Objective Truth

We can take subjective and objective views of the same facts: we can conceive of the object by reference to ourselves (“the object I am seeing now”) or by abstracting away from our specific characteristics and thinking from no particular point of view (“the planet next to planet Earth”).[1] This general point applies to the fact of truth: we can think of it in relation to ourselves or we can think of it as it is in itself irrespective of any relation to us—from the point of view of the world, as it were. I might think of truth as “the property I value most” or as “the property conferred on propositions by reality” (“Nothing is true but reality makes it so”, as Quine memorably remarked). How does this distinction apply to standard theories of truth? Which category do they fall into? Suppose we define truth as “the property rational enquirers converge on in the long run” or “the property a proposition has when it is known” or “the property of cohering with the rest of my beliefs” or “the property that serves me best in life”. These all make reference to the knowing subject, individual or collective. They are therefore subjective: we are thinking of truth from the human perspective, as it relates to us. We are not prescinding from ourselves and trying to define truth independently of ourselves: the general form of these definitions is “truth is what is R to me/us”. Logically, they are like “truth is what seems to me to be true”. Truth is conceived egocentrically, or anthropocentrically. Attributes of the self are introduced into the very nature of truth.

But that is not the only way truth has been defined; it has also been defined without reference to the self. So it is with the so-called correspondence theory of truth: truth is correspondence to the facts (reality, the world, being). There is a relation of correspondence (isomorphism, fitting) between propositions and worldly items, generally understood as combinations of objects and properties (“states of affairs”). If we think of propositions in Frege’s way, this relation holds for all time between mind-independent abstract entities and conditions of mind-independent reality (the universe). In no way does truth bring in human (or other) subjects; it exists apart from anything subjective or personal. It is completely objective. When we think of truth in this way, the human subject drops out; in its nature it has nothing to do with us. It’s like space, time, and matter. Thus, we have an “absolute conception” of truth to be set beside and contrasted with relative and subjective conceptions. This is held to constitute the essence of truth, its intrinsic constitution. From this perspective, the other definitions are deemed secondary at best and misleading at worst (or positively pernicious). They are to truth what the appearance of water is to water—not the real essence of what they purport to define and quite dispensable. The objective always takes precedence over the subjective (this term is used as a derogatory).

Now I want to make two points about these contrasting views of truth. The first is that the difference between them presages a battle: is truth inherently human and subjective, relative to us, or is it completely free of all subjective elements, absolute and objective. Is truth epistemic and practical, or is it metaphysical and divorced from all practice? This is a deep division and we may expect it to produce some ideological heat, not to be easily resolved. It will also affect such questions as the nature and status of moral truth and aesthetic truth. It bears on the prospects of a truth-conditional theory of meaning: can meaning be understood in terms of the objective conception of truth or must it be couched in terms of the subjective conception? This, I take it, is familiar territory. But the second point is not: is the objective conception even possible? The subjective conception is certainly possible, being framed in terms of humanly accessible facts—the only question being whether it is really a conception of truth, as opposed to such things as justification and utility. But there has always been a problem of understanding exactly what the objectivist correspondence theory actually says. What are these “facts” to which propositions correspond, and what is the relation of “correspondence”? Are facts complexes of objects and properties, and is correspondence a type of picturing? We don’t seem to know quite what we mean; it remains cloudy and obscure. Thus, anti-mystics repudiate it and opt for less heady doctrines (like the redundancy theory). The objective conception of truth is lacking in intelligibility. Maybe truth is objective in some way, but we can’t clearly say what that way is. The subjective views are intelligible enough but fall short, while the objective view seems on the right track but lacks in clarity or even intelligible content. Metaphysically, the objective view is a mess; spiritually, we rather like it. Subjective theories do nicely on the intelligibility front, but they fall under suspicion where material adequacy (Tarski’s term) is concerned. They strike us as neither necessary nor sufficient for genuine truth. Accordingly, Houston, we have a problem, a characteristically philosophical problem. One type of theory makes sense but is false, while the other doesn’t make much sense but impresses us as true. Ach! Compare philosophical theories of mathematics or ethics or the mind or necessity or the a priori or free will. In the case of truth, debates have raged over the various theories on offer, but the underlying dynamic has not been recognized, namely the conflict between subjective and objective conceptions of the target subject matter. The correct view would appear to be that truth is objective but we can’t make good on this conviction conceptually, whereas subjectivist theories make sense all right but are simply not plausible. I don’t know how else to put it: truth belongs to the class of natural mysteries (“mysteries of nature”, as Hume put it). We glimpse it perhaps in our limping formulations, but we can’t see limpidly into it. We may imagine the human institution of pictorial art and draw an analogy in the picture theory of propositions, but that idea is easily punctured. It may then seem that we must go deflationary or eliminative, but that is tough to stomach. In any case, we at least now see what is troubling us, what the deep structure of the debate turns upon. What is truth? Who the hell knows. I myself don’t doubt that truth is as the objectivist says, but I don’t have any real idea what this amounts to. Maybe I have a subjective conception of an objective conception that I don’t have: I picture the correspondence relation based on my own subjective perceptual experiences of correspondence relations of a geometrical nature, then I connect this to my vague mental image of a complex physical object; this forms my subjective conception of what a properly objective conception of the truth-making type of correspondence would be like. I certainly don’t have any direct perception of, or insight into, what the actual truth-making correspondence consists of. It’s just a word I throw around in philosophical discussions. Truth is an objective enigma.[2]

[1] See my papers, “Objective and Subjective Knowledge”, “A Paradox of Objectivity and Subjectivity”, “Philosophy of Objectivity and Subjectivity”, “A Program Delineated”, and “On Meaning, Mathematics, and Space”.

[2] An irenic individual might suggest carving truth into two pieces, each a legitimate type of truth. There is, on the one hand, subjective truth and, on the other, objective truth—the former pellucid, the latter obscure. But this is hard to accept: surely propositions don’t have two truth-values of truth and two of falsity. The proposition is either true or false, not true in one sense but not in another, and likewise for falsity. There is really no such thing as subjective truth (justification is another matter). The truth would appear to be that there is only one kind of truth but we can’t make much sense of it (our problem not its).

Locating Meaning

Where is meaning? Where is it located? This is a good question, because not easy to answer; maybe answering it would give us some idea of the nature of meaning. Is it in the external world, or in the mind (conscious or unconscious), or in the soul (immaterial substance), or in the body (behaviorism), or in the brain, or in the community, or in the abstract Plato-Frege realm, or somewhere else entirely? Or is it in many places, or none? People talk about whether meaning is “in the head” (the skull, the brain, the inner ego?), but that doesn’t exhaust the location question; we should approach the question more broadly and comprehensively. To that end, I will consider an alternative intellectual history with some echoes of recent discussions; this should help us gain a better perspective on the issues.

Consider a group of Cartesians firmly convinced that the mind (the soul) is an immaterial substance having neither extension nor location. They accordingly believe that meaning resides in this substance along with anything mental. So long as the substance remains unaltered it will contain the same meanings, even posthumously. You can change the body, the brain, the environment, or anything external to the soul thus conceived and you won’t change meaning. It all depends on the internal make-up of the immaterial substance. They are savagely “internalist”. Now a renegade comes along, call him “Mantup”: this chap has come up with an ingenious thought experiment he wants to try out on his colleagues, involving a place called Twin Earth. You know the story from Mantup’s Earth counterpart (H. Putnam), so I won’t repeat it. Suffice to say that it shows that meaning is (partially) determined by the environment in such a way that “water” has a different meaning on Earth and Twin Earth. This goes against the prevailing immaterialist internalism. Mantup’s argument is found persuasive, but disturbing, for two reasons. First, it undermines the entrenched semantic internalism: “Meaning just ain’t in the soul!”, people exclaim. Meaning is in the world, the physical environment, a matter of causal interactions with physical things, at least partly. So, meaning seems to be an amalgam of the inner and immaterial and the outer and material—a metaphysical hybrid. But how can meaning be both material and immaterial, extended and not extended, located and not located? This goes against everything they believe—and yet it seems true. The resolution breathlessly proposed by some members of our imaginary group is that the soul cannot be immaterial! I know, crazy right? But they have an argument: it’s the only way to avoid metaphysical absurdity—because we can now say that meaning is uniformly material, extended, and located. That strange furrowed organ in the head (they have no name for it) actually plays a role in the formation of mind: it is the mind, or at least is vital to the mind’s powers. Who would have thought? They are now externalist materialists where once they were internalist immaterialists. Quite a volte face. If meaning has a location after all (a region of space next to a planet), then so must the mind have a location—right where the relevant part of space is. The correct theory of meaning has led to a revision in the metaphysics of mind. Meaning turns out to be physical and located in the brain. Syntax was already ensconced in the brain (no Twin Earth cases for syntax), and now semantics follows suit.

Now let’s go back to Earth and our own intellectual tradition. When we say that meaning is in the head, or deny this, what do we mean by “head”? I think there are three possibilities: the conscious, the unconscious, and the brain. Either meaning is in the conscious mind, or in the unconscious mind, or in the physical brain. What is the truth? I don’t think it is plausible that meaning is a creature of consciousness like sensation; it has a partly submerged nature. We don’t consciously assemble complex meanings from an array of simple meanings; our unconscious does that for us (compare seeing an object). A lot of linguistic processing goes on unconsciously—that is a truism. Yet meaning is not completely divorced from consciousness; consciousness comes in at some point—as when you consciously hear what someone says or carefully construct a line of poetry. This unconscious level is affected by external factors, as in Twin Earth: “water” differs in meaning in the unconscious minds of speakers on Earth and Twin Earth, as well as in their conscious minds. The physical environment forces a difference of reference in the two places, and this conjoins with the unconscious and conscious content of the speakers’ mind. In fact, I would say that the unconscious existence of meaning is aptly described as “physical”: not that it is reducible to physics but that it is “of the body”.[1] It operates at a subconscious cerebral level, like the subconscious processing of visual data. Moreover, the unconscious semantic level is larger and more important than the conscious level (as with phonetics and syntax). If so, meaning is mainly located in the unconscious physical world—the world of space, extension, and spatial location. The external component is clearly physical (water impinging on the senses) and so is the internal component in so far as it is unconscious (which it preponderately is). In short, meaning is (mainly) physical and located where matter is located. It is “bodily” in the way vision is. It is true that meaning can appear at the conscious level, and perhaps necessarily so, but it must also have an unconscious existence, as revealed in its combinatorial powers. As in all human skills, there is a vast reality of unconscious know-how lying behind any complex skill, from walking to talking. We only catch glimpses of it at the conscious level. How much of the child’s grasp of language is consciously represented? Not much. Does the child consciously know what he is doing when he speaks? Of course not. Meaning is located in the brain below conscious awareness (except when it reaches consciousness). Control of the larynx and other vocal organs is clearly unconscious and clearly body-directed, hence “physical”. Really, the whole contrast between “mental” and “physical” is out of date; the important point is that meaning is something that has a reality outside of what we can introspectively report. What we call “language mastery” is something wider than what crosses our conscious minds as we speak and understand. Indeed, I myself would happily say that meaning is not “in the mind”, though it is mainly “in the head”, because it is fundamentally “in the brain”, i.e., “physical” (it isn’t caused by non-physical supernatural agencies). Where is meaning? In the physical (biological) world, both internal to the organism (spatially) and also external to it. Thus, I am a kind of “physicalist” about meaning—not in the reductive sense but in the sense that meaning is a matter of actions of the brain. It is a sensorimotor skill. It isn’t like thought in this sense. That is why we don’t really introspect meaning: it isn’t a content of consciousness but a congeries of habits governed by the brain, though habits of a high cognitive order. It isn’t an attribute of an immaterial substance and it isn’t a bunch of qualia; it’s a body-involving sensorimotor skill of a specific kind. Thus, we may as well describe it as “physical” in the weak sense I have gestured at. It is not a divine disembodied attribute of something immaterial but a biological capacity rooted in the brain. Meaning is located in the head-world nexus.

Some theorists have contended, not without reason, that externalism extends beyond the semantic into the psychological. But this point can be overdone. Beliefs can be de re and so can meanings, but there are reasons why psychological externalism is less immediately appealing than semantic externalism: for language is clearly more tied to the body than mind is. We speak but we don’t do anything analogous with thought and belief—we don’t have bodily organs that are dedicated to these activities. We refer to things in speech publicly, but we don’t do the same with our thoughts. We don’t warm to “use” theories of thought, but we do for language. Languages vary from place to place, but thoughts don’t; thought is more universal. Words are more tied down to things than concepts are, more local. Language is public but thought is not. In other words, there are reasons to adopt an externalist conception of language that don’t apply to the mind. Language is more “outside the head” than thought is, though thought can be de re and hence environment-dependent. Calling thought “physical” is more of a conceptual strain than describing meaning this way. And remember that the language capacity is largely independent of other cognitive capacities like rational thought (or irrational thought). A behaviorist theory of language is marginally less repellent than a behaviorist theory of thought (though still repellent). Meaning is closer to behaving than thinking is (a statue called The Speaker would not portray him with his head in his hands completely silent and immobile). So, let’s not exaggerate the externalism of thought, ignoring the differences from language.[2]

[1] See my “Truly Physical”. Actually, we discovered in the nineteenth century that the mind was physical—as opposed to divinely (or devilishly) ordained and supervised. We discovered too that mental illness is not possession by evil spirits but an organic disorder. This is a type of “physicalism” in a perfectly good sense.

[2] There are ways of being an externalist about meaning but not about thought, such as being a causal theorist about words but a description theorist about concepts. Not that externalism about thought is a false doctrine; it is just not a simple deduction from externalism about meaning. Intuitively, meaning is embedded in the world in a way that thought isn’t (it is more inward). Language is all about hearing and speaking, but thought is more removed from the senses and the body.

Lolita’s Tennis

I make it a habit (a ritual) to (re-)read a chapter of Lolita every Christmas day. Yesterday was no exception; I chose chapter 20, in which Lolita’s tennis game is lovingly described. Here we are told of “the indescribable itch of rapture that her tennis game produced in me—the teasing delirious feeling of teetering on the very brink of unearthly order and splendor” (230). The chapter is a moral turning point for the enraptured Humbert and deeply moving. But that is not the topic of this brief essay: I was struck by the clear expertise Nabokov reveals about his own tennis game. I knew he was a player and sometime teacher of the game, so I decided to google the topic. To my delight and amazement, I was informed that he was actually an excellent player with professional ambitions at one time (playing in the Davis cup for Russia before the revolution—sadly thwarted). He was admitted to top clubs in Berlin in the interwar years based purely on his skill and performance. The boy could play! He was an enthusiast and accomplished with it. How I wish I could see his backhand! The man was a genius! Now I will play the game with renewed dedication and religiosity. I made a point of hitting yesterday against the wall, working on my left hand. If only I could meet him on a tennis court and hit some balls! I wonder how hard he could hit. Lolita, we are told, had a first-class game—skilled and graceful—but her will to win had been destroyed by her relationship with her stepfather. That tells you a lot about Nabokov’s compassion for his divine creation.[1]

[1] As it happens, a tennis friend of mine, Paul, a Rumanian, was at the wall too, teaching his granddaughter how to play. She was about Lolita’s age and having her first lesson, patiently and devotedly given by her grandfather. He was doing what Humbert signally failed to do, as he ruefully acknowledges. The symmetry was positively Nabokovian.