Friday, September 6, 2013

(LCR) Truth

The last question on today's quiz threw quite a few of you, so let me say a little about truth. The Toolkit has two things to say about truth: it distinguishes coherence from correspondence theories of truth, and (on the logic page) suggests the most fruitful place to begin is to think of truth as the correspondence of a statement with the state of affairs to which it refers.

This is pretty straightforward; suppose I utter the statement "the cat is on the mat." This statement is true if it is the case that the cat in question really is on the mat, and false otherwise. This is, in general, how we will be using the word 'truth' in this course.

There is a popular notion that we can usefully speak of truth as relative to individual or cultural perspectives, attitudes, or opinions. There are, I think, compelling arguments why this cannot be so, but I'll save those for later discussion.
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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Can we deduce that we, as human beings (the kind who use this type of logic), observe truth through our senses? I see one objection to that: human beings (even if they are being logical like this class promotes) are prone to audiovisual hallucination and imagined olfactory/gustatory precepts, as in smelling or tasting something in your mouth because you see it on a cooking show and not smelling/tasting blood when you see your best friend. Or can we also deduce that we gain truth through a combination of dependable senses and proof through logical language? Then you've got a checks-and-balances system for making sure that your senses aren't haywire if your expressed logic makes sense and you can be sure your logic isn't fallacious if your senses are sensing. Plus, a consensus tends to help; to the objection that all our senses and methods of logic are haywire I've got no answer except that it doesn't seem very likely and we'd probably have varying degrees of decay in our senses and logic within the consensus group; we could see where the others were going wrong. Do you think that solves the cultural/individual perspective if we depend on what is directly before the senses? Or is it more complicated?

I'm taking the side of correspondence theory of truth because we can only test truth by what we, fallible human beings as always, can see as opposed to testing it "with other statements." Coherence theory remains too cerebral; humans have difficulty gauging how thinkers producing these mentally-based statements perceive the evolution of thoughts on a given perspective because the statements are all in the head and human beings have this thing that doesn't allow them to be as objective as they'd like; but the physical world allows for statements that we can adjust when something changes, i.e. "President Obama has been elected for a third time. Is this unconstitutional?" Correspondents say yes with the ostensible information on TVs, from the press, watching the inauguration, etc. while coherents may be skeptical or may not know, depending on what their "other statements" are. The physical world tells us what we need to know. We can say convincingly that "that cat is on that mat in this room of this building and has been there since 3:35 PM to now (5:56 PM); I know this because I watch cats like most other Americans." Is that last part about U.S. cat-watching/obsessing particular to the U.S. or is it worldwide? The cats raise the problem of cultural perspective and muddle the clean-cut argument I had before. Is it probable to get a consensus detailing which people of which nations of the world fawn over cats? No. I'm also not sure how effective the NSAs of other countries are because otherwise we could do a scan of which people look up cats and how often. I won't be agnostic and say "we don't have enough information." Cats exist all over the world. U.S. citizens tend to be lonelier and more stressed out than SOME other nations, not all. Can we conclude that U.S. citizens have an obsession with cats more than other places because they're lonelier and more stressed and need cuddlesome creatures to make them feel better? No. There are no definites yet. Can anyone think of a solution to this problem that doesn't involve conning around the entire world checking the average citizen's number of cats and giving him (I just imagine a nice but loquacious Australian guy from Sidney who goes on and on about his 20 cats for hours) a psychological evaluation? Also, how do we make it a truth that all feline-carrying U.S. citizens are lonelier and more stressed than other feline-carriers?

September 7, 2013 at 3:01 PM
Robin said...

Honestly, I just couldn't remember what the Toolkit said about truth. I looked it up after we put pens down. Your question was straightforward.

September 8, 2013 at 12:20 PM
Matt Silliman said...

Robin: fair enough.

Christopher: Your rather long and interesting comment may confuse ontology with epistemology (see toolkit); a statement is true if the condition of the world it describes actually obtains in the world. This is separate from the question of how and whether we can KNOW that it is true -- and granted, the knowing can be fraught. But don't let that confuse you about what we mean by truth.

September 8, 2013 at 4:13 PM

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