Response for Benjamin Cain on Truth Units
Here is an abridged version of the questions you raised. Hopefully, this version is relatively true to the issues you raise in your original response to Truth Units:
I’m not sure about the motivation for a new theory of truth, for one that’s supposed to reckon with late-modern complexities.
I’m not clear on how your account is supposed to relate to empiricism and positivism. What’s the difference between “truth units” and sense data?
Your account also seems pragmatic, so is there a difference between truth units and utility?
If epistemology is supposed to make sense of experience, and we have different experiences… is the concept of truth still needed in such a pragmatic, subjective account? If we’re talking about the contents of personal experience, aren’t we doing phenomenology rather than even epistemology?
You say individuals can have the same experience… but… qualia would separate them.
The question of truth is how the models relate to the environment. Experience would be the brain’s model, and philosophy and science deal with more abstract models that can be assessed, independent of our personal experience.
Executive summary?
The short answer is late-modern complexities, empiricism, positivism, sense-data, utility, epistemology, pragmatism, phenomenology, quali, and more abstract models that can be assessed, independent of our personal experience — these are all different models, different ways of “cognizing” human thought and activity. All of these models are arrived at through truth units.
Specifically, the “cognition” each model represents can be mapped out (in concept) in truth units. A truth unit can be seen as an experience, and the conclusion that came out of the experience. As conclusions generate more thought (which are also considered “experience” in truth units) the thought (as an experience) leads to more truth units. So the model and the thinking behind it can all be expressed in truth units.
The different models are different “carbon rings.” Truth units are “carbons.” (Although of course truth units are a model too.)
I’ve read a lot of philosophy and other stuff (my reading). I might not fully understand what I read. Nonetheless, I think a lot of philosophy since 1950 has been negative, in that it documents problems without proposing solutions. My question is “OK, what are the solutions? What do we do now?” Truth Units is a synthesis of possible solutions. It’s a clumsy synthesis, possibly over-reductionist. I hope to clean it up and improve it. I advance it because I see my ideas as the other shoe dropping on philosophy since 1950. If those philosophers were gathered in a room to hash things out and come up with a solution, I think they would end up agreeing to something like truth units.
Years ago, I thought about Truth Units as a short book or a long essay, which has been beyond my capability to date. So I’m taking cracks at it on Medium, building things based on the questions and critiques I get. Yours has been the most thorough and diligent I’ve yet received.
Thank you very much for sharing whatever thoughts this response sparks for you!
Historical background
Skepticism has been a more or less central focus in western philosophy since Descartes. Many philosophers have argued against skepticism, both directly and indirectly.
One indirect argument is introducing a deus ex machina. Descartes and Berkeley brought in God. Kant brought in noumena. Idealism substitutes the ideal world for the real world, without refuting skepticism.
Moore refuted skepticism directly, famously holding up his hand in one of his lectures, saying “here is a hand.” Moore set the direction of analytical philosophy by declaring doubt in the real world out of bounds. Since then, analytic philosophers have worked on how we understand the real world (notably through language).
But Moore did not actually refute skepticism, he just took it off the table. As analytic philosophers pursued our understanding of the real world, they came to the precipice of skepticism and stopped.
Wittgenstein brought in language games. Quine brought in conceptual schemes. Dummett brought in anti-realism. They weren’t skeptics per se, but they denied that we could abandon language and perceive the real world. A reader can be forgiven for responding “so, skepticism.”
Are postmodernists skeptics? They deconstructed the real world. “So, yes, skepticism.” Interpretations were still left, but like the late analytics’ conceptual schemes, there was nothing we could call the real world on the other side.
Skepticism has never really been refuted. Even the Skeptics of ancient Greece weren’t purists. They effectively said “pure skepticism is untenable, so agree with people as needed to get along.”
I remember a character named Phaedrus in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Phaedrus decided to be a pure skeptic and deny the real world. He sat in his room and didn’t respond to anything, including his own thoughts and feelings. Presumably he breathed, because that would be automatic. But he didn’t eat or drink, go to the restroom or go outside. I forget what happened to him, but I remember it didn’t end well.
What does it all mean?
Today, we are skeptics, but not as much as Phaedrus — we still try to live life. The real world is real to us in a conditional sense. We believe no more than we have to. After that, everything is just empty opinion. As a result, the real world is a real mess.
Given this, the challenge to us is how to be skeptics living successfully in the real world. Since we believe in skepticism and we believe in the real world, the crux is where to draw the line between the two. Skepticism needs to be balanced with practicality. We can’t completely negate the objective or the subjective.
So this leads to the question “what is true and what is not?” Strictly speaking, nothing is true, but we need to accept some things are true, including:
· Consciousness
· Its contents
· Your agency
· Surviving
· Thriving
· Other minds
· Social contract
The first three are necessary to survive and thrive on our own, in the wilderness — unless you prefer to go the Phaedrus route, which everyone is welcome to do. You have to add the last two if you want to live with other people and survive and thrive.
I’m not saying the above is true true. I’m saying if we want to live in society, we have to assume the above is true. There’s the classic philosophical question “how to live?” I don’t see how we live in society otherwise. So that’s my opinion, and I choose to act on it. I’m not negating your choice, whatever it is. If you choose otherwise, it’s likely you will disagree with most of what I say, and I will respect your disagreement.
You can choose Phaedrus or anything else. It’s just that my thoughts about truth rest on the above assumptions. If you don’t share those assumptions, I can’t envision a dialog. If you share those assumptions and still question or disagree with my thoughts, I hope you share your questions or disagreements. If you disagree, I hope you refute me. The skeptic in me wants to be proven wrong — kind of a masochistic thing.
Truth in a skeptical world
I mentioned above the dividing line between skepticism and the real world. Let’s say skepticism and the real world are like the North Pole and the South Pole — latitude 90 degrees (there is not latitude higher), longitude zero degrees.
In truth units theory, truth occupies every latitude and longitude between the poles. Because English defines truth as fact, the real world, etc, I’ll call points of latitude and longitude (other than the poles) “beliefs” but refer to every belief as a “truth unit.” The real world and skepticism’s no world, while both true, are best understood as the limits of truth. This is like the framework Wittgenstein uses in the Tractatus, when he talks about contradiction versus tautology. More broadly he talks about the world (1.0) versus what we cannot talk about (7.0). He says “the world is all that is the case.” What is “the case” he says are all the “facts.”
In truth units theory, “the world is all the truth units.” We don’t know what “the case” is, so we substitute truth units (what is believed) for the facts — both are “atomic.” So all truth units define “the case” — the real world.
Wittgenstein says true propositions picture facts. Truth units are all possible propositions. However, in truth units theory, a proposition needs a latitude and longitude. A latitude and longitude means it refers to a point in the contents of consciousness. (The concept of pi is a point in consciousness, but the numerical value of pi isn’t.) (More on points in the contents of consciousness later.)
Where do truth units fit in?
So truth units respect the truth of skepticism. But do they respect the real world?
Yes, they do, if you accept the first three assumptions of consciousness, contents and agency. Truth units theory unites these three assumptions as experience. Quoting Wikipedia, John Locke said “the mind at birth [is] a blank slate… filled later through experience.” In truth units, experience includes everything in consciousness, including feelings, memory, imagination, and “sense-data.” (The unconscious has a role in truth units, but is not part of experience.)
(The ontology of sense-data was discredited by late analytic philosophers, notably by Wilfrid Sellars. In truth units theory, sense-data is an unidentifiable part of experience.)
(Also, John Locke was wrong about the tabula rasa of the mind. The human mind is born with some “pre-programming” as detailed by Kant and Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought (2007).
Again given the first three assumptions of consciousness, contents and agency, experience is real. Experience is “the case” — the real world. So in this way, truth units respect the real world. (Hence “truth units” rather than “belief units.”)
Where does reality fit into truth units?
Reality is what truth units come from. Deleuze talks about the fragmentation of reality. Our minds see correspondences in the endless fragments, positive and negative, in these correspondences. These correspondences are expressed as truth units.
Reality is there — you might say we perceive it — but it is translated en route to our consciousness. The translation is via a progressive chain of truth units. (I just realized this is a definite nod to Kant’s noumena.) In the Truth Units follow-up piece A simple picture of unfathomable reality, this is illustrated in a figure comparing English text to Chinese text. You can’t not read the English for the same reason you can’t read the Chinese. The English is “phenomena” and the Chinese “noumena” in your eyes in this thought experiment.
Everyone’s body of beliefs about the world (including believing the world exists) can be expressed in truth units. Think of each point of latitude/longitude as a truth unit somewhere between the pole of “no facts” and the pole of “no opinions.”
“No facts” means “total doubt” which means “Phaedrus” which means “pure skepticism.”
“No opinions” means “all facts” which means “reality” which means “the real world.”
A tortured line between fact and opinion
We know we need to balance fact and opinion in our own minds. We know that to get along with other people, we need to balance the other’s balance of fact and opinion with our balance of fact and opinion.
As detailed in Truth Units, a truth unit comprises a claim, a test to verify that claim, performing the test, looking at the results, and a verdict finding for or against the claim.
Each truth unit reflects a process our minds go through every time we consider calling a belief “true” although we might not be conscious of this process, or we might not document it. And truth units reflect the scientific method, where scientists are conscious of the process and document it. Society has not matched the progress science has made.
(These points are detailed in Truth Units vs. Relativism and will be further detailed in subsequent follow-up pieces.)
People make progress when they balance others’ balance of fact and opinion with their own balance of fact and opinion. Achieving this balance is difficult when someone else’s experience (and the truth unit structures they have built from their experience) is different from your own. Achieving this balance is easier when the truth units are laid out on the table and examined. If there is no agreement, at least there might be some understanding, and so mitigate frustration, anger and hate.
Thank you for reading. Please comment! Your questions and critiques are appreciated.
Learn more about truth units:
