Truth Units and Philosophy’s Unfinished Work
Philosophical steps to establish true and false, right and wrong
Preface: my articles on truth units were aptly critiqued by Steven Gambardella and Benjamin Cain, both better writers and more knowledgeable about philosophy than me. In response, this piece goes deeper into the philosophy side of truth units. Truth units themselves are explained more fully in my other articles.
Anyone who reads a chunk of 20th-century western philosophy — analytic or continental — learns that language and reality do not meet, that they are two separate worlds.
Analytic philosophers like Wittgenstein, Sellars, Dummett and Quine didn’t always say so explicitly. Rather, they deconstructed all connection between language and reality, then walked away. One example is Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). The book surveys 20th-century western philosophy and concludes that the only valid activity remaining for philosophy is “conversation.”
We tend to think of philosophy as guidance toward deeper understanding and wise action. A “conversation” doesn’t sound especially productive. Does 20th-century western philosophy offer any guidance? Where do we go from here? Or do we just wait for Godot?
These questions seem especially timely, now that we live in a “post-truth” era. Disregard for truth is everywhere we look. Concepts of truth, fact, reality, etc, keep getting twisted.
For sake of discussion, let’s define “truth” as the intersection between language and reality. If there is no connection between language and reality — as 20th-century western philosophy has shown us — then there is no truth. If there is no truth — no connection with reality — we are left with chaos and madness (which pretty well describes our current culture).
The philosophical purpose of truth units
The project of Truth Units began as an answer to the classic philosophical question “what is truth?” However, its purpose isn’t to add to, critique, or respond to any dialogue in existing philosophy.
Instead, its purpose is to take what we know now and figure out where to go from here. Western philosophy has put us in a place, and we need to move forward from that place to another place. This is a process of evolution, of incremental progress. We are on a journey of many miles. We’ve taken many steps. But the journey is not yet finished. We need to take another step now.
Adopting truth units is just one possible step. A potential benefit is that it gets us to a new place with minimal disruption — by pruning philosophy, not replacing it.
A key premise
A key premise behind truth units is that the question “what is truth?” needs a single answer that works in every situation, whether philosophical or practical. A philosophical answer needs to be practically useful, and a practical answer needs to be philosophically valid.
“Truth” as it’s understood today has many definitions. So, in any given case, the waters are muddied when the meta-question comes up “which definition applies to this situation?”
Many times on TV, I’ve seen MAGA people make false claims to mainstream journalists. Taken aback, journalists often retort “but those aren’t the facts.” Then they struggle to define “fact” much beyond “a claim supported by hard evidence.” To respond, MAGA people often cherry-pick their evidence, stealthily based on different definitions of “fact.” You can imagine this bewildering people with a casual or vague definition of “fact.”
Truth — discovery or test?
Truth units “disquotationally” dispense with concepts like “facts” and “evidence.” A truth unit starts with a hypothesis/question (a “claim”). A “test” is selected to judge the claim. The claim is put to the selected test in an “evaluation.” Based on the “result” of the evaluation, a “verdict” is rendered. (This description reflects a conscious process, but the process is also unconscious, as will be expanded upon further below.)
The claim-test-evaluation-result-verdict process can be expressed as “truth is the passage of a test” or even more aphoristically as “truth is a test” with the following “analysis” in mind:
1. Truth is a test.
2. A test is a process.
3. A process produces a result.
4. A result is a function of a process.
The above “analysis” suggests a truth cannot be detached from the process that produces it. However, in discourse, we often don’t mention the processes behind assertions of truth. We leave out the “analysis” above and just mention the result (the “verdict” part of the truth unit).
Framing a truth as a freestanding result leads us to think of truth as something we discover. Or uncovers — as Heidegger said when he talked about the Greek word for truth, alethia, which he says translates literally as “unhidden” (a = “not,” lethia = “hidden”).
How our minds work
But if you watch the human mind in action, you see that truth is something the human mind produces — produced through the process characterized above as claim-test-evaluation-result-verdict, the process represented by truth units.
Now let’s put these ideas in the context of the separation of language and reality. We intuitively think of a truth as a discovery of a “piece” of reality. But wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that when we encounter a “piece” of reality, we process that “piece” in our minds, and we share that result of that process using language?
But it feels like truth is something we discover in the world. It was enshrined in our thinking that way when Plato emerged from his cave. Since then, western philosophy and science have been about discovering more.
Now we’re drowning in discoveries, like in Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel. In response, Jean-Francois Lyotard urges “incredulity towards meta-narratives” and Bohr commands physicists to “shut up and calculate.” Are these really answers to “where do we go from here?” No wonder Rorty just wanted us to have a “conversation.”
A battle of metaphors
Both “truth as discovery” and “truth as test” are metaphors, memes, meta-narratives. A few points pro and con:
1) “Truth as discovery” is misleading, given language doesn’t intersect with reality.
2) “Truth as discovery” has led us to a bad place, given current tensions in our culture.
3) “Truth as discovery” can hide the process of discovery, creating doubt.
…and…
4) “Truth as test” makes sense in many situations.
5) “Truth as test” is explanatory in arguably every other situation.
6) “Truth as test” is consistent with many threads of modern philosophy.
You might see how “truth as test” can be unifying and “truth as discovery” divisive. Consider the story of the blind men putting their hands on the Indian elephant for the first time. They could have benefited from sharing their tests, rather than announcing their discoveries.
Evolutionary biology supports the idea of “truth as test.” It suggests the human mind is another arrow in the quiver of human survival physiology. In contrast, the Platonism of “truth as discovery” suggests that our minds open a window to the infinite — which sounds mystical to us today, when we think about it.
How truth units get closer to reality
While language and truth are separate, truth units theory delineates the interface between them.
Parmenides thought reality was one, and Heraclitus thought reality was flux (“you never step in the same river twice”). Common to both is the Greek concept of physis. While the word physis translates as “nature” it is cognate with the Greek verb “to grow.” Physis speaks to reality’s infinite richness (whether one or flux).
The concept of physis reemerges metaphysically in Différence et répétition (1968) in which Gilles Deleuze “develops concepts of difference and repetition that are logically and metaphysically prior to any concept of identity.” (Wikipedia)
In analytic philosophy, a related concept is “discrimination” — i.e., the act of making a distinction — specifically the process of distinguishing elements of reality from each other. These could be the elements of physis, or differences and repetitions. Also, they could be seen in the analytic concepts of “sense data” and “atomic facts.”
“Discrimination” is a critical function for living organisms. In “lower” creatures, it’s more of a chemical function. In “higher” creatures, it’s more a function of the brain. Whatever the means, living creatures discriminate in order to distinguish “friend” from “foe” in features of their environments.
From physis to truth units
In our minds, discrimination begins unconsciously in turning sensory input into information “primitives” that are processed unconsciously into a picture of our environment, then consciously processed into our thoughts, up to the most abstract.
In truth units theory, all processing, from differences and repetitions to abstract thought, can be modeled as concatenating truth units, which can be modeled in microcircuits.
To be sure, this modeling is rough. Truth units only model unconscious and conscious “truth decisions.” Microcircuits only model “truth decisions” in a binary modality, and cannot match the sophistication of neuronal “circuitry.” Nonetheless, computer software performs many human cognitive functions passably well.
Computer functions can be traced from inputs of ones and zeroes to final software outputs. In concept, truth units can be traced the same way in the human mind. However, our conscious minds can only trace conscious thought — not the path between consciousness and physis.
A Chinese-English thought experiment
We can strip off our language, our interpretation, our unconscious processing. But we can’t see the raw input. We can’t see “raw” physis.
Below are two samples of text, one English, one Chinese.
Assuming you, like me, learned in school English but not Chinese, the English text is instantly readable, and the Chinese text is completely inscrutable, except knowing it is writing.
The interesting thing for me about the English text is I can’t “unread” it. I can’t look at text and not see words. It’s the exact opposite when I look at the Chinese text — I don’t see any words, just pixels on my screen. But looking at the English text, I absolutely cannot help but see words.
The closest I could get to experiencing English text as inscrutable would be if you showed me single “ambiguous” letters like O or I, then I could see them as graphic shapes.
In this thought experiment, for someone who reads English but not Chinese, the left is what we call “reality” but is actually the product of mental processing, of concatenated truth units. The Chinese is actual reality for us — raw physis. We can only see differences and repetitions, without knowing what they mean.
Reality is raw physis. As we discriminate, truth units are created and concatenated, representing the contents of our consciousness.
A practical theory of truth
Earlier, a key premise behind truth units was stated: the question “what is truth?” needs a single answer that works in every situation.” There are several fundamental ways truth units are practical:
(1) You can ask “what’s your test?” in response to any claim presented to you.
(2) Truth units are intuitive. For a broad range of things, we “do” truth units, we just don’t think of it that way. When we don’t use truth units, we are often putting truth on a pedestal.
(3) Truth units lean toward the polar opposite of confrontation. An average stance in an argument is “I’m right, you’re wrong.” The truth units stance is “tell me why you believe that?” (“what is your test?”) which expresses interest in people’s “stories” and encourages people to tell them.
(4) Truth units make discussion and debate more time-efficient and productive by keeping people focused on the key issues surfaced by truth units. Truth units discourage time-wasters like ad hominem, posturing about truths on pedestals, and not debating a truth unit but instead looking for the next truth unit lying beneath it.
(5) Truth units can defend a position all the way to the “bottom.” Other theories of truth eventually take you to the edge of a cliff. Truth units are built on the contents of consciousness, which ultimately no one can doubt.
Relativism and truth units
Truth units overlap with relativism and pragmatism. It could also be said truth units overlap with psychoanalysis, which has done demonstrable good for Howard Stern, among others.
Truth units looks relativistic because they are inclusive and tolerant. But truth units theory is not an “anything goes” philosophy. We talk about people’s tastes in music changing over time. Your favorite music in one year is based on truth units. Your favorite music a few years later is also supported by truth units. But the two sets of truth units in different years are different. Each “conclusion” has its own “rationale.”
Think for a moment of each of your tastes in different years as heads and the truth units supporting them as bodies. Each head-and-body pairing is unique. Switch the heads around between bodies. The new pairings won’t make sense.
Pragmatism and truth units
Truth units looks like pragmatism (lower-case p) because it focuses on “what works.” Pragmatic philosophers have defined pragmatism in different ways (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):
Pragmatic theories of truth are usually associated either with C.S. Peirce’s proposal that true beliefs will be accepted “at the end of inquiry” or with William James’ proposal that truth be defined in terms of utility.”
James’ definition suggests the question “utility toward what end?” Truth units state the end explicitly.
Peirce explained “the end of inquiry” as “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate.” Peirce arguably said this with the scientific method in mind. Scientists tend to ultimately agree on what is true. But they don’t all agree on how science should be used. Their proposals have varying social implications. In contrast, truth units structure takes human emotions and motivations into account.
With Peirce’s ideas in mind, I think it’s ultimately clear how we should evaluate human history, what objectives we should set for humanity, what are the measures of success, and just as importantly, how we should feel about and respond to our inevitable failures. Many people throughout history have had and expressed this clarity, at least in part. A personal role model in this regard for me, because he arguably saw the complete picture, is Michel de Montaigne, as portrayed in Montaigne: The Art of Life, a Medium article by Steven Gambardella.
Conclusion — tying up loose ends
Philosophy in the 20th century showed us that reality and language are two separate things. The apparent conclusion is that there is no truth.
Contemporary culture decided this meant truth is all relative. Everyone can discover truth for themselves.
In truth units theory, there is accountability for what one holds true, even with no absolute truth. Truth is a relationship between: (1) what we believe true and (2) the process that led us to that belief. The two are inseparable.
By focusing on truth as a process, truth units theory offers a path to resolving differences of opinion. The first step is the equitable question “what is your test?” which surfaces beliefs based on experiences and thoughts in the conscious mind.
To the extent all humanity’s experiences and thoughts are weighed by discerning, knowledgeable, unselfish, compassionate people, how could we not call their judgment true? To the extent others disagree, how could we not call their disagreement wrong? Or if not, invite them to present their evidence.
Thank you for reading. Please comment! Your questions and critiques are greatly appreciated.
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