MY SEARCH FOR TRUTH

My parents had little education.  After years of truancy my father left school on his 14th birthday and looked for a job.  Employers asked him for a reference from school so he went back to his headmaster and asked for one.  The headmaster said: “Go back and hold up your hands and say: ‘These are my references.’ ”

As a young man he went to Canada and I think it must have been there that he learnt to be a fur cutter.  He later returned to England and set up in business as a furrier.  Across the street from his workroom was a third-rate auction sale room.  There he was able to buy very cheaply what became my most treasured childhood possessions, including a very large Meccano set, a large Chemistry set, a good microscope, old sets of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedias and Newnes’ Pictorial Knowledge and an ancient set of Encyclopedia Britannicas.

The Childrens Encyclopedia was a great source of information and enjoyment and when I began to ask philosophical questions I turned to it.  I suspect that the philosophical chapters were written by the compiler himself, Arthur Mee.  And I now know that he was a journalist with strong Baptist convictions and a passion for imparting Victorian Christian values to children.   I was certainly put off by the high moral tone of what I read and the constant exhortation to live up to Victorian ideals.  But only later did I become confident enough to realise what an unreliable guide these chapters were.  They created confusions in my mind that took years to dispel.

The chapter on Truth set out traditional ideas.  It began with a poem that depicts Truth as something eternal and unchangeable and independent of humanity.  It asserted that we constantly seek truth but we can never find it, that seeking Truth is the greatest good and brings the greatest happiness.  That went down well with me.  I was blessed with a voracious and omnivorous curiosity, and studying was certainly my most enjoyable occupation.

At school my subjects included Maths and Physics but I found them fairly incomprehensible until after some years I was lucky enough to encounter a teacher who explained them in a way I could understand, and then I found them more fascinating and satisfying than anything else I’d studied so far.  I learnt that clear definitions were the essential foundations of both.  But in Physics I was taught that mass, length and time were the fundamental concepts on which Physics was based and that they could not be defined.  This greatly troubled me but I just had to accept it in order to study the subject.  And later when I started to puzzle about Truth I concluded that it must also be a fundamental concept which couldn’t be defined.  And indeed, that belief has been maintained by some philosophers.

In school English, I encountered Francis Bacon, who became one of my favourite authors.  He opens his essay on Truth:

“What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.” 

Bacon was suggesting that it’s difficult or impossible to know the essential nature of truth, but his essay didn’t go on to try to deal with the problem.  It continued to bother me.

Another thing stuck in my mind.  Keats ended his great “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with the lines:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

I knew it was a great poem and I knew the closing couplet was often quoted, but I wondered what on earth it meant.  I puzzled over it for years but could never understand it.

The search for truth has been the traditional concern of philosophers.  And they have always asked: “What is the essential nature of truth?”  Many great writers have written confused and confusing things about it.  They’ve said that it’s a mystery we can never understand, and they write as if it’s something that in some vague and mysterious way has an existence and even power of its own.  Ghandi said that Truth is God and God is Truth.

Every question can be thought of as a search for truth, and there are some extremely perplexing questions which many think are profoundly significant and for which no satisfactory answers are ever found, e.g.:

What is the nature of God?  What is the meaning of life?  Why are we here?  What is the nature of Good and Evil?  Why do bad things happen to good people?

Those who remain deeply concerned about these questions usually conclude that they can never be answered:

 “Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and saint, and heard great argument

 About it and about: but evermore

Came out by the same door as in I went.”

These difficulties incline many of them to religious or mystical convictions that the answers they are seeking constitute a profound truth that they can never apprehend.  I became one of the many people who believe that the reason why no satisfactory answers to these questions can be found is that they are spurious questions based on deep misconceptions.  So these writers no longer make me feel confused about the nature of truth.

I still have the opening page of my first attempt at an essay on Truth, written in my best handwriting with a fountain pen 75 years ago.  The paper is now yellowing and crumbling, and it’s many years since I was able to write as legibly as that.  And since then my ideas have changed even more than my handwriting.  It now seems to me that my problems about the essential nature of truth were simply the result of muddled thinking.

As children we learn that when we tell about what actually happened, then what we said is called “true”, but if we distort the story to get out of trouble then that is called “lies”. 

As we grow up, our understanding of the truth of certain statements is generalised into an idea of “Truth” with a capital T, a concept of the sum of all true statements.  We hear and read about “the truth”.   The question: “Is that true?” may be asked in the form: “Is that the truth?”  We develop an idea of truth as an [abstract] thing.   But it’s not a thing -- just a property of certain statements. 

It seems to me that this muddled concept of truth as a thing was the principal source of my confusion.  If you have an idea of truth as an abstract thing which is somehow fundamental,  absolute,  objective, inherent in the nature of things, then it seems to be indefinable; you feel  you can’t describe it; you can’t specify its essential nature.

I think I may also been misled by a confused idea that truth is always clearly distinguishable from falsehood.  The witness oath reads: “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”.  We read about “the plain unvarnished truth”.  But in the real world things are often not as simple as that.  Truth is not always  a sharply defined quality.

For example – The law treats children and adults differently.  But is this particular person a child or an adult?  How should the court deal with John if he is an extremely mature teenager, or a man in his twenties with severe intellectual disabilities?  Mary is absent from work.  Is she sick?  She may be convalescing and still unable to do her job. She may be able to work but only able to perform light duties.

Another source of my confusion about truth was my similar difficulties with the notions of Right and Wrong and Justice.  When I was young I thought - as perhaps most people do - that they too were somehow absolute, objective things.

In my essay on “Morality for Sceptics” I explain why I’m now one of those who believe they are instead nothing more than a product of our culture, our ideas and our attitudes; that they are sets of values and rules evolved to promote the welfare of society and to serve the needs of those who wield power.

This view makes it easier to see that ethical statements like “You ought to tell the truth” and “You ought to keep your promises” are clearly of a very different kind to statements about what exists or occurs. So the question of whether they are true or false seems completely inappropriate.

In a similar way I came to understand that Beauty is also not an abstract thing in itself, or a natural property of things in the world, but essentially about a relationship between a person and something arousing the person’s senses and emotions.  It is a variable quality subject to cultural determinants, fashion, personal taste.  Aesthetic statements like “That’s a beautiful sunset” or “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a beautiful composition” are of a very different kind to statements about facts like “Augustus was a Roman emperor”.  Again, it doesn’t make sense to ask whether they are true or false.

When I understood that Right and Wrong and Justice and Beauty were not abstract things with an objective independent existence, it became much more natural for me to think of truth in the same way.

 “Truth” is only a word, a symbol for an idea.  It’s simply not true that we can never fully know and specify the meaning of that word.  We all use the word often, and we know exactly what it means.  It’s just how we describe statements that correspond to what exists or occurs, or to what existed or occurred in the past; these statements are said to be "true".  They contrast with statements about things or events that don't so correspond, "lies" or "errors" or “fictions” - which are said to be "not true". 

When we’re children, telling the truth is usually talked about in situations concerning recent good and bad behavior. We’re taught that telling the truth is good and telling lies is naughty.  So we come to associate the idea of truth with moral virtue.  This confuses the virtue of telling the truth with the moral neutrality of the truth itself.  Truth is just a collection of facts and there’s nothing morally good about facts - consider statements like “The earth is spherical”, or “There’s a tree in the garden”.   And because truth is morally neutral, seeking for truth is not in itself a virtuous activity.

It’s often very difficult to discover exactly what the facts are about the world and what happened in the past.  Sometimes it’s impossible.  Enormous effort and resources go into scientific and historical research.  Law courts and government enquiries go to great lengths to establish the facts.  There is so much we don’t know.  And it’s impossible to imagine a future time when research has discovered everything there is to know about the world and the universe and their history.  Our concept of “The Truth” corresponds to a concept of this totality of all facts known and unknown.  We can’t imagine ever knowing all these facts, and in this sense we can’t ever know with certainty “the [whole] truth”.

This seems to have a great emotional effect on some writers.  It seems to reinforce their leanings towards mysticism and religion.  Perhaps they feel anxiety about any ignorance and somehow find comfort in the idea that God knows everything.  Personally, I don’t find our incomplete knowledge frightening or mysterious or incomprehensible.  I don’t feel any need to see anything mystical about it and it doesn’t pose any problem for me about understanding the nature of truth.

My Children’s Encyclopedia insisted that “truth must remain relative---that is to say, different in various circumstances”, and [in bold capital letters] that this was “A MOST USEFUL FOUNDATION FOR ALL OUR THINKING”.   And of course the truth of some statements IS conditional or qualified.  Their truth or falsity is related to circumstances, to context, to the [often implicit] definitions of the terms used, to the frame of reference of the speaker or writer, or to that of the reader or hearer.  One of my favourite stories is about a snail who was mugged by a tortoise.  The police arrived and asked the snail if he could give them a description of his attacker.  The shaken snail said: “Well  . . . . . I’m not really sure . . . . it all happened so quickly.” 

The Eiffel Tower is stationary.  But the earth is moving in its orbit around the sun at an average speed of about 108,000 kilometres per hour.  If you’re walking across the U.S. it’s a long way from New York to San Francisco.  But it’s not far compared to the 150,000,000 kilometres between the earth and the sun.  Water boils at a temperature of 100 degrees Celsius.  But the boiling point is higher if it has salt dissolved in it and it’s lower on the top of a mountain.  Queen Victoria is dead, but this statement was false in 1900.

So the truth or falsity of SOME statements IS relative.  But not the truth of ALL statements.  All men must die.  Adolf Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945.  The Earth moves in an elliptical orbit around the Sun. Sciences like astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, meteorology and engineering have established facts whose truth is not relative.

Why does the fact that the truth of some statements is relative, give rise to confusion about the nature of truth?  I just don’t know.  I don’t find it confusing; the confusion seems to me unnecessary.

In the 20th century, theorists of literary criticism began to stress as never before the importance of an awareness of cultural relativity.  They began to emphasize that literature should be analyzed and reviewed in terms of the historical and social context of the writer.  They then pushed this attitude to extremes.  They now assert that there is no objective reality whose existence and properties are independent of human beings—of their minds, their societies, their social practices, or their methods of investigation.  They do not accept that the descriptive and explanatory statements of scientists and historians [and laymen] can, in principle, be objectively true or false. This is sometimes expressed by saying that there is no such thing as truth.  They do not accept that the opinion of an expert is more valid and reliable than the opinion of the non-expert.

These claims seem unreasonable to me.  It seems that we can only make sense of our experiences on the basis of a belief in objective reality. Putting it the other way round, we couldn’t make sense of our experiences if we really believed that there was no such underlying reality. Certain other considerations also seem especially relevant: the way our experience, and our model of reality based on it, enables us to satisfy our needs by providing information about a real world around us; the way we can see that our senses evolved for that purpose; the way other people talk and write in ways consistent with our own experience.  This belief in an objective reality underlies how we live, how we deal with the world and other people.

And the assertion that anyone’s opinion on any subject is as valid as that of experts who have spent their lives studying and investigating that subject  is to me just plainly absurd.   It’s like saying that any toddler can run as fast as an Olympic athlete.

This 20th century turn in academic literary criticism is not merely fashionable and harmless theorizing without any adverse consequences in the real world.  Its assertions appeal to and are adopted by people like creationists, vaccination refuseniks and climate change deniers.  In their hands these assertions cause real harm to public education, health, and future well-being.   In the social media on the internet their pronouncements have encouraged the dissemination and acceptance of the false and dangerous ideas of ignorant, self-interested and malicious people.

To sum up, there’s nothing confusing or mysterious about the concept of truth.  When a statement corresponds to what exists or occurs, or to what existed or occurred in the past, the statement is said to be "true".  But because of the way some imaginative writers have used the ordinary little word “truth”, we may sometimes be tempted to think that it’s somehow different from other words, somehow privileged (especially when it's spelt with a capital T), but it isn't.  There's just no need to surround it with mystery or with moral or religious or spiritual meaning.  Like all other words, it's nothing more than a convenient label for a useful bundle of mental associations.

©  Barry Simons 2022