This post deals with a fine detail about truth, which I feel has significant implications for the theory of values that I am assembling here. Some may find it massively redundant.
Preamble
Playing a card game with some friends the other say, I brought up the example of the Experience Machine thought experiment. It was well received, and the votes added up thus: 2 would absolutely not plug into the machine under any circumstances (including myself), 2 were unsure, and 1 would definitely do it. The interesting thing about one of the two that were unsure was that she would given specific conditioner about incorporating real people into the scenario with you. We have termed this "multiplayer." It seems that asking people what minimum conditions would have to be met in order to plug in is actually a fascinating way to explore what a person values.
This lead me to question why I value truth so strongly. Is it reasonable? My intro to philosophy textbook states that "the philosopher's faith is that Truth is good and worth pursuing for its own sake." That's one heck of an assumption. It is, of course, a useful assumption if you're a philosopher, because without it, what are you doing? But that is little solace, because a priest assumes the existence of god to justify their lines of thought too.
In my various searches for a basis for values, I have actually had to overturn most of what I based by identity on. I'm dismantling, but hoping for reconstitution through rigorous application of - and deduction from - the most certain axioms: the a priori. Kant tried the very same thing, but I don't think that he dug nearly deep enough, and I find many of his axioms to be unsatisfying. Nietzsche refuted (many times) many of Kant's assumptions. The existentialists tried to find a solution, but ultimately deferred the question. They all also toss around this concept of "truth" as if it were an assumption as mentioned above.
I can't seem to find anything online written on the ontology of truth. There is quite a lot on theories of truth (which do touch on my question), but I'm looking at it from a more fundamental level. What is the ontology of truth, and to what degree should we pursue it? Is it worth sacrificing happiness as in not entering the Experience Machine?
Definition Derivation
It is reasonable to say that existence must true. But which is prior? Truth must exist, and existence (material or ideal) must be true. But that is contradictory, as something cannot precede its' own ground.
The negative of existence is nothingness. Both are true. However there cannot be an untruth in an objective reality (material or ideal). Untruth does not correspond to either existence or nothingness, as both are true, and the objective world is thus always true. Untruths can only be expressed through language as lies, and are thus only part of the mind and language. Art does not constitute untruth because a work of art is a true thing in itself, even if it "uses lies to be the truth." And even lies have an element of truth to them, as it is true that they do not express the truth.Truth is inescapable. So where is it? We can only look at it through other things, never directly. It's always in the corner of your eye, but you can't see it directly. Truth seems to function linguistically as a way of asserting that something exists or not. It is a function of the mind to compare our understanding (an idea image) to the external reality (original image).
It is a function in the mathematical sense f(x), where we compare x to the array of reality (existence and nothingness), and return a true if x is a subset of the array, and return false if it does not. I suppose it would return a partial truth if some of the elements of x correspond to the reality array. I will call this truth-as-operation or the Truth Function. It also falls under the correspondence theory of truth.
Truth-as-Operation
f(x): iff image(x) ⊆ [[being] ∪ [nothingness]] = true;
The Truth Function is deeply troubling to me as opposed to truth as a fundamental ontological category. Truth does not exist independently, it is merely a property of ideas. If truth were a fundamental ontological category, it could be used as a part of the basis of an a priori value theory. It cannot be used as a justification of valuing reality, because it relies on a valuing of the reality-image. It is yet another evaluative tool that requires a ground. To value truth requires valuing reality for its' own sake, unless supported by some other morality hereto unknown to me. To say that you value reality because it is true is a tautology, or even possibly absurd. You're really saying "I value what is real because I have this way of comparing my ideas to it." It's like saying that you like the Mona Lisa because you can buy a print and compare it to the original in the Louvre.That's not to say that this operation isn't extremely useful. The usefulness of our senses - and in fact our very survival - is dependant on the Truth Function (or so we are led to believe). This is debatable on skeptical grounds, but that is a conversation that I do not have space for here.
It's quite amazing how many terms are truth-as-operations. Words such as "because," "therefore" or anything else dealing with justification including causality are all the Truth Function. All of rationalism relies on it. What is our justification for justifying something? Remarkably, we can actually ask this question because truth is not an ontological category, but a function, and can chain: f(f(x)) AKA (f o f)(x).
The expression f(f) of course does not return anything as the function does not exist independently of of an analytical subject, so truth-in-itself does not exist, which is counterintuitive to our way of thinking. We cannot justify justification unless applied to a subject.
Functionally this requires some adjustment in language and thought. To say that "it is true that I think therefore I am" is a tautology because a self-evident statement is an expression of direct reality, and contains collapsed truth in its' self-evidency. Evidence is truth-as-operation, so the requirement is already met within the statement itself. Things that we know with certainty (a priori) do not need to be run through the Truth Function for this reason.
Rationality Bias
This entire endeavour of trying to find justification for values assumes that one should find values that are rational. Schrödinger Imperative demands that we resolve this crisis, so that is not called into question. But need it being found on a rational basis? Why do I value certainty in values? How do you justify rationality over irrationality? The Truth Function is a tool that I can use here, but should I? How do I evaluate if a Truth Function is worth using? I may need to accept it for reasons of coherence.
Outline:
- "Truth" is an evaluative tool
- Compares an idea to reality
- Truth is a property of ideas
- Is not a fundamental ontological category
- Being and nothingness are independent of truth
- Truth is dependant on ideas and existence and nothingness as it is a function
- Truth is not a candidate for a ground for values
- One can only value reality, not truth
- Self-evident statements contain truth already
I wrote my extended comments on your previous post before noticing (and reading) this one.
ReplyDeleteI can see that I've fallen directly into this trap of assumption. My essay assumed the existence of information about being—which is tautologically true in the physical definition of "information," roughly the converse of entropy, but which is quite problematic in the epistemological sense in which I used the word.
Put more simply, we cannot value information about the universe unless we have some reason to believe that we are capable of accurately modelling the universe. Or put more formally, "What Expede said." I think perhaps my meaning becomes clearer if I depart from the Aristotelian concept that propositions may and must be either true or false, p(A)∈{0,1}, and admit instead the Bayesian concept that propositions possess a probability—dependent on the evidence and background information available to us, but screened by that evidence from the real world—which ranges strictly between 0<p(A)<1.
I currently have the background information that within an Experience Machine, all of my data would be independent of reality, so that p(A|DI)=p(A|I) ∀ D. This doesn't precisely help my ability to evaluate p(A). However, I also have the background information that I would lose this background information on entering the machine, which means that I would believe that p(A|DI)≠p(A|I) in general. And this would lead my estimates of p(A) actively to diverge.
I would dispute your claim that our a prioris are exempt from a Truth Function. I would say, rather, that the Truth Function derives everything else it knows from those same a priori propositions: and so it will return the value 1 from them: p(I|I)≡1.
I would very strongly advise you to read E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, as his equations start very close to what you're describing here, and proceed over several hundred pages to derive an extraordinarily robust mathematical theory of what perception can possibly tell us about objective reality.
(You might also be interested, on an unrelated basis, in his book The Physical Basis of Music.)