I pose the question above because, in my readings about freedom of speech and academic freedom, I repeatedly came across two claims:
1.) Freedom of speech as per the First Amendment is construed by the law as essential for allowing the “clash of ideas” considered necessary to get to the truth. No idea nor speaker is privileged, and the purpose of the clash in a democracy is to let everyone knows what other people think, and also to let government officials know what the people think. Note that there seems to be some contradiction here, as clashes of ideas about things like abortion don’t necessarily produce any “truth” if there are religious beliefs or subjective preferences behind those ideas. There is no clash of ideas, for example, that will produce an answer to the question, “Is abortion immoral?”, but it is still important to have this clash so that elected officials can run the our democracy.
2.) In contrast, the “clash of ideas” in academia is seen as absolutely essential to get at the truth. Further in academia some people (those with expertise) and some ideas (evolution) are privileged. So, in contrast to public discourse, in which individual views take precedence and there is no a priori meritocracy, academic discourse is meritocratic and somewhat authoritarian. But in both cases, à la John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes, clashes of ideas are seen as capable and essential in getting at truth.
In the discussion below at the Heterodox Academy in NYC, I riled up some people by claiming that some areas of the humanities, like art, music, or literature, are taught not to arrive at truth but for other reasons (self-reflection, etc.). (Readers should know by now that I see all humanities as essential components of a good liberal education.)
Now some of what we call “humanities”, like economics and sociology are what i call “quasi-scientific” in that they do use the empirical methods of science and there is are truths that can be gleaned. Do prices tend to rise, for example, when supply decreases? But, I maintain, there’s not these kind of truths to be gleaned from art, music, or literature.
What “truth” there is in art, music, literature, and so on, turn out to be empirical truths, like “how accurate is Joyce’s depiction of Dublin in Ulysses?”, or, as Louis Menand says below about Jackson Pollock, “How did he influence the history of art?” Yes, those are also questions that could in principole be answered. But you’d be hard pressed to maintain that there is “truth” in theology, or even in philosophy. Philosophy can correct logical errors in our thinking and clarify difficult areas of inquiry, but even philosophers maintain that their mission is not to provide truth. For example, is pulling the switch in the trolley problem the right thing to do? No clash of ideas can resolve that. Further, in my view ethics is simply working out the consequences in society of a set of subjective preferences; and if that’s the case there are no ethical “truths”. You can ask whether “allowing abortion will have effect X on society,” but that is an empirical question and not an ethical one, for it does not say whether abortion is right or wrong. Further, you can determine whether a fetus can survive outside the womb, which may affect one’s opinion about abortion, but that doesn’t tell you whether discarding frozen embryos is wrong.
Below is the the panel discussion in which I riled people up by raising the question: “Is the clash of ideas in non-empirical fields of the humanities—fields like art, literature, and music—designed to produce truth? If so what kind of truth? This is the question I now pose to readers of this website, and I’m crowdsourcing it as I’m thinking of writing something about this. But it’s a sticky topic. Just think of it this way: “If you are teaching the history of art, what kind of truth do you claim exists in the paintings of Van Gogh?” (Or any other artist, for that matter.)
The video of the discussion is below (one hour of palaver and 15 minutes of questions.) I wish I had done a better job, but so be it: blame insomnia. Also, remember that I am but a scientist, not a big-gun person in the humanities and public intellectual like John McWhorter or especially Louis Menand, a Harvard professor who writes for the New Yorker. The participants are me, Menand, McWhorter, and Jennifer Frey (Dean of the Honors College andProfessor of Philosophy & Religion at the University of Tulsa). The moderator was Coleen Aren, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at William Paterson University, and the person who introduced Coleen was Alice Dreger, well-known author and now senior scholar of the Heterodox Academy.
There is something, the function of which depends on “clash” :
Dialectic
In particular, contradictions are put into opposition, such that a truth – the Thing in Itself (Kant) – is found among the debris of the starting materials.
In case you missed it – as did I – this model is entirely an alchemical transformation – but instead of base metals, it is in thought :
Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition
Glenn Alexander Magee
Cornell University Press
2001
… conveniently for Hegel’s descendants in Leftism, nobody can say the results of the alchemy is not true, as it is independent of empiricism, notably from the Enlightenment (e.g. Scottish Enlightenment, Common Sense Realism). I.e. it isn’t tangibly obvious like a chunk of metal. Instead, truth is ephemeral in the development of the dialectic.
The Hermetic alchemy is Hermetically sealed in the Hermetic head.
….
Just Say No to alchemy.
Minds differ still more than faces
-Voltaire (attributed – no damn source again!)
What?????
(Don’t bother to answer.)
As you say, philosophy can correct logical errors in our thinking, but pointing out such logical errors can be important in ethics. I have in mind Philippa Foot bringing out clearly that we don’t need to assume that the rightness or wrongness of an action is solely a matter of its consequences. Bringing out the wrongness of an assumption can be a great step forward in our thinking — as for example if we underestimate the distance to the fixed stars, we will assume solar parallax is observable with our instruments, and this may appear to be a problem for heliocentric accounts of the solar system. Seeing the falsity of the assumption can then be an important step in arriving at a correct theory.
I don’t know Foot or why she said that consequentialism is unnecessary or important for ethics, but I don’t see how she has brought out the truth. Rather, she has dispelled a misconception that kept us from getting at the truth empirically. But your example about solar parallax seems to have nothing to do with ethics or Foot. Better you provide an example about how philosophy has given us the truth rather than the tools that help find the truth.
You might find Jerome Bruner’s discussion of this difference interesting. In his book “Actual Minds, Possible Worlds,” he describes two different modes of thinking, which he terms the narrative and paradigmatic modes, or thinking like a storyteller vs. thinking like a scientist. Each has its own “rules” for finding truth.
I’ve requested it from our library, thanks.
Great book suggestioin.
tl;dr The question our host describes may be broader than just the question whether the humanities can lead to empirical truths.
In my experience many academics in the humanities (especially historians, sociologists, and education researchers) think like a storyteller but adopt the appearance of a scientist (“theory”, predictions, hypotheses, statistical tests, even Bayesian methods). But they wildly misunderstand what these things mean. Many of these folks think that a model of some natural process is like an assumption. They do not understand what quantitative theory is, do not know the difference between a population vs. a sample (or the average vs. the mean — ha ha I had these reversed), or the difference between a model parameter (the thing one wants to estimate) and an empirical variable (the thing one measures to estimate the parameter value). Typically these folks have never encountered simulation methods. And they are willing to believe counterintuitive results from few observations made in a theory-free context and presented after extensive p-hacking, so long as the results fit the narrative of the story they want to tell.
Example: as part of an administrative task, I was asked to read and comment on some survey or empirical studies of the sociology of disability. All studies had few participants (some were autoethnographies with n=1), none could generate tests of predictions, but I said in my comments to the administrative group that all the studies were capable of generating very interesting hypotheses and the topics were important and worth studying. The leader of the administrative group was offended, claimed I was dismissing her own field of research (oral histories), and declared she had written a book based on n=3 oral histories of an important cultural event. I had to resist explaining, for example, the difference between the studies I reviewed (which took tiny samples from large populations of affected individuals, and were good only for generating hypothese) vs. her area of research (where her sample included the whole population of 3 existing oral histories, and was perfectly good for drawing conclusions).
These folks live in such a narrow slice of the academy, where the data are just an excuse for telling the story (and sometimes a way to obscure how flimsy the story is), that one can’t easily convince them to view their own data and analyses and conclusions in the way that e.g. an evolutionary biologist would view her own work (with skepticism and a critical eye toward the proposition that a conclusion is true given the model and the data). I think that shift is needed before one could even start to talk with humanities researchers about whether their research leads to truth.
Is there “truth” to be found in the humanities? No, not generally, or only accidentally.
But there may be “wisdom” in the humanities. That is:
The ability to make right use of knowledge
Prudence, common sense
Learning, knowledge
The weight of informed opinion
But wisdom depends on context and what is wise in one society or in certain times may vary.
+1
I like this answer, but I may differ in that I see such wisdom as embodying truths. They tend to be truths that are hard-to-impossible in practice to discover within known sciences. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean they’re completely discontinuous from scientific inquiry.
Putting aside the truth vs Truth vs truthiness of art or philosophy, I do want to quickly comment that I believe we would be well served to divorce “morality” from “ethics”, as they are not synonyms. The morality of a thing is purely subjective to the religion or culture or traditions of the group doing the thing. Ethics, as I see it, is more universal, and typically can be boiled down to some sort of hybrid of The Golden Rule and “fairness”.
Yes, agreed. I was sloppy in my language.
I don’t think this comment tracks the definition of morality in philosophy.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on The Definition of Morality:
“There does not seem to be much reason to think that a single definition of morality will be applicable to all moral discussions, even within philosophy. One reason for this is that “morality” seems to be used in two distinct broad senses: a descriptive sense and a normative sense. More particularly, the term “morality” can be used either 1) descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct endorsed by a society or a group (such as a religion), or accepted by an individual for her own behavior, or 2) normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be endorsed by all rational people.”
Morality in a purely subjective sense is morality in the descriptive sense. An example of morality in the normative sense would be Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” aka the Golden Rule. Kant thought he had the truth about morality, compelled by rationality, and he has his supporters in philosophy today. On the other hand, if there is nothing to morality other than “a set of subjective preferences”, there might be no such thing as morality in the normative sense. But that’s a philosophical claim, too.
That is all well and good, so let us define, moving forward, Morals as #1, and Ethics as #2. Because although they tend to run along parallel roads, they trip over each other often enough, certainly in the layman/colloquial sense (which usually is the one that matters) to need differentiation.
This gets into my first lecture in my capstone class, where I wade into Truth, Belief, and Knowledge as it is commonly described in philosophy. I won’t repeat all that here as it gets very verbose, but your form of truth is objective truth, and that form is what is favored as “truth” in philosophy. Objective truth (really just truth) is physical reality. Objective truths are facts.
What your detractors were on about are subjective truths, but using that as a kind of truth only muddies the picture since subjective feelings about what is true is a very different thing from what is actually true. So the preferred term here is belief. Beliefs are the internal mental states (subjective feelings / convictions) that we get when we come across something that we consider to be true. They seem true to us, and we experience such moments as a kind of mental confirmation. But beliefs are subjective, and many ardently held beliefs are not true at all in any reality [cue a picture of RFK Jr.].
Knowledge, meanwhile, is a special kind of belief. Knowledge are justified beliefs in that they have a higher probability of being true. Knowledge is acquired either thru direct observation and experience (empirical knowledge), or thru vetted authorities that pass on their knowledge to us. A lot of knowledge is passed on thru our college professors in the STEM fields and in history classes.
The other humanities do pass on knowledge when they delve into history or into other aspects that are considered to be facts. So it is correct that they do provide truths on those occasions. But when a class in visual arts or music explores subjective experiences like how we may feel about a Van Gogh painting or into the lyrics of a Beatles song, those experiences are best classified as beliefs. This is not to down-grade the humanities, since they provide for us the lion’s share of the greatest emotional experiences that we species can experience. And meanwhile there are a lot of truths out there that are explored in the STEM fields that are absolute trivia and are not impactful at all.
Not all items of knowledge are objectively true, of course – we just believe them to be true with some justification. Humans seek to gain knowledge that is hopefully true thru various endeavors, and the biggest one of these is science. But science is not the only source for discovering truth.
If you suppose that there is a way the world/reality is and that discovering/explaining/modelling that is aiming at Truth, then most of philosophy can claim to do that.
Logic and formal semantics are sciences housed in humanities. They are found in philosophy departments but require a concern for truth that’s more commonly associated with mathematics.
PCC(E), ethics CAN be quasi-scientific but more often it is games or play, where people learn to sharpen reasoning skills or where they defend their favourite theory. Your ‘philosophy’ examples involve this latter sort of ethics. There’s much better stuff as well.
+1
So tell me, how does philosophy determine whether there are gravity waves. Seriously, you think that most of philosophy can determine empirical truths about the world? I beg to disagree.
Suppose you are designing a robot to help a blind man navigate around his apartment. There are empirical facts not easily available to him because he’s blind, and you want your robot to be able to tell him whether there’s a chair or a table or a cat in his way.
In a sense, the robot needs to be able to determine what the real world is like vs what it’s not like. It’s possible that there’s a cat in the man’s way. So, that is a way the world could be. But of course the world might NOT be like that; it might be different. Your robot needs to tell the man what is actually the case — in a sense, it needs to tell him which world he’s in, or what is actual. Is it a cat-in-the-way world or not?
If you are modelling/reasoning about, eg, what is possible and what is actual, then you need a language with at least the expressive capacity of what philosophers call a possible-worlds semantics. (You don’t have to accept the metaphysics of possible worlds, but you need at least as much power as possible-world semantics provides.) In this way, what philosophers establish gives, eg, the AI engineers the minimal tools they need when designing the robot that tells the blind man that there is/is not an obstacle ahead. The empirical fact is there, but we need to connect that with the programming code to convey to the blind man what he needs to know in order to know how to react to the world around him. The tools for that are philosophy.
Sorry, but this can be done purely by scientists and not-philosophers. I don’t find this argument that ALL SCIENTIFIC FACTS MUST BE ESTABLISHED BY PHILOSOPHERS (your contention) unsatisfying. This is the end of our discussion, I do not wish to argue further. Readers can judge your contention.
As far as I’ve seen, (objective) truth in music is either historical (Bach was a composer in the Baroque period.) or analytic (The chord in measure 2 is a V chord.). I’m open to other categories I’ve missed.
But there is also an evaluative component (Charlie Parker is a greater bebop musician than Benny Golson.) in which it can not be supported as an objective fact like historical and analytic facts in music, but neither is it completely subjective, either, as evidence can be marshaled in support.
Often, though, the evaluative component is not even stated. Why are universities more likely to teach a class on the Beatles and not Gerry and the Pacemakers? One might support why a class on the Beatles is proper, but rarely in explicit comparison to Gerry and the Pacemakers and others.
A class on the Beatles makes more sense in that they are both more well-known and had a greater influence on culture. And these claims can be supported by objective statistics, meaning that one can ascertain some Truth here.
However, it would not be in search of Truth to choose the Beatles solely on personal musical preferences of the instructor.
Just finished watching.
You were accused of subscribing to a “crude empiricism.” I’ve heard that before myself; it’s what I call the “civil insult.” It’s a technique used to try to make you go away without engaging. I will assume that the discussant was referring to the empiricism exclusively, and not to the person espousing it.
I can accept that there may be other meanings of truth than the empirical truth you cite from the dictionary, but what are they, and what are the methods used to elucidate them? I’ve asked and have never gotten a satisfactory answer. This is not unrelated to the indigenous “ways of knowing” debate that has gained such currency. If humanity is missing out on a vast realm of unexplored truth, I’d like to know about it.
The question of Jackson Pollock’s art came up. I can fathom an answer to whether his art is considered great. That’s an empirical question that can be tested, verified, or rejected as true or false. But is it possible to determine the truth or falsity of whether Jackson Pollock’s art *is” great? If so, I’d like to know how one determines that truth.
I can see why you ruffled some feathers, but was your adherence to empiricism wrong? One panelist said that she could have that discussion, but then she declined to have it and moved on. I’ve heard “We can have that discussion” before, too.
There is nothing wrong with “crude”.
A crude estimate is better than no estimate – a crude estimate of how many miles to go … etc. Empiricism starts with … crude… ness ..(?).
The “crude” might have easily been more accurately put as “vulgar” – but politeness kept it from being so. I can’t help but note a certain preference of theory in the disparagement of empiricism… like mathematics envy.
We know what else has “vulgar” appended to it.
There are several meanings for ‘truth’, and they are used without problem all the time outside of academia. But in academics, under the umbrella of philosophy, we need to not play so loosy-goosy with terminology so that we all can fruitfully discuss a given subject matter without being distracted by mere semantics. The truth that Jerry is arguing about is what is physically real — real for everyone (whether they know it or not), and philosophers do prefer to use that term for reality. All those other ‘truths’ are best called ‘beliefs’. Any detractors were adhering to the informal and non-academic form of ‘truth’, but in academics that sort of thing should be considered to be a kind of category error.
As S points out, logic is usually housed in philosophy departments. Logic provides an uncountable number of truths. And logic is often considered to be non-empirical.
But I think the “a priori” status of logic is an exaggeration – we don’t use logics that don’t work for us in practice. We don’t use the tonk connective, for example. We don’t, because it would lead to unreliable beliefs. We have other logical principles that conflict with “tonk”, of course – but why do we have those other principles? Ultimately, it’s because they worked for our ancestors.
The “tonk” link says the term was introduced by the logician Arthur Prior (who AIUI is noted for his modal-logic model of time). ISTM his career choice suggests nominative determinism. Was he influenced to become a logician from having the name A Prior? I wonder if somewhere out there is a logician named Alan Posterior.
Contemplating human experience and interpreting it cannot, by definition, lead to empirical truths.
You might find of value the metaphor of Michael Oakeshott in his 1959 essay “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind.” Poetry, here, is broadly understood as the arts, which he distinguishes in kind from practical activity and the scientific. The opening pages develop the metaphor and make claims for the inclusion of each voice in the “conversation.” Later, he addresses the issue of truth:
“Nevertheless, there are false beliefs about poetic imagining and poetic images which die hard. Some people find poetic images unintelligible unless they can be shown to be in some sense ‘true’ or representations of ‘truth’, and the obvious difficulties which face such a requirement are circumvented by means of a concept of ‘poetic truth’, a special kind of ‘truth’ usually believed to be more profound than other manifestations of ‘truth’. There is, further, a disposition to understand poetic imagining as an activity (superior to other activities) in which ‘things are seen as they really are’, poets being thought to have a special gift in this respect, not enjoyed by other people. Again, there are people who do not understand how poetic imagining can be anything other than ‘expressing’ or ‘conveying’ or ‘representing’ experiences which the poet has himself enjoyed and wishes others to enjoy also; and these ‘experiences’ are often thought of as ‘emotions’ or ‘feelings’. And finally, it is commonly believed that all poetic imagining is an attempt to make images which have a special quality named ‘beauty’. But all these and similar beliefs are, I think, misleading, and none of them can survive investigation; and I am certain that they must be erroneous if (as I believe) poetic imagining is what I have called ‘contemplating’.
The notion of ‘poetic truth’ has this much to be said for it: it recognizes that whatever ‘truth’ a poetic image may represent, it is not practical, scientific, or historical truth. That is to say, it bears out the view that to charge a poetic image with practical impossibility, scientific solecism, or historical anachronism is as much out of the nature of things as to accuse a cabbage of theft. But, properly speaking, ‘truth’ concerns propositions, and while practical statements may constitute propositions and scientific and historical statements always do so, poetic images are never of this character. And I do not myself understand how the concept ‘truth’ applies to a poetic image such as:
O sea-starved hungry sea
or
Fair maid, white and red.
Comb me smooth, and stroke my head;
And every hair a sheave shall be.
And every sheave a golden tree.
or to Anna Karenina, or a movement of Nijinski on the stage, or a tune of Rossini or to Bellini’s St Francis. None of these purports to be an affirmation of ‘fact’; and indeed, a world of images from which ‘fact’ and ‘not-fact’ are alike absent is not a world whose constituents are properly to be qualified by such epithets as ‘true’ and ‘erroneous’, ‘veracious’ or ‘false’ or ‘mistaken’.”
The essay is easily available through any academic library. Here is a PDF that I found online: https://ia601502.us.archive.org/1/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.182989/2015.182989.The-Voice-Of-Poetry-In-The-Conversation_text.pdf
That is all lovely! I was fairly transfixed.
In case you are knowledgeable about poetry, there was one that hit me pretty hard about 30 years ago but I cannot find it. It goes something like …
“The light of the stars does not fall upon upon my eyes.
It is my idea of starlight that falls upon my eyes …’
Or something like that. Anyway, if you know it, that would be awesome.
This doesn’t answer your question, but I’d like to say that there is a much more basic reason for the First Amendment than allowing the clash of ideas to lead to better government: we consider the freedom to think what we think and to express it and to discuss it to be a fundamental human right.
Unfortunately there are those who believe that a human right even more fundamental is not to be belittled and scorned and maligned out of human flourishing on the basis of what group they belong to, and the government should accordingly curtail speech that seems in their eyes to do that. There is no way to resolve these competing, colliding “human rights” by appealing to fundamental values, since both are held by their adherents to be fundamental. It is just you (and I, and others like us) who believe that free speech is a fundamental right. Our opponents believe there is an equally fundamental right to to be protected from hurtful speech that undermines their dignity.
Such attempts to “balance” competing “fundamental rights” are actually the rule in the countries usually regarded as democracies. The United States is the sterling exception. Governments elsewhere can usually curtail speech if they really want to and client groups often demand that they do so to assist them in their power struggles against “oppressors.” This is, at bottom, what wokism is, and why it’s so inimical to freedom.
Absent a U.S.-style First Amendment, there is no way to resolve these conflicts consistently in favour of free speech. The organs of the state can’t be trusted always to rebuff the client groups who try to enlist it in censorship against their rivals. Rather the state seeks “balance”: this speech will be permitted only if no one complains really really bitterly about it. Why should the state rebuff the client groups it curries favour with? Indeed, the state likes to gather power to itself — that’s what free speech is supposed to prevent, and so its own interests are aligned with the groups who want to censor other people’s hurtful speech. This is what leads to the perpetual growth of human-rights bureaucracies and kangaroo courts in non-1A countries. Policing speech in the name of human rights.
In the end I think you have to go with the utilitarian view that the clash of ideas leads to better government. It’s generalizable in a way that an appeal to fundamental rights is not. This even though I agree with you that freedom of speech is one of those fundamental rights, and the “right” to not have one’s feelings hurt or to keep the wrong people from winning the election is not.
There has to be a REASON why something is considered a fundamental human right. I do not accept the view that certain rights are self-evident and so I think that freedom of speech has to be justified. Some people think that pregnant women have a right to choose an abortion. I agree with that, but you can’t just assert that right; you have to justify it.
Yes, we do so consider this idea and in the U.S., more or less strive to realize it. But ‘fundamental’ does not entail ‘transcendental.’ The First Amendment is, after all, an afterthought in the Constitution. Those who made the government of our polity had to agree and insure conventionally that the new nation’s people, then and now, could be persuaded to live by it in such a way as to insure the well-being of all citizens. In this they and we have thus far failed. But the impetus to realize the ideal is still with us in the Constitution. May it remain, and become healthier through our civic practices.
I recently attended a debate between two fundamental Christians and two atheists. The Christians of course claimed that morality is dependent on religion, and therefore objective—there is Good and Evil, and can be ascertained from the Bible.
One of the atheists oddly countered that no, morality is subjective, and can vary from culture to culture. I don’t agree with that, I think morality can objectively be measured by whether one’s actions harm others.
Measuring the degree of morality is really a task for the legal world, not the humanities. But the humanities can enlighten us about moral issues, which then inform our politics. That’s why we treasure such works as Ann Franks’ diary or Huxley’s ‘A Brave New World’. Without that enlightenment, I’m not sure we could attain a heightened morality, or a just society, which can also be objectively measured by quality of life metrics.
Except that “harm” can only be assessed subjectively, that is in terms of things we like and dislike.
Well, we can measure harm by metrics such as rates of poverty, crime, access to food and shelter and health care, and disease and death rates, just for starters.
That’s an overly narrow measure of harm grounded in a distributionist social-justice view. A libertarian would reject the premise that advocating against state coercive measures aimed at achieving them would constitute harm that, by itself, justified silencing him so he couldn’t gather others to the cause of opposing them.
Even if you can precisely and objectively measure income equality — that’s how poverty is defined in rich countries, not by any absolute level of deprivation — whether it’s harmful enough to justify fixing it is entirely a personal value judgement.
It still comes down to saying harm is whatever you don’t like.
This one sure got people going! I was outside day. Guess I’ll give it a watch/listen after my TWiV 1240. I’ll start with a bias toward “crude empiricism” (hooray science) that allows and embeds new data and methods consistent with a clearly reasoned framework (maths and logic).
And a nod to this, from the post: “(Readers should know by now that I see all humanities as essential components of a good liberal education.)”
Logic is a part of philosophy, and there are truths in logic, and there are true principles of logic. So, if logic is a part of philosophy, and there are truths in logic, then there are truths in philosophy.
Philosophy can discover contradictions: that it is a truth that A contradicts B.
Philosophy can discover that some arguments, and some argument patterns (fallacies) are bad. But these are discoveries of truths: e.g., that it is true that argument X is a bad argument; that it is true that equivocation is a fallacy.
I don’t see any truths in logic. It is like math: the consequences of axioms.
“I don’t see any truths in logic. It is like math: the consequences of axioms.”
This very argument uses principles of logic in its inference. If the principles of logic are not true, then you cannot know the conclusion of your argument is true.
If there are no truths in logic, because it’s like math, then there’s no truths in math. So, 1 + 1 = 2 would not be true.
If math has no truths, then none of the sciences that use and incorporate math, such as physics, has any truths that utilize math.
If logic has no truths, then the principle of identity is not true, which means that “if p, then p” isn’t true. But it is a contradiction to deny “if p, then p.”
If logic has no truths, then contradictions would not be false.
If logic has no truths, then nothing would be known to be false, for recognizing a falsehood involves a logical inference from the discrepancy between a statement and reality.
If logic has no truths, then all scientific reasoning that incorporates the principles of logic is not true. But all the sciences incorporate the principles of logic. So none of the sciences are true, or have any truths derived by logic and inferential reasoning.
Your position appears to be this:
Only the sciences have, or can have, truths.
The humanities are not sciences.
So: The humanities do not have, nor can have, truths.
But the first premise here is not itself a scientific statement. So, according to itself, the first premise neither is, nor can be, true. So the first premise self-refutes, and so is false, and therefore the argument fails.
History is considered a humanity. But surely history has truths. But if no humanity has truths, then history would have no truths.
To sum up: The view you are arguing for appears to have false or far-fetched implications, and also self-refutes. So, it neither is, nor can be, true.
I also noticed that you today posted a picture of Jacob Arye Katz, a child killed in the Holocaust. But on your view, the statement “The killing of Jacob Arye Katz was wrong” is not true. And also the wider statement “The Holocaust was wrong” would not be true.
Definitely yes.
Even profound overarching truths.
Like in Homer.
Even allegorically in the Bible.
Especially on matters of human behaviour.
Allegorically in the Bible? Oy vey!
Haha!
Yep. It’s just a story book.
Gaza in 2 words.
The Gadarene swine.
Can you give an example or two of such a “profound overarching truth” from Homer or the Bible?
Let us get at the answer through its name. Studia humanitatis, the study of humanity, originally referred to the classical languages and their literature. It was thus separated from divinity, the study of theology, and at that time did not need to be separated from science. So by studying the remnants of Greek and Roman civilisation we were studying humanity? At the time, it may have seemed like things had gone downhill since the fall of Rome and that there was a golden age worth studying as if it were the peak achievement of mankind.
Since the first medieval universities we have accreted many other disciplines under the umbrella of the humanities, until these days it covers everything that is not science, mathematics, and engineering. Science is designed specifically to find truth. Mathematics uses logical proofs to ascertain its own version of truth. Engineering certainly uses the fruit of mathematics, but there is an empirical element summed up in the old adage that if it broke you didn’t make it strong enough; if it didn’t break you made it too heavy.
So where does that leave the humanities in relation to truth? If we accept that they are still the study of humanity then the best we can hope for is that there is an observational body of knowledge, describing the human condition and drawing tentative conclusions about human nature. This may not have the rigor of science, or the certainty of mathematical proof, but it is akin to the empirical experience used in engineering. It is just as valuable in understanding ourselves and our place in the world and need not feel inferior. Some of its observations are undoubtedly true, some will remain uncertain, but it is the best we have and the alternative—to not examine ourselves—is to lead lives described by Socrates as not worth living.
I’m a bit late to this one, but maybe I can contribute.
My understanding is the most basic aspect of consciousness and intelligence is the ability to associate one thing with another, exactly what that means in the human brain still isn’t really understood but the linking of associations and hence the ability to predict and name is a key facit of what makes us able to do both science and the arts.
At its bedrock some associations maybe entirely arbitrary – which neurons fire when you experience the colour green – but once those associations are set you then have context to base your understandings.
Truth doesn’t exist on its own. You have to be true to something. This has obvious applicability in mathematics and how you can get very different results depending upon your axioms. It also applies to science and fitting theories to results.
I also think that you can ask is a work of literature true to its context – does it give an insight into the world it depicts? Does, say, a novel concerning a holocaust survivor give an insightful depiction of how such an individual might behave and think.
With music the most obvious example might be someone trying to compose or write a piece of music in the style of a composer or band. Does the new piece catch “the essence” of a piece by Bach or the Beatles. Do we associate what we are hearing with original pieces? If we didn’t know it was a new composition would we think it might be by the original composer(s).
Associations are legion and so asking is “this” “true” to “that” will always result in multiple answers. The sciences try to close down and remove spurious associations, the arts may wish to explore just how open they can be; and the essence of our brain’s connectivity is that we can enjoy and gain insights from new and unusual associations.
I realise this doesn’t get us very far, but I think it does explain in some ways behaviours you will see in both science and arts facilities. Finding new associations is a very human activity, as is trying to be true to an ideal.
I see a connection here. Is it close to what we are trying to debate?
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever wrought.”
-Immanuel Kant
Translated from :
Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, ca. 1784
Proposition 6.
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant
… IMHO a great quote, worth putting here.
princi-blue-poles? Some typos are just yearning to be made!
This has probably already been mentioned, but I felt like the disagreement in the panel discussion was entirely over the semantics of the word ‘truth’. The whole discussion seemed to be ultimately disagreements about “What the word ‘truth’ means to me.”
To avoid of this pitfall, it might be worth adopting a rule in any discussion that the words ‘true’ and ‘truth’ etc and forbidden.
How about “what exists in nature”?
Yes! And then the others would have to give their definitions, and then in the remainder of the discussion the words themselves are forbidden. People are only allowed to use the definitions.
This would guard against getting sucked into the semantics of discussions about what the word ‘truth’ means to me, which quickly leads to an impasse.
I used to teach a course on critical thinking with my philosopher friend Chris DiCarlo. We put a lot of emphasis on listening to experts but the really difficult part for most people is finding out who is an expert. There are some tricks you can learn in order to distinguish a charlatan from an expert but it’s not easy. There are some sources that are more reliable than others but none of them are infallible.
If the role of a university is to teach critical thinking, then we are not doing a very good job. When I hear some of the things that the other members of the panel were saying about truth I begin to understand why the “academy” is failing in its most important function.
BTW, I agree with Jerry that most people listen to most experts and I’ll add that the distrust in some experts varies a lot from one country to the next.
A provocative panel discussion, and one that left much to be discussed.
Boccaccio wrote, in essence, language is used to both inform as well as deceive, but above all to entertain. That was in 1351 or so. In the author’s epilogue to The Decameron, he wrote that a corrupt mind never understands a word in a healthy way. And a healthy mind cannot be corrupted by nefarious stories.
All pointing to the endless challenges facing understanding and learning, and matters of interpretation.
Truth is not the issue for the humanities —art and literature — it’s experience. Authenticity of experience. Depth of experience. Range of experience. Talented professors help bring the student closer to knowing the differences, and the excitement and significance in exploring the difference.
The social sciences are separate issue.
As for science, how do you know science is good? That’s why you need the Humanities.