Transcription
[Music] hi my name is Josh Rasmussen I'm an associate professor of philosophy at Azusa Pacific University and today I want to talk about the nature of truth.
Truth is a treasure everyone wants more of. Scientists build careers searching for it. Students spend fortunes collecting it. All businesses and all universities devote massive resources to get it. Entire religions arise around the pursuit and defense of it. Even now, you are curious to gain more of it from this video.
But why? Why prefer truth over falsehood? Why is truth worth pursuing at all? By understanding more about truth, you can better understand why truth is a treasure and how to get more of it.
There are different theories of truth on the market, and to help you investigate which of these theories may be true, I will discuss some of the major theories and their challenges. I'll begin with the correspondence theory. This theory claims that for something to be true, it must correspond with, that is, match or accurately describe something real. For example, if I place a real cat on my mat, then the statement "a cat is on my mat" becomes true.
This theory makes sense of our scientific practices, where we observe aspects of the real world and effort to gain more truths about the world. On this theory, truth is a treasure because the more truth you have, the more often your expectations match actual reality. Pretty intuitive, right?
Here's a challenge to consider. When you see a cat, you experience it from a unique vantage point. After your brain processes external stimuli, in other words, you experience the cat from your perspective. But then, how can you see the cat as it truly is outside your perspective? It's not like you can get outside your head to look at the cat.
This problem is related to a more basic question about the nature of correspondence. How can truths inside your head correspond to things outside your head? How does that work? Some philosophers worry that by analyzing truth as correspondence, you exchange the mystery of truth for a greater mystery.
Let's consider an alternative approach. A number of theories treat truth as dependent on elements of one's perspective. These theories include, for example, versions of coherentism and pragmatism. To illustrate, your belief that the cat is on the mat will count as true if it is coherent if you are a coherentist, or useful if you are a pragmatist.
On these theories, truth is a treasure because the more truth you have, the more desirable your thinking is. It is either more rational or more useful. These theories also solve the correspondence theory's problem of getting outside your perspective, since all your truth is ultimately based on features accessed within your perspective, such as your aims or the coherence of your beliefs.
An important challenge, however, is that some truths seem to lie beyond everyone's current perspective. For example, either it is now true that there is an even number of cats, or it is now true that there is an odd number. But presumably, no current perspective includes awareness of the precise number of cats. No one has counted the cats. Hence, the truth of the number of cats does not depend on any current perspective. Rather, it depends on the number of cats, whether or not anyone knows that number.
We've just learned that some theories of truth claim that for something to be true, it must correspond with something real, while other theories claim that truth is dependent on elements within one's perspective. Another strategy is to remove truth. Here are two theories to illustrate removal.
First, deflationism says that you can translate all sentences that use the term "true" into sentences that do not. For example, the sentence "it is true that the cat is on the mat" just means that the cat is on the mat. Here, the term "true" is removed.
A more extreme idea is nihilism, which says that nothing is. According to nihilism, translating alleged truths is not necessary or even possible because there are no truths.
Theories that remove truth all have a certain advantage. They decrease the mystery of truth. A potential disadvantage, however, is that they increase the mystery of why we treasure truth. Why seek truth if it doesn't help you align your beliefs with reality (correspondence theory), or improve the quality of your thinking (perspective-based theories)? It may seem that you cannot reduce the mystery of truth without also reducing its value.
In closing, I will suggest a scientific method for further investigating the truth about truth. Start with observations of clear truths, like that you exist, that one plus one equals two, and so on. Then find a theory of truth the best accounts for all these clear cases. The simplest theory of truth that counts for all the cases has the best chance of being true.
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