Is There Objective Truth?

Rorty is more offering a different way that we to think about truth than denying how we colloquially use the word. What you might call a banal truth like who won the Super Bowl the standards for Rorty are still the same as for tougher truths – the relevant community of observers has a clear consensus on who won the Super Bowl. The definitions get more important and diverge more on harder truths – such as when we say things about frontier scientific truths. They’re also important for how to think about religion in modern society (that application goes back to William James at least).

It’s an approach to thinking about truth that takes seriously the idea that our brains mediate and interpret the world around us and that we can’t have concepts of truth that make strong assumptions about the correspondence between our ideas, observations, and interpretations on the one hand and reality on the other.

I’m an amateur on Rorty but I identify with him strongly – I’ve read three books of his and a number of papers (and not a ton of his really heavy duty work).

A lecture by Alan Charles Kors made this distinction clear to me. If I ask you how many people are in a room, and you say 6, I might claim that there is no way to answer this question objectively. (What if someone is hiding under a desk? What if you am not good at counting? What if there is someone behind you and whenever you turn around that person jumps out of your line of sight?) Whereas if you tell me that 6 is less than 5, I can be sure you are wrong, because by definition, 6 is greater than 5.

So you need to distinguish between empirical truth and definitional truth. It may be reasonable to claim that empirical truth cannot be proven — in a strict sense — to be objective.

The “forecast” part of that passage also bothers me, as it reads to be deeply “Bayesian” and Bayesian inference is far from being a foregone conclusion.

But, the issue reminded me of Greenspan’s book. From The Economist:

Later he joined the circle surrounding Ayn Rand, a libertarian novelist-philosopher. In an early encounter, she baffled him into affirming the possibility that he did not exist. She called him the Undertaker because of his gloomy demeanour, and was to be heard for a time asking of her new follower: “Well, has the Undertaker decided whether he exists yet?”

Wikipedia has a good entry on truth. I think it is a very poorly defined term in English.
Quoting Wikipedia:
“All Germanic languages besides English have introduced a terminological distinction between truth “fidelity” and truth “factuality”. To express “factuality”, North Germanic opted for nouns derived from sanna “to assert, affirm”, while continental West Germanic (German and Dutch) opted for continuations of wâra “faith, trust, pact” (cognate to Slavic věra “(religious) faith”, but influenced by Latin verus). Romance languages use terms following the Latin veritas, while the Greek aletheia, Russian pravda and South Slavic istina have separate etymological origins.”

“There is no objective truth” is a statement about objective truth… so yes, there is.

@Ricardo,
So you need to distinguish between empirical truth and definitional truth. It may be reasonable to claim that empirical truth cannot be proven — in a strict sense — to be objective.
I don’t think that’s it. You’re right about 6 being greater than 5 by definition. But the Super Bowl and the Abraham Lincoln claims are empirical. And I’m quite confident that they’re true.
@Gabriel Pulatti,
To put your ‘objective facts’ in some context… what would you say about the winner of Superbowl 50 if in another 50 years, it came out that it was a result of match-fixing?
How would I know, assuming I’m around in 50 years, that it was a result of match-fixing?
@Levi Russell,
“There is no objective truth” is a statement about objective truth… so yes, there is.
Well done, Levi.
@Greg G,
He [Rorty] merely claims that humans lack the tools to prove objective truth to a metaphysical certainty even if it does exist and even if we stumble onto it.
I doubt that he merely claims that. Are you sure he does?

But Scott is a fool for pragmatism. Best to ignore it.

Modern science tells a story about the evolution of life on Earth. In this story life has grown from prokaryotes (like bacteria) to single-cellular eukaryotes, to multi-cellular forms, to humans. I am willing to believe that story, to take it as an axiom underlying any human-thunk-up philosophy.

If you also accept that story, do you think that primitive bacteria had a word, or a concept for truth? I guess probably not. We humans prefer to believe that lower forms act only on impulses or instincts; lower forms get along without a concept of truth. I guess that our human concept of truth developed more recently in evolution.

Truth is a fancy concept needed for the first time in evolution, I propose, when a mind can consider a proposal and judge the proposal. The evolution of brains did indeed cook up that concept and a word for it, “truth”.

If you accept that story, doesn’t that imply that “truth” is a word in natural language, having no more definition than required by circumstances? Words in natural language have fuzzy meaning. Words are signals discovered between (or among) entities which are striving to coordinate their efforts for mutual gain. When a signal succeeds somewhat it becomes part of the lexicon.

But to get the full story, you will need to wait (sorry) for the draft of my chapter on Philosophy of the Critters.

David,

You ask if I am sure about my interpretation of Rorty. I have read several of his books and I am very confident I am understanding him correctly. Surely you realize it would only undermine my position on this to claim absolute certainty. Rorty is a a very talented and entertaining writer. You might enjoy some of his stuff.

Any of us could be wrong about anything even though we are likely right about a great many things. At one time Newton’s theories were thought to be the most certain bedrock objective truth that applied everywhere and at all scales. When that turned out not to be the case, the model of certain scientific knowledge came to be replaced by the idea that all knowledge should be regarded as provisional and possibly vulnerable to new evidence.

I am curious why you think that it would be more likely Rorty would hold an idea that is easily disproven than that he would hold one more easily defended.

Ricardo –

Invoking definitional truth does not help. How can you be sure of your definition? If it’s private, it’s not rule based or verifiable; if it’s based on definitions you’ve received, you could be mistaken.

I’m not understanding how these statements about the world that we’ll all answer yes to – whether David’s or Bob’s – are supposed to arbitrate between a pragmatist theory of truth and whatever is behind David’s sense of objective truth (I assume some kind of correspondence theory?). Aren’t we going to answer “yes” under both theories?

@Scott Sumner,
The only way I can make sense of your argument is to assume that you view objective truth as “things Scott Sumner is sure about”. I’m flattered, but not quite sure everyone will find that definition to be adequate.
Really, Scott? That’s the only way.
Well, here’s what I intended, and it’s what I was saying with my other responses to commenters who apparently share your view: You can’t say both that there’s no absolute truth and that you’re sure of something, including that statement.
And no, I do not view objective truth as “things Scott Sumner is sure about.”

I realize tempers are flaring up around here so let me just ask for clarification. I am not posting anymore; I’ll just read what others say.

In his previous post (which David quoted above) Scott wrote, “As there is no such thing as objective truth.” So David’s whole post here is an attempted (I would say successful) refutation of the claim, “There is no such thing as objective truth.”

Now it seems that there are two lines of response. One is to say, “David, Rorty isn’t claiming that.” The other is to say, “Yes Rorty believes that, and he was a smart guy, so do you think a quick blog post disposes of his position?”

It’s placing a hard burden on David to have to wage a two-front war, with critics who are contradicting each other. I personally didn’t know whether Rorty believed there was objective truth before this episode, and after reading his defenders here, I still don’t know.

(Perhaps there is no objective answer to the question, “Does Rorty believe in objective truth?”)

Rorty is attacking the concept of “objective truth” because he doesn’t think objectivity can be achieved. He understands that there is likely some fact of the matter in reality. He just thinks the claim of objectivity can’t be justified and that, when it falls, it takes the usefulness of the claim of “objective truth” with it.

He was very clear on the fact that he thought people could and should continue to advocate for what they believe in and produce the best evidence they can when doing so. It’s important to understand that he was trying to change the way philosophers use the term. He was not that concerned with changing the way people use the term in everyday conversation.

This sounds a lot like this from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”

I wonder what Rorty would make of Schrodinger’s Cat. The truth is neither out there nor in our heads. It’s determined by the very act of observing.

It is hard to take philosophers too seriously when it seems the universe is even stranger than any of us can imagine.

There are people throughout the third world who will swear that Carolina won because that is where they dump the losing team’s victory paraphernalia (if media reports are true).

Pertaining to the question of who won the Super Bowl: Join me in imagining that somewhere there is a community where they have a local event which, through happenstance in their local history, they call the “Super Bowl”. They know that people in the larger, surrounding language community have a famous event also called the “Super Bowl”. But let us suppose that in this particular local-language community, someone who mentions the “Super Bowl” will be understood as referring to the local event, and not to that other Super Bowl unless somehow indicated. The answer to who won the recent Super Bowl would depend upon the language-community within which that question was asked.

Perhaps this seems like a frivolous objection to David’s objective truth about the winner of the Super Bowl, and surely it is a small and annoying snare on the path to positive knowledge. But I believe that such nibbling away at the meanings of words, meanings which have been assumed objectivity concrete, can remove strength from most sentences which claim to express objective truth.

I do not intend to cast doubt on all truth. We thrive by finding subjective, good-enough truths, within language communities.

James,

I agree with everything in your last comment. So does Rorty. This is why no one has produced, or will produce, a quote where he claims to be able to show there is no fact of the matter.

Rorty is making the point that the fact of the matter is not ever changed by the claims people make about it. CLAIMS about truth are properties of sentences produced by humans.

Rorty is arguing that claims of personal access to objective truth are themselves “confusion in a conversation” to use your term.

All the people who are so sure they know what Rorty is saying without even reading him should read him if they are really interested in the topic. I think most people will be surprised at what a clear and entertaining writer he is.