Is truth subjective? (part one)
January 16th 2007 10:13
This is a discussion with Epiphanie Bloom of Postmodern Critic and Daily Inspirations. The rules are that we get three posts each, and a 300-word limit per post, and I get to go first.
So...
Epiphanie suggests that "truth is subjective" because "reality is subjective".
I slightly agree, slightly disagree. Here's how I'm interpreting and where I'm coming from.
Firstly, it seems to me that "truth is subjective" itself purports to be "objective" -- to be true regardless of what anyone thinks. So I'd argue that Epiphanie at least has to add "except for this one" and conclude that there are some claims that are true regardless of what anyone thinks.
Secondly, I'm pretty much with Quine (I'm inclined to believe his claims are objectively true) when he asserts that you can make almost any belief true, as long as you're willing to perform drastic enough operations on the rest of your belief system, and as long as the whole of the system accords with experience. If aeroplanes fall from the sky because you've decided to believe that 2 x 2 = 5, then you haven't made drastic enough changes elsewhere.
So I'd agree that, though there are some objective truths, the truth of most claims is "subjective" in the sense of depending on what people think -- in fact, depending on the whole of what they think.
But what about reality?
Imagine that there were only minds, and no bodies (or, if you like, just one mind -- you). Everything we experience would be a mental concoction, and dependent on what we thought.
But even in such a world, wouldn't there still be the base level, beneath experience -- the reality of many minds, or one? And wouldn't this be independent of what anyone thought?
Doesn't the mere use of the word "reality" presuppose objectivity?
Even if you convinced yourself it was turtles all the way down, wouldn't you have to concede the reality of turtles all the way down?
That's opening argument from me. Do read Epiphanie's rejoinder here.
So...
***
Epiphanie suggests that "truth is subjective" because "reality is subjective".
I slightly agree, slightly disagree. Here's how I'm interpreting and where I'm coming from.
Firstly, it seems to me that "truth is subjective" itself purports to be "objective" -- to be true regardless of what anyone thinks. So I'd argue that Epiphanie at least has to add "except for this one" and conclude that there are some claims that are true regardless of what anyone thinks.
Secondly, I'm pretty much with Quine (I'm inclined to believe his claims are objectively true) when he asserts that you can make almost any belief true, as long as you're willing to perform drastic enough operations on the rest of your belief system, and as long as the whole of the system accords with experience. If aeroplanes fall from the sky because you've decided to believe that 2 x 2 = 5, then you haven't made drastic enough changes elsewhere.
So I'd agree that, though there are some objective truths, the truth of most claims is "subjective" in the sense of depending on what people think -- in fact, depending on the whole of what they think.
But what about reality?
Imagine that there were only minds, and no bodies (or, if you like, just one mind -- you). Everything we experience would be a mental concoction, and dependent on what we thought.
But even in such a world, wouldn't there still be the base level, beneath experience -- the reality of many minds, or one? And wouldn't this be independent of what anyone thought?
Doesn't the mere use of the word "reality" presuppose objectivity?
Even if you convinced yourself it was turtles all the way down, wouldn't you have to concede the reality of turtles all the way down?
***
That's opening argument from me. Do read Epiphanie's rejoinder here.
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Comment by katyzzz
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Don't call me slow.
And I'd forget the aeroplanes and go for an Accountant, he'll soon get 2x2=5, or when it comes to stock reporting he's more likely to go for 2x2 <3, so it all depends on your needs, ask a journalist and he'll give you a global answer, not letting truth get in the way of a good story, but I'll leave you three to argue amongst yourselves about the semantics, sounds like fun, should we take this seriously, do you think? You think therefore you am, well I had to say am because you can harly say I is, so one of us must sacrifice, I'm with Ahmed, just after the money, must admit he's rather more successful than I, thinking about posting continuously on every little computer gadget or widget or whatever, after all whoever let truth get in the way of a fast buck, and as I'm first here, no-one can call me slow.
Hope you get lots and lots of responses, can't have the movies taking over any more than they do already.
katyzzz
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
Is not phylosophy the seeking of truth? Or is it the seeking of deceptions?
Is truth subjective or is it being confused with the knowledge of truth?
If truth is subjective then we should be its master and be able to control our entire universe. All things should be subject to out godlike powers.
Yet we cannot and we fail at every point.
We cannot control our bodies, if we fall ill.
We cannot control our minds, if we become senile.
We are victim to some truths that we cannot control. Objective realities.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Dear Damo,
I'm not sure what sort of "reality is subjective" argument Epiphanie will mount. I suspect she'll try to go down the route of confusing reality with perception of reality, as you suggest, and explain away the psychotic and the LSD user.
If "reality is subjective" means that our experience of the world is mediated by our minds, I'd happily agree.
If it means that people walk around telekinetically changing the world, the idea is unattractive to me -- unattractive, and yet I can't logically rule it out. A person who believed this would disagree with you -- we CAN control the entire universe (though, if there's more than one person, I wonder what will happen if two people attempt to change the same piece of reality in different ways).
It's possible we're inside the Matrix. It's possible that Bishop Berkeley was right, and we have minds but no bodies. It's possible that you're the only person who exists, and everything else is a figment of your imagination. -- Most hypotheses, especially these sort, can't be falsified, because the dogmatist can keep inventing reasons that the apparent falsification was not a true one.
What is philosophy? -- There's as many opinions as philosophers. If there's any who believe there's absolutely no objective truth (few and far between, because of the self-referentiality problem; and if you're going to admit one objective truth, why not admit others) -- if there's any, and they think philosophy is not a fraud, then presumably they'll think it serves other purposes. For instance, it might serve to disabuse people of their ridiculous attachment to truth. Or it might simply be a pleasurable activity.
I've been reading some Foucault lately (and quoting him copiously). He does believe in objective truth, but I think his take on what philosophy is good for would still apply if there weren't any:
It is understandable that some people should weep over the present void and hanker, instead, in the world of ideas, after a little monarchy. But those who, for once in their lives, have found a new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of doing, those people, I believe, will never feel the need to lament
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
Admittedly we only have 5 senses to percieve what we call reality and to pass this interpretation via electrical signals to the brain. The human mind exists and interprets this. In essence we only know truths that our minds have chosen to accept.
We may just be brains in class jars being fed virtual reality or we may be illusions.
What we are is the objective truth, what we think we are can be completely false. We can rewire the signals with drugs and believe we are butterfies.
Here is another conflict: If someone states that there are NO objective truths then are they not implying that is the one objective truth? The assumption contradicts itself..
BTW:Foucault words remind me of someone else words. I'll save that for later.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Hey Damo, yeah, I'd agree with that! That's what I was saying (less clearly than you) in my post, and in my previous comment:
I should mention, though, that there's another way by which Epiphanie could argue that most truths are subjective. She doesn't need to rely on the hypothesis of brains in vats, which merely makes it possible that most of our experience is mind-dependent. She doesn't even need to reach, as I have, for Quine's picture of human knowledge.
I'm wondering if she could argue that truth is necessarily linguistic, and that meanings are unstable or are always open to interpretation, etc.
This seems to be what Obi-Wan Kenobi is saying to Luke in "Return of the Jedi":
BEN: You father was seduced by the dark side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I have told you was true... from a certain point of view.
LUKE (turning away, derisive): A certain point of view!
BEN: Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
Comment by Norm
Consumption Malfunction
Equal and Opposite
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To find the truth one might have to abandon all belief in the past and the future being any different, to arrive at the presented truth.
Nonesensical Norm.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Depends on what you mean by objective, subjective, and truth.
I think you're talking about a sort of Buddhist experience, being in the moment, seeing things as they really are. And to do this you have to liberate yourself from attachment to the past and worrying about the future. The past is objective in the sense that it's settled; and the future is subjective in the sense that its possibilities are open; but neither past nor future exist.
If this is what you're saying, I think there's something to it, but I'd need to contemplate it further.
I think that your line of thought could also be linked to Hegelian philosophy. The words "synthesis" and "spirit" are Hegelian...
So Hegel famously says that being (the past?) and non-being (the future?) synthesize into becoming. And I think he also makes comments on the structure or the experience of the present, or of modernity in general, along similar lines.
But I can't really comment on these things. Don't know enough about Hegel... And, confessedly, Hegel is one of the people I simply can't read. Have tried and have had my butt kicked time and time again...
One more thought. Don't know if this is relevant...
If you're talking narrowly about true sentences (as opposed to "the truth" in a more Platonic way), there's traditionally four theories: correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, deflationist. The first is the common sense view -- that truth is a matter of correspondence between language and reality. And proponents of this view sometimes speak of "truthmakers" -- things that make a sentence true. For instance, what might make "Adrian is typing" true is a state of affairs in the world, namely Adrian typing.
Some people have wondered if truthmaker talk is problematic when you're talking about the past or the future. If the past no longer exists, then what's the truthmaker for "Socrates had a long beard". Aristotle, along similar lines, believed that claims about the future were neither true nor false, because the future didn't yet exist.
But do past and future not exist? -- Talk about true and false here connects to metaphysical talk about reality and time.
The common sense view is that only the present exists ("presentism"). The theory that the past and future also exist is sometimes called the "block universe". And you believe that only past and present exist, whereas future is still growing, this is "dynamic block".
Block universe is a common view among physicists, and has been argued to fall out of the special theory of relativity. Goedel, in fact, believed that if you could travel far enough in space (which would be impossible, due to some sort of fuel problem), you'd wind up backwards in time. Imagine (as a similar picture; Goedel's is a lot more complex) that time-space is a globe like the earth, and if you keep travelling you finish where you start.
As I said, don't know if this is relevant, but it seems to me that it could connect with your comments about the past and the future being the same, or the past being objective, the future subjective, or the present being what's real, etc.
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
I don't think Obi-wan was quoting deep phylosophy. It was more likely that these lines were written to cover plot contradictions. Darth kill your father Luke. I am your father Luke. Oh crap, how do we fix this. What would Yoda say? Something vague and mysterious so people can put their own fuzzy meaning on it. So Luke your father killed(Darth) himself and at the same time he did not.
If I was Luke I'd be wondering if the Jedi are some sort of freaky cult.
You did raise the issue of multiple objective truths.
Certainly I have no problems with truths that compliment each other and do not contradict. How could two truths oppose each other and both be true?
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
I reckon Lucas had the father thing planned out, but -- who knows? -- you might be right.
I do think, though, that the words could be profound, even if they weren't intended to be. Another example of the way perspective seems to be built into language is that the carpenter who says "this table is solid" and the physicist who examines on an atomic level and says "this table is full of holes" are both correct -- both statements are true -- but the meaning is relative to their particular contexts and intentions.
How could two truths oppose each other and both be true? Well, the short answer is I don't think they can... Maybe you can do something funny with logical laws to make this doable, but I'm having trouble thinking through the matter.
The longer answer is that it might be possible that contradictory subjective truths are true, as I've suggested in my post, but this uses "true" in a particular way -- to mean something like a statement that is consistent with the rest of your beliefs, and with experience.
You're making me think now that if you were inclined to use "true" to refer to correspondence between language and base-level, objective reality, then you couldn't speak of truth being subjective...
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
In digital electronics there is no such problem. We test the logic in a truth chart- Binary 1 is on and 0 is not on. It is not clouded by explanations and vague narratives.
Somethings need a context to determine the meaning of a statement.
Is the table solid? The answer is yes in one context but no in a microscopic context. Both are correct as one question is asking about a different aspect of the same item. The context of the question requires a more complete answer. Saying yes the table is solid saves us from over explaining down to the infinite degree. Eventually you would hit upon the unpalatable answer that you don't actually have an absolute answer.
Hence I would argue that the inerpretation of any objective truth needs a context or framework inorder to be comprehended.
Comment by Uula Limanski
Thinking The World
here's the way i see it after our old sources:
- since we can't be objetive about nothing that is "real" (coming from Kant: we can't have access to noumena, and thus we're bound to discuss phenomena), what's the point of discussing if truth is subjective or not? We can't be nothing other than subjective..
- Another way to comment on your question is using Nietzsche: how can we say that we got to the truth? How can we know that there is nothing deeper inside that, and that what we found is another mistake (as they do in physics all the time..)
From my point: truth is what is "real". Since we can't have access to "real", we can't access truth. That doesn't mean that truth is subjetive, it's just something we don't have access to. So i understand Epiphanie when she concludes that "truth is subjective" but i don't agree.
Cheers, Uula
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
A similar idea is this: truth is a property of things like sentences (and not things like horses). Truth is therefore always linguistic. But language is unstable in its meanings -- there's always vagueness, multiple possible interpretations, etc. So truth, in practice, is always mind-dependent. Truth is mostly subjective (apart from claims like "truth is subjective").
Now, I think this is an interesting argument. But I wonder if language can be made stable. Can't say much more than that for the time being; but I'm thinking very vaguely about "pragmatic" theories of language, where you treat meaning as a matter of use and not as a matter of representation in the head...
Perhaps another way to put this is to use your electronics example. If you plug numbers into a machine, the machine works; it's only on rare occasions that you get a logical contradiction. Well, if you plug words into people, people work -- I say "hand me the phone" and you hand me the phone... It's only some of the time that there's confusion...
Well, even in maths there's room for uncertainty and vagueness and ambiguity, etc -- room for doubt about truth. At least, that's what I take to be an outcome of Goedel's famous theorem -- that any formal system has axioms that are undecidable in terms of that system...