Guest Post: An Approach To Truth
I have the honor once again to host a guest post from my dear friend, Armen Yampolsky. His essays are always insightful and thought provoking. His thorough analytical approach brings us further into the depths of questions that we might normally treat superficially, missing critical substance and nuance. Every essay he shares with me gives me so much food for thought, but the essay I present today is a tour de force. It’s so packed with deep philosophical insight that every time I read it, I find something new. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Questions regarding the truth make up some of the most fraught conflicts of opinion, and have done so seemingly for the entirety of human existence. Inquiries into the subject span a truly broad range of perspectives and conclusions. In this essay, I propose an approach for navigating this topic. My goals are narrow, limited to helping improve comprehension. I am not attempting an overview of ontology or a formal critique of any specific philosophical position. Rather, I am presenting an interpretive approach to help better understand others' meanings when they speak of truth or reality. Ideally, the perspective I present will contribute toward clarifying the reader's own beliefs and positions regarding questions of truth.
In my essay Reasons for Disagreement, I present five categories into which disagreements fall. Each category has its own unique characteristics, and I note that disagreement on logical grounds should be especially effective in identifying flaws in arguments. Equivocation in particular is especially commonplace and tough to spot. Identifying instances in which people are equivocating on terms, for example, is one of the most straightforward and powerful ways to demonstrate an invalid conclusion. The following statement could easily be encountered in a comment of a news article or forum discussion:
"Advocates of free trade argue that it increases freedom for all. Any restriction on trade is therefore an attack on freedom itself."
Here we encounter an unsurprising statement that is easily shown to be vacuous, if we just clarify terms. What does the writer mean by "free" in the first sentence, and how is that related to the definition of "freedom itself" in the second? Questioning the meaning of terms typically serves to progress clarification far more quickly than inquiring into other categories of disagreement, such as the informative or the speculative. Certainly, posing questions such as, "Is the writer privy to information I don't possess?" or "Is the writer speculating on the future without providing supporting historical trends?" can be powerful in resolving disagreement. But clarifying terms is often a more effective first step in exposing and addressing a muddled intellectual position. This conviction serves as the foundation of my presentation: investigating and addressing ambiguous language provides the greatest bang for the buck when it comes to understanding others' assertions and overcoming disagreements.
Overly complex explanations run the risk of mistaking the forest for the trees, and losing the attention of the interested reader. Overly simplistic explanations run the risk of missing nuance critical to a right and proper understanding. At the risk of being too broad or simplistic, I attempt to break up and define the terms we use when we refer to truth at the broadest level possible. My hope is that attentive readers will be generous with their feedback, so that necessary adjustments can be made in future revisions.
The clearest hypotheses and contracts define terms at the outset. What I propose here is a similar approach to discussions of reality and truth. My assertion is that, to understand most, or perhaps even all, assertions, convictions, questions, contentions, quarrels, and overarching generalizations concerning matters of truth, the definition of the word "truth" must be clearly defined in every instance. I propose that there are primarily three definitions, or three categories, of truth in common usage across the entirety of written history, and equivocation across the three runs rampant. Since, typically, expressions concerning truth lack a handy and clear dictionary of terms, we shall introduce one ourselves, and ask, as and when appropriate, which of these terms might be in play?
Rather than inventing new terms, which would be cumbersome, I will use symbols to differentiate between these definitions while preserving the word "truth" throughout. Let us review these definitions and conventions.
1 - Personal truth (truthp)
Personal truth, sometimes referred to as subjective truth, refers to something that is true for an individual, but requires and allows for no justification to others. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that tendencies toward attempting to rationalize the veracity of this sort of truth to others can be signs of an unhealthy psychology or underdeveloped intellect. Examples of personal truths include statements such as, "It hurts me when you say that," or "I knew it the moment that Uncle died." There are no rational grounds by which anyone can deny such statements -- they are always unfalsifiable. Similarly, there are no rational grounds by which anyone can properly persuade another of the truth of such statements, and someone who happens to be convinced can easily, and validly, be unconvinced without any change to externalities; it is sufficient that a previously convinced person merely feel less convinced, and any previous semblance of veracity vanishes instantly.
That is not to say that such truths aren't true. They are true. It is entirely incorrect to conclude otherwise. What matters here is what one can do with such statements. They are, by definition, limited in their use. It is totally valid to say, for instance, "It is true that I felt this way in the past," and totally invalid to say, "It is true that I felt this way in the past, and therefore you are required to believe it." Belief in another's personal truth is itself a personal decision. Social policy based on personal truths can be politically expedient, but the citizenry's belief in their veracity is consistently short-lived.
2 - Common truth (truthc)
Common truths only exist within a community. Without reference to some community, whether real or imagined, there cannot be a common truth. The essential characteristic of this definition of truth is that it has one or more threshold conditions -- minimum criteria or standards -- defined by a community, which must be met in order for an assertion to be considered true. We can think of threshold conditions as lines or barriers that must be crossed in order for the community to agree to a truism. Statements of common truth must be accompanied by the community's threshold condition in order that we can comprehend it.
For example, if someone says, "it is truec that the Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion," the statement is still too vague to properly comprehend its meaning. It must be accompanied by a standard, that some community accepts, for why it is true. If we amend the statement, and add a reference to a community, for example, "according to principles of faith in Tibetan Buddhist society," we arrive at a perfectly valid statement of veracity. In this example, it is the Tibetan principles that serve as that line that must be crossed in order for the statement to be considered a common truth, and it is this line that I refer to when I speak of a "threshold condition". If the statement did not pass the condition (i.e., if it was not in accord with those Tibetan principles of faith), then the statement would not be truec.
When a lonely castaway, shipwrecked on a desert island, refers to something he learned about in school in an assertion of truth, it is still a personal truth unless and until he attempts to prove it, whether to himself or an imagined interlocutor. As soon as he engages in this effort, he must appeal to some commonly held threshold, even if he does so in total isolation.
A community's threshold conditions for truthc can come from a variety of sources. We have seen such conditions arise from individuals, as well as social institutions. Dogma can serve perfectly as a community threshold, as can ancient pronouncements in oral and written artifacts. It is entirely valid to say, for example, that "it is truec that the world is about 5700 years old, if we adhere to the traditional Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Bible." This is not a personal truth, because the threshold is defined by and for a community, and convincing others within that community is a perfectly legitimate and sensible activity.
New common truths often emerge alongside the formation of new communities, and vice-versa: sometimes it is new frameworks, perspectives, or discoveries that give rise to these communities. As these communities introduce and evolve perspectives and language to help make sense of reality, they require time to establish new threshold conditions. Consider, for instance, a relatively recent community embracing what we refer to as the liberal conception of justice:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."
The term "self-evident" suggests that the assertion is decidedly not based on empirically gathered evidence, but on some common truth held by a community of American patriots who require no additional proof to buttress it. Is the text really concerning itself with evidence, or mere conviction? To better understand it, we must investigate the provenance of this sentiment of liberality, which many trace to John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689):
"The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions."
Locke is being very practical here, instructing us to "consult" our rational faculty. Unlike the text in the American Declaration of Independence, one can read Locke as attempting to prove something to us by appealing to something we all have -- our reason, and the conclusions it allows.
During his time, Locke's ideas were revolutionary and challenged prevailing views on political truth. Societies like France, Britain, and the US, however, were gradually becoming receptive to this new, liberal perspective. In the era of Enlightenment, an ever growing educated population questioned the grounds on which hereditary principles were used to allocate civil rights and privileges. The exploitative and tyrannical behavior of the British Crown over the American colonies made acceptance of the conceit of natural law especially appealing and appropriate to its cause of independent governance. While not universally embraced, these principles gradually became integrated into political discourse. Many began to recognize that, within a liberal framework, political truths must reference natural rights as essential to liberal justice. Thus, the proposition became self-evident - or truec - to those who accepted it.
If we were to rewrite the opening of the Declaration Of Independence with this essay's approach to terms, it might sound something like this:
"We hold that in the conception of justice as practiced in the American colonies, natural rights are recognized and treated as the primary rights grounding and circumscribing political proposals. Since natural rights are present in equal measure across humanity, and none can be stripped or diluted, each individual must logically be treated as equal to any other as constituents of the political domain. Americans accept this conclusion as forming a threshold condition for truthc in any implementation of liberal justice. That is why we say it is truec that all men are created equal."
That's quite a mouthful! No wonder political documents tend not to define terms at the outset. Doing so exposes their critical vulnerability: that not all communities agree to or share any given threshold for common truth.
This brief overview leads us to recognize that confusion in matters of common truth can arise from a few sources of ambiguity:
First, the community's identity, and its thresholds for truth, are almost always shaped by context, such that misunderstanding and perplexity become dependent on how richly informative, or else paltry and nebulous, the given context is. In the Biblical example I proposed earlier, we might have easily encountered the same assertion of truth about the age of the universe, but without the crucial reference to the Hebrew bible. Resolving such ambiguity relies on acquiring more information, whether through new archaeological evidence that clarifies the positions of the dead or through further inquiry that deepens our understanding of the living. To evaluate any assertion of common truth effectively, we must recognize both the community in question and its specific thresholds.
Second, there are almost always multiple communities to which individuals belong. For example, a physician of Western medicine who is also an observant Sikh sees himself as belonging to at least two communities, with two (sometimes incompatible) sets of threshold conditions for what can rise to be treated as truec. Here too, context usually plays the leading role in determining which threshold is being referenced at any given time. Through this observation we can see why two seemingly incompatible expressions of common truths, both perfectly defensible and provable to others, can arise within a single individual without any logical contradiction. There is no requirement that, in the human condition, only a single community's thresholds must be referenced when speaking of different common truths.
A SPECIAL THRESHOLD
Third, there is a special threshold, belonging to a distinctive community, that is ever-present, and has always been so. This threshold can be expressed as a two-part, non-taxonomic set, such that any truth statement complies with and references a model of reality which
expresses, with the least number of exceptions, the entirety of the evidence in hand
predicts, with the least number of exceptions, all relating evidence gathered in the future
The reason this set is a special threshold condition for common truth is because it is the only condition that we should expect to be found readily in all societies, at any time in human history. The ability to control the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers through irrigation, which emerged over eight millennia ago, exemplifies this threshold being collectively recognized, at least among the engineers who designed and refined the system. This shared understanding enabled the construction of monumental structures like the pyramids of Giza, the creation of sea- and space-faring vessels, the erection of our cities' skyscrapers, and the advancement of modern medical methods and technologies. Even for a prehistoric nomadic desert tribe, this same shared threshold condition might have manifested as a collective truth guiding them to avoid regions where sinkholes had previously been encountered. It is also the most common threshold condition we are exposed to today, and is, problematically, an assumptive condition, a point I will touch on in a moment.
We can gain insight into the compelling nature of this threshold by examining a simple, everyday behavior practiced by the majority of the world’s population today: our use of geolocating software. Why does such software allow us to reach our destinations rather than leading us tens of kilometers away? We are using a tool developed by individuals who do not speak the same language, do not share the same values, and have entirely different foundational beliefs and cultural perspectives. Yet, paradoxically, these engineers operate within a model of reality that, under normal circumstances, they ought not to believe in, considering that few have directly witnessed evidence supporting its validity. While a small number may have evaluated the evidence firsthand, the majority, as is often the case, rely on their trust in others who have indeed observed and outlined phenomena that support the model. And yet, quite contrary to how they experience reality, each of these engineers agrees to modify the straightforward playground or jungle mechanics that their bodies naturally intuit with invisible and what might easily strike us as oddball modifications. (Here I am referring to the effects of special and general relativity.) Their trust is reinforced by the fact that the unintuitive model allows their technology to work: the proof is in the pudding.
The reason we reach our destination is, simply, that someone proposed a new model of reality about a century ago, and this model happens to outperform, for the time being, all others for the community threshold condition I cite above. There was no need for this model's descriptions to be evaluated directly by the engineers respecting it, or carefully translated into "culturally sensitive" language. We might be tempted to call the community to which these disparate engineers belong as "the community of science." But let's not allow nomenclature to lead us astray: this community pre-dated what we today call science (or, more accurately, the methods of classical Western philosophy). While we need not assign a specific name to this community, "evidence-centric" serves as an apt descriptor. It has always existed within humanity, likely predating homo sapiens. Its shared conditions for truthc span the most diverse societies across time and geography, from the hominids of the Acheulean industry to the physicists studying gravitational waves at LIGO. Its singular threshold condition is uniquely responsible for what we call technological progress.
Understanding this particular threshold condition in such a light can also serve to alter our categorizing of truths of old. It is tempting, and not unusual, to speak of ancient practices, such as sacrificial rites, as barbaric or superstitious. We have a tendency to refer to truths on which atavistic practices rested as being unsupported by evidence, characterizing them as a purely religious truisms with "only" faith-based threshold conditions. This is not a necessary conclusion, if we recall the paucity and inconsistency of the evidentiary record of the time.
The idea that wrapping thigh bones in a double layer of fat and burning them on wood clefts might secure the gods' favor — an idea that could have been thought truec in Homer's time — might have been seen as a rigorously scientific conclusion by today’s standards. Why did Hesiod, in Works and Days, write that, "on the eighth day of the month, it is time to geld the boar and the bellowing bull; but the hard-working mules should be done on the twelfth day," right after serving advice that resonates as practical and reasonable to many of us today? Is it because he carelessly co-mingled his scientific tendencies with his religious convictions? This sort of second-guessing of our ancestors is unwarranted. There is little reason not to hew to the simple explanation: he was merely expressing the conclusions of the strongest evidence-based model of reality available to him.
This evidence-centric threshold also serves as a bulwark against claims that all knowledge is trapped within cultural perspectives. It demonstrates, by the mere act of acknowledging the mechanism allowing for the history of technological progress, the hollowness of the postmodernist assertion: that our knowledge of reality is not objectively knowable and is instead constructed through language, power relations, and social contexts. If this were true, knowledge would be imprisoned within cultural boundaries, cross-cultural engineering collaborations would fail, and none of us would arrive anywhere close to our desired destinations. We would never arrive anywhere at all, and any fulfilled predictions would be reduced to mere instances of blind luck. Objectivity is unrelated to what's actually happening or what actually exists. It has to do with an impartial respect for this specific, evidence-based threshold condition for common truth, something children who teach one another practical skills understand intuitively. "You've got to jump before the rope hits the ground" has nothing to do with power relations or social contexts. Children will tell you they know it objectively, and they will be right to say so.
Since part of the threshold concerns the future, assertions of this specific common truth take a notable and unique form: they are always statements of likelihood, and never statements of fact, even though they present this way on first blush. When members of this community say, for example, "it's true that the Earth revolves around the Sun," they are actually saying, "It is extremely unlikely that a future experiment will obtain observations that falsify a model of reality that concludes that, currently, the Earth revolves around the Sun." The evidence-centric community's statements of truth are without exception speculative assertions, prognostications about the future. After all, for the scientist, a physical law is a hypothesis yet to be disproven.
The prevalence of this specific threshold condition has resulted in at least two curious, notable phenomena. First, the word "true" in common parlance is by default assumed to refer to a common truth, and, specifically, a common truth adhering to the evidence-oriented community's distinctive threshold condition. Second, the general public, captivated as it is by technological advancement, has intuited the special nature of this community, and, as a result, has engaged in a shabby pretense of belonging to it. It quickly becomes apparent that the person adamantly claiming a naturalist's worldview is espousing sheer superstitions and ideological dogma. In many industrialized nations, it has become shameful to renounce scientific conclusions. What we observe instead is an Ophelia-like insistence on alignment with science, accompanied by assertions which are entirely unable to meet this community's stringent threshold condition for truthc.
I anticipate that the reader, in reviewing my careful treatment of this unique, distinctive threshold condition, might suggest categorizing it separately from the standards used to define other truthc's. That would be a mistake. By grouping it together with other common truths, we underscore its imperfection, its limits in scope, its changeability, the manner and importance of the work required to convince others, and its distinctly and essentially social nature. All expressions of truthc are verifiable and falsifiable, regardless of which community's threshold for truth is used; and, for all, the effort of doing so requires appeal to threshold conditions socially defined. The rabbi and the scientist, in their professional roles, share an identical function: to provide guidance on matters of truthc to their respective communities, falsifying or proving statements of veracity according to those communities' standards.
3 - Absolute truth (Truth)
"...knowledge is by nature directed to what is, to know what is as it is..."
-- Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 477a
This category of Truth pertains to what is ultimately real and unchanging, what is universally and eternally true. In my symbolic convention, I capitalize the term 'Truth' in order to capture its grand scope and its distinction from community-based thresholds. Ancient philosophers provided us with examples of how such Truth can be conceived.
For instance, Plato posited a concept he called Forms, idealized archetypes of material things which make up the world with which we interact. He believed these archetypes to be eternal and unchanging, and one of these -- The Good -- is what any Ultimate Truth is predicated upon.
"The Good therefore may be said to be the source not only of the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their being and reality; yet it is not itself identical with being, but transcends being in dignity and power."
-- Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 509b
In the late fourth and early fifth century, during the twilight of the Western Roman Empire, St. Augustine, drawing upon Platonic thought, wrote in his Confessions:
"And I entered and beheld with the eye of my soul... the Light that never changes... He that knows the truth, knows what that Light is, and he that knows It, knows Eternity."
-- Augustine, Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10
Despite their differing approaches, both Plato and Augustine believed humans could come to know Absolute Truth. But as with truthp, proving statements of Truth beyond formal realms like mathematics or logic remains intrinsically challenging and often fails to achieve universal assent. Efforts to prove a worldly Truth based solely on rational conclusions — particularly arising from formal principles which we believe not to be derived from direct experience (e.g., a priori knowledge based on our conceptions of mathematics) — tend to be inherently limited. They can quickly become circular or reliant on other contested or common truths. Traditional supporting premises used to prove the Truth of God's existence, such as "everything has a cause" or "all that exists must have been designed," appear anthropocentric and, upon reflection, unnecessary. Similarly, the ancients' assertion that the human soul is perfect in some way, and by way of this perfection we can have recourse to Perfect Knowledge, can be viewed as anthropocentric, perhaps even chauvinistic. It requires an essential differentiator between man-as-ape and the rest of the primate world, one that rests on interpretation and faith rather than being a conclusion of reason alone.
Tenets that are commonly held to reflect Truth include basic mathematical principles (such as the Commutative Property of Addition, a+b=b+a), but do not include other "physical" principles (such as mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2), even though an intelligence could have discerned both in similar fashion. The former is supposedly "fundamental" and "independent of empirical observation" while the latter is something we insist can only be arrived at by way of experimental observation.
But there is nothing about mass-energy equivalence that would prevent it from being treated as a priori knowledge by a superior intelligence -- an intelligence we can't understand. To such an intellect, this equivalence could seem as intuitive and fundamental as the Commutative Property of Addition seems to us. In turn, this latter property, along with many others we call intuitive, can be seen as unintuitive, and learned only through empirical observation, by lesser intelligences. In a philosophical inquiry, we cannot neglect the possibility that superior intelligences understand intuitively, and consider a priori, those unintuitive paradoxes that seem to create stumbling blocks for humans, such as the seeming paradox of the free will requirement in human morality contextualized by the mechanisms of causality our models so often require in our understanding of nature.
Plato and Augustine held complementary worldviews which incorporated and defined the human. These worldviews associate the human condition with divine perfection—either inherently present in humans or as the ultimate goal of the human spirit. Structuring reasonable arguments on worldviews like this can result in clear, crisp definitions of Truth. But other worldviews can offer equally clear but contrasting definitions of Truth. For example, my worldview perceives humans primarily as developing primates, closely resembling chimpanzees. It regards rationality as a nascent survival tool, undeveloped and not exclusive to humans, and views divinity as a construct of human creativity. It requires a definition of Truth that is limited in the same ways we would characterize a chimp's conception of Truth as limited. To say otherwise would be to make an exceptional claim within such a worldview.
Equivocation between Truth and the truthc which adheres to the scientific community's special condition, is subtle, but routine. Let's examine a not uncommon sentiment among our contemporaries.
"The universe is governed by immutable laws."
Does the statement refer to Truth or truthc? Though the distinction between the two is stark, this text alone does not provide the answer. One definition of truth requires a community, along with its own defined threshold to breach, and the other requires no community at all, and no threshold. One is meant to be supported by, and is expected to be subject to, critique from society. The other does not abide by it, instead making a universal claim about the fundamental essence of reality.
"All things change over time."
Is this an assertion about the intrinsic nature of reality itself, or is it a claim based only on the evidence at hand, one that the speaker is ready to contradict if new evidence compels him to do so? Neither I nor the reader can tell from the statement alone.
This leads us to another question: is Absolute Truth really a personal truth in disguise? Each has something in common with the other, for instance, neither is falsifiable. Indeed, the search for Absolute Truth can involve mystical experiences which can be convincing to the individual experiencing it. But they also differ in ways important to comprehension. One difference is that, as we've just seen, assertions of a Truth are very often presented as if they were an evidence-based truthc, when in fact they are not. Personal truths seldom suffer such conflation. Another difference concerns the way that Truth has been used to convince and control people historically. Social institutions which have a stake in controlling their population's behaviors, such as religious institutions and political parties, have leveraged the illusion of Truth toward these efforts. These distinctions are not to be treated lightly. They help us understand the tendencies of social institutions and the mechanisms of propaganda.
"It is known."
-- Dothraki saying, George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Although common truths can be dogmatic, many include a model, framework, or set of best practices, along with or in place of rigid assertions. In describing what I call the special threshold condition for truthc, for which evidence reigns supreme, dogma is (ideally) entirely absent, and only models remain. Their truth value is judged on two dimensions: correspondence of the models' outputs to evidence observed, and the models' success in predicting new evidence. I tried to shy away from calling these criteria scientific, because the history of what we refer to as science typically requires a third criterion for any model or system of truth: internal coherence. This requirement was not always present within evidence-centric models of reality, and it may not be present in the future.
From the scant historical evidence at our disposal, it appears that the requirement for logical coherence was first systematically developed by the ancient Greeks, though earlier civilizations surely recognized and applied principles of consistent reasoning. Still, as a new-ish requirement, it has provided humanity with enormous advantages. It is so powerful and so compelling that questioning it, or even proposing that it is unnecessary, is generally met with discomfort or unease. It is currently understood to be a non-negotiable third condition for any scientific community worthy of that name.
First, internal coherence allows for the formation of an epistemic baseline that is amenable to gradual improvement and sophistication. An internally coherent model requires just a few changes to better align with new evidence. When evidence contradicting the geocentric model of the solar system was first observed and documented, scientists did not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If we look at it from the perspective of internal cohesion, very little of the older model required changing in order to evolve into the heliocentric understanding we hold today. Without touching the internal cohesion that made up the bulk of the model, only a fundamental premise required changing. (Even so, it should go without saying that the worldly implications of this model change were substantial, involving paradigm shifts extreme and destructive.)
Second, internal coherence allows for humans to have taken advantage of their unique ability to build on prior knowledge at scale, because coherent models are far easier to teach. It is one thing to memorize dogma; it is an entirely different thing altogether to learn the internal workings of a system and evaluate it according to innate rules of common sense. Retention of new knowledge is far more effective if it can be mentally reconstructed from underlying principles as opposed to leaning on rote memorization alone. Furthermore, as students are exposed to the premises and frameworks of any given model of reality, they are able to use their critical faculties to question coherence in ways that may have escaped their teachers. Not so with dogma, or opaque or internally contradictory models, which afford no such quick, direct path for judgement and revision.
Finally, internal coherence provides humans with a sense of trust -- a sine qua non for any practical knowledge. In this way, we might see coherence as belonging to a category of best practices, along with razors such as the principle of parsimony, or practices such as stereotyping, which have been shown to increase correspondence in low information situations. Best practices, however, are not proofs, and there is no known theory advancing the idea that any given truthc must conform to any given best practice. It is the amazing track record of best practices that entice us and prompt us to turn to them time after time, affording us with a sense of trust. But a track record does not a proof make.
Requiring that a model have internal coherence implies several things. First, it requires us to view the core truths derived from human reason -- so called a priori knowledge -- as an inviolable and primary characteristic of this community's truthc. After all, how can we even use the word "coherence" without accepting the precepts of logic? Whenever we point out incoherence, it is only because there is something within an argument, model, or system, that does not follow something else given the tenets of human reason. But as we have seen in the previous section, these tenets can be understood as artifacts of a limited human intelligence, for which the bright line between innate logic and knowledge gained from the world is arbitrary. Whenever we speak of the requirement of coherence, we must question the distinction we make between formal and fundamental knowledge attained from human reason, which allows coherence to be evaluated, and maxims that are arrived by way of evaluating observations. Coherence, as a virtue of a system of thought, is itself questionable using the very same conditions that system may require: evidence, that the line differentiating categorization of logical precepts versus empirically derived laws of nature, has correspondence in reality.
Second, we must be mindful of how the use of words change over time, and take the possibility of future terminology shift into account. Futurists and science fiction writers have toyed with the idea of a black box artificial intelligence -- one that is totally inscrutable to humans, but provides, by tremendous margins, superior correspondence to evidence in hand, and superior ability to predict observations yet to be encountered. This essay concerns the use of the word truth in practice, and as such, the evaluation of this word cannot be separated from its psychological component. For most of human history, people called things "true" routinely and comfortably, even though a coherent, well thought out model of reality, in which every constituent premise and conclusion fit perfectly and logically with every other, was absent. Why shouldn't it be so in the future? The onus is on the denier to demonstrate that humans will not eventually jettison coherence as a requirement for evidence-based truthc. Like the Dothraki in George R. R. Martin's epic, why wouldn't people say "it is known" when they can do so reliably?
Though the nomenclature I present in this essay is unlikely to be put into practice, the key points I've tried to communicate must be, if we are to speak cogently about truisms: the type of truth under discussion must be clearly demarcated, whether along the lines I've drawn, or else capturing some other distinctions. Once strong definitions for terms used to describe truth are put in place, categorical assertions of the supremacy of one system of thought over another become unconvincing, and the perceived need for a hierarchy of systems becomes less compelling. Only when contextualized by, and evaluated in terms of usage, can different systems of thought be compared.
Doing so is no cure-all. It does nothing for the routinely observed phenomenon of arational, unfalsifiable assertions being presented under the guise of a rational conversation. It does not help us with poor or misleading interpretations, and leaves open the possibility that some authors' meanings can never be known. And it doesn't help when one community's common truth is treated as if it passes a different community's threshold condition, resulting in misuse or misapplication of a truth statement. But as a thought exercise made habitual, I believe it can benefit us as we navigate an ever more confusing epistemic sea and seek out truth in all its manifestations.
- A. Yampolsky, Los Angeles, 2024