Colorful language and the colors of Truth

I have been thinking about the way “true” and “truth” are used in our language, and the parallels such usage has with profanity.

Just like profanity, the “literal” meaning is not the “real” meaning.

Just like profanity, the real purpose is to adorn one’s assertions with bogus weight and authority.

Consider:

(1)    “I’m unhappy with the way you’ve been treating me.”

(2)    “Fuck you, bitch!”

We’ll get to the “truth” example in a minute.  But first let's look at how much additional information is contained in #2 relative to #1.  Yes, this is dry sarcasm and yes I know I’m not really funny.  Moving on …

A man I admire very much, Keith Sewell, divides the world up into two groups – those he deems “rational”, and those I will (more generously than he) call “spiritual”.  The “spiritual” folks in this bifurcation use “truth” to promulgate assertions that have no basis in empirical observation and logic (aka “reason”).  Thus “truth” is essentially “bogus weight and authority”.  The best he can say for “rational” folk is that we use truth “redundantly”:  “It is true that my house is small” is no different than “my house is small”.  He gives no truck to the idea that “truth” is what corresponds to the “actual state of reality”.  He gives sound reasons for this, but they are beyond the scope of this blog.  (But see poppersinversion.blogspot.com.)

Now I spent several weeks consciously observing rational folk – including myself – and how we used the words “true” and “truth”.  What I found was astonishing.  That is, even we use “truth” mostly in the “bogus weight and authority” sense.   “Actual state of reality” was a close second, and “redundant” probably came in third.  Now when I say “mostly” I do not mean “most of the time”, but rather that “true” usually carries more than one meaning at the same time and that the “bogus weight and authority” component is the stronger.

Let’s look at a concrete example where “true” might be thought to bear all three components of “redundancy”, “bogus weight and authority”, and “actual state of reality”:

Bob:  Your dog bit me.

Joe:  But he’s so gentle; my dog would never do something like that.

Bob:  It's true!

Keith would probably say Bob’s last statement is zero parts “actual state of reality”;  that it’s all “redundancy” and “bogus weight and authority”.  Most folks, even us rationals, would disagree.  So how much of Bob’s last statement is “bogus weight and authority” and how much should be given to the other two components?  My own contention is that “It’s true!” is tantamount to “I don’t have to provide evidence either of the bite itself or of my honesty; ‘true’ is all you need to know.”  That is to say,  it’s nearly 100% “bogus weight and authority”.

Keep in mind this is how rational folk use “truth”.

As Bill Cosby would say, I told you that so I could tell you this.  I have seen Keith in several debates on rationalist oriented discussion boards.  Almost without exception the idea that “truth” means anything other than “actual state of reality” is totally missed.  If other meanings are discussed at all, it is in the context of those "spiritualist folks over there".  Keith is ever the trooper, and defends his rejection of the “truth” concept against all comers even so.  The point is that this is how rationalists respond when confronted with the word "truth" directly.  It is not how they use it.

So to close the circle and test your knowledge of profanity, here’s a quiz.  What does “fuck” mean?  If you had sex in your answer and it wasn’t metaphorical, then fuck off  ... I mean, I'm dissapointed you didn't get it.

Introduction to "Truth?"

This blog is intended to provide and introduction to a much more complete and philosophically meatier essay by Keith Sewell called “Truth?” (http://www.poppersinversion.blogspot.com/). I first met Keith in 2007 when I responded to a letter he wrote in the Humanist Network News. Over the years we have exchanged countless emails and discussed many things, but mostly philosophies surrounding his essay. Keith has the philosophical background and intellectual firepower to give this philosophy a credibility that I never could. But it’s fair to say that most people (including myself) misunderstand it at first, and “at first” is as far as most people (myself excepted) get. Here then is my attempt to assist future newcomers.



The Basics

“Truth?” neither denies the existence of reality, nor our ability to make valid statements about it; it simply says that any such statements are limited by the interplay between the reality being represented and the mind doing the representing. The fundamental indictment of “Truth?” can be proclaimed in a number of succinct ways. Among them:


1. “Man is the measure of all things.” - Protagoras


2. “We cannot hold the divisions that we choose for reality to be its own intrinsic divisions.” – Keith Sewell


3. “Nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence.” - Richard Rorty


#1 and #2 are equivalent. As to #1, I would substitute “the observer” for “man”, and ask you to consider how unlike you own world is the world of a mouse not 4 feet from you. You and the mouse impose different “divisions” on reality, ala statement #2. Statement #3 is a mathematical trap. Direct experience does not get you out of it as you must previously be inclined to trust direct experience. Even those who say “seeing is believing” abandon that slogan when it fails the test of coherence (dreams, hallucinations, phantom limb sensations, etc.).


Keith often uses the term “qualitatively superior form of knowledge” in contrast to the admittedly human generated knowledge described above. It is this knowledge that he identifies with “Truth”, and this knowledge that he believes to be a harmful illusion. He argues that we have either been using our ‘truth’ concept to refer to this (a qualitatively superior form of knowledge) or we have been using it incoherently.


Post-Structuralism

Having broken free of our phantom moorings in Truth, where does that leave us? Some have put forward the idea that we can make no distinction, or no preference, among statements. That is generally known as post-structuralism. While it is not held explicitly among ordinary folk, in a certain sense it survives in the separation of “domains of discourse”. This has religion and spiritualism taking up one area, and reason taking up other areas like engineering and navigation. Both domains often (indeed most of the time) exist within the same person.


Keith attempts to strike down the truce between these domains by (1) showing that even without Truth we can prefer some knowledge proposals to others, and (2) that no coherent method of selecting knowledge proposals can be understood to yield those of our religions. (1) is directly argued for, while (2) is couched more as a challenge – but one that to date has not been met.
 That it is possible to develop a procedure for preferring some knowledge proposals over others is shown by the example of science, which we can see to work in the clear sense of delivering predictions that enable us to influence reality in our desired directions, and in growing in its range of applicability, explanatory power, and internal consistency. Keith also notes that scientists (collectively) change their minds, indicating that even well established scientific theories cannot in any meaningful sense be held as “true”.


As for the rest of us, Keith’s essay invites us to learn from science, but does not lay out any specific procedure by which we must sort knowledge proposals. Rather he invites each of us to do this for him or her self – to sort back through all of our knowledge, with as much intellectual honesty as we can bring to the task, in order to clarify to ourselves the tests through which we distinguish knowledge from non-knowledge. Keith suggests that this is necessary before any meaningful discussion between people of widely different viewpoints can take place.


So What?


By now you may be saying “Yeah, but so what?” This is the third and perhaps most important aspect of “Truth?” If it gets less coverage, it is only because Keith did not think the target audience would be too hard to sell on this one.


At the heart of the matter is that we can see ‘truth’ to have always been the concept through which we - initially in our clans and tribes, but now up to the level of nation states - have been able to maintain our parochial gods and ideologies as ‘the real ones’. Those gods of the “heathen barbarians” across the river or in the next valley being impostors, precisely and solely through our truth concept. In this form our illusion of possession of "truth" has always had localized advantages in fostering social cohesion and military effectiveness. But our continued propagation of this illusion into modern times, and societies armed with nuclear and bio weapons, now seems to threaten all with extinction.

 Call to Action

So we’re done, right? No, we’re only getting started. To the extent that “Truth?” is found to be convincing, Keith is calling on all who do find it so to explicitly abandon their ‘truth’ concept; to cease to think about it, speak about it, or write about it, except in opposition. In this small way, he and I believe, enough of us acting in concert may be able to bend the arc of history.


A personal note from Gary Shyger

Hopefully I wrote the above introduction to “Truth?” with a modicum of faithfulness to the original. Keith takes a hard-hitting “take no prisoners” approach, with no vacillation and no hesitation. He has been doing this work thanklessly, and has endured many slings and arrows, but perhaps a little less of late. There are some interesting signs of a turning tide. I was baffled at first by how someone could feel so strongly about something which, intrinsically, couldn’t be “true”. It was worth effort to find out.



Is this a fool’s errand? A lost cause? It would certainly seem so. But consider the number of people who are already on our side. Yes, for now it’s only with the rational half of their brains - that “domains of discourse” thing again. But without going into more detail than would be appropriate here, I can tell you that “Truth?” is a veritable handbook where I work, even if most would disagree with its theological implications. Perhaps not so lost as it seems.



Gary Shyger


August 2010