Truth

Truth is a word we use to compliment texts that are coherent and well tested against experience.

So first of all, truth is a word. It is something we say about texts. It does not refer to any object in the world of experience. It refers to a relationship of agreement. For example, when we say, "That is true", we often simply mean, "I agree". We mean that the text agrees with our experience or with other texts that we take to be true.

Since truth is not an object that can be immediately perceived, a text must somehow be evaluated to see if it is true. It must be tested. For simple observation statements, we can simply check to see if we experience what is stated. For example, you say, "It is snowing," and I look out the window and see that it does indeed appear to be snowing. Then I am willing to say that your statement is true. It is an honorific I confer on your statement as a result of my testing.

For more complex texts, more complex testing is needed. For example, if I say, "This is an accurate map," it will be difficult for you to immediately make a judgment. You can try to use it and see if you get lost. As long as it works well, you will tentatively accept my assertion. On the other hand, if you have had bad experiences with other maps I have given you, you may have your doubts. In this case, you are not comparing the map directly to experience but to a whole network of other texts and experiences.

One approach to evaluating texts is to consider all of the texts that you tentatively accept at any point in time. You use this network of texts until a problem comes up. One problem may be that you discover an inconsistency between some of the texts in your network. Past experience has shown that texts that are coherent with other true texts are more reliable than those that are inconsistent with them. The world of experience seems to be largely self-consistent. So when your working set of texts gets out of coherence, you make moves to restore it to coherence, by changing or ejecting some of the texts.

The same process is needed when you have a new experience that contradicts one of your texts. You need to make adjustments. What specific adjustment you make is fairly open. Which texts need to be altered depends on many factors. For example, we would tend to try changing the rules of logic or some well tested, highly useful physical theory only as a last resort. Instead, we may go back to check our experience again. Maybe we were mistaken. Maybe we misinterpreted what we experienced. But eventually, if there is no other way, even these texts may need to be changed.

This process does not result in one true network of texts, though, since others may decide on different adjustments that could still work. This makes the truth of the texts tentative and evolving. Some people have trouble with this rough and tumble approach to truth. They would prefer something less fluid. But even with this approach, a great deal of the system is usually preserved. Only rarely is a major rearrangement needed.

Still, is there a more stable approach? Take the two main threads of coherence and testing against experience. If you emphasize coherence, perhaps taking mathematics as your model, you can imagine that the world is one vast system of inter-related patterns. By developing more and more comprehensive, coherent systems, you can hope to get closer to that universal pattern. You can further claim that you have direct access to those patterns though your reason. Then you can get at the truth without all the messy interactions with the world of experience. The problem though is that the systems you develop may in fact have no relationship to the world of experience. They are simply texts, however elegant. And it is very difficult to show others that you have direct contact with a universal world of patterns when all they see is words.

Going to the other extreme, you can emphasize testing against experience, perhaps taking observation statements as your model. You can then say that truth is a direct correspondence to reality. The first problem with this is with the term reality. How does reality differ from experience? You could say that it is the world behind experience, that causes experience, but that we cannot experience it directly. It must always be mediated through experience. But then how do you know your experience reflects it? All that it seems that you can do is test against the experience itself. Reality seems to be just that in experience which resists your desires, forcing you to “face reality”. The second problem is that observation statements do not cover enough territory. Almost immediately you are into theories and maps and hypotheses and you cannot derive these from observation statements. Instead you invent them and use observation statements to invalidate them if they are inconsistent. Finally, the observation statements themselves can be very theory laden. Why did you choose those particular words and concepts? Couldn't you have used others?

So it seems we are left with a whole range of texts that need to work together, some closer to the pure coherence end, some closer to the direct description of experience end, but a lot in the middle. We can make these texts more useful by keeping them as coherent as possible and by testing them against experience as best we can, and we can use the word truth to praise them. This may be a weaker use of the word than some of us had hoped for, but it is still a useful word and in the thick of practical inquiry and problem solving, this is what we usually mean by it anyway.