What is Truth? Analysis of a Podcast Between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson
Truth is unlike most other ideas, the distinct difference is that, you can’t reason your way to the idea of truth. Let’s say you come up with an idea of truth. By what standard are you going to judge it to be a true idea of truth? By the idea you just came up with? If you judge it to be true by that standard then any idea of truth which can justify itself will be true. If not then what else is there? Whenever you try to dig down to the underlying reason for why you believe something to be true, you get to a point where you have to say that it just struck me as true or that it’s self-evident even though it really isn’t. The point I am trying to make here is that there is an irrational aspect to truth, meaning that you’ll never be able to create a list of rules which could determine what’s true at any given instance. If you want to understand truth you will inevitably have to become uncomfortably comfortable with irrationality.
Few years ago there was a podcast between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson in fact it was the very first conversation these men had. In the podcast 62 they discussed truth for almost 2 hours and what made the conversation dynamic was the fact that they represent fundamentally opposing philosophical approaches to truth. Sam Harris is a realist and Jordan Peterson is a pragmatist. In a nutshell, pragmatists believe that all truths are contextual while realists believe that there are universal truths. You will soon see Sam’s and Jordan’s perspectives have some undeniable validity but you can’t reduce truth to ether one without leaving things out.
Pragmatism introduction
Let’s start our search for the answer to the question: “What is truth?“, withing the pragmatic framework. Jordan is essentially a pragmatist, to be accurate he claims that he’s a Darwinist but will get to that distinction shortly for now we can set that aside and focus on pragmatism. When a pragmatist tries to understand what’s true he tries to solve the following problem: how can an individual [the subject] perceive the external reality [the object] in a way in which he could achieve his aims?
It’s hard to appreciate just how profoundly difficult it is to understand the question itself without even thinking about trying to solve it. Well, just imagine that there’s a box, you can’t interact with it and there might or might not be something in it. Your task is to describe what’s inside the box. Obviously there is nothing you could say about it and that’s the point. If you eliminate all of the subjectivity, and the only way to do it is by removing yourself, then there is nothing you can say about reality. Perception requires the subject and the subject introduces subjectivity — there is no way around it. Nietzsche was aware of this and that’s why he said “There are no facts there are only interpretations.”
If you were to look inside the box and see an apple inside it and then say that the color of the apple is red then you wouldn’t be quit correct. The color red which you see is the relationship between the apple, light and you. If the color red would have been the property of the object then the object wouldn’t need to interact with light or you to be described as red. It seams nonsensical to make the second part of the previous statement but that is something you would need to do if you were to claim that you can describe the object as it is. Many people claim that they do in fact describe the reality as it is but, it’s inescapable that whenever you describe the object your in fact describing your relationship with the object and the relationship that object has with different objects. You can never see the thing in itself. And you can’t speak of a thing which is separate from everything else.
Pragmatism
Pragmatist are the ones who take these problems most seriously. What they conclude is that if you can’t perceive the thing in itself then every truth claim is contextual and if every truth claim is contextual then there is no universal truth, no capital letter True. So what do you do with truth when everything is so interconnected and complicated? The pragmatic answer is to focus on what we really care about — end results. As Jordan explains it.
“Pragmatists claim that the truth of a statement can be only adjudicated with regards to efficiency in attaining it’s aim.”
Pragmatists are essentially saying: “Let’s act out our ideas and the ones that produce desired results are true enough.” The genius in the pragmatic approach is in the fact that when your interacting with the object, your interacting with the reality as it is. Just think about it, when you perceive reality you can only see a representation of it but your actions get to touch the thing which you can’t perceive the thing in itself.
Pragmatic truth is distinctly different from that which most will understand as truth. There are even some among pragmatists who claim that pragmatic approach to truth isn’t trying to get to truth as example Richard Rorty. A pragmatist might want to say that he’s trying to get to useful ideas. Jordan himself as a pragmatist refrains from saying that something is true instead he says that something is “true-enough” to achieve this or that, implying the importance of context. Still it’s a framework for getting truth, it’s just that a truth which is centered around an object isn’t convenient for us to put in words.
Reality doesn’t draw lines between events but if you want to put results of your actions into words then you must. The end results aren’t always binary and sometimes you don’t know which action caused which outcome. This and other problems is the reason why many pragmatists don’t describe pragmatism the way Jordan and I do. To solve problems in pragmatism they start marrying pragmatism with other things and then call that marriage pragmatism. It would be the same as saying that 2 + 3 is 2. It goes without saying that pragmatism gets really confusing really quickly.
To avoid any confusion I will continue using pragmatism in it’s most fundamental sense, since it doesn’t matter what sort of idea you subordinate to pragmatism you won’t be able to solve the following problem which Sam explained as:
“It is possible for there to be consensus around truths that are in fact not true. It’s possible to not know what your missing. That’s something a pragmatist can’t say. A pragmatist has to locate truth in existing conversation, existing consensus.”
Let’s take out the conversation part since that is pragmatism married with something else. The core of pragmatism is interaction with reality, you can only interact with reality which is local to you therefor you can’t get truth outside your local environment. This is a problem you can’t resolve within the pragmatic framework.
I can give a practical example which happens all the time. Let’s take a person and call him Bob who drives with a car and maintains a short distance to the car in front of him. Bob has driven like this for 5 years and hasn’t gotten into an accident. Whenever you ask Bob to maintain a longer distance he says to you: “I have driven like this for 5 years, I have been in this position for 1000 s of times without getting into an accident. I think my distance is long enough.” Pragmatically speaking he’s true enough to continue driving the way he does. It’s a fine solution until you get in an unexpected situation and those extra 10 m would have been enough to avoid an accident. You could of course share your own experience or find statistical data backing up your claim and remain within pragmatic-ish framework, but Bob is a hardcore pragmatist and he will remind you that your own experience or statistical data has different context and therefor might not be true in this case. You can make this sort of example about any low-probability high-cost event.
Darwinism
If we look back a little then we can remember that Jordan said that he’s a Darwinist and maybe Darwinism will somehow solve the problems in pragmatism. There are two senses in which Jordan uses the word. The first is the evolutionary sense, as he put’s it:
“It was impossible for a finite organism to keep up with multi-dimensionaly transforming landscape. So the best that can be done, was to generate random variants, kill most of them because they were wrong and let the others that were correct enough live long enough to propagate, whereby the same process occurs again.”
Darwinism used this way is a process of creating an organism which can achieve his aim of survival until reproduction. You can’t really use this idea to figure out whether a claim is true or not. But Jordan uses Darwinism in a another sense in which pragmatism is compounded over time with a specific goal of survival. In this sense something is true-enough if it has worked pragmatically up until this point. And “up until this point” gets carried along forever.
The thing you really get from applying Darwinian idea to truth is a truth which is more general. I have a truth claim which gets at the issue nicely: “lying is a good way of achieving your goals” What did pragmatists claim again? “The truth of a statement can be only adjudicated with regards to efficiency in attaining it’s aim.” Well, then if by lying you attained your aim then pragmatically speaking you were true-enough. If you really detached yourself from your morals and looked at lying case by case then it would be difficult to conclude that lying is a bad general approach to reach your goals. But if you looked at lying trough the Darwinian framework then the answer would be no — lying isn’t a good general way of achieving your goals. The only Darwinian justification you can give is that you can’t see that many pathological lyres running around and living accomplished lives. There’s reason why lying persists despite cultural attempts to weed it out. At one level of analysis lying is true.
So is Darwinism the perfect solution? No and maybe yes. It depends on which version of Darwinism your talking about. The one in which pragmatism is compounded over time with a specific goal is pragmatism compounded over time with a specific goal. You have all of the problems and benefits as in pragmatism only in different degrees. You have more general truths but it’s more difficult to see causality. And you still can’t get a truth which is outside your environment. In any truth framework which is based on pragmatism, you can’t get outside the environment because you get truth by interacting with it.
If we look at Darwinism in an evolutionary sense then the situation becomes more ambiguous, let’s look at an example so that we would have something to play with. 10 million years ago few pigeons flew to an island in the Indian ocean where there was abundant food and no predators. Few million years of evolution and these pigeons lost the ability to fly and became the Dodo bird. Then Dutch sailors visited the island in 16th century. With them they brought the usual rats, dogs, pigs and other animals. Less than a century later Dodo was extinct. It’s hypothesized that the culprits were pigs and rats which ate Dodo’s eggs. Dodo wasn’t strong enough to protect their eggs nor could they fly up a tree and lay eggs there, since they could no longer fly.
You might think that since the basis of Darwinian process is random mutation that you wouldn’t be constrained by the local environment. But as the Dodo and 99,9% of all of the species that have ever existed prove, in case of changes in environment and especially fast changes in environment, random mutation rarely helps you get to a position where you can achieve the Darwinian goal, with the exception of quickly reproducing species — bacteria, viruses and the like.
When you have species which reproduce slowly then random mutation isn’t going to cut it. Clearly humans have unparalleled ability to adapt to fast changes in environment which isn’t based on evolution. As one of many examples, since 1960 s we have had to live with “let’s delete all humanity” button, I am referring to nukes here. No other human civilization before 1960 s has had to live with the ability to wipe itself out in an afternoon. Evolutionary process wasn’t that which enabled us to adapt to this change. The way we got here is by evolution but if you can say that there is something more important that survival then your some what outside of Darwinian framework. There are important nuances here and I think I will leave them untouched for now. Since I know that I will inevitably have to start talking about realist perspective but that’s the topic of the next essay.
Final thoughts
I know that I have been pushing pragmatic and Darwinian approach to the extreme but I have been doing it for a reason. I wanted to show that you can’t singularly rely on pragmatic truth for truth. When Sam gave his critique of pragmatic approach to truth by pointing out that you can’t say that everybody is wrong. Jordan in essence answered that if you believe that, then you don’t think of Darwinian process broadly enough. The way Jordan tries to solve this problem is by nesting realism inside pragmatism. The most important claim in realism is that there is such thing as a universal truth. Then the idea is that you could use the realistic view of the world to transcend the limitations of your local environment. But then you have a paradox. Realism is antithetical to pragmatism and by proxy Darwinism. You can’t nest one antithetical concept into another. You can’t at the same time say that there are only contextual truths and some of those contextual truths are universal. It makes no sense.
Clearly we have the ability to get outside the bounds of our environment. We have people every once in a while who can say that everybody has been wrong and then present something better. Where are they getting this truth if not in the environment? What is realistic truth? Is there such a thing as universal truth? I will try to find answers to these questions in part 2.
