The Philosophy of Truth
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. —Thoreau
Truth tends to lead to successful action. In that much, truth has instrumental value. But truth also has intrinsic value. Given the choice between a life of limitless pleasure as a brain in a vat and a genuine human life along with all its pain and suffering, most people opt for the latter.
In Plato's Cratylus, Socrates says that aletheia(Greek, 'truth') is a compression of the phrase 'a wandering that is divine'. Since Plato, many thinkers have spoken of truth and God in the same breath. According to John the Apostle, Jesus said to the Jews: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
When truth isn't truth
Today, God may be dying, but what about truth? Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's personal lawyer, claimed that "Truth isn't truth", while Kellyanne Conway, Trump's counsellor, presented the public with what she called "alternative facts". Over in the U.K. in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, Michael Gove, then Lord Chancellor, opined that people "have had enough of experts".
One way to understand truth is simply to look at its opposites, namely, lies and bullshit. The liar must track the truth in order to conceal it. In contrast, the bullshitter has no regard or sensitivity for the truth, or even for what his or her audience believes.
Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
—Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Following his defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Mark Antony heard the rumour that Cleopatra had committed suicide, and consequently stabbed himself in the abdomen—only to discover that Cleopatra herself had been responsible for spreading the rumour. He later died in her arms.
"Fake news" may be as old as humanity, but in our internet age it has spread like a disease, swinging elections, fomenting social unrest, undermining institutions, and diverting political energy from health, education, and good government. Initially, "fake news" referred to false news with large scale popular traction, although Donald Trump seems to have extended the usage to include any news that does not serve him.
Those who are alarmed, or who feel they are in a minority, can take comfort in the words of Søren Kierkegaard:
Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion — and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion… while truth again reverts to a new minority.
—Søren Kierkegaard, Diary
The correspondence theory of truth
Truth is a property not so much of thoughts and ideas but more properly of beliefs and assertions. But to believe or assert something is not enough to make it true, or else the claim that 'to believe something makes it true' would be just as true as the claim that 'to believe something does not make it true'.
For centuries, philosophers have agreed that thought or language is true if it corresponds to an independent reality. For Aristotle, "to say that what is is, and what is not is not, is true". For Avicenna, truth is "what corresponds in the mind to what is outside it". And for Aquinas, truth is "the adequation of things and the intellect" (adaequatio rei et intellectus).
Unfortunately, but perhaps also fortunately, the mind does not perceive reality as it is, but only as it can, filtering, distorting, and interpreting it. In modern times, it has been argued that truth is largely constructed by social and cultural processes, to say nothing of individual desires and dispositions. Michel Foucault famously spoke, not of truth or truths, but of "regimes of truth". Categories and constructs regarding, for example, race and sexuality may not reflect biological let alone metaphysical realities.
The coherence theory of truth
A thing is more likely to be true if it fits comfortably into a large and coherent system of beliefs. It remains that the system could be a giant fiction, entirely divorced from reality, but this becomes increasingly unlikely as we investigate, curate, and add to its components—assuming, and it is quite an assumption, that we are operating in good faith, with truth as our aim. So conceived, truth is not a property, or merely a property, but an attitude, a way of being in the world.
'Truth' is not a feature of correct propositions which are asserted of an 'object' by a human 'subject' and then are 'valid' somewhere, in what sphere we know not. Rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds. All human comportment and bearing are exposed in its open region.
—Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth
The pragmatic theory of truth
All the better if we can actually do something useful with our system and its components. If truth leads to successful action, then successful action is an indicator of truth. Clearly, we could not have sent a rocket to the moon if our maths had been wide off the mark. For William James, the truth is "only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving".
If something works, it may well be true; if it doesn't, it most probably isn't. But what if something works for me but not for you? Is that thing then true for me but not for you? For Nietzsche, who makes himself the natural friend of two-penny tyrants, truth is power, and power truth: "The falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to a judgement… The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding…"
Short-term or long-term?
Deflationary theories of truth
That a thing fits into a system, or leads to successful action, may suggest that it is true, but does not tell us much about what truth actually is. It has been argued that to say that X is true is merely to say that X, and therefore that truth is an empty predicate. Truth is not a real property of things, but a feature of language used to emphasize, agree, or hypothesize, or for stylistic reasons. For example, it can be used to explicate the Catholic dogma of papal infallibility: "Everything that the pope says is true." But this is merely shorthand for saying that if the Pope says A, then A; and if he says B, then B…
For some thinkers, something can only be true or false if it is open to verification, at least in theory if not also in practice. The truth of something lies at the end of our inquiry into that thing. But as our inquiry can have no end, the truth of something can never be more than our best opinion of that thing. If best opinion is all that we can have or hope for, then best opinion is as good as truth, and truth is a redundant concept. But best opinion is only best because, at least on average, it is closest to the truth, which, as well as instrumental value, has deep intrinsic value.
A reader once emailed to ask, "How can I know when I am lying to myself?"
And I replied,
By its very nature self-deception is hard to distinguish from the truth—whether our internal, emotional truth or the external truth. One has to develop and trust one's instinct: what does it feel like to react in the way that I'm reacting? Does it feel calm, considered, and nuanced, or shallow and knee-jerk? Does it take the welfare of others into account, or is it all about me? Am I satisfied with, even proud of, my self-conquering effort, or does it make me feel small, angry, or anxious?
Self-deception doesn't 'add up' in the grand scheme of things and can easily be brought down by even superficial questioning. As with a jigsaw, try to look at the bigger picture of your life and see how the thought or reaction might fit in. Did you react from a position of strength or vulnerability? What would the person you most respect think? What would Socrates think? Talk to other people and gather their opinions. If they disagree with you, does that make you feel angry, upset, or defensive? The coherence of your reaction can speak volumes about the nature of your motives.
Finally, truth is constructive and adaptive, while lies are destructive and self-defeating. So how useful is a self-deceptive thought or reaction going to be for you? Are you just covering up an irrational fear, or helping to create a solid foundation for the future? Are you empowering yourself to fulfil your highest potential, or depriving yourself of opportunities for growth and creating further problems down the line? Is the cycle simply going to repeat itself, or will the truth, at last, make you free?
Author Neel BurtonPosted on August 24, 2018 August 24, 2018 Categories Philosophy, Psychiatry/psychologyLeave a comment on The Philosophy of Truth
How Does the Language You Speak Influence the Way You Think?
Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation. —Rumi
The ostensible purpose of language is to transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Language represents thought, but does it also determine thought?
Wittgenstein famously said that "the limits of my language stand for the limits of my world." Taken at face value, that seems too strong a claim. There are over 7,000 languages in the world—with, by some estimates, one dying out each and every week. The number of basic colour terms varies quite considerably from one language to another. Dani, spoken in New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, each have no more than two colour terms, one for dark/cool colours and the other for light/warm colours. But, obviously, speakers of Dani and Bassa are able to perceive, and think about, more than two colours.
More subtly, there is no English equivalent for the German word Sehnsucht, which refers to the dissatisfaction with an imperfect reality paired with the yearning for an ideal that comes to seem more real than the reality itself. But despite lacking the word, Walt Whitman could clearly conjure the concept and emotion: Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it the dream, And, failing it, life's lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream.
The English language has a word for children who have lost their parents (orphan), and a word for spouses who have lost their spouse (widow or widower), but no word for parents who have lost a child. This may mean that parents who have lost a child are less likely to enter our minds, but not that they cannot enter our minds, or that we cannot conceive of them. We often think about or remember things that cannot be put into words, such as the smell and taste of a mango, the dawn chorus of the birds, or the contours of a lover's face. Animals and pre-linguistic babies must surely have thoughts, even if they have no language.
Time heaved a gentle sigh as the wind swept through the willows. Communication does not require language, and many animals communicate effectively by other modes. However, language is closely associated with symbolism, and so with emotionalism and conceptual thought and creativity. These unique assets make us by far the most adaptable of all animals, and enable us to engage in highly abstract pursuits such as art, science, and philosophy that define us as human beings.
Imagine what it would be like to live without language—not without the ability to speak, but without an actual language. Given the choice, would you rather lose the faculty for sight or the faculty for language? This is probably the first time that you are faced with this question—the faculty for language is so fundamental to the human condition that, unlike the faculty for sight, we take it completely for granted. "Monkeys," quipped Kenneth Grahame, "very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings."
If language does not determine thought, how, if at all, does it interact with thought? Or, to put it another way, how does the language you speak influence the way you think? Russian, Greek, and many other languages have two words for blue, one for lighter shades, the other for darker shades—goluboy and siniy in Russian, and ghalazio and ble in Greek. A study found that, compared to English speakers, Russian speakers were quicker to discriminate between shades of goluboy and siniy, but not shades of goluboy or shades of siniy. Conversely, another study found that Greek speakers who had lived for a long time in the U.K. see ghalazio and ble as more similar than Greek speakers living in Greece. By creating categories, language can enhance cognition.
In contrast to modern Greek, Ancient Greek, in common with many ancient languages, has no specific word for blue, leaving Homer to speak about "the wine-dark sea." But the Ancient Greeks did have several words for 'love', including philia, eros, storge, and agape, each one referring to a different type or concept of love. This means that they could speak more precisely about love, but does it also mean that they could think more precisely about love, and, as a result, have more fulfilled love lives? Or perhaps the Greeks had more words for love because they had more fulfilled love lives in the first place, or, more prosaically, because their culture and society placed more emphasis on the different bonds that can exist between people, and on the various duties and expectations that attend, or attended, to those bonds.
Philosophers and academics sometimes make up words to help them talk and think about an issue. In the Phaedrus, Plato coined the word psychagogia, the art of leading souls, to characterize rhetoric—another word that he invented. Every field of human endeavour inevitably evolves its own specialized jargon. There seems to be an important relationship between language and thinking: I often speak—and write, as I am doing now—to define or refine my thinking on a particular topic, and language is the scaffolding by which I arrive at my more subtle or syncretic thoughts.
While we're talking dead languages, it may come as a surprise that Latin has no direct translations for yes and no. Instead, one either echoes the verb in the question (in affirmative or negative) or expresses one's feelings about the truth value of the proposition with adverbs such as certe, fortasse, nimirum, plane, vero, etiam, sane, minime…This may have led to more nuanced thinking, as well as greater interpersonal engagement, though it must have been a nightmare for teens.
Much of the particularity of a language is extra-lexical, built into the syntax and grammar of the language and virtually invisible to native speakers. English, for example, restricts the use of the present perfect tense ("has been," "has read") to subjects who are still alive, marking a sharp grammatical divide between the living and the dead, and, by extension, between life and death. But of course, as an English speaker, you already knew that, at least unconsciously.
Here's another, more substantial, example: When describing accidental events, English speakers tend to emphasize the agent ("I fired the gun") more than, say, speakers of Spanish or Japanese, who prefer to omit the agent ("the gun went off"). One study found that, as a result, English speakers are more likely to remember the agents of accidental events—and, presumably, to attach blame.
In English, verbs express tense, that is, time relative to the moment of speaking. In Turkish, they also express the source of the information (evidentiality)—whether the information is direct, acquired through sense perception; or indirect, acquired by testimony or inference. In Russian, they include information about completion, with (to simplify) the perfective aspect used for completed actions and the imperfective aspect for ongoing or habitual actions. Spanish, on the other hand, emphasizes modes of being, with two verbs for "to be"—ser, to indicate permanent or lasting attributes, and estar, to indicate temporary states and locations. Like many languages, Spanish has more than one mode of second-person address: tú for intimates and social inferiors, and usted for strangers and social superiors, equivalent to tu and vous in French, and tu and lei in Italian. There used to be a similar distinction in English, with thou used to express intimacy, familiarity, or downright rudeness—but because it is archaic, many people now think of it as more formal than "you." It stands to reason that, compared to English speakers, Turkish speakers have to pay more attention to evidentiality, Russian speakers to completion, and Spanish speakers to modes of being and social relations.
In many languages, nouns are divided into masculine and feminine. In German, there is a third, neutral class of nouns. In Dyirbal, an Aboriginal language, there are four noun classes, including one for women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals—or, as George Lakoff put it, "women, fire, and dangerous things." Researchers asked speakers of German and Spanish to describe objects with opposite gender assignments in these two languages, and found that their descriptions conformed to gender stereotypes—even when the testing took place in English. For example, German speakers described bridges (feminine in German, die Brücke) as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, whereas Spanish speakers described bridges (masculine in Spanish, el puente) as big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering.
Another study looking at the artistic personification of abstract concepts such as love, justice, or time found that, in 78% of cases, the gender of the concept in the artist's language predicted the gender of the personification, and that this pattern held even for uncommon allegories such as geometry, necessity, and silence. Compared to a French or Spanish artist, a German artist is far more likely to paint death (der Tod, la mort, la muerte) or victory (der Sieg, la victoire, la victoria) as a man—though all artists, or European artists, tend to paint death in skeletal form. Grammar, it seems, can directly and radically influence thought, perception, and action.
It is often said that, by de-emphasizing them, language perpetuates biases against women. For example, many writers in English still use "mankind" to talk about humankind, and "he" for "he or she." Similarly, many languages use masculine plural pronouns to refer to groups of people with at least one man. If 100 women turn up with a baby in a pram, and that baby happens to be male, French grammar dictates the use of the masculine plural ils: ils sont arrivés, "they have arrived." Language changes as mores change, and sometimes politicians, pressure groups, and others attempt to change the language to change the mores—but, on the whole, language serves to preserve the status quo, to crystallize the order and culture that it reflects.
Language is also made up of all sorts of metaphors. In English and Swedish, people tend to speak of time in terms of distance: "I won't be long"; "Let's look at the weather for the week ahead"; "his drinking caught up with him." But in Spanish or Greek, people tend to speak of time in terms of size or volume—for example, in Spanish, hacemos una pequeña pausa ("let's have a small break") rather than corta pausa ("short break"). More generally, mucho tiempo ("much time") is preferred to largo tiempo ("long time"), and, in Greek, poli ora to makry kroniko diastima. And guess what? According to a recent study of fully bilingual Spanish-Swedish speakers, the language used to estimate the duration of events alters the speaker's perception of the relative passage of time.
But all in all, and with perhaps a couple of exceptions, European languages do not differ dramatically from one another. To talk about space, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal language, use 16 words for absolute cardinal directions instead of relative references such as "right in front of you," "to the right," and "over there." As a result, even children are always aware of the exact direction in which they are facing. When asked to arrange a sequence of picture cards in temporal order, English speakers arrange the cards from left to right, whereas Hebrew speakers tend to arrange them from right to left. But speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre consistently arrange them from east to west, which is left to right if they are facing south, and right to left if they are facing north. Thinking differently about space, they think differently about time as well.
Language may not determine thought, but it focuses our perception and attention on particular aspects of reality, structures and enhances our cognitive processes, and even, to some extent, regulates our social relationships. Our language reflects and at the same time shapes our thoughts and, ultimately, our culture, which in turn shapes our thoughts and language. There is no equivalent in English of the Portuguese word saudade, which refers to the love and longing for someone or something that has been lost and may never be regained. The rise of saudade coincided with the decline of Portugal and the yen for its imperial heyday, a yen so strong as to have written itself into the national anthem: Levantai hoje de novo o splendour de Portugal ("Let us once again lift up the splendour of Portugal"). The three strands of language, thought, and culture, though individual, are so tightly woven that they cannot be prised apart.
It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that comes to an end.
See my related post, Beyond Words: The Benefits of Being Bilingual
Author Neel BurtonPosted on August 8, 2018 August 13, 2018 Categories Philosophy, Psychiatry/psychologyLeave a comment on How Does the Language You Speak Influence the Way You Think?
New Audiobook on the Emotions
Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions has just come out on Audible!
So now you can take it in the car, gym, kitchen, or wherever…
The book is narrated by the very talented Alexander Doddy, who also did Growing from Depression.
For more info, follow this link (UK) or this link (US).
Author Neel BurtonPosted on August 1, 2018 August 1, 2018 Categories Philosophy, Psychiatry/psychologyLeave a comment on New Audiobook on the Emotions
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