How can we, or should we, learn what is true and what is false? This is one of the most enduring and basic questions in philosophy – “basic” because it is fundamental to so many others, not because the answers are in any way easy or simple.
The question, or some form of it, came up a number of times in recent discussions of “common sense”: if common sense isn’t reliable, I was asked, what is? I’m going to try to avoid the word “reliable” as I think its different uses became confusing in the previous debate; I have little stake in its use as a term. But the basic question of determining truth from falsehood is a crucial one and worth asking.
That’s not to say, however, that it admits easy answers, for I don’t think we should expect easy answers on the most basic philosophical questions. If the answers were easy, it would be a stunning and bizarre fact that so many intelligent people have spent so long trying to answer them and explain them without coming to a resolution (as indeed has, so far, been the case in the recent debates, though these have lasted only weeks and not centuries). This is one reason why I don’t identify knowledge of the truth as deriving from a single source like “common sense” – though my posts and comments should make clear I have many more specific problems with that concept, especially as defined by Thill and other commenters on this blog.
How should we identify truth instead? The question of how we should discern truth is closely linked to the question of how, in practice, we do discern it. I like to say that we start where we are: we assess new information learned by reasoning out its coherence with the information we have already accepted. The new information comes in through sense perception one way or another, though the perception might be of someone else’s testimony: I observe you tell me something.
So I think the Vedānta schools are probably right when they describe the means of knowledge (pramāṇas) as perception, inference and authority – that is, the testimony of sources we trust. But that’s not to say any of these sources are always right. Rather, they’re right often enough to be worthy of our belief unless there is some reason to mistrust them in a particular case: for example, I would normally believe my eyes telling me that there is a large yellow stick floating in front of me, but I can’t touch the stick and I have heard that this perception is a symptom of eye diseases, so I don’t.
When a particular belief is in question, though, it’s not enough to refute it merely by saying we learned its contrary through any of these means of knowledge; for they can be, and often are, wrong. Moreover, this is not a matter of one means taking precedence over another. Yes, my senses tell me that the sun revolves around the earth; but because I trust the authority of trained astronomers, I know that this is not the case. Or alternately: a scientist friend (in this case our esteemed commenter Ben) tells me there’s a new article in a refereed psychology journal telling us that caffeine doesn’t actually increase alertness; but I don’t accept this claim because it is so completely contrary to my felt and observed experience of caffeine’s effects on myself. The conclusions must have been misreported, or something wrong with the methodology, or the sample unrepresentative, or the definitions of “alertness” something very different from what I understand by it.
But how do I, or should I, make the decision in those cases where means of knowledge conflict with each other or with themselves? I don’t think a hard-and-fast rule can be provided. Providing an easy and definitive answer to the question “How can I tell true from false?” is like providing an easy and definitive answer to the question “How can I become a better fiddle player?” Discernment of true and false is a virtue, a skill learned with time and practice; there is a wealth of tips and advice one can offer about how to do it better, but one can’t provide a formula for it that will settle disputes in advance. (Or rather, one can; it’s just that one will be wrong.) In saying this, I’m expressing agreement with a contemporary school of analytic philosophy known as virtue epistemology.
Thill disputes such claims:
If you have easy answers to determine what is unreliable, indeed, if you can go to the absurd length of deeming common sense (on which you rely for your very survival) unreliable, you can surely specify what you consider reliable and what you depend on to function in the world…. your claim that it is not easy to ascertain what is reliable implies that it is not easy to ascertain what is unreliable. This is at odds with your easy dismissal of the appeal to common sense on the grounds that it is unreliable.
But I’ve made no such easy dismissal. The easy answer Thill asked for, as far as I can tell, is a statement of “that which is X is reliable and that which is not-X is not,” an exaltation of one single source of knowledge in the way that Thill exalts common sense, which is what I’ve refused to provide here and elsewhere. My refutation of “common sense” as a reliable source of knowledge didn’t rely on a single-sentence knockdown; more importantly, it didn’t say simply “all X is true and all Y is not,” but tried to show us the complexity of the world and of knowledge. I have never said that the items of knowledge included in “common sense” are always wrong; indeed, I suspect most of them are right. The point was that we do not have any special reason to believe a claim based on the fact that it is said to belong to “common sense” (in the sense of knowledge learned without training).
If my alternative view can be described in a sentence, it is probably this: we need to engage in the complex process of knowing as best we can. And if that sounds vague, that’s because it is, intentionally. You should be suspicious of anyone who claims to give you a single easy tip that sums up the whole of how to play the fiddle, do successful biology experiments, or pick up romantic partners. You should be similarly suspicious of anyone who claims to easily sum up how to tell truth from falsehood in the general case.
There is, of course, plenty to be learned in each of these practices; that’s one of the reasons they’re not easy. There are various tips and tricks that can aid in each: play emphasized notes with a down stroke of the bow; control as many variables as you can; groom your hair carefully; trust the conclusions of scientists with expertise in their fields. All of these tips are generally wise, but still admit exceptions: there are two emphasized notes of the same pitch in a row; controlling an additional variable would cost so much that you’d need to hire fewer staff and make careless mistakes; you’re courting someone who likes the dishevelled look; the scientist misspoke because she’s having a bad day. And in each field there is also advice offered that is well meaning but inappropriate, advice we should not take: play as fast as you can; fudge your data a bit and nobody will notice; pretend to be wealthier than you are; treat a claim as true because one can learn it without specialized training. The acceptance or refutation of one of these tips may be a relatively simple matter by itself; but that doesn’t make the whole practice an easy one.
Is this a definitive account of how we can discern truth? No, it’s just a start. But that’s the point.
Moore'sHand said:
“How can we, or should we, learn what is true and what is false?”
There seem to be two questions here indicated respectively by “how can we” and “should we”:
1. What, if any, is the general criterion of distinction between truth and falsity?
2. Assuming that we can formulate an adequate general criterion of distinction between truth and falsity, what is its importance?
There is the possibility that we have specific criteria for distinguishing truth and falsity in specific contexts, e.g., criteria for distinguishing true and false statements on apples, cars, etc., but no general criterion of distinction between truth and falsity applicable to all the different sorts of claims which have truth-value, i.e., no single criterion or standard applies equally to claims about apples, black holes, intentions, and moral good or evil.
Amod Lele said:
Interesting: I think we may agree on this point, that there is no single criterion which is appropriate for determining truth in all cases.
michael reidy said:
It is true that Advaita Vedanta recognises 6 pramanas.
It is true that water is wet.
It is true that water is H2O.
It is true that I like choclate.
Bach is a better composer than Brian Wilson.
Sometimes truth is a good fit and sometimes not.
Is that so?
Moore'sHand said:
There no single criterion or standard used for determining the truth of those claims “Water is H2O.”, “I like chocolate.” etc. The way we determine the truth of “Water is H2O.” is vastly different from the way we determine the truth of “M.R. likes chocolate.”
One could say that “correspondence to reality” is the general standard here, but that’s misleading because “correspondence to reality” is actually what we mean by “truth”. There is no general standard of “correspondence of reality”.
Whether a claim corresponds to reality, assuming that it is meaningful to say that a given claim either can correspond or fails to correspond to reality, depends on its content. And this content also determines how we go about ascertaining whether it is true or false.
“Sometimes truth is a good fit and sometimes not.” If this means that there are utterances or sentences of which it makes no sense to say that they are true or false, e.g., imperatives, optatives, performatives, etc., then it’s correct.
michael reidy said:
When I am told that ‘there are thousands of Irish singles waiting to meet you’, do I say OMG, I can’t face it, I don’t even have a clean shirt. No I merely reflect that there is a world near this one for which this would be true. I then check to make sure that the cordon sanitaire is intact. Such then is the fit of contrafactuals, the coherence of likelihood that allows us to navigate the treacherous shoals of uncertainty.
We are always then telling the difference between the true and the false even in the notional realm to the confounding of the strict verificationist. (The meaning of a statement is the method of its verification) Of course and this is a matter of common sense, to coin a phrase, there are different degrees of confidence, worlds near or remote from the home planet, if you will.
elisa freschi said:
Dear Amod,
isn’t it the case that in our era we tend to overestimate the paradigm of mathematics, i.e., of the quantitative over the qualitative? This works nicely in many, perhaps most cases, but it is not (or not always) able to represent the human condition, which is linked to qualitative elements, too (i.e., education, background, character…). Hence, one looks for rules which should apply automatically, independent of the specific human being applying them. This might work in the case of a chemistry lab, but not in the wider field of “knowledge acquisition” which depends so largely on wider interconnections with preexisting knowledge.
Amod Lele said:
Well put, Elisa. I agree.
Ethan Mills said:
I think most, if not all, pramāṇa theorists in India saw the pramāṇas as what we would now call “success terms.” That is, if your perception isn’t actually true (and some would include that it should lead to successful practice), it isn’t really a pramāṇa, but a “pseudo-perception” (pratyakṣābhāsa). I used to think there was a lot to say about comparing contemporary reliabilism (Alvin Goldman, et al.) with Indian epistemology, but I don’t think the pramāṇa-vādins had any sense of pramāṇas as statistically reliable (you might look at how Goldman and others define “reliable”).
I also think many classical Indian epistemologists were what we’d now call externalists, meaning that, contrary to internalists, they don’t think you need to have access to whatever justifies your belief in order to have knowledge. You can know without knowing that you know as long as your belief is actually true and caused in the right way. I think this is especially true for Nyāya.
What this means for your point is that it’s possible we don’t actually have to know whether the stuff we know is true in order to know it. This sits uneasily with internalists and some virtue epistemologists, who are generally more interested in giving epistemic advice about how to tell truth from falsity (although pramāṇavādins and reliabilists obviously also give advice).
michael reidy said:
Ethan:
Interesting point.
The idea in Advaita as represented in Vedanta Paribhasa would be that the default condition is to take the perception as true until it is contradicted. The mental modification (vritti) is cognised but that mental modification may be based on a superimposition of what is out there (illusion). Because this way of knowing has the same ostensible structure as ‘true’ i.e. as yet uncontradicted, coherent etc knowledge; the risk is always there of error. Good enough assurance is good enough. But perhaps my understanding if faulty.
Amod Lele said:
Very interesting point, Ethan. Thank you for it. My studies of Indian philosophy focused a lot more on ethics, so I’m hazier than I should be on the epistemological topics that are so often placed front and centre there. My advisor once pointed out that Indian philosophical schools generally don’t distinguish between justification and truth, and I admit I have a hard time seeing how that would work – not that I think they’re full of crap, just that I don’t understand it. This helps me make some first steps in that direction.
Amod Lele said:
Although, what counts as being “caused in the right way,” and how does that differ from justification?
Ethan Mills said:
For Nyāya, “being caused in the right way” is how I think of their definition of perception as a cognition that arises from the contact between an object and a sense organ and is nonerroneous. If it’s caused by a process involving a functioning sense organ, good conditions, the object really is there, etc., then it’s a genuine perception.
Reliabilists like Goldman mean something quite similar. Perception is reliable because beliefs formed by perception in good conditions, etc. tend to be true (whether the agent has access to the facts about the reliability of the process or not). Reliabilists and other externalists often see this as replacing talk of justification, for reasons I can’t entirely recall at the moment. I think it has something to do with the internalist-leaning nature of most justification talk in which agents have to know that they know in order to be justified.
Amod Lele said:
Thanks, Ethan. I think I’m getting a general, fuzzy sense of the distinction, but need to learn more about the area before I can really get it.
For a variety of reasons I’ve been wanting to start delving more into theoretical philosophy (epistemology and metaphysics). This is helping.
Ethan Mills said:
I haven’t studied as much Vedānta and Mīmāṃsā epistemology, but both schools take the sort of “innocent until proven guilty” approach. I’m not sure if that means a cognition actually is true until it’s proven false or if you’re justified in taking it to be true until then.
As for truth and justification in general, I think the concepts are conceptually distinguishable even if they were in fact insufficiently distinguished (but that’s often been the case in Western philosophy, too). There is a separate word for truth – satya – and I’d say prāmāṇya – lit. “the property of being a pramāṇa” could mean something like justification. However, a lot of pramāṇa people also accept a Nyāya slogan – “whatever exists is nameable and knowable.” That is, if something is true it must in principle be knowable by some creature (humans, animals, asuras, God, etc.). It’s a sort of verificationism. There’s a great article by Roy Perrett called “Is whatever exists nameable and knowable”? in which he shows quite convincingly that this thesis is false.
I don’t think all Indian epistemologists accepted this, but that’s because I have a more skeptical interpretation of Dignāga and others. But if this was a widely accepted thesis, it could make sense of why idealists thought that if you can’t justify your idea of the external world, then it must not exist. On the other hand, if Vasubandhu, for example, didn’t accept this, it may mean that he was more of an external world skeptic rather than a dogmatic idealist like later Yogācāras. That’s something I’ll be thinking about in my dissertation chapter on Vasubandhu, anyway.
Amod Lele said:
Thanks – if you’d like someone to read over that chapter for you (or other parts of your diss), let me know.
michael reidy said:
Bina Gupta in her book on the Saksin The Disinterested Witness(pg.69) refers to the later advaitins concept of ‘the unknown object’ (ajnanatasatta).
Knowledge then does not confer reality on an object, it merely removes our ignorance of it.
Ethan Mills said:
Thanks for the quote, Michael. I’m constantly astonished by the depth of Indian philosophy, which could keep you busy for many lifetimes. I’ve delved into Advaita a little bit and I’ve found the theories of error to be particularly interesting, but I haven’t heard much about the unknown objects. That’s definitely something I’ll have to look into.
skholiast said:
For all your demurrals, Amod, you do sound sort of like the Wittgenstein of On Certainty in your methodological pluralism (if I may call it that). I especially like the way you’ve brought this into dialogue with the Vedanta accounts, whose three-legged stool of sense, inference, and authority does rather dispense with the need to pin down a single account of truth.
On a slightly different front I wonder if either you or Ethan knows — and if so, what you think of — Timothy Williamson’s view (in Knowledge & its Limits) which simply denies that knowledge may be accounted for in terms of belief plus some other condition. Or, as he puts it: “Knowledge first” — knowledge is its own mental state, irreducible to others (e.g. to justified true belief.) Forgive me if this has come up lately and I’ve missed it.
Amod Lele said:
Thanks, Skholiast. Could you say a bit more about what elements of Wittgenstein I’m reminding you of here? He’s admired by enough people whose philosophies I admire myself (MacIntyre, Murdoch, etc.) that I figure there should be something there. In short I mainly have respect for his thought for that most un-Wittgensteinian of reasons: because he has become a major figure in the history of philosophy.
I haven’t heard of Williamson. What does he say knowledge is, if not belief? I’m skeptical of views that take an important philosophical term as effectively undefinable (eg Moore on good). Does he have another way of specifying the kind of mental state that knowledge is? If so I’m intrigued – it might dovetail in interesting ways with some criticisms I’ve read of the idea of belief (eg Stephen Stich).
skholiast said:
On Wittgenstein, what I think resonates is hard to put into words. He has a multi-faceted approach that worries a problem first from one angle, then from another, but never feels merely occasional or ad hoc. The phrase in the post that really caught my eye and made me think of L.W. was “we need to engage in the complex process of knowing as best we can. And if that sounds vague, that’s because it is.” This really does feel as if it could have been lifted from L.W.’s last notebooks. (It may say something about me that this is where I started with Wittgenstein.) Note too that like almost all of his work they were not written for publication. Hence both the urgency and the “if this doesn’t work I’ll try something else” feeling.
Williamson is a different sort of animal. I am not confident that I can gloss him but for my own part I am (while cautious) actually intrigued by an approach that treats some term as irreducible (precisely like Moore on the Good), because it often foregrounds surprising things. I was struck here by Ethan’s characterization of classical Indian epistemology as externalist, for Williamson has expressly rejected internalism, and likewise asserts that one can know without knowing that one knows. How far this will coincide with any given Indian school I can’t say, however. There are some decent online reviews but I don’t recall anything that drew parallels with non-Western thought.
Ethan Mills said:
There is an article by Jonathan Stoltz on Indo-Tibetan epistemology and Williamson that’s worth checking out. Williamson’s famous book, Knowledge and its Limits, is almost as hard to read as Dharmakirti, but he says a bunch of interesting things about knowledge as a basic mental state, i.e., it can’t be analyzed into components such as justification, truth and belief, which isn’t to say it doesn’t involve truth in some way – that’s the tricky part that’s hard to explain, especially for me, but I think for Williamson as well. He seems to think explaining his complex ideas in epistemology with complex ideas from philosophy of mind is the path to clarity. I’m sure there’s a better summary of the book than I can give somewhere out there.
Charlie said:
Amod Lele
July 27th, 2011 on 8:19 pm
Thanks, Ethan. I think I’m getting a general, fuzzy sense of the distinction, but need to learn more about the area before I can really get it.
For a variety of reasons I’ve been wanting to start delving more into theoretical philosophy (epistemology and metaphysics). This is helping.
Hi Amod,
This is the way I see it.
What many people call theoretical philosophy or metaphysics, Buddha calls the 4NT.
They feel that the study of what exists and what can be known should be studied in a graduate course on philosophy, taught by Doctors of Philosophy.
Buddha feels that “what exists” and “what can be known” IS the realm of every day life.
Understanding your metaphysics is basic to how you live your life, how you understand your relationship to your self, others and nature.
The answer you give to these two questions IS your personal philosophy.
Metaphysics IS Philosophy.
Buddhism is a Metaphysics class for the masses.
Buddhism is Oriental Philosophy stripped for export.
EVERYONE has a notion as to what exists and what can be known.
Buddha felt that some people are confused on these matters, and somehow they have come to believe that an illusion is more real, (exists) than the reality that is right in front of their noses.
In this sense Thill is correct, common sense is basic to understanding the 4NT, only not common sense as Thill defines it.
Thanks again.
Charlie
Charlie said:
Amod says….
That’s not to say, however, that it admits easy answers, for I don’t think we should expect easy answers on the most basic philosophical questions. If the answers were easy, it would be a stunning and bizarre fact that so many intelligent people have spent so long trying to answer them and explain them without coming to a resolution (as indeed has, so far, been the case in the recent debates, though these have lasted only weeks and not centuries).
The way I see it…..
In a sense it is stunning and bizarre, but also a little sad and a little funny that the class of people that are “intelligent” have not come up with an answer and an explanation of the most basic philosophical questions.
But I feel there is a reason for this situation.
It is a feature of the class of people, defined as “intelligent” that ask questions and look for answers, that they demand that these answers must be “explainable” or “defined” or “described” for them to “know” it.
This is a metaphysical claim.
Metaphysics is the realm of understanding what exists and what can be known.
Metaphysical claims are claims about reality/nature.
It is of first importance to clarify what can be known before we can say it is true or not.
Epistemology is a “logy”, it is the intelligent people’s method of investigating what can be “known”.
The “intelligent” peoples “method” of investigating what can be known, (and by extension what can exist, ontology) has the constraint or condition of “explain-ability” or “define-ability” placed upon it.
For this class of people, their metaphysical stand is that for something to be known and for something to exist it must be explainable, definable or describable.
From this point of view it is absurd to think that you can “know” some thing and not be able to describe or define it.
Amod (continues)……
So I think the Vedānta schools are probably right when they describe the means of knowledge (pramāṇas) as perception, inference and authority….
To propose that there is some “thing” that is knowable yet “un-definable” (ineffable) is also a metaphysical claim. It is also a claim about reality/nature.
This is the “perception” option of knowing. But it is not “perception” as understood by “intelligent” people.
Perception as understood by “intelligent” people can still be defined and described and talked about.
So we are now at the place where we have to define or describe the “ineffable” aspect of “perception”.
Somehow we have to convey the “meaning” of what it is like to have an “ineffable perception”.
We have come to the place where words are no longer helpful.
If we would propose a precise definition of the “ineffable experience of perception” we would be defeating our proposition of it being “ineffable”.
Can this be done?
Can people experience (know) nature without having to speak about it or think about it?
Can people experience (know) nature without describing or defining or naming it?
To think or speak or define or describe we need language.
People existed prior to inventing language, therefore it is presupposed that people have the ability to create a language, we call this ability our ability to reason.
People have the ability to create a language (reason) we create language (any one of thousands) but then we also find that we need rules to govern how we use the language, so we create logic.
All of this happens in human minds. All of this is mental manipulation of concepts or abstractions.
None of this has a direct, intimate, immediate, physical connection with nature.
Besides our ability to mentally manipulate concepts or use abstract thought, we also have an intimate, immediate, physical connection with nature through our senses.
Humans do this regardless of whether or not they have invented a language.
However, we do share these senses with each other, they are common to all humans, and if they were not we could not invent a meaningful concept based language.
If one person looked at the sky and saw “blue”, and another saw “orange” and some else saw “pink and green polka dots” we could never agree on the concept of “blue”, we could never agree on anything.
It is important to note that this “agreement” is a social convention, it does not mean that the sky is “blue”, it just means that we “agree” that the specific part of the spectrum of reflected light that matches the color of the sky” we will name “blue”. So if we ask the question ‘Is the sky blue” and answer “yes”, it is only true because we have previously agreed that it should be so.
Nothing in nature recognizes the sky as “blue” except the human mind.
The sky does have a hue, but in nature it does not have a name.
To get “intelligent” people to accept the possibility of there being something that exists but cannot be defined or described or talked about, you have to re-introduce them to, or re-mind them of their subjective, direct sensory experience of nature.
One of the most widely used and effective methods that has stood the test of time is the 4NT.
Which are the opening statements of a dialogue intended to have them start the process of investigating their own personal sensory connection to nature, by understanding their own sense perception of pain or suffering. Pain is a “perception” that everyone can understand / know without having to name it “pain”.
The 4NT are not dogma but a method or a tool. Once the method/tool has been used to do its thing, you can safely put the tool away.
Thanks again,
Charlie