In my previous post, I considered the question of whether principle follows from partisan alignment, or, instead, partisan alignment follows from principle. And I said that if there is a “team” whose guiding principle is the search for truth, I want to be on that team.
Finding “team truth” would probably be easier if I believed in “truth.” Or, perhaps “believe” isn’t the right word because “believe” can mean accepting something is real or true, even if its reality cannot be proven. In this sense, I do believe in “truth,” even though I also accept the strength and validity of many arguments against the existence of truth.
“Truth” doesn’t exist
Many have argued that the idea of of an objective truth is impossible. If we are hoping for “THE Truth,” using the capitalization from William James’s Pragmatism, and looking for “one system that is right and EVERY other wrong” (Pragmatism, Lecture VII: “Pragmatism and Humanism”)–what Hilary Putnam would call a “God’s-eye-view”–we run into problems.
American Pragmatists like James and Putnam are not alone in arguing this: post-modern philosophy (e.g., Foucault), theories of embodied cognition (e.g., George Lakoff), and skepticism (e.g., Hume) reject objective truth. Philosophical results like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic demonstrate the impossibility of any logical system. Even Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge ends up describing a system in which the only objective knowledge we have is in regards to what is false; we never know if a hypothesis is true, only that it has not yet been proven false.
Jorge Luis Borges notes that infinity corrupts all ideas, including proof: any logical proof depends on on the truth of its premises, but how do we know a premise is true? We have to prove its truth, of course, which requires other premises. And these premises must then be proven–thus proof is stuck in an infinite regression: it can never set an absolutely “true” premise. Bertrand Russell notes this same regression in his Logical Atomism and decides that you have to start with something that is not true but rather “undeniable.” But that only begs the question.
Each of these arguments has merits that I cannot deny or refute.
Team Truth
Although I believe that there is no such thing in provable, demonstrable objective truth, and even believe it is illogical to speak of things being “true,” still I believe in truth. Not only do I believe in it, I am an ardent advocate for it. I think the search for truth is both socially valuable and personally rewarding.
This is a cognitive dissonance that bedevils me. But humans manage cognitive dissonance all the time. Although “truth” eludes logical definition, there is a difference between what fiction writers do and what scholars do–at least a difference in purpose: the fiction writer is inventing things that definitely did not happen, while the scholar is trying to identify things that actually do (or can) happen.
Even though I lack a logically defensible “truth,” still I recognize that somethings are real and true and some are not and are false. For example, this morning, I walked the dog (that’s true), and I did not walk the cat.
I’m rooting for team truth.