What is truth? I’d like to continue a dialogue on this subject between Elisa Freschi and myself that began in the comments to my post on performance theory. I’ll start by summarizing the debate so far (skip down a couple paragraphs if you’ve already been following these comments, or would rather click on the links to see the original debate).
We have been debating the extent to which truth can properly be understood as correspondence to reality. I think it generally can, but insisted that that reality should not just be understood as “outer” reality. Our understandings of our inner, subjective states can also be true or false in the sense of succeeding or failing to correspond to reality (as when we are incorrect about being happy).
Elisa continued this debate with a post on her own blog (as I’m now doing in return). She argued that the experience of pain is “subject-dependent,” and cannot be understood as corresponding to a reality beyond the subject’s own understanding: “No scientist could convince me that the pain I am experiencing is unbearable if I can bear it (and vice versa, different people react very differently to what seems to be the same neuronal stimulus).” I responded in the comments that we can indeed misjudge pain, like happiness; I mentioned a physiotherapist friend who gets frustrated when he asks people to rate the pain from a minor injury on a scale of 1 to 10 and they immediately say 10. Elisa replied as follows:
It is not fair to ask someone who has only experience of a feeble pain to collocate it on a scale from 1 to 10. She would, rightly, collocate her present pain on the 10th level, because the ’10’ as a level of pain sensation can only make sense in regard to the pain we have actually experienced. A child will say that 10 is the pain one experiences after a minor fall, a woman who has just given birth will describe the 10-level-pain as something different, but they are right in maintaining that the pain they are presently experiencing is the highest they have ever experienced. The physiotherapist asks them to conform to an objective scale, valid for everyone, hence his disappointment.
My response: the assigning of a level-10 pain can be erroneous. Suppose I get a minor muscle spasm that I think is the most painful thing I have yet experienced. I therefore rate it a 10 on the pain scale. The following week, I am stung by an Australian box jellyfish, which produces pain so intense that victims sometimes die simply from the shock of the pain. I realize then that what I would have rated a 10 wasn’t really a 10, more like a 4. I just didn’t know it then. I might have been justified in believing that the earlier pain was a 10, but my belief was not true. (Even the idea that it’s justified seems suspect, if I have some awareness of the kinds of pains other human beings have been in and some empathy towards them – I should know that there are others who have had pains like this, and additional pains more severe than this.)
A further example: suppose that I had been stung by a box jellyfish several decades before the muscle spasm – but so long enough ago that I had forgotten about it. In the ensuing decades I have had very little pain, so much so that the muscle spasm appears to be the most intense pain I have ever experienced. I rate it a 10. An old friend hears about this, and says: “That was a 10? Compared to the jellyfish sting?” So I reply: “Wow, I’d forgotten about that! Yeah, actually this is really more like a 4, not a 10.” It seems clear to me that I was wrong when I rated it a 10.
In both cases, my own opinion of the same subjective experience has suddenly changed. As a result of different information, I have now decided that my previous view was wrong. That means that if I am right now, I was wrong then, and vice versa. It is not possible for me to be right now that this subjective pain is a 10 and to have been right then that this subjective pain was a 4. I have to have been wrong about my own subjective experience; my own understanding of that subjective experience did not correspond to reality, and was therefore a false understanding.
In a slightly different direction, Elisa’s post also suggested a theology of mystical experience: rational disproofs of God’s existence do not change the fact that Teresa of Ávila had an experience of God: “What she cannot be mistaken about, I argue, is that she is perceiving God sending an arrow towards her hearth, etc. The theological side of this God is, in fact, not part of her sensation.”
But I think this is not true. Teresa is perceiving something that seems like God, looks like God, feels like God. But that doesn’t mean she is actually perceiving God. If I think I see a snake in the road, but on later reflection I see it turns out to have merely been a rope, then I did not in fact perceive a snake. I perceived a rope which I thought was a snake; I only thought that I perceived a snake. But I was wrong.
Two aspects are at play here in my view, one a Wittgensteinian critique of the subjective experience as a basis for the establishment of concepts and the other a Wittgensteinian balking at the total dismissal of the private.
“It is not a something and not a nothing either.”(P.I. 304) W’s class used to be called the ‘toothache class’ and taking that as a hint I think our experience of toothache can be used as an index of pain. Most of us have experienced toothache so it is intelligible to ask whether our pain has the same level of discomfort as a bad toothache. In the Wittgenstein world that does not have to degenerate into infinite regress because it is fitted to its locus i.e. subjective but something.
That subjective-but-something applied to mystical experience brings in its train the notion of wisdom. Did the transverberation of Saint Teresa alter her characteristic judgements and insight? Thereafter was she capable of surprising herself? Would a certain spontaneous flash of intuition cause her to exclaim – where did that come from? God experience alters you, indeed it must alter you or it wasn’t God. The concept of God realisation of the Vedic tradition is even clearer on this point.
Elisa:
A rational apodeictic demonstration would be trumped by the personal experience of a saint. Sankara would agree with that because in his view no rational demonstration of the existence of God is possible. That leaves us with the self-validation of God-realisation and we are back again with the concept of wisdom. Is Saint Teresa a discerner of souls, a staretz, a sage etc. The converging evidence of multiple subjectivities suggests that she was.
There is something intersubjective about the experience of a toothache: since we have had one, we have some sense of what it is probably like for others to have one. I was trying to get at this with my point about empathy above, and on reflection I’m not sure I went far enough with it. I can see that, for other people who react to toothaches similarly to the way I do, sticking their hand in a flame produces a much stronger reaction. So I can infer that the burnt hand is more painful than the toothache even if I have never experienced it. If I think that the minor pain is the worst pain I have experienced, it is probably due to a failure of empathetic imagination.
Amod 1 (about the post): You know the Indian simile about the 100 lotus-petals. If one pierces them all, one would think that they have been peirced all at once. In fact, however, there is a sequence, but the petals are so close to each other that one runs the risk not to perceive it. Similarly, Teresa d’Avila does PERCEIVE God, although this does not mean that the object of her perception is ‘God’. It just mean that she has a perception about God, nothing else. Later, after her vision, she might claim that she has seen the historical Jesus Christ, etc., but this was not part of her perception. Similarly, in the case of a child who claims to have seen a ghost, he might be mistaken since what he perceived was not an externally existing ghost, but he is not not mistaken in claiming that the object of his (illusory, we might argue) perception was a ghost. (To be more explicit about the lotus-simile: I have the feeling that you do not distinguish between object and content of perception. The two might be the same, but ought not, else we could not explain common-sense sentences such as “I bumped into a chair [in the dark]”. At least, I think you should not *assume* that they are the same.)
As for pain, thanks for your interesting remarks in your comment (about the failure of emphatetic imagination) and about the oblivion of a more intense pain. This makes me think that physiotherapists before asking questions should ‘help’ their patients in remembering past painful experiences. Still, after all that, what is left is that *we* are the ultimate authority about our painful experience (for one, a jellyfish bite might be more painful than giving birth, for another, herpes zoster would be even worse etc.). What I mean is just that there is no external criterion (such as neurological response),
Michael: thanks for putting it so nicely!
Elisa,
Thanks. Amod may have his own demurring to do but mine is briefly this. You appear to be saying that what we perceive are our perceptions and not the supposed object. Is this just in the case of noumenal experience or does this apply to perception in general?
The distinction between the content and object is definitely what’s at issue here – I’m not sure that’s the best terminology, but I understand what you mean. We are using “perceive” in two different senses, in a sense, on either side of a theory of error. When I see something that is really a rope but that I think is a snake, what am I perceiving: the rope or the snake? As far as I can tell, you’re arguing for the snake and I’m arguing for the rope. So are we just arguing a semantic point about the definition of the word “perceive” – whether the object of the verb should be the content or the object of perception? Perhaps, although I suspect there’s something deeper still going on as well.
I agree that “purely objective” measures such as neurological response are not adequate arbiters of subjective experiences like pain. We can expect that, when someone has certain neurological reactions associated with pain, s/he will be experiencing pain as well, but the neurological reactions do not constitute the pain. Pain itself has a nonphysical dimension, in that respect.
Amod: thanks for pointing out that you also do not believe in neurological response as being totally exhaustive in regard to the perception of pain. As for your first remark, you are right, we seem to be using two different senses of “perception”, which leads me to what Michael wrote.
Michael: Thanks for your careful analysis. Still, I would rather say that my point is that the external object does not exactly correspond to the content of our perceptions. To name just one of Russell’s examples: we cannot deny that we *perceive* something elliptic while looking at a coin from a certain angle, although the coin has never ceased to be round.