The Truth of It — Part I: What is Truth?
How do we know what’s true? This has become a pressing matter of late. Will the vaccine that promises to save lives end up killing me? Was the 2020 presidential election stolen? Is the covid-19 pandemic a hoax? Is climate change real? Each of these questions has turned into a matter of life and death — literally. We could all gain some welcome peace of mind if we could just figure out what’s real and what’s not. But, how can we get past the confusion obstructing our path to truth? Here’s the bad news: If that proves impossible, then every plan, decision, or project we make will be lost to chaos.
It’s scary that people these days are so divided over basic facts. Our collective future depends on large scale cooperation, but we can’t cooperate if we can’t even agree on what’s real. I’m even wary about my own decisions regarding which sources of information to trust. I get angry when political factions aim to persuade others to challenge values I hold dear. I get frustrated when people I care about can’t seem to be swayed by evidence. And I feel disheartened when I realize how many people fail to recognize what seems so clear to me. Deeply felt differences undermine my sense of community with others. How can we survive the current storms of disinformation, misinformation, and deception? There are no easy answers, but I’m searching for a safe harbor.
What is Truth?
Searching for truth with a capital “T” is complicated. There are many kinds of truth, including metaphysical, axiomatic, analytical, identity, valuative, cultural, historic, moral, empirical and experimental truths. (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/) Here, I’m only concerned with the last two of those. Empirical and experimental truths are those which help us navigate the material world (including our own actions in that world). We come to know that world through our observations, definitions, creativity, and logical inferences.
Philosophers discuss many theories about truth. For me to believe that a statement is true, I expect it to correspond to aspects of reality we come to know through experience. By holding to this standard, I can judge what’s true or false as I sense or measure natural phenomena. Another of my assumptions is that true beliefs will be coherently related to other true beliefs. That is, I expect truth to be orderly and not chaotic. I also agree with the Pragmatists in expecting truth to be both viscerally satisfying and verifiable. That is, truth ought to bestow confidence and also be subject to scrutiny by others. While there are further relevant fine points to ponder, these few are the ones I find most useful.
Some doubt that assigning a truth value to a statement adds anything to making a simple assertion. That is, they think that saying, “It’s true that the sky is blue,” is no different from saying, “The sky is blue.” Either way it’s put, there’s no certainty that we can trust that the sky is blue. Nonetheless, it seems useful to me to tag the trustworthiness of statements that are made, apart from the states of affairs they describe. Including such a truth value doesn’t signify only that the state of things named is true. It also suggests that the statement made about the sky’s color is true. When a source affirms that a something stated is true that adds some measure of that source’s reliability as we accumulate experience matching what they say to the way things are.
This question of truth values raises another issue about truth: what is a “truth-bearer?” (i.e., what vehicle conveys truth)? We judge the truth of vehicles such as beliefs, propositions, sentences, utterances, or other similar devices that indicate the states of affairs we find around and inside of us. Before we can judge the truth value of a claim, we must first separate factual statements from opinions and preferences. Statements of fact can be found to be true or false, while opinions or preferences are merely adopted or rejected on the basis of one’s personal values. Many people don’t seem to recognize that difference. In 2018, the Pew Research Center surveyed over 5,000 US adults, asking them to distinguish factual statements from opinions. Only 26% correctly identified all five factual statements (with no requirement that respondents believed they were true) and only 35% correctly identified all five opinions. (https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2018/06/18/distinguishing-between-factual-and-opinion-statements-in-the-news/)
Making that distinction shouldn’t be so hard. Factual statements are ones that can be proved or disproved by considering publicly available evidence, whereas opinions promote the values and beliefs held by the source. Empirical and experimental truths are matters of fact, not opinion. In principle, independent observers can reenact prescribed steps to determine whether or not claims hold true. By taking such steps truth-finders can differentiate truth from fiction. All the while, we should bear in mind that the material world seems unaffected by which statements we believe and which we don’t. It just continues humming along according to its own rules and dynamics.
Why Worry About What’s True?
It’s important to recognize facts which others can verify, because individuals (and even large groups of people) are susceptible to faulty observations. I consider myself among the susceptible. We’re all prey to illusions, mistaken perceptions and self-delusions. We confuse what we expect with what we encounter and how we interpret situations with the way things actually are. Any accomplished magician can demonstrate how easily our senses can be fooled. Children’s creative explanations of complicated events illustrate how limited knowledge and imprecise understandings can shape the way we imagine the world works. At times, our grown-up thoughts are equally subject to misrepresentations and our emotions often color what we believe we know. It’s useful to ask others questions like “did you see that?” or “does that make sense to you?” to strengthen our confidence in our own perceptions. Learning to listen carefully to the answers is perhaps even more important. These strategies take advantage of the likelihood that those with different knowledge or perspectives can provide corrective feedback for our errors.
In this digital age, it’s easy to feel swept up and tumbled about by the tsunami of information constantly coming at us. We’re easily deceived by others. We’re also adept at deceiving ourselves. Numerous data sources compete for our attention, many of them carefully crafted to win our allegiance. I find myself reacting emotionally to news or editorials before I know the relevant details. And, there’s so little time to keep up with it all. While I’m trying to learn about one piece of the puzzle, many more will pop up. My ability to discern facts is limited and my shortcomings are easily exploited in the marketplace of ideas. Faced with such a daunting task, we have little choice but to depend on others to fill the gaps.
And yet, those others can be just as easily fooled as I can be — as we all can be. All of us are prone to emphasize small portions of the information presented to us. For example, we overvalue what we notice first, most recently, or what’s new to us. We’re more easily influenced by information that’s readily available to us than that which doesn’t come to mind. What we already believe about the world and our place in it molds what we perceive to be true. We interpret random events in terms of patterns we expect. We focus on what’s most apparent, rather than on what matters most. We may unwittingly bring about results that we believe are inevitable, since such beliefs inform our actions. We attend to data that confirm our predictions and neglect those that undermine our favorite convictions. We cling to what we think we know and reject whatever challenges our assumptions. We underestimate and misunderstand the laws of probability. As a consequence, we too quickly infer general rules from a few familiar instances. I wish I were exempt from these misleading tendencies, but the fact is, nobody is.
Our relationships to our social environments also affect our judgments of what’s true and what’s not. As social creatures, we’re often persuaded by those we’re closest to. We tend to approve of the attitudes and beliefs of people we like and disapprove of those held by people we don’t care for. To make matters worse, we tend to prefer people who share our values over those who don’t. While it’s easy to recognize the biases of others, we tend not to notice our own. What we assume about members of identifiable groups may prevent our recognizing what’s true about the individuals we meet. We tend to understand our own actions as responses to our circumstances, while we’re likely to explain others’ actions in terms of the particular dispositions we presume them to have. So, For all these reasons, interacting with communities affects our quests for truth.
Emotions also influence our decisions and may distort our understanding. We tend to avoid information that portends danger or other negative outcomes. We desire certainty and withdraw from potential harm. We resist messages we perceive as limiting our freedoms. We judge decisions made based on how things turn out, rather than evaluating the methods that were used to make those decisions. We’re likely to defend decisions we’ve already made, rather than re-litigate them. How ideas are presented and the symbols used to express them can incite emotions that affect our responses to them. Overconfidence may lead to devaluing the observations of others, while insecurity may lead to blindly following another’s lead. So, our emotional responses have a definite impact on our perception of truth.
How Can We Find the Truth?
History teaches us that we all travel essentially the same roads through life. There are a finite number of narratives that get recycled despite some differences in their particulars. We each rely on our own tools to navigate the twists and turns that present themselves. Imagine how much easier it would be to find our way if we could more easily share personal logs and other tips for the journey. Such teamwork, however, depends on consulting common maps and understanding some general rules of the road. Unfortunately, such basic premises are not as universal as I hope them to be. In my next piece (“The Truth of It — Part II”) I’ll describe some means I use for recognizing what’s true. I believe we all can live better lives in this world if we band together in our search for the truth of it.
