What is truth?

[thomyum2]

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.

Thanks for your thoughts, Gary. I'm only really just beginning my exploration of Kant's philosophy, so I could be way off here, but I'll offer some thoughts.

As Roger Scruton points out in the passage I quoted a couple posts above, we are able to have objective knowledge about the world - we are able to learn things about the world that go beyond just what we know from our own perspective - almost all experience confirms this. The world is more than just what I, as an individual, subjectively experience. Although much knowledge does trace back to individual subjective experiences, those experiences are 'synthesized' to create objective knowledge. I like to think of the analogy of using our two eyes to see. Each eye has a slightly different perspective on whatever we are looking at. But our minds are able to combine these two individual perspectives to create a more 'objective' view that allows us to see depth - we effectively synthesize a 3-dimensional picture from these two perspectives. So I think objective knowledge is like that - multiple perspectives come together to form an objective picture of reality. That's how we are able to distinguish between reality and illusion - if everything was subjective, how could we do that?

But even so, it's not an absolute picture - we can never get outside of the universe and look down on it. Objective knowledge has limits.

From what I understand about Kant though, is that he recognized that while we can have objective knowledge of the world, there are elements of that knowledge that come from the structure of cognition itself rather than from the world itself - elements such as time and space are cognitive structures that we impose on the world in order to make sense of it, rather than being objective features of the world independent of our minds. The analogy frequently used here is that if we wear red glasses, then the world looks red. So it's not that we can have no objective knowledge, it's just that we have to understand that objective knowledge always is shaped by the nature of our mind. The noumenon - the 'world as it is in itself', free of any conceptual organization by the human mind - is not accessible to us.

Like I said, I'm relatively new to Kant, so perhaps others here will correct me or add clarifications.

[Immanuel Can]

A very thoughtful reply. I'll try to do it some justice.

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.

That's fine. It's more interesting that way.

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.

Well, we'll have to be precise about what makes a belief subjective, and what makes it objective. I can, for instance, have a subjective belief that I'm about to eat a vanilla ice cream cone. And maybe I am. In that case, the subjective impression is not false. But if, when I bite into the ice cream, I find out it's not vanilla but white chocolate or lemon chiffon, then my subjective impression was false.

Either way, the decisive factor was when my subjective impression came into contact with the real world...the objective world.

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.

Certainty...absolute certainty...is no more than an internal feeling. The truth is that none of us actually has it. But we can have very-high-percentage confidence in some things, and for us, that serves the crucial purpose of letting us know what is worth expecting or believing or risking in the objective reality we inhabit.

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.

I'm suggesting we have at least approximations of that. It is true that nobody has the perfect yardstick; but we do know when something is "about a yard." And for us, that's good enough.

Your statement that all human knowledge is probabilistic is followed by examples which all involve predicting the future,

I don't think it was. For instance, I spoke about confidence in gravity, which is very much a present reality as well as a past phenomenon.

I don’t think it’s possible to assign a probability of accuracy to most of our beliefs.

I don't think any of us has any choice. We all have to do it, anyway.

Take this morning. You got out of bed, and put your feet on the floor. What was your level of confidence that the floor would support your weight? Would you say it was low or high? But you could not know for certain the floorboards were not rotten, or that some nefarious person had not tunnelled under you at night, or that this morning would be different from every other morning you'd experienced, in that the floor would suddenly disappear.

But you had faith it would be there for your feet...so much faith, you probably didn't hesitate to plant your feet on the floor. Yet is it entirely impossible for that floor to fail you in some way? Clearly not...it could have happened. But you were high-level confident it wouldn't. And you were right.

But what about tomorrow morning?

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'm not quite grasping your objection here...you seem to be onto something, but I can't tell what it is, quite. Can you develop it, or maybe give an example of what your concern is?

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.

I agree.

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.

This seems to me to get back to the original point.

What "seems to me" is an epistemological question. But "what actually is," is an ontological one. As human beings, what we find is that our "seemings" and the ontological reality to which they refer can be different. This is the case in my ice cream example: it "seems" to be vanilla, but it's actually white chocolate. Unfortunately for us humans, what "seems" to us is never quite certain. We have to venture our own calculations of probability in relation to the propositions or "seemings" we experience, and live with the results.

In that sense, we are creatures of faith. "Faith" is not what its detractors have made of it: it's a universal human faculty, and a necessary one, and even a desirable one. All of us "place faith" in various things, whether it's our bedroom floor, our ice cream cone, or the word of our teachers, or the existence of a purpose in the universe. We can't avoid it, because we are living beings, fallible ones, ones that sometimes get things wrong, but hopefully get them more right, and we are all risking ourselves on various life projects and intentions, the success of which is never guaranteed or secured to us in advance.

We are not creatures of certainty. We do not possess the truth, but only estimate our proximity to it...sometimes rightly, sometimes not so rightly. But we cannot pretend that any of us has absolute certainty. That ideal is not possible for the kind of creatures we are. We never have enough information to obtain it.

Good thoughts. See if you can clear up number 3 for me, if you'd be so kind.

[Gary Childress]

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.

Thanks for your thoughts, Gary. I'm only really just beginning my exploration of Kant's philosophy, so I could be way off here, but I'll offer some thoughts.

As Roger Scruton points out in the passage I quoted a couple posts above, we are able to have objective knowledge about the world - we are able to learn things about the world that go beyond just what we know from our own perspective - almost all experience confirms this. The world is more than just what I, as an individual, subjectively experience. Although much knowledge does trace back to individual subjective experiences, those experiences are 'synthesized' to create objective knowledge. I like to think of the analogy of using our two eyes to see. Each eye has a slightly different perspective on whatever we are looking at. But our minds are able to combine these two individual perspectives to create a more 'objective' view that allows us to see depth - we effectively synthesize a 3-dimensional picture from these two perspectives. So I think objective knowledge is like that - multiple perspectives come together to form an objective picture of reality. That's how we are able to distinguish between reality and illusion - if everything was subjective, how could we do that?

But even so, it's not an absolute picture - we can never get outside of the universe and look down on it. Objective knowledge has limits.

From what I understand about Kant though, is that he recognized that while we can have objective knowledge of the world, there are elements of that knowledge that come from the structure of cognition itself rather than from the world itself - elements such as time and space are cognitive structures that we impose on the world in order to make sense of it, rather than being objective features of the world independent of our minds. The analogy frequently used here is that if we wear red glasses, then the world looks red. So it's not that we can have no objective knowledge, it's just that we have to understand that objective knowledge always is shaped by the nature of our mind. The noumenon - the 'world as it is in itself', free of any conceptual organization by the human mind - is not accessible to us.

Like I said, I'm relatively new to Kant, so perhaps others here will correct me or add clarifications.

Well, you might be more knowledgeable about Kant than I am. I'm a relative novice on Kant. However, it seems to me that the very fact (as stated above) that we wear "tinted glasses" (apply categories of the understanding) means we don't truly possess objective knowledge of the world around us. We may have "relatively reliable" knowledge to serve our purposes, but it's not objective; it's not coming from an observer-neutral perspective. I think if we define objectivity as a God 's-eye view of the world, then we lack objectivity. If we define objectivity as reliable knowledge, then some subjective knowledge is also equally reliable.

[popeye1945]

"Well, you might be more knowledgeable about Kant than I am. I'm a relative novice on Kant. However, it seems to me that the very fact (as stated above) that we wear "tinted glasses" (apply categories of the understanding) means we don't truly possess objective knowledge of the world around us. We may have "relatively reliable" knowledge to serve our purposes, but it's not objective; it's not coming from an observer-neutral perspective. I think if we define objectivity as a God 's-eye view of the world, then we lack objectivity. If we define objectivity as reliable knowledge, then some subjective knowledge is also equally reliable.[/quote]

We do not experience objective reality because objective reality is, in fact, ultimate reality, a place of no things, a field of unmanifested energies. What an organism experiences is not reality; what an organism experiences is the state of its ever-changing, ever-altered biological state in its constant state of being played as if the energies were playing biological forms like instruments, and the melody it plays on its biological instruments is the creature's apparent or everyday reality. In this way, all organisms are reactive creatures; there being in fact no such thing as human action, there being only human reactions, as is so with all organisms. All structures and systems considered objective are but our common biological readouts of the experiences of a common biology, such that one can inform another of an area of a mountain range and be sure the subject will have at that location the same biological readout of the energies at that location. Humanity will not evolve intellectually or emotionally until it discovers its true nature, that of a resonating pattern being played by the energies that surround it. In this reality, organisms, including humanity, are not agents in the world; they are, but a functional part of a whole that cannot be directly experienced in its entirety. We are given by experience a narrowed field of a dualist environment, which is, in and of itself, a highly functional illusion. Truth is experience, and is true to the biology doing the experiencing; it is not infallible, which is why it is said that to the individual, experience is truth, while to the collective, it is agreement, in both cases, truth is subjective evaluation.

[popeye1945]

If you're interested in aesthetics, I recommend John Dewey's " Art as experience."