The Social Construction of Truth

Let us consider the objection again. Can I give a concrete example showing that the mathematical concept of the proposition is inadequate to model the world of daily human experience? It seems to me that religion, ethics, and perhaps literature or art are areas of the human world which might yield such examples. Yes, perhaps, consider a work of literature.

Is it not customary to speak of the "truth" of a novel even if that novel is fiction? Perhaps we do not use the word 'truth' but we might say the "theme" of the work or "what the author is trying to say." However, all that this means is that the author is trying to "say" something and of course it is customary to say that what one says has "truth" in the sense that it is either true or false. (Please note that now I am talking about word use, and I am not talking about the truth or falsehood of the proposition that proposition theory posits. I am discussing the use of the word 'truth' as it is used in the context of discussing a novel, not in terms of the truth value of a proposition in proposition theory.) Therefore we grand that we speak of the "truth" of a novel provided we agree that the author is "saying" something through the form of the novel.

So what, for example, is Jack Kerouac saying through On the Road? (This is just the most recent novel I have read.) Is he saying anything? Although this sort of question is vague, we presume so. Afterall who would claim that On the Road is nonsense? Perhaps some might do so, saying that it is a pointless story advocating an unhealthy lifestyle of drugs, sex, jazz, and aimlessly wandering across the globe, but of course in saying so they would be contradicting themselves by saying that the book says nothing yet "advocates" something--curious indeed. So we will assume that On the Road "says" something--i.e. something other than what is literally stated in its component words. What this something is, is of course not very simple. Answer the question, what is the theme of On the Road? This question will of course lead to different, perhaps conflicting answers. Whose answer is correct? Perhaps someone will say that the novel says p and another will say that not-p. Who is going to say definitively whether p or not-p is correct? Need there be an answer? In the interpretation of a text might it not be helpful to know that on one hand the text says p but on the other hand says not-p? Perhaps such knowledge leads to even more knowledge about what the text is saying. Note here that if our p's are propositions, we run into trouble since propositions are posited as entities such that p is true iff not-p is false. This indicates that propositions are inadequate to discuss the complexities of what a text is saying and hence the truth of a text.

Of course, in order to make this response to the objection much more valid I would need to perform a much more complex analysis of text interpretation; however, I do not (as yet) have the necessary training for such an analysis. Nevertheless, the example is clear.

Plantinga believes that possible worlds exist. Indeed, I am inclined to agree. They exist in as much as the lines, planes, cubes, primes, sets, ordered pairs, real numbers, and a whole host of other mathematical notions exist for the mathematician: formally--i.e. on paper, and nowhere else. To dispel confusion Plantinga distinguishes between existence and actuality: possible worlds exist because, he says, states of affairs exist and possible worlds are nothing other than states of affairs, but the world in which we live is actual. We are actual, but there are other possible selves which exist in possible worlds. I do not, therefore, merely criticise necessity because I think it absurd to say that propositions and states of affairs exist (or possible worlds). Indeed they do. However, I think that the sorts of existence at issue are different. Propositions exist in a way far different than the way a human being exists, for example, but yet we use propositions to study the world in which humans live, breathe, eat, and generally muddle through existence.

This is my criticism of propositions and states of affairs (and consequently necessity, although this becomes of less significance as the analysis goes forward). The nature of the existence of propositions is so different from the nature of the existence of the world of real people and real issues that it is a fraud (whatever that means) to use such notions to analyze the "real" world in terms of those entities.

Hence my goal is social rather than logical: the world in which we live cannot be adequately characterized by propositions or states of affairs. Indeed, contra the early Wittgenstien, the world is not all that is the case (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). This too is my goal in criticizing the conventional conception of truth as concieved in the West (we will get to this eventually).

I should say to the reader who is wary of my suspicions of propositions and truth that I am not just trying to make trouble--stir up the masses, so to speak. Rather, my ultimate aim is to achieve positive results--i.e. I wish to be edifying and not merely destructive. Speaking metaphorically I want to remove the factory (the mechanical notion of proposition) in order to plant a garden. Whether I will be successful, I do not know. That is for the reader to judge.

At the moment, I am far from reaching my goal: I have only begun to raise some suspicions about propositions. This will be a gradual process, perhaps not even to be completed in the space of this blog but in the real world of everyday life.

Let us continue to consider propositions. These things are spaceless, timeless entities which are either true or false (and never any other value). Yet somehow we humans are able to grasp these entities in order to express them in language. The German who says "Der Schnee ist weiss" grasps the same entity as the Englishman who says "Snow is white." These entities are curious phenomena indeed. It would seem that to believe in them requires as much faith (if not more) as to believe in God (or gods if one prefers). Perhaps an overstatement, but surely some of the same problems arise. For example, how does an entity which exists in a realm "beyond" that of the physical world interact, or "know" about the physical world? In the case of God (or gods), of course, we may say that this is by virtue of the entity having some sort of property of omniscience or omnipresence. However, how are we to solve the issue with propositions, assuming they are not like gods or some such silly thing? How does a proposition, e.g., as the one expressed by "snow is white" know about snow, or whiteness, or the the one who utters it?

Now, it might be possible to modify the conception of proposition to give it more respect and to avoid the above problem. We might consider propositions to be not entities in some timeless, spaceless, ethereal realm, but as being like mathematical objects--i.e. they are merely the construct of a theory. (We have already indicated this idea.) In this case, for example, a proposition is defined (naively) as what is common between "snow is white" and "der Schnee ist weiss." Hence we have the following objection against my claims.

Objection. It works quite well for science (which indeed talks about the real world albeit a small part) to use mathematics to study the world of atoms, electrons, quarks, and all other things, so why is it not proper to use the notion of proposition to study the rest of the world?

Reply. The quick answer is that propositions are not adequate to discuss certain aspects of life crucial to the philosopher or generally anyone genuinely trying to muddle through life, and not just some academic who wants to cronstruct an elegant systematic philosophy or theology in order to live comfortably as a slightly eccentric profesor. These things are inadequate to muddle through life. I have already indicated this reply before.

In particular the category of human experience is one such area of the world untouched by the theory of propositions. Why so? Consider our thought processes. For the most part our actions and beliefs are the results of internal deliberation about our experiences, past and present, not the result of "if p, then q; p, therefore q" or some such pattern of logic. This may occur but by and large it does not in our every day deliberation.

Objection. Upon reflection, however, it may be possible to put our experience into the pattern of modus ponens or reductio ad absurdum or some other logical pattern. And in this way we are dealing with the propositional content of our thoughts. Hence, propositions do give us insight into our everyday experiences. For example, a person might be in a room getting ready to go out. The person looks out the window and sees that it is raining and thinks "I should bring my umbrella." Even though this does not contain the use of modus ponens (MP) explicitly, we can, with justification model the person's thought processes thusly. When the person looked out the window, she saw that "It is raining" is a true proposition, and she knows that "If it is raining, then it is good to bring an umbrella." So by MP she concludes that "It is good to bring an umbrella."

Reply. Indeed this is how we are taught to evaluate arguments in an introductory course in philosophy or logic. However, while such a procedure is intuitively correct, it is an artificial process. The person looking out the window does not even think about any logical deduction rule such as MP when deciding to take an umbrella. It must be admitted that this is an artificial process. Of course the effects of using this artificial process are not manifest in the above simple example. The situation is very simple and we are ready to conceede that such an analysis is correct, but consider a more complex case in which a person suddenly says to himself "I believe in God" or "It is wrong for me to waste money on myself as I do." These cases surely might be analyzed in a similar fashion to the story about the umbrella, but here I think that there are virtually unlimited number of analyses and I would be hard pressed to decide which one is correct. In this case, propositions (and all their associated logic) give us no help in deciding whether or not the persons "conclusion" is "correct."

I am still unsatisfied with my responses to these objections. I shall consider it again, in my next entry, I'm tired of typing.

I suppose I ought to begin to tell this story about truth I've been talking about. I can only hope that it will end up somewhere with positive results. I do not want to be merely a negative party pooper or something like that.

In the first entry of this thing I indicated that the story begins with my study of modal logic. So this is where we shall begin. I do not want to give too much detail about the actual systems of modal logic I studied because that would be tedious and probably pointless. However, I do need to explain some of the more philosophical aspects about a particular type of modality--the alethic modalities of possibility and necessity. In particular I will speak about necessity, for this is the heart of the matter.

So we say "necessarily, p" when it is the case that 'p' must be true. Philosophers like Alvin Plantinga are ready with the example of mathematical statements such as "seven is prime" wich are just such "propositions," they say, that are not capable of being false "in any possible world." Hence we say that "necessarily, seven is prime" is true. Another case is "all bachelors are unmarried men." They say that it is the case that "necessarily, all bachelors are unmarried men" because the "proposition expressed" by "all bachelors are unmarried men" must be true, or its denial "some bachelors are not unmarried men" is "self-contradictory"--whatever that means.

If you ask why "all bachelors are unmarried men" must be true, Plantinga will respond by saying that it is due to the meanings of the terms "bachelor" and "unmarried man." The set of bachelors is contained in the set of unmarried men, and to say otherwise implies a special meaning of one of those terms (See Plantinga's Nature of Necessity for all of this.)

If you say that the contingency of the meanings of the words "bachelor," "unmarried," and "man" make the proposition contingent (because these words mean what they do by mere human convention) Plantinga will reply that you are confusing the sentence with the proposition. The state of affairs that S expresses p is contingent has nothing to do with the contingency or necessity of p. It is true that it is not necessary that S expresses p, but this does not mean that p is not necessary.

This brings us to the heart of my criticism of the notion of "necessity" as Plantinga discusses it. The notion of necessity relies on an entity called the proposition. Strictly speaking, sentences are never necessary because their meanings are contingent (by convention), but the propositions they express exist in some ethereal realm separate from space and time, and they are the bearers of being necessary or contingent.

In order to make sense of a proposition being true necessarily, Plantinga revives the Leibnizian notion of possible worlds. He makes the notion respectable to 20th century philosophy by defining in precise terms what a "possible" world is. He begins with the notion of a state of affairs. For example, "being in love", "being white", "being an American in the year 2004 in the town of Hillsboro, Kansas" to name a few. Roughly, a state of affairs is of the form "being P" where P is some property.

We require a couple more notions prior to defining a possible world: inclusion and preclusion. A state of affairs S₁ includes a state of affairs S₂ iff (if and only if) it is the case that if S₁ obtains, then S₂ obtains as well. A state of affairs S₁ precludes a state of affairs S₂ iff it is the case that if S₁ obtains then S₂ does not obtain. For example, "being an American in the year 2004 in the town of Hillsboro, Kansas" includes "being in Hillsboro, Kansas" but precludes "being in Budapest, Hungary."

Now we are ready for the grand definition. A possible world w is a state of affairs such that for every state of affairs S, exactly one of the following holds: (1) w includes S or (2) w precludes S. In short, a possible world is a maximal state of affairs.

Now we must say that p is necessary iff it is the case that p is true in every possible world. (Note: p is true in a world w iff w includes the state of affairs that is logically equivalent to p.)

This is all very elegant of course, but it does no help for the overall validity of the notion of necessity because it once again posits an entity: the state of affairs, which is not much different--metaphysically--than the proposition.

So far I have only explained some of the background of our subject, and I haven't even really began to touch the heart of the matters about truth in general. At the present my criticism is that propositions are entities which are purely metaphysical at best. They are mathematical creations, and I think that their explanatory power is severely limited in the face of the "real" world. They work very nicely for a mathematical description of the world but they do very little to help in addressing real issues of philosophy--e.g. the meaning of human existence. The story shall continue.

In thinking about how I will execute the task I have set before myself (i.e. that of exploring the notion of truth) there are some questions which are essential for me to answer at some point. These are:

(Q1) What is the conventional conception of truth?
(Q2) What is wrong with that conception?
(Q3) What is right about that conception?
(Q4) What "better" conception of truth am I offering?
(Q5) How is it possible to reconcile a socially bound notion of truth with belief in some sort of absolute being (e.g. God) which is thought to have established certain immutable truths (e.g. those of 'right' and 'wrong')? Is it possible?
(Q6) Are there (as a consequence of Q5) multiple equally valid conceptions of truth? If so, how is this possible?

Surely there are many more questions, but these seem (right now) to be the most important ones for me to consider.