Objective Truth

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).