332. Truth as a trojan horse

From the classical Greeks, western thought has inherited an urge towards truth at all cost. But that drive has turned out to be a trojan horse. As in the work of Nietzsche, for example, it has been shown that, to tell the truth, there is no truth.

A dominant view, for long, has been that truth is reference to something in reality, representing reality. According to one tradition this lies in elementary observation statements that refer to objective reality as we see it. Here, facts form the rock bottom of truth.

This view was demolished by Kant, who claimed that observation is formed by mental frames, such as those of space, time, and causality, that do not reveal objective reality as it is in itself.

Another tradition, going back to Plato, is to see reality as we observe it as confused, chaotic and in flux, while real reality lies behind that, in the form of universal, eternal ideas. This was also the recourse that Descartes took to ‘clear and distinct ideas’ as the basis for truth, and Spinoza with his ‘adequate ideas’.

Both forms of truth as reference have been taken down in postmodern thought, in the idea that human beings, and different people in different ways, mentally construct both observation and ideas, which eliminates objective truth. Ideas and words do not represent reality but constitute it, making what we see as reality. Yet we secretly maintain belief in the myth that we see the world as it is. It is difficult to act in the world without it.   

Also, many have shrunk back from the resulting relativism exhibited by postmodernism. If there is no objective truth, is there any difference left between mere opinion and truth? Then every opinion is as good as any other, and the basis for rational debate seems to disappear. And if there is no basis for debate, what remains to settle differences is violence.

Is there a way out? Can we save facts while acknowledging that they are not (fully) objective. As noted by Kant, facts without theory are blind, theory without facts is empty.   

There is a way out, in the notion of truth as ‘warranted assertibility’, taken from American pragmatic philosophy, which I have been using in this blog.

For a theory to have the best possible truth value, it must be shown to ‘work’ in terms of logic, purported facts, and application. While facts can be disputed, because they are informed by theory, they are still often, though not always, more reliable than theoretical speculation.

A case where facts depend on theory is that of black matter. It has never been observed, but its assumption is needed to account for movements of galaxies. Releasing the notion does not become an option until an alternative theory for accounting for those movements is found, as may now be happening, in an emerging information theory of the universe.      

With truth as warranted assertibility, counter to postmodern relativism debate becomes more important than ever. Precisely because we cannot grasp objective truth, the only chance we have of correcting our errors is debate, in confrontation between different views constructed by different people along different course of life, in different environments.  

Also, there is an evolutionary argument for a form of realism to remain. If we assume that the world exists in some form, even if unknowable to us, and we construct ideas on the basis of interaction with it, then in evolution and personal development ideas that are not to some extent adequate to that world would not have survived. False ideas obstruct survival.

That argument is not air-tight, however. I have speculated before, in this blog, that human thought operates on the basis of an object-bias: we think of things and abstractions, such as truth, and identity, as if they are objects, of concepts as if they are containers. That may have served humanity well for a long stretch of its evolution, as hunter-gatherers, but may now be working against survival.

Lacan characterized philosophy as love of truth, not truth as power but as weakness, a lack. I would revise that as follows: love not as closure, as terminal, but indeed as a lack, but a shifting one, imperfection on the move.