On truth

Actually, I should write now about Harry G. Frankfurt’s book On Truth, which was published a year after the book version of his On Bullshit. As one reviewer says, it “exists largely as a footnote to Harry G. Frankfurt’s earlier work.” However, I haven’t read it. From the reviews I got the impression that it isn’t Frankfurt’s best work, maybe best expressed by the fact that the Wikipedia says no more about it than that “it develops the argument that people should care about truth, regardless of intent to be truthful. It explicitly avoids defining ‘truth’ beyond the concept commonly held, which corresponds to reality.” As I understood the reviews, Frankfurt tells us that truth should be our guide in life.
Whether my summary is correct or not, I don’t want to discuss a book that I haven’t read on the base of reviews, so forget now about Frankfurt for the rest of this blog, but I have always wondered what it means that truth is correspondence to reality. When, as a student, I first heard about this theory, my reaction was: “I don’t understand. How can we know what reality is if we don’t know that it is true what we perceive? For isn’t it so that what we perceive, however, depends on what we consider true? The correspondence theory is founded on a circular reasoning, for reality and truth are mutually dependent.” In other words, what we see is a matter of interpretation and depends on, as Popper and many psychologists have made clear, the theories in our minds about what is real. It has taken me years, before I understood that advocates of the correspondence theory of truth see reality as something independent of the mind. Although this understanding has made much clear to me, and although I see myself as a realist in the sense that there must be “something objective” independent of the subjective views of reality in our minds, nevertheless, I still think that the basic problem has not been solved by this insight, namely that for us reality and truth are mutually dependent. And can there be anything in the world that isn’t “for us” or it would be impossible for us to know it? Just this is why again and again we must develop new theories. If we could perceive reality – the world as it is, so to speak – directly, without intermediation of our eyes and of instruments and of theories in our minds, we didn’t have to develop continuously new theories, test them against reality, improve our theories, test them again, etc. according to the simple scheme described by Popper: P1 > T1 > E > T2 > P2 (see this blog for an explanation). We could simply look at the world, and we would know how it is. Aristotle’s description of the world would have been valid and true for ever, just as, for instance, Ptolemy’s description of the movements of planets. Science would be as simple as that: Look and write down, and you know what is real. Giving explanations of what is happening in the world would be more complicated, but basically it works the same.
Above, I supposed that there may be something real; that possibly an objective reality exists (ignoring the question whether this isn’t a naïve view). I think that for many practical questions it is a workable view. Even though we can perceive the physical reality only via theories in the mind and in our theory books (or on the internet), matters are more complicated if we want to know the social reality. For if there is something in the world that is mind-dependent, then it is how the social reality (in its widest sense) is constituted. Therefore, if there is something in the world humans disagree upon it is the meaning of certain social facts. Once I wrote: “Social facts are literally ‘made’ by us. When we play chess, we don’t simply move wooden objects, but we play a game and we move pawns, rooks and queens etc. When humanity dies out, the wooden objects may still exist and they may be found by a roaming animal, but the idea of game and the idea that these pieces of woods ‘actually’ are pawns, rooks or queens has been lost. Such meanings belong to … ‘our shared conceptual scheme and culture’. Social facts are ways we think about what is around us in the social and in the material world and the ways we react to them, but when we think differently about these ways, they change with our thoughts and get another meaning.” Often, it goes deeper than simply chess pieces. The different interpretations of certain social facts can be the source of intense human conflicts. Take the intentional burning of holy books. For some – usually non-believers – a holy book, like the Bible or the Qur'an, is simply a bundle of paper, but for others it has a deep meaning and it touches their souls if the book is hurt. As we see again and again in the Middle East, especially in the Israelian-Palestinian wars, conflicts about interpretations of social facts can lead to intense conflicts and tens of thousands of deaths. Happily, most differences in interpretations have not such serious consequences, and they are somewhere between the difference in interpretation of pieces of wood as chess pieces and the difference in interpretation of the ownership of a piece of land leading to war. Nevertheless, different interpretations of certain social facts can lead to annoying misunderstandings and negative feelings. For instance, in some Asian cultures, direct eye contact can be seen as disrespectful or confrontational, while in Western cultures you just are supposed to have eye contact with the person you are talking to. Not doing so is impolite. Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, we can say that even if all possible scientific questions have been answered by developing true theories, the problems of the interpretation of social facts still have not been touched at all.