What is truth?

[Immanuel Can]

There are debatably different definitions of what it means to "know" something. What definition of "knowing" should I use?

Your own. Tell me how YOU go about the business of locating whatever it is YOU regard as "truth." Just that.

Give me an example of something you think I know, and I'll try to tell you how I go about measuring its truth.

"What I think" has nothing to do with how YOU go about locating truth. I don't know what you think you know; you'll have to tell me, and tell me how you decided you know it's true.

But okay: you seem to say you know something about New York City...may I take that for granted?

The statement, "New York City is in New York State." Is it true? How do you know?

[thomyum2]

I know I'm interjecting and maybe interrupting a good dialogue here but thought I'd offer an alternative way to think of this dichotomy.

Please do. Welcome.

Thank you, it's good to be here (and to be welcomed!)

Whether a statement is true or not, or how or whether we can determine the truth of a statement, is an entirely different question from whether a statement is objective or subjective.

Consider that the two are inextricably linked.

To say something is "true," when speaking to somebody else, is to say they ought to believe it, because it conforms to the way things are in the real world. So truth can never be a merely subjective matter: if only some person or persons believe it, and the external world fails to conform to that belief, then that belief is simply not true...just as the LSD taker's subjective belief is not true.

Someone has sagely said, "Reality is the thing that pushes back against our subjective perceptions." That's not bad. It's pretty much also a definition of the truth.

But consider that both subjective and objective statements can be true or false. For example, "my foot hurts" or "I like NY" is subjective, but I can be telling the honest truth or lying about my real feelings. There's is no 'external world' or any 'objective', publicly available, criteria that anyone can access in my pain or in my liking of NY that needs to conform - these are purely private. Or is there? Are the facts about my own thoughts and sensations a part of the 'external world' in regard to the truth of the statements I make about them?

Very interesting topic, it's bringing out some new insights I hadn't considered before.

[Gary Childress]

The statement, "New York City is in New York State." Is it true? How do you know?

Yes. It is true. I know because that's where New York City is. Am I right? Do you agree or disagree with me?

[Immanuel Can]

But consider that both subjective and objective statements can be true or false. For example, "my foot hurts" or "I like NY" is subjective, but I can be telling the honest truth or lying about my real feelings.

We have to make a very careful distinction here.

"I like NY" is a factual statement: it can be true or false. You can be being honest, or you can be lying. And it's true if, and only if, it is objectively the case that you do like NY. That is, it is only confirmable by conformity with the facts of reality.

"But NY is nice" is not a factual statement, but an aesthetic judgment; it's subjective, and cannot be true or false.

Or is there? Are the facts about my own thoughts and sensations a part of the 'external world' in regard to the truth of the statements I make about them?

Yes. The feelings you have are subjective; nobody can tell you what you're feeling. Only you know. But that you have the feelings in question is an objective fact, part of the real world, and either true or false.

It is not unusual for people to claim to have a subjective set of feelings they do not, in fact, objectively have; as when a Chad says, "I love you, baby," to hit on a target, but is thinking of her merely as a score. Or they can claim not to have a feeling that they do in fact have, as when somebody being buckled into a roller coaster is asked, "Are you scared," and answers, "No."

Very interesting topic, it's bringing out some new insights I hadn't considered before.

We appreciate you input. We can tell you're thinking carefully, because you revise and reconsider as you develop your position.

[Immanuel Can]

The statement, "New York City is in New York State." Is it true? How do you know?

Yes. It is true. I know because that's where New York City is. Am I right? Do you agree or disagree with me?

Well, how do you know that's where New York City is? How do you know it's true? What did you use, in order to get that confidence?

[Gary Childress]

The statement, "New York City is in New York State." Is it true? How do you know?

Yes. It is true. I know because that's where New York City is. Am I right? Do you agree or disagree with me?

Well, how do you know that's where New York City is? How do you know it's true? What did you use, in order to get that confidence?

I've read and seen a lot about it that confirms it.

[Immanuel Can]

Yes. It is true. I know because that's where New York City is. Am I right? Do you agree or disagree with me?

Well, how do you know that's where New York City is? How do you know it's true? What did you use, in order to get that confidence?

I've read and seen a lot about it that confirms it.

Okay, let's go with that. Let's not even question the quality of the sources or the truth of the claim.

What you're saying is that you knew because you compared the statement to how things are in the external world. New York really is in the region they call New York State. So the statement was true. And it was true in a way such that not only should you believe it, but that I should, too. It was objectively true. That's how truth works.

But subjectivity does not work like that. It has no sources of outside verification, and cannot thus compel any other person to have to agree.

"Vanilla is a better flavour than chocolate." That's subjective. How can it be confirmed? It cannot. And I can justly say, "Chocolate is better than vanilla," and you're no more bound to agree with me than I was with you. There is no truth involved. Reality does not require us to believe one or the other.

[thomyum2]

What you're saying is that you knew because you compared the statement to how things are in the external world. New York really is in the region they call New York State. So the statement was true. And it was true in a way such that not only should you believe it, but that I should, too. It was objectively true. That's how truth works.

But subjectivity does not work like that. It has no sources of outside verification, and cannot thus compel any other person to have to agree.

So, for the sake of discussion and clarification, let's take another example: the belief that the earth is flat or round. If I lived in a rural place a thousand years ago, and I never travel farther than, say from Athens to Sparta, then holding the belief that the world if flat works just fine - reality does not, as your quote said, 'push back' against this belief at all. But if I'm navigating a ship or aircraft going from London to New York, believing that the world is flat is going to be a major liability. And then, of course, we do not know what technological innovations or advances in human understanding will come in the future that may cause us to need to revise our picture of the reality we live in that could make the belief in a flat or round world obsolete.

I think this understanding of our limitations and the awareness of an ever-changing picture of what reality looks like, over the course of history and across cultures, leads some people to make claims about the relativism of truth and say things like 'truth is subjective' (or as I often hear these days - 'intersubjective'). As finite and temporal beings, we never have a complete picture of 'reality', so using the definition of 'conforming to reality' begs the question of which or whose version or narrative of external world we look to for conformation of what is the 'truth'. How do we reconcile the sense of humility that comes with the recognition that our understanding of reality is always incomplete with the commitment to truth as an absolute concept? I have a sense that this leads us toward Kant, but I'd like to hear what you have to say.

[Immanuel Can]

What you're saying is that you knew because you compared the statement to how things are in the external world. New York really is in the region they call New York State. So the statement was true. And it was true in a way such that not only should you believe it, but that I should, too. It was objectively true. That's how truth works.

But subjectivity does not work like that. It has no sources of outside verification, and cannot thus compel any other person to have to agree.

So, for the sake of discussion and clarification, let's take another example: the belief that the earth is flat or round. If I lived in a rural place a thousand years ago, and I never travel farther than, say from Athens to Sparta, then holding the belief that the world if flat works just fine - reality does not, as your quote said, 'push back' against this belief at all.

Actually, it does: but I lack the experience to know it does.

Reality will "push back" in that if I try to sail off the edge, I will not be able to do it. The status of things in the world will not permit it. So my subjective belief is simply "untrue" -- it fails to correspond to reality, and reality does not accommodate it.

That doesn't mean I know that. It just means that that is how it will be.

But if I'm navigating a ship or aircraft going from London to New York, believing that the world is flat is going to be a major liability. And then, of course, we do not know what technological innovations or advances in human understanding will come in the future that may cause us to need to revise our picture of the reality we live in that could make the belief in a flat or round world obsolete.

Right.

Human knowledge is always partial, incomplete, and revisable. Reality is not. Truth remains truth, even when I don't know what the truth is.

I think this understanding of our limitations and the awareness of an ever-changing picture of what reality looks like, over the course of history and across cultures, leads some people to make claims about the relativism of truth and say things like 'truth is subjective' (or as I often hear these days - 'intersubjective').

That's a plausible guess, actually. The fact that we so often find out we were wrong about something, and have to revise our understanding, may lead us to epistemic humilty; to a recognition that however firmly we may believe something, we should always leave a small gap for the possibility of changing our minds.

That being said, not all knowledge is equal. Some things we do know with such confidence that our knowledge is close to 100% sure. Other things, we may find highly likely, but not absolutely certain...say, 90%. Then there are things that are the best estimates on the current data, but still need to be open to instant revision, and may even already show gaps that raise questions...perhaps we're only 80% on those. And then there are things that are more plausible than not, but not so wildly plausible that we venture to insist on them...maybe our certainty stops at 65%. By the time we get to close to 50%, we might not be ready to call what certainty we have "knowing" at all. Maybe it's better to call it "venturing" or "wagering." And below that level of confidence, we'd have to call it outright "risking" or "gambling." Not all knowledge attains the same level of confidence...nor should it all.

So the relevant question is, "With what level of certainty can we say X?"

As finite and temporal beings, we never have a complete picture of 'reality', so using the definition of 'conforming to reality' begs the question of which or whose version or narrative of external world we look to for conformation of what is the 'truth'. How do we reconcile the sense of humility that comes with the recognition that our understanding of reality is always incomplete with the commitment to truth as an absolute concept? I have a sense that this leads us toward Kant, but I'd like to hear what you have to say.

This dovetails nicely with what I was suggesting, I think.

I don't believe in absolute certainty in human knowledge. I think we find that there's always at least a small, however implausible, window of doubt involved in all human knowing.

For example, I believe in gravity. And I feel that my confidence level in it is very high...but never absolute. It is possible, though not likely, that some new theory will suddenly spring from science, and it will revolutionize our whole idea of the dynamics between objects, and perhaps even shatter our picture of the world. It has happened before. Kuhn called such things "paradigm shifts," and they are far from unusual, even in the hard sciences. But what is my confidence in tomorrow's weather? Less. I've read the report, and I feel only 70% conviction they'll get it right, perhaps. Maybe less. And as for my conviction I'll win at blackjack...that's about 40%, on a given hand.

Human knowledge is all probabilistic, not absolute. But reality always wins. That's how things like paradigm shifts happen. Despite the best efforts of the brightest human minds, things can get missed or misunderstood; and reality corrects for that eventually, if we keep looking.

Subjectivity, however, is not correctable. As it does not depend on reality, but merely on feeling or intuition, it can go wildly wrong; and no method exists for correcting it, so long as it is detached from being tested against reality.

[Gary Childress]

So, is pain an objective property or a subjective property if it is the case that more than one human being would feel pain under circumstance X? Let's say I put my hand on a stove burner. I feel excruciating pain. Someone says, no, you don't feel pain, you're faking it. So he puts his hand on the burner, and lo and behold, the person feels pain just like me. Then a person with an artificial arm puts his hand on the burner, and being made of space-age super materials, he feels no pain. But we assume that if the person with the artificial arm had a normal arm, then he would have felt pain. Is it an objective truth that the burner causes pain, or is it a subjective truth?

[Immanuel Can]

So, is pain an objective property or a subjective property if it is the case that more than one human being would feel pain under circumstance X?

Objectivity isn't about feelings. It's about how things really are. If a billion people are deluded, in that they think something unreal is real, or something false is true, or true is false, they're still deluded.

But consider what happens when the subjective is divorced from the objective. Say, I'm a leper or quadriplegic. I've lost sensation in my left arm. I no longer feel pain there. Does that mean that if I lean on a hot stove, my arm won't burn? Subjectively, there's no pain. Objectively, my arm is going up in smoke.

[thomyum2]

So, for the sake of discussion and clarification, let's take another example: the belief that the earth is flat or round. If I lived in a rural place a thousand years ago, and I never travel farther than, say from Athens to Sparta, then holding the belief that the world if flat works just fine - reality does not, as your quote said, 'push back' against this belief at all.

Actually, it does: but I lack the experience to know it does.

Reality will "push back" in that if I try to sail off the edge, I will not be able to do it. The status of things in the world will not permit it. So my subjective belief is simply "untrue" -- it fails to correspond to reality, and reality does not accommodate it.

That doesn't mean I know that. It just means that that is how it will be.

But if I'm navigating a ship or aircraft going from London to New York, believing that the world is flat is going to be a major liability. And then, of course, we do not know what technological innovations or advances in human understanding will come in the future that may cause us to need to revise our picture of the reality we live in that could make the belief in a flat or round world obsolete.

Right.

Human knowledge is always partial, incomplete, and revisable. Reality is not. Truth remains truth, even when I don't know what the truth is.

I think this understanding of our limitations and the awareness of an ever-changing picture of what reality looks like, over the course of history and across cultures, leads some people to make claims about the relativism of truth and say things like 'truth is subjective' (or as I often hear these days - 'intersubjective').

That's a plausible guess, actually. The fact that we so often find out we were wrong about something, and have to revise our understanding, may lead us to epistemic humilty; to a recognition that however firmly we may believe something, we should always leave a small gap for the possibility of changing our minds.
...
So the relevant question is, "With what level of certainty can we say X?"

As finite and temporal beings, we never have a complete picture of 'reality', so using the definition of 'conforming to reality' begs the question of which or whose version or narrative of external world we look to for conformation of what is the 'truth'. How do we reconcile the sense of humility that comes with the recognition that our understanding of reality is always incomplete with the commitment to truth as an absolute concept? I have a sense that this leads us toward Kant, but I'd like to hear what you have to say.

This dovetails nicely with what I was suggesting, I think.

I don't believe in absolute certainty in human knowledge. I think we find that there's always at least a small, however implausible, window of doubt involved in all human knowing.
...
Human knowledge is all probabilistic, not absolute. But reality always wins. That's how things like paradigm shifts happen. Despite the best efforts of the brightest human minds, things can get missed or misunderstood; and reality corrects for that eventually, if we keep looking.

Subjectivity, however, is not correctable. As it does not depend on reality, but merely on feeling or intuition, it can go wildly wrong; and no method exists for correcting it, so long as it is detached from being tested against reality.

Thanks for your detailed explanations of your position here. I’ve let this sit for a day to try to absorb it, but I find myself at odds with a number of things you’ve said. I’ll try to summarize:

1) In your first part, you’re saying that the truth value of a proposition is determined by whether or not that proposition corresponds to reality, and that much I follow. But I’m getting tripped up when you say ‘my subjective belief’. Insofar as beliefs take the form of propositions, it can be objective (it’s a belief about something in reality – the shape of the world – which is external and public) but still false. So I wouldn’t call it 'subjective' just because it’s false.

2) I’m struggling with your idea of certainty of truth. I’ve always thought of certainty as a subjective matter – an internal ‘feeling’ of confidence in our own knowledge, not something that is objectively measurable - so it strikes me as odd to apply a subjective criterion to objective knowledge. Given that we don’t, and can’t, have a full picture of reality, there’s really no yardstick against which to evaluate or quantify the certainty of the knowledge that we do have. Your statement that all human knowledge is probabilistic is followed by examples which all involve predicting the future, which is a rather special case in terms of knowledge. Probability makes sense in these kinds of cases because we estimate likelihood of future events based on experience with past events. It's a measure of expectation of an outcome, not of certainty, which I understand as being our degree of confidence in the accuracy of things we say. Obviously, uncertainty of our knowledge and its truth apply beyond just predicting the future, and I don’t think it’s possible to assign a probability of accuracy to most of our beliefs.

3) You said in the earlier post that aesthetic statements are subjective because they are judgments, but it seems to me also that to claim that proposition is true is also to make a judgment, albeit a different kind of judgment than an aesthetic one. If we are to consider ‘truth’ as a property of statements or propositions, based on their correspondence with reality, then truth is also not separable from the context of the use of the proposition – when, where and to whom it is said, and how the statement is understood by both the speaker and the receiver. So it seems to me that ‘correspondence with reality’, while conceptually simple, it not

I’ll go back to my original point, that objective and subjective are better understood in terms of being properties of propositions in terms of whether or not the facts necessary to determine the truth can (in principle, at least) be accessed externally and observed publicly or are private only to the individual. E.g. “The table is round (objective) but it looked oval to me when I saw it (subjective)”; or Beethoven’s 5th symphony is in the key of C minor (objective) and it’s a great piece of music (subjective). ‘Objective’ refers to qualities that are retained by the object from one individual or observations to the next; ‘Subjective’ are qualities that are held by the subject, i.e. within the observer only. Entangling these two terms with concepts of judgments and truth and reality seems to me to just create confusion.

Incidentally, I happened to read this passage by Roger Scruton earlier this week in his introductory work on Kant and I think he articulates this difficult question very nicely and succinctly here:

The world is objective because it can be other than it seems to me.... I can have knowledge of the world as it seems, since that is merely knowledge of my present perception, memories, thoughts, and feelings. But can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of how it seems? To put the question in slightly more general form: can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of my own point of view? Science, common sense, theology, and personal life all the possibility of objective knowledge. If this supposition is unwarranted, then so are almost all the beliefs that we commonly entertain.

[Gary Childress]

So, is pain an objective property or a subjective property if it is the case that more than one human being would feel pain under circumstance X?

Objectivity isn't about feelings. It's about how things really are. If a billion people are deluded, in that they think something unreal is real, or something false is true, or true is false, they're still deluded.

But consider what happens when the subjective is divorced from the objective. Say, I'm a leper or quadriplegic. I've lost sensation in my left arm. I no longer feel pain there. Does that mean that if I lean on a hot stove, my arm won't burn? Subjectively, there's no pain. Objectively, my arm is going up in smoke.

So pain is NOT objective? Is that correct? It's a subjective feeling, and therefore it is not "true" according to your definition of subjective truth (which says that there is no such thing as subjective truth). Subjective things are not "true". Is that correct?

[thomyum2]

So, is pain an objective property or a subjective property if it is the case that more than one human being would feel pain under circumstance X?

Objectivity isn't about feelings. It's about how things really are. If a billion people are deluded, in that they think something unreal is real, or something false is true, or true is false, they're still deluded.

But consider what happens when the subjective is divorced from the objective. Say, I'm a leper or quadriplegic. I've lost sensation in my left arm. I no longer feel pain there. Does that mean that if I lean on a hot stove, my arm won't burn? Subjectively, there's no pain. Objectively, my arm is going up in smoke.

So pain is NOT objective? Is that correct? It's a subjective feeling, and therefore it is not "true" according to your definition of subjective truth (which says that there is no such thing as subjective truth). Subjective things are not "true". Is that correct?

That's kind of the point I'm trying to make as well. Truth/falsehood and separate concepts from objective/subjective. The former is whether or not something we're saying corresponds to reality. The latter is about whether the reality we're talking about is something external or internal. Maybe that's a simpler way of putting it?

The original comment that started all of this was Popeye saying that all truth is subjective. Which would mean that no one can say anything about true the objective world. So I agree with the objection to that statement.

[Gary Childress]

Objectivity isn't about feelings. It's about how things really are. If a billion people are deluded, in that they think something unreal is real, or something false is true, or true is false, they're still deluded.

But consider what happens when the subjective is divorced from the objective. Say, I'm a leper or quadriplegic. I've lost sensation in my left arm. I no longer feel pain there. Does that mean that if I lean on a hot stove, my arm won't burn? Subjectively, there's no pain. Objectively, my arm is going up in smoke.

So pain is NOT objective? Is that correct? It's a subjective feeling, and therefore it is not "true" according to your definition of subjective truth (which says that there is no such thing as subjective truth). Subjective things are not "true". Is that correct?

That's kind of the point I'm trying to make as well. Truth/falsehood and separate concepts from objective/subjective. The former is whether or not something we're saying corresponds to reality or not. The latter is about whether the reality we're talking about is something external or internal. Maybe that's a simpler way of putting it?

The original comment that started all of this was Popeye saying that all truth is subjective. Which would mean that no one can say anything about true the objective world. So I agree with the objection to that statement.

If the meaning of "objective" is to be independent of an observer and "subjective" is to be dependent upon an observer, then I think, if Immanuel Kant was right about phenomena and noumena, then it could be arguably fair to say that a conscious being cannot utter a non-subjective truth to another conscious being. EVERYTHING we say ultimately rests on our conscious experiences, and conscious experience is not objective. It cannot be observed by an outside observer or transmitted from one human to another except through indirect means.

I can't transmit MY pain (the pain that I am experiencing in a given moment) to another human being, but I seem to be able to transmit the information that I am feeling pain to another human being, and the other human being can assume that my feeling of pain is reasonably similar to his or her feeling under similar circumstances. In that sense, all observers transmit indirect reports about what they experience upon the assumption that outside observers experience the same things the same way as the subject of the report does.

It could be that when humans agree on something, it ultimately amounts to two human beings saying, "yes, I see it that way too." or "Yes, I've had that happen before too."

The idea that we are communicating something objectively is an illusion created by two observers who are in sync with each other. And we can never step outside of ourselves to verify if something is an illusion until we experience it for ourselves.

I can think that jumping off a 10-story building is a bad idea based on inference. But I can't objectively know it's a bad idea until I test it out. At the point before I test it out, it would be subjective knowledge, not objective knowledge. But because something is subjective knowledge doesn't mean it isn't true. It's probably very true that jumping off a 10-story building would be a bad idea for me. But it could be argued that it's not objective knowledge for me.