The Truth About Truth

“You know, what I like about that person, is he just tells it like it is.”

“What’s great about her, is she ain’t afraid to speak the truth.”

These are statements we often hear people speak in conversation, and often these remarks are made in admiration of some person of interest, perhaps a politician or religious leader or simply a friend at work or at school. Now, whatever the truth may happen to be in each or every circumstance, there is one thing that is not in dispute: That all of us hold a very high regard for truth. There is not a single person I have ever known–or ever heard of–who prefers being lied to or deceived in some way.

Furthermore, in conversations like these, a person who disagrees with the statement about someone speaking the truth, doesn’t do so by saying, “I would much prefer if that person were lying.” What they disagree about, is that that person is telling the truth to begin with. This shows truth is of such value and esteem that even if we despise a person who is said to be speaking honestly with us, we cannot deny that truth is a good thing, only that that person must not be the one speaking it. We must attempt to say that person is lying.

There are, however, some people–weirdos, most of them, anyway–who deny there is any such thing as truth, at all. These people are typically collected under the umbrella term of postmodernism, and while not all of them say the same thing about truth, most all of them say that truth is not quite what we think it is. Some, for example, say that truth is the result of sentences (or language), and that before there were sentences, there was really no truth about anything. Others say that truth is whatever your friends will let you get away with–which, well, wouldn’t that be fun? And others claim that whatever is true is merely the product of the irreducibly complex cultural conditioning of the time; the result of social construction, as they call it.

Now all of this may strike the average person as sounding rather strange. And that would be for the simple reason that it is rather strange. All of these statements are repugnant to common sense. They are also self-refuting, since the moment a person says there is no such thing as truth, we have every right to ask if they believe in the truth of what they just said, or not. If they respond yes, then they’ve ruined their credentials. If they respond no, then we have no reason to take their assertion seriously. Postmodernists are really a funny bunch–very cartoonish, and sometimes they can even be cute. But just because we don’t take them seriously–or, at least, I don’t–doesn’t mean they don’t take themselves seriously. They tend to take themselves very seriously; too seriously, in fact. They tend to believe that what they say about there being no absolute truth, just is the absolute truth. And this has lead to some very dangerous results. We will get to those results in a minute. But first we must return to the concept of truth.  

Because the truth about truth, is this: There is really nothing all that tricky about truth. Truth is telling it like it is. Truth–if we want to be a little more technical about it–is when what you say (or believe) corresponds to reality. If, for example, I say that I believe in the sun, and there is an actually existing state of affairs matching up to the propositional content of my statement, then I am believing something that is true. I say that the sun exists, and that is true, because the sun exists. The truth-bearer (my position) is authenticated by the truth-maker, or an obtaining reality which is in alignment to it. In other words, “the facts” align with what I say.

Here’s a perhaps simpler way of putting it: I am speaking truth, when I say of what is, that it is, and what is not, that it is not. That is how Aristotle phrased it. To do the opposite, or to say of what is, that it is not, or of what is not, that it is, is to speak a falsehood.

All of this, of course, should come across as being very common sense, and fairly simple, and present no real strain on the intellect. Even if we can dig more into the nature of truth on a technical level, much of this conversation comes down to our ability to know things, and by “know” we mean the holding of a justified, true belief: That we can hold in our mind some bit of informational content that matches up to the way things are in fact, and do so through an act of (internally and externally consistent) reasoning. We will return to this point again later, as well.

But now that we have the definition of truth out of the way, let us return to the opposite position (opposite of absolutism, that is), a position which either denies truth, or attempts to tells us that truth is really something very much different than what we think. That would be the position of relativism, which has been promoted for some time by many postmodernist and feminist philosophers. The primary claim, of course, is that there just is no absolute truth. You may think this is a very silly to say, and not worth addressing, and you’d be right about the first part. But it’s perhaps because so many people thought these claims were not worth addressing, that so many other people–now on the popular level–are saying totally incoherent and stupid things, like “speaking my truth” or “telling his truth” or “preaching her truth” or God knows what. It is also part of the reason that people believe they can identify as whatever gender or race or species they choose, as opposed to accepting what they are, in fact. It has been the result of much cultural delusion.

To see what is wrong with so much of the popular or political ideologies of the day, we must understand the philosophical swamp from which they emerged.

The postmodernist, the feminist, the “social justice” advocate–many of these perhaps otherwise friendly people (or perhaps not) will tell you there is no such thing as truth. The position, however, is notoriously self-contradictory, since to make such a claim is to assert something which that person believes to be true. Again, if we accept the claim, it ruins the claim. And this clear reduction to absurdity is what has lead so many of the postmodern types on to attack the very rules of logic–calling “reason” a western invention, a creation of the patriarchy, or whatever–but to stage an attack on the rules of logic, requires (go figure) the rules of logic. You can’t argue against reason without reason. At this point, one might begin to understand why so many of the “arguments” coming from that particular part of philosophical or political spectrum are not really arguments at all, but insults and appeals (however vague) to emotion.

But the laws of logic are not an “invention” of anything. Like the law of gravity, they are a discovery, and can–and have–been in use throughout all cultures, places, and times, even if we mostly attribute their coming to prominence to thinkers such as Aristotle for explaining them to us. Indeed, most of us work within the laws of logic intuitively (although imperfectly, sometimes, or even much of the time, as the case may be), even if we do not know much about them explicitly. The rules of reasoning are, in other words, not something that can be reasoned against. One cannot coherently object to logic without relying on logic, a position which would immediately reduce to silliness. Well, that is essentially postmodernism for you, and much of feminist and social justice philosophy, as well. The problem is people get so caught up on terms. People often (and only) hear the titles or descriptors of a school of thought, such “feminism” and “social justice”, and just assume, on that basis alone, they must be a good thing–how could something like “social justice” not be a good thing? Well, they are not a good thing, I’m afraid. They are, in fact, quite a ridiculous thing, and sometimes even a dangerous thing. Really, they are hardly any different from when a politician slaps a nice-sounding title like “Let’s Make the Whole World Perfectly Safe Plan” on an otherwise horrendous foreign policy scheme. The name has next to nothing to do it. It’s what’s behind the name that needs to be examined.

(I hope you do not think I am exaggerating. Nothing I’m arguing against is even close to being a strawman. If anything, I am attempting to fortigy the postmodern position, which is a project I find to be, well, magnificently difficult. To give an example of just how asinine many of these schools of philosophy are, I refer you to the recent conundrum where a group of folks in academia submitted seven “fake” articles to various postmodern, feminist, and social justice journals, which not only passed through the peer review process, but a few of which were nominated for awards. Mind you: One of these articles included a chapter from Mein Kampf. Read this, and then think again about what I said earlier with respect to those friendly fundamentalist types. You tell me which is more insane.)

I suppose the most important thing to come away with here is a clear picture of what postmodernism is. Postmodernism is not philosophy; it is political ideology, founded entirely for the purpose of infesting the institutions of western society, with the full intent of tearing it down, one very bad idea at a time. None of this is about pursuing truth at all. It is only about pursuing and implementing a radically left-leaning agenda. To be clear: This is what your kids in the humanities are being taught in school, and probably very soon the “sciences”, as well. Please hear my interview with NYU prof Michael Rectenwald for both a brief history of postmodernism, and the state of affairs in academia today because of it. It’s not good.

Now, there are, of course, other theories of truth, some within, and some without, the postmodern purview. One such would be that of the pragmatist. People like Jordan Peterson come to mind, whom I admire in some ways, and take many objections with in others. His theory of truth would be that of the pragmatist (so far as I can tell), since he seems to think that truth is whatever is beneficial in someway. Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty are more rigorous thinkers in this regard, but the pragmatist theory of truth fails in the following obvious way. It is quite conceivable that something can be useful but untrue. I might believe, for example, that there are monsters living under the manhole cover in the street. Because I believe this, I avoid (as a little kid) running out into the road. This is useful for keeping me from getting run over by a bus, but is clearly untrue. What I believe is not an actually obtaining state of affairs, but a useful and false belief. No sane person would say that belief is true simply because I accepted it and found it useful in some way.

This brings us (I think) to a very important part of the conversation–the part about God–the part which almost all conversations of this sort will ultimately arrive at.

Because now the question is relevant: How do we know that our beliefs are true, and not just useful illusions in some way? This is a deep and important question and one that requires–not an epistemological analysis, per se–but a metaphysical one.

We say, for example, that we as humans have “knowledge” when what we hold is a justified, true belief. In other words, a belief that is formed by reliable faculties, generally aimed at truth, and operating in an epistemically conducive environment (an environment they were designed for, in other words).

Now, whether we can assume our faculties are reliable and generally aimed at truth (as opposed to helpful illusion, or some mix of the two), will depend greatly on how we believe those faculties came to develop. If we are creatures designed by God (however He may have brought us about), then we can rest on the assurance that God probably wanted us to detect truth in some way. The probability of our faculties being generally reliable then, is high, even if those faculties are not infallible.

But if we are not creatures designed by God, we are then left wholly to the whims of natural selection working on random mutation, which is–to put it lightly–problematic for any person wanting to affirm the reliability of reason. Because there just is no reason to assume on a purely naturalistic (read: atheistic) worldview that only true beliefs would pass through the selection process. It seems quite plausible that false but useful beliefs could pass through as well, which our belief in God, and morality, would certainly have to be if (IF, IF, IF) naturalism were true. But to admit that is to cast doubt upon our faculties as a whole (since the probability of reliability faculties on this view would be, at best, inscrutable, but more likely probably very low), and should therefore render skepticism unto every belief. But every belief includes belief in naturalism and evolution and so on–it would also include our belief about being skeptical. So the position of naturalism on the one hand, and evolution, on the other, really do not play well together, at all. Thus, we can only salvage epistemic justification in the theory of evolution if we have God to support it. (See Alvin Plantinga’s famous evolutionary argument against naturalism for a further development of this.) This is the one part that I believe postmodernists get right, many of whom are coming from an atheistic perspective, whether they realize it or not (to be frank, I’m not sure many of them do.). The best support of postmodern ideology–and all these rather very strange ideas coming out of it today–is an atheistic worldview. The notion is still ultimately incoherent, as is just about everything with regards to reason on atheism, since reason cannot exist in conjunction with naturalism (atheism implies determinism, which is incompatible reason, since the claim is that we have no real ability to decide between truth and falsehood to begin with; everything is selected for us)–but they are thus unshackled from having to stick with truth, since truth is probably not something humans can know, if God does not exist. They can just invent whatever fantasy they want — and believe me, they do.

But clearly that position is ridiculous. Clearly, we can know truth. Clearly, we can decide between alternatives, even if we occasionally choose the wrong alternative. Clearly, we can can know that “I exist”, or that 2 + 2 = 4, or that Jim Carey used to be funny, once. The fact that we can know things is a far more obvious and intuitive premise than any presumption of atheism, which is not an intuitive position at all. 

The final truth about truth (at least for this post; they’ll be more) is that our knowing of truth and the plausibility of that given X is inseparable from X, whereby X is our ultimate metaphysical worldview. And here is where our basic, everyday intuition about truth–the experience that there just is such a thing as truth, and that we can come to know truth, even if we can’t know every truth–can be used to cut away any philosophy or idea that would lead us to deny that, or severely bring these most basic experiences into question. We can use truth to reject postmodernism, atheism, and the New York Times. We can use truth to embrace the fact that we are especially unique–and, as it happens–made for knowing things. That we are rational animals with an aim. The aim of using reason to know about ourselves, about the world, and about God.

–  Pat

Related Reading and Resources

Alvin Plantinga presenting his EAAN

I also, for those interested in epistemology, would recommend Plantinga’s book Warranted Christian Belief.

Ed Feser, as always, has a lot of good stuff on this, especially against relativism.

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