. However, the correspondence theory requires a mind-independent reality to which true beliefs correspond, and our imaginary fingers, by definition, are not mind-independent. Neither our real fingers, nor any other physical objects, are the realities that make mathematics true.

            The linguistic version of the correspondence theory of mathematical truth fares little better. Whatever it might be, mathematical reality is not physical reality. It is, instead, a realm of abstract objects. On the linguistic theory, the correspondence relationship is a causal relationship described by science. Abstract objects, however, are not the sort of thing that can enter into causal relationships. Only physical events and states of affairs are the sorts of things that can be causes and effects. The causal theory of correspondence just does not work for mathematical truth.

            Beliefs about the future can be true now, but not through correspondence to reality. We can have a mental image now of the future to come, but no reality now exists which it can picture, So how can a belief about the future be true now? A causal theory of correspondence does not help. Causes must always precede their effects. So how can a future reality have a causal effect on a present linguistic belief?

            Beliefs about possibilities can be true beliefs. Yet it pushes the limits of credulity to postulate a realm of possible realities that they copy or to which they correspond. Consider what is called a contrary-to-fact conditional – an if/then statement in the subjunctive mood whose if-clause is false. For example, we know enough about kangaroos to believe truly that if kangaroos had no tails, then they would topple over. (Lewis 1973) In the actual world, all kangaroos do have tails. To what reality corresponds the belief that if kangaroos had no tails, then they would topple over? For the correspondence theory of truth to apply here, possibilities must, in some strange way, be realities. Again a causal theory of correspondence does not help, for how can mere possibilities have causal effects on beliefs in the actual world?

            Beliefs about the colors of objects are paradigms of true beliefs. Snow is white, grass is green, and dandelions are yellow. Yet the correspondence theory does not give a good account of truth here either. The problem is not that correspondence requires strange, abstract, or possible realities. The problem is that, with colors, there is no reality to which color beliefs correspond.

            People sometimes think that there is a simple correspondence between the color of an object and its surface reflectance. We see the color blue, for example, when light with a wavelength between 420 and 480 nanometers (billionths of a meter) hits the retina of our eyes. White light from the sun is a mixture of different wavelengths from 400 to 700 nanometers that includes the ranges of each color. When white light hits a blue object, the object reflects only light of a particular wavelength, say 450 nanometers, and absorbs the rest. Because this falls in the blue range of our visual system, we see the object as blue. Our belief that the object is blue is true because the blueness of objects corresponds to a high surface reflectance between 420 and 480 nanometers.

            Color vision, however, is far more complex than this simple picture allows. For one thing, objects appear blue in many more ways than simply reflecting light of a wavelength between 420 and 480 nanometers. (Hardin 1988:2-7) The blue of a gas flame comes from the heat energy of its atoms and ions. The blue of the sky comes from differential scattering of light by dust particles. The blue of the sea is usually a reflection of the blue of the sky. The blue light in a rainbow comes from differential dispersion of light of different wavelengths. The blue of a Xmas tree bulb comes from differential transmission by the bulb’s translucent coating. No one feature, like surface reflectivity, corresponds to a given color. 

            The cones in the human retina are not simple detectors of wavelengths. The three types of cones respond to different wavelengths of light with different outputs. The eye combines these outputs before sending them to the occipital lobe for processing. Because what we perceive is this combination of outputs, information about wavelengths is lost. Therefore, different combinations of wavelengths can produce the same color perception. For example, we will see light of wavelength 580 nanometers as pure yellow. However, a mixture of greenish light of wavelength 540 nanometers and reddish light of 670 nanometers will evoke the same hue. In fact, any hue can be duplicated in infinite ways by using mixtures of different intensities of red, blue, and green lights. Consequently, no one wavelength of light corresponds to a given color.

            The correspondence theory of truth just does not work for color beliefs. Nor does it work for beliefs about mathematics, the future, or contrary-to-fact possibilities. This conclusion might tempt someone to think that different theories of truth apply in different domains – correspondence to reality in physics, but something else in mathematics and in predictions about the future.

            This eclecticism cannot work, however. People legitimately make inferences that involve premises in different domains, yet they expect these premises to pass on truth to their conclusions. For example, a physicist might start with a physical description of reality as a first premise, use some mathematics as a second premise, and derive a prediction that was a physical description of the future. However, the truth of the first premise (correspondence) is different from the truth of the second (mathematics), and different again from the truth of the conclusion (future). According to the eclectic theory of truth, this mixed inference equivocates; the premises do not pass any unequivocal truth to the conclusion and so the argument is invalid. Yet such mixed inferences are, in fact, valid. So truth cannot be eclectic.

Standpoint

            The Godless have a deeper reason for being suspicious of the theory that the truth of a belief consists in its copying, mirroring, or corresponding to a mind-independent reality. In normal cases of picturing, we can have in front of us both the picture and its subject. We can find a standpoint from which to view both the reflection in the mirror and what is reflected. From this standpoint, we can judge if the copy or reflection is accurate. However, when we check the truth of a belief, the belief is in our minds. So the correspondence theory of truth requires that there be a standpoint outside the human mind from which to check the accuracy of our belief. Only from this external standpoint could someone judge that a belief did, or did not, bear the right sort of relationship to reality. (Blackburn 1999:7) To make the judgment of correspondence, he would require both a view of the beliefs in a human mind and a view of mind-independent reality. Whose standpoint is this? It cannot be a human standpoint because it must include a view of a reality independent of the human mind. It must be a God’s-eye-view of the world, a view ever inaccessible to finite humans.

            The Christian New Testament, John 18, 37-38, tells a story of the encounter between Jesus and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea in the first century.

37 Pilate said, ‘So, then you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘It is you who say that I am a king. I was born for this, I came into the world for this, to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.’

38 ‘Truth?’ said Pilate, ‘What is that?’

Pilate was quite right, while he had the chance, to ask Jesus the question, What is truth? On the correspondence theory, only God could have the right viewpoint to know the answer. Still, Pilate also wasted his question, for without a God’s-eye-view of his own, he could not have understood the answer. The Godless cannot accept truth as anything but a human-sized notion. Anything else will just smuggle in a hidden appeal to God.

            Recall that belief looks in two directions. First, belief looks toward emotion. In a healthy psyche, emotion enables rational belief formation and gives rational beliefs strength. Second, belief looks toward truth. A thought held in the face of all contrary evidence is a prejudice or an article of faith, not a belief. Beliefs must respond to reasons and evidence in order to aim at truth.

            Consider, now, a belief in the correspondence theory of truth. To what sort of evidence could this belief respond? It is not a belief arrived at by mathematical or logical reasoning. Nor is it a belief arrived based on evidence. No human being can have access to a standpoint encompassing both a belief and the reality that it purports to represent. Human beings have no way of first looking at beliefs, then looking at a mind-independent world, and then checking to see if the two correspond. In their quest for truth, human beings are confined to what is humanly accessible.

            If truth did consist in correspondence to reality, we might legitimately wonder to what sort of reality true emotional judgments corresponded. It would be a very strange reality indeed, full of peculiar properties like admirableness, despicableness, awesomeness, and so on. It might be such a strange reality that we would find it unbelievable. Then we would have no way of saying that our judgments were true, and it seems impossible that it could be true that anything mattered.

            In a sarcastic vein, we might say that these peculiar properties should not bother the correspondence theory, given the other strange features it requires: Mathematical reality, future reality, possible realities, and a God’s-eye-view. We are better, though, to say that these peculiarities give us reason to reject the correspondence theory, and to look elsewhere for the nature of truth. For the Godless, truth must not be something that is in principle inaccessible to human beings. The “to-be-pursuedness” of evaluative beliefs must be found, not in the nature of reality, but in the involvement of beliefs with the emotions.

Minimalism about Truth

            The correspondence theory is a theory about the nature of truth. We have seen that the natures of many important truths – truths about mathematics, possibilities, the future, and the colors of objects – do not consist in correspondence to reality. Further, we have seen that if correspondence to reality were the nature of truth, then truth would always be inaccessible to us. Perhaps the assumption that truth has a nature misleads us. In the second third of the twentieth-century, philosophers such as Ramsey and Wittgenstein put forward the radical idea that truth has no essential nature. In the last third of the century, philosophers such as Quine, Rorty, and Horwich formulated the idea in satisfactory ways and made it influential in philosophy.

            Our misconception that truth has a hidden nature is caused, says Horwich, by our tendency to think of the predicate ‘is true’ by analogy to a scientific predicate like ‘is magnetic’. (Horwich 1998:2) Magnetism does have an underlying nature. We can generalize and say that any piece of material is magnetic if, and only if, the spins of its component atoms are aligned in one direction. Truth, however, has no underlying nature. We cannot generalize and say that any belief is true if, and only if, it corresponds to reality. We can only something about each particular belief. Someone’s belief that grass is green is true if, and only if, grass is green. Her belief that 235 + 154 = 389 is true if, and only if, 235 + 154 = 389. Her belief that her friend deserves her admiration is true if, and only if, her friend deserves her admiration. Because truth has no underlying nature, we can say nothing general about all truths.

            On this view, truth is a very minimal notion. Truth plays little part in philosophical reasoning. Minimalism trivializes the notion of truth in the sense that truth does not explain anything. Because truth has no underlying nature, we cannot use truth to explain or justify our beliefs. We can explain the truth of a belief, but we cannot go on to use the belief being true to explain anything else. We can say, for example, that our scientific belief that electrons exist is true because there really are electrons. Yet we cannot reverse the direction of explanation and say that there really are electrons because our scientific belief that electrons exist is true. Truth does not solve any problems.

            Yet minimalism about truth does not entail that scientific, mathematical, or philosophical problems are trivial. Minimally, someone’s belief that 235 + 154 = 389 is true if, and only if, 235 + 154 = 389. However, she still has to add 235 plus 154 to find the answer. The theory of truth does not do the addition for her. Minimalism does not make mathematical problems go away. Nor does minimalism make emotional judgments any easier. Her belief that her friend deserves her admiration is true if, and only if, her friend deserves her admiration. However, to see if her friend deserves her admiration, she still has to reflect on whether she would admire her friend if she were free of the distortions to which emotions are prone. This reflection is not trivial for her, involving, as it does, much self-discovery and communication with her friend.

            Minimalism about truth does not trivialize the problem of making emotional judgments. Instead, it makes the problem potentially solvable. The correspondence theory of truth required [1] a God’s-eye standpoint from which we could compare our judgments to [2] a peculiar normative reality. Since we can meet neither of these conditions, the problem of making true emotional judgments would be intractable. Minimalism recommends that we do not look to the theory of truth for help with our judgments. It recommends that we just get on with the process of critical reflection on our emotions and try to avoid the distortions to which they are prone.

            Someone might think minimalism to imply that the concept of truth is a concept we could do without. Perhaps we could just list all the beliefs we think are true without ever using the word ‘true.’ We could do this by asserting that grass is green, 235 + 154 = 389, and so on, but the list would be huge. The concept of truth allows us to summarize such lists conveniently. We often meet situations where we want to say that someone’s belief is true without knowing exactly what it is that he believes. Suppose that we think him to be a particularly good judge of character, but do not know what he thinks of the Queen. The concept of truth allows us to say that whatever he believes about the Queen is true, though we do not know whether he judges her admirable. This may seem like a trivial usage until we reflect that we could not ask the central question of this chapter without it. Our question was, “Can it be plainly true that anything matters for us?” We interpret this question to mean, “Are any of our emotional judgments true?” We ask this question without knowing what all the emotional judgments in question are. We may know some of them, the ones that we are each aware of making, but we mean also to include judgments made by others and judgments that we may not yet have made. Without the concept of truth we could only ask the question by listing the infinity of possible questions that this simple question summarizes.

            Had the correspondence theory of truth been correct, the answer to our question whether any of our emotional judgments were true would have been, No. Luckily it is not correct, and we can continue to ask the question. However, we must not expect any help in answering it from our theory of truth. We can only take each emotional judgment as it arises and ask whether we would have the cognate emotion if we were free of the distortions to which emotions are prone. We need the concept of truth to state our question, but not to answer it.