Does Truth Matter?

Theories of truth are very various, as if people can’t decide what kind of thing truth is. Is it just another name for consistency (coherence), an inter-propositional relation? Is it nothing at all, mere repetition of the proposition said to be true? Is it some sort of abstract correspondence between proposition and world, a picture or isomorphism of the facts? Or is it a way of talking about utility, benefit, what pays? You would think that truth is the opaquest of things, given the variety of theories of it. But people don’t tend to ask why truth matters, i.e., why we should care about it: whatever it is, why is it important? The pragmatist theory brings out the urgency of that question most clearly, because it aims to answer the question of mattering: truth is utility, and utility matters. We want to know what is useful, what works, and truth does that, since truth simply is the attribute of being conducive to success or well-being. Beliefs that are true are precisely beliefs that are good for us—prudentially valuable—and that is why truth matters. The other theories leave us hanging, because they don’t offer an answer to why we should care about truth: why should we care that our beliefs form a coherent whole, or that they stand in a relation of correspondence to the world, or that the word “true” allows for the re-assertion of the proposition that is true? We think truth is valuable, a good thing, and pragmatism gives a clear answer to why—because to be true is to be useful. Falsity is useless, counter-productive, harmful—so we avoid it. The value of truth thus receives a solid grounding, an explanation; and it’s not clear that any other theory does this. The trouble is that pragmatism is a false theory: it is neither necessary nor sufficient for truth that a proposition be useful. This is an old story that I won’t repeat (useless true beliefs, useful false beliefs); the point for present purposes is that without pragmatism truth comes to seem pointless, expendable, of no account. It is true that truth and utility are correlated to some degree, which is why the pragmatist theory looks promising at first: generally speaking, what is true is useful and what is useful is true (and what is false is harmful and what is harmful is false). But we can’t identify the two properties; the connection is contingent not constitutive. This leaves us with the question of why we should care about truth—what has it done for us lately? Let me set out the question as starkly as possible. Suppose that truth is some kind of correspondence (the most popular conception of truth)—a mapping between proposition and fact. And suppose we consider an astronomical belief about a remote galaxy that happens to be true but is not useful in any way. The truth of this belief confers no benefit on its holder or on anyone else; it has zero utility. Then why should anyone care about it? Why should anyone strive to ensure that the belief is true or worry that it might not be? It is a fact about the belief in question that has no conceivable utility for anyone. Consider another type of correspondence relation that might obtain between the individual and the galaxy, say that it has as many stars as the individual has hairs on his head—there is a mapping, an isomorphism, between the two. Who cares? What difference does it make? It’s just a quirky fact, an adventitious correspondence with no relevance to anything someone might care about. It doesn’t matter. Likewise, the truth type of correspondence doesn’t matter, because it bears no relation to what does matter, prudentially or morally.[1] Of course, some true beliefs matter because they feed into action and action matters to well-being, but this is what matters not truth as such. As soon as the belief is detached from action, its truth ceases to matter; it is the property of being useful that matters, whether truth is implicated or not. Truth only matters because it is instrumental in providing utility—its mattering is entirely extrinsic to its nature. The truth relation itself has no intrinsic value; only the relation between the belief and the action matters. So, we are under the illusion that truth matters, because it is correlated with successful action; its not mattering becomes evident when we detach truth from useful action, as in the astronomical example. That is, a belief’s being true is not a property of the belief that has intrinsic value, because truth itself is utility-independent. If pragmatism were true, we could say that truth is inherently valuable because it is identical with utility; but it isn’t true, so truth is left hanging, a kind of pointless add-on. If all our beliefs were suddenly rendered false, while retaining their utility, we would not be a shade worse off, simply because correspondence with the world is not an inherently beneficial relation (consider the Matrix). To put it differently, truth doesn’t care if it matters to us; it cares only that it stands in the right correspondence relation with the universe, no matter how distant or irrelevant to our concerns. It is sometimes said that truth is the property of standing for an existing state of affairs: but why should this abstract metaphysical property be of any concern to us? What would change if it ceased to obtain? Everything would go on as before. As long as beliefs retain their functional role, they serve to advance our needs and desires; whether they stand in this fancy relation to states of affairs is beside the point. Does animal belief stand in such a relation to the world, or is it rather a state with a certain function in the animal’s life? Does the animal care? Our brains exist on a planet at such and such a distance from some remote galaxy, but this fact is of no value to us, being irrelevant to what matters to us; similarly, our brains stand in truth-making correspondence relations to the same galaxy (assuming we have beliefs about it), but this fact too is of no value to us, being irrelevant to what matters to us. There is no benefit attached simply to being true, so it is not clear why it should matter (except instrumentally). Truth as such doesn’t matter. It is not a value. It has no value. True, truth doesn’t actively harm us (like being at a certain distance from a particular galaxy), but it is strictly irrelevant to what matters to us. It’s a don’t-care, a matter of indifference. If it turns out that my belief about that distant galaxy is false, my response ought to be “How interesting, but really I don’t give a damn”. Mere falsity is not a defect that ought to keep me awake at night. This ought to change our attitude to lying: it is not vicious to lie if the lie merely produces a false belief that has no untoward consequences for the well-being of the person lied to. I could lie about that galaxy and inflict no harm on my interlocutor. False beliefs can indeed sometimes confer benefits, and the mere fact of falsity is not in itself a harm. The truth is generally a good thing instrumentally, but this is not a rigid rule and anyway is not a fact about truth as such, as opposed to its usual correlates. By all means seek the truth, you will likely be better off that way, and so will other people, but don’t think that this shows that truth has intrinsic value. How could it, given its nature as an abstract mind-world correspondence? The correspondence theory, as opposed to the pragmatist theory, is really a recipe for truth demotion, if not truth demolition. Why should we even continue to talk this way, in view of its irrelevance to what matters? Instead of responding to defamation by saying “That’s false” we could say “That has the property of unfairly maligning someone”, since that is really what is wrong with defamation. Making false statements about someone is not wrong if it imputes good qualities to the person! Talk of truth and falsity here is just shorthand for such periphrases; it is never the real point at issue. It simply doesn’t matter whether a belief stands for an existing state of affairs or not (much the same has been said of scientific theories by those impressed by the difficulty of obtaining truth and its irrelevance to the primary aims of science). My own view is that truth exists and is a type of correspondence, but it is not intrinsically valuable (unlike goodness and beauty). It has no more value than lines of projection in geometry. What matters is utility, but truth is not utility. Pragmatism is false but eminently right-headed.[2]

[1] There is a rough analogy between this position and Derek Parfit’s position on personal identity. We thought that identity through time is what matters to survival, but certain thought experiments undermine this view. What matters to survival is psychological continuity not identity, though the latter is generally correlated with the former. Similarly, what matters in belief is not truth but utility, which is generally correlated with truth. (I am not saying here that I agree with Parfit.)

[2] Let me report that the position advocated here came as a surprise to me. I had always assumed that truth has value, but I hadn’t reckoned with the implications of the failure of pragmatism as a theory of truth. The key move is to recognize that the value of truth is instrumental not intrinsic. Pragmatism is right about value; its mistake is to locate value in truth itself. The correct analysis of truth shows that it has no intrinsic value. You might suppose that truth has value for the intellectually curious—they care whether their beliefs are true. But what if you have no such curiosity, like animals and most of mankind? Then truth has no value for you: it doesn’t bear on your actual concerns. Surely, we don’t want to say that the value of truth resides in the eccentric interests of rare intellectuals with too much time on their hands. The pragmatist doesn’t claim that truth is utility for the intellectually curious but not for anyone else. Perhaps the reason most people don’t care about the truth is that there is nothing about truth to care about, not intrinsically anyway. (That was not an easy sentence to write.) Truth is good if and only if it leads to the good.

Geometrical Knowledge

How do we come to have geometrical knowledge? How do we acquire geometrical concepts? The question has been around since Plato and his theory is still probably the best—we have such knowledge innately. But this doesn’t answer the question of what triggers the innate knowledge (it isn’t there fully formed from the start): what in our experience enables the innate knowledge to enter our consciousness in explicit articulate form? It can’t be Socratic interrogation because someone has to have the knowledge without such interrogation, and obviously most people don’t learn what a triangle or circle is by explicit verbal instruction. Is it by seeing shapes, or touching them? But how do we see and touch shapes—how does our experience come to have this kind of geometrical content? You might suppose that triangles and circles are present in the stimulus as it reaches the sense organs, ready to picked off like apples from a tree, but this is not the case. The pattern of light that impinges on the retina is notoriously fragmented, fluctuating, and fleeting; yet the concepts of geometry are fixed immutable forms, as Plato emphasized. The proximal stimulus is remarkably impoverished compared to the representational powers that exist in the mind; no mere copying process could produce the latter from the former. You can’t make a Euclidian purse from a retinal sow’s ear. In fact, as we now appreciate, the visual system makes elaborate computations that lead from the mess on the retina to a stable, intelligible, three-dimensional sensory world—a world of shaped objects in space. We see an objective world of determinate forms based on a stimulus that is anything but, thanks to our sophisticated visual processing mechanisms. Vision science investigates these mechanisms and it has made impressive progress. Can we conjoin this with Plato’s innateness hypothesis to answer the question of the origin of geometrical knowledge? It sounds like a promising idea, but we need to be more specific about the eliciting stimulus that triggers the innate schematism: what is it exactly that causes geometrical understanding to form in the mind? There is an innate structure in the mind-brain of unknown character, and somehow the course of experience elicits it; but what is it about the perceptual system that makes it suitable for performing this role? What does it do that leads to the formation of geometrical understanding? I suggest the following: it works by means of perceptual constancies. As is well known, the visual system (and tactile) corrects for variations in the proximal stimulus that result from changes of distance, illumination, perspective, and so on. It extracts distal invariants from proximal variations, thus producing a world of objective forms from an array of idiosyncratic subjective impingements.[1] These forms—shapes, among other qualities—constitute the geometry of the human visual world. They are generated by a process of correction applied to the proximal stimulus. Thus, we perceive cubes and spheres and other forms that are not subject to the vagaries of the proximal stimulus. The visual system attributes these forms to distal objects. This is not to be understood as a process of conscious rational thought but as an automatic unconscious computational mechanism (unreasoning animals have it too). Perceptual constancies are primitive properties of visual systems, which can occur in creatures that lack rational thought. However, in the case of humans rational thought does coexist with perceptual constancy, and an innate potential for geometrical understanding comes with the genes; in humans, geometrical knowledge can flower. We have the conception of geometrical forms as fixed determinate shapes with specific properties by virtue of a combination of innate schematism, rational thought, and perceptual constancy—with the last of these doing the heavy lifting. This is the capacity that triggers the formation of geometrical understanding, given the right innate structure. For it deals in perceptual invariants, objective shapes, a repertoire of determinate geometric forms—not in flickering patterns of light striking the retina. There is no geometry worthy of the name in the patches of light that cause nerve endings to fire in the retina, but by the time the visual system has done its work a fully formed geometry has been attributed to the distal environment. It only remains for this visual geometry to interact with the system of representations we call “innate ideas” and we have the roots of geometrical understanding—concepts of triangles, circles, etc. Perceptual constancies are vital to this process of cognitive production. It isn’t that distal objects somehow emit shapes that end up on the retina and can be copied by the brain to yield shape concepts; the shapes have to be generated by the visual system from clues contained in the proximal stimulus. Perceptual representational content is endogenously generated from perceptual primitives and then attributed to the environment; geometrical knowledge, as we ordinarily conceive it, results from the interaction between this system and the innate endowment we bring with us into the world. It is as if the innate geometry lies dormant in us until stimulated by the operations of the perceptual systems as they impose constancies on the data of sense. This capacity arises early in all perceiving creatures, so human children are primed to output geometrical competence before the school years begin: they are then ready for formal geometrical instruction. They know what triangles and circles are well before they are taught their mathematical properties. They have been having experiences as of triangles and circles from an early age—forms subject to perceptual constancies—so they are acquainted with geometrical figures; they just need to attach these perceptual primitives to their innate system of “ideas”. The triggering is perceptual, but not in the way the old empiricists supposed, i.e., by a copying procedure; rather, perceptual constancies play the eliciting role. Not that any of this is easy to understand—the nature of the innate schematism, the act of triggering—but it is the general character of the formation of geometrical knowledge. In the case of language an innate schematism is triggered by verbal sensory input, and the child comes to understand what words and sentences are (a basic level of grammatical knowledge); in the case of geometry the same kind of thing happens, only here the innate schematism is triggered by a perceptual system that is built around constancy effects. When a ball, say, moves away from the perceiver, retaining its apparent size as the retinal image shrinks, this embodies the idea of a geometrical form that persists across space and time; it is an invariant in a world of variation. It is the primitive prototype of Plato’s eternal geometric forms existing in a flux of fleeting impressions. Constancies imply permanence amid change, and that is precisely what Platonic forms are supposed to be. Geometric objects are constancies idealized.[2]

[1] For a thorough discussion of perceptual constancy, see Tyler Burge, Origins of Objectivity (2010) and Perception: First Form of Mind(2022).

[2] Our knowledge of color is not dissimilar. There is also color constancy and this affects our conception of color: we don’t think of colors as varying with every change of illumination, etc. We think of colors as invariant under variation of proximal stimulus, and hence as possessing a certain sort of objectivity. We can then study colors as stable qualities with a fixed nature. If colors and shapes were conceived as varying with the proximal stimulus, we could hardly study them at all—they would be too fleeting and lacking in any fixed nature. They would not be colors and shapes as we know them (there would be no such thing, for us, as the color red or the shape square).

Other Bodies

The orthodox view of our knowledge of minds is that while other people’s minds are doubtful my own mind is not: I can be certain of my mind but not of other minds. Hence there is a skeptical problem of other minds but not of my own mind. There is a deep epistemological asymmetry between self and other. However, it is not thought that there is a comparable asymmetry with respect to the body: the existence of other bodies is doubtful, but so is the existence of my body. I might be a brain in a vat with no body, and other people’s bodies might be hallucinations; there is a skeptical problem about both. Now that I don’t contest, but it doesn’t follow that there is no epistemological difference between my knowledge of my body and my knowledge of other bodies. I could be more certain of my body than I am of other bodies, and the ground of my knowledge might be different in the two cases. So, let’s explore the question. How do I know other bodies (human, animal, and inanimate)? I know them by sense perception, notably vision. But sense perception is subject to illusion and hallucination, so that source of error has to be recognized. How do I know my own body? By sense perception, to be sure, but also by direct knowledge of what I am doing, by proprioception, and by sensation (feelings in my body). So, I have more evidence about my body than I have about other bodies—more to go on, more to appeal to. Moreover, I don’t have hallucinations of my own body as I have hallucinations of other bodies—I never have impressions of my body existing when it does not, as I have impressions of other bodies existing when they do not (as when I have a false impression of someone lurking in the dark, etc.). Also, I am always (when awake) aware of the condition of my body, even when I can’t perceive it with my five senses, but this is not true of other bodies. I can’t have proprioception of other bodies, but proprioception of my own body is ever-present and highly reliable. All in all, I am in a solid position epistemologically with respect to my body: I know my own body remarkably well, even if I can’t be certain I’m not a brain in a vat. It’s really the best-known physical object in the world as far as I am concerned. I would venture to suggest that the probability of my body existing is a good deal higher than the probability that other bodies exist. I am more ready to accept body solipsism than the hypothesis that other bodies exist but mine doesn’t. I’m pretty damn sure my body exists! Yours, well, that’s more a matter of speculation, faith, received wisdom. Every night I dream of bodies that don’t exist, but I never dream of my own non-existent body. But is this something I can defend against a determined skeptic? Actually, no, except to a limited degree, but this degree marks a difference between my body and yours. For I can argue that I must at least have a brain, while your brain is up for grabs. This is because I know with certainty that I have a mind, and my mind needs a brain; but I don’t know with certainty that you have a mind, so I can’t infer from that that you must have a brain. I can’t move from knowledge of your mind to the conclusion that it is housed in a brain, because I don’t have that knowledge; but in my case, I have indubitable knowledge of my mind, so I have a solid basis for the move to a brain. Thus, I have a Cogito-type argument for a body part belonging to me, but I have nothing comparable in your case—you could be all hallucination as far as I am concerned (though not as far as you are concerned). There is no Cogito-type argument of the form “I think, therefore you have a body”, but there is such an argument as “I think, therefore I have a body”—where the body I have perhaps consists just of a brain. Can I infer the existence of any bodies other than my own from the existence of my body (even if that is just a brain)? In the case of the mind, that looks to be infeasible: I can’t infer from the existence of my mind that any other minds exist or ever existed or will exist (solipsism-of-the-moment is inescapable as a skeptical possibility). But in the case of the body the prospect of other bodies looks brighter: because I can infer from the existence of my body that other bodies didand will exist. The reason is that the matter of my body did once belong to another body and it will later come to belong to a separate body too. The matter of my body moves around composing different bodies at different times, but the “matter” of my mind does not. Thus, my bodily matter survives my body’s demise, as it once survived the demise of another body or bodies; but my mind does not likewise persist through time—it is limited to me. So, I can know that other bodies once existed and will exist, given that I know that I have a body—not so for mind. This thinking thing might be the only thinking thing that ever existed or will exist, but this extended thing is one among many extended things spread out in time—that is its nature. I can assert “I am an extended thing, therefore there must be other extended things (at some time)”, assuming that a past and future exist during which my matter exists and my body doesn’t. My body implies other bodies (on reasonable assumptions) but my mind doesn’t imply other minds; and this point applies equally to my brain alone. (But, of course, I can’t infer that your body exists in this way, since your body is not composed of the matter that composes mine.) In short, I know more about my body than I know about your body; so, I have more of an other-body problem than a my-body problem (though I do have somewhat of a my-body problem). It is true that I cannot be certain that I have a body just as I experience it, but I can be certain that I have some sort of body (even if it’s just a brain quite unlike the one I think I have). However, I really can’t be certain that you have a body of any kind, since you might just be a figment of my imagination, an outright hallucination. Accordingly, it is too simple to say that there is no epistemological asymmetry between my knowledge of my body and my knowledge of your body: I am better placed to know my own body, and in several ways.[1]

[1] In the Matrix people hallucinate their body and are quite wrong about what it is up to, but they can’t hallucinate the fact that they have some sort of body, since that is a precondition of their having a mind at all. But there is no conceptual bar to hallucinating other people’s bodies in toto; they need not have any physical reality at all.

Cogito for the External World

The traditional Cogito “I think, therefore I am” yields a moderate harvest of existential conclusions: the existence of a subject of thoughts (albeit momentary and etiolated) and the existence of propositions as the content of thoughts. We might compare this to a plant that is rooted in the earth and directed to the sun (earth as subject, sun as proposition). The plant exists, as it were, between the earth and the sun—as a thought exists between a subject and a proposition. It needs both, pointing down and pointing up; it “presupposes” earth and sun, as a thought presupposes subject and proposition. But does the thought (episode of thinking) bring with it any further existential implications? The plant also exists in a surrounding environment of physical objects and processes—does the thinking exist in a surrounding environment of objects and processes? If so, are these objects and processes logically implied by the thinking? In particular, is what we call the external world implied by the existence of thoughts? Is there a Cogito for the external world? The idea might seem incredible: how could a thought, an event of thinking, imply the existence of the external world? What about the evil demon and the brain in a vat? True, some philosophers have sought to deny that these scenarios are really possible—they have held that the content of thought requires the existence of suitable external objects in order to exist at all. Thus, we have “externalism” about the content of thought: what a person thinks is fixed by his or her actual environment and causal connections thereto. However, such views are not terribly plausible; in any case, I won’t discuss them. But I will discuss another line of argument that seeks to forge a logical link between mind and world—between the internal and the external. That is, I will defend the following Cogito: “I think, therefore the external world exists”; or, to parallel the traditional phraseology, “I think, therefore it is”—in Latin “Cogito, ergo est”. The “it” here is the physical world that exists outside the mind—the world of extended objects in space. We won’t get the entire external world as normally conceived, but we may get a part of it—and so derive from “I think” propositions concerning the existence of ordinary material objects. The first thing to notice is that thoughts (and other mental events) do in fact occur in an environment of physical objects, rather like plants; the question is whether this is an a priori necessary truth. Thus, thoughts occur in the vicinity of bodies and brains and interact with these objects, as a matter of actual fact; what we have to determine is whether this is built into the very identity of thoughts, a necessary condition of their existence (like subjects and propositions). Is it part of the nature of thoughts to be so situated? First, we can observe that thoughts have bodily effects: what you think affects what you do. And this is part of their identity: if you think it’s cold, you will dress warmly (given appropriate desires). If a thought did not have such consequences, it would not be thatthought. This is a familiar reflection. Of course, the thought might not actually have such consequences, but it is (as we say) disposed to have them (even if the brain of the thinker has been removed from the body, he still has a tendency to act in certain ways). The question is what this tells us about the thought itself: must it be somehow bodily? I think the answer is yes: the thought can have bodily effects only because it has a (partly) bodily nature. That is, the thought can only have a certain functional role vis-à-vis the body if it has a (partly) bodily nature. This nature will involve the brain; so, the thought has a cerebral nature of some sort. A materialist will say that its nature is wholly cerebral, but we need not commit ourselves to that, restricting ourselves to the weaker claim that it has a cerebral aspect. Accordingly, and in line with reasonable materialist sympathies, thoughts must have a physical nature of some sort (along with a possibly non-physical nature). But then we can deduce from the occurrence of a thought that something physical exists—that there exists something bodily that is built into the thought. This something is presumably complex and consists of elements that could exist without the thought existing (just like in the case of the brain), so we get the idea of a material world that can exist independently of anything mental. We get something like an atomic theory (bodies are made up of smaller physical components). Of course, we already know this to be true on empirical grounds, but now we see that it is deducible a priori from the very nature of thinking: if a thought exists, it must have a nature that allows it to affect the body (if there is one); but then it must have a bodily nature of its own; therefore, there must be something bodily in the world. Cogito, ergo est. I think, therefore there is an external world. Given that I know with certainty that an episode of thinking is occurring, and given that I know a priorithat this requires bodily existence of some sort, I can infer that a body exists in much the way I normally suppose. In fact, I can be certain of this—or as certain as I am that subjects and propositions exist given that thoughts do. I can infer a physical “environment” for acts of thinking much like the one I normally take for granted (centering on the brain). I can formulate a Cogito for the external world, or part of it.[1] Lichtenberg is thus multiply wrong in his claim that nothing follows from “I think” apart from the existence of thoughts. And Descartes is wrong that the Cogito argument applies only to the self; in fact, the conclusion is more robust in the case of the external world than in the case of the self, since only a vanishingly thin notion of self can be derived from “I think”. Descartes, of course, cannot avail himself of this argument for the external world given his dualism—for him the mind has no physical nature at all—but this dualism is hardly something we would wish to hang onto. A reasonable dose of materialism is all we need to develop a modified Cogito that delivers substantive conclusions about the make-up of the world: we can now assert that the world is partly mental and partly physical. The existence of physical things follows from the existence of mental things; it isn’t merely a contingent add-on. Thus, thoughts are rooted in selves, point to propositions, and incorporate their physical environment (the brain). They imply the existence of something psychological (a self), something abstract (a proposition), and something physical (a body); they are not logically cut off from the rest of reality. They affirm more than just their own existence (a la Lichtenberg) but extend outwards into three domains. The Cogito has been underestimated.[2]

[1] I won’t discuss how much of an inroad into skepticism this makes except to say, “Some but not much”.

[2] It has been overestimated in its original incarnation, as a proof of the existence of the self as commonsensically conceived; but it has been underestimated as a device for proving other existential propositions from apparently minimal resources. There is more in “I think” than meets the eye.