What is Truth? Analysis of a Podcast Between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson(part 2)
This is part 2 of 3 part series where I am trying to figure out truth. In the first part we looked at truth from the pragmatic perspective and we reached a point where pragmatism doesn’t work. The problem is that if you get truth primarily by interacting with your environment then you can’t get beyond it. Yet, you can observe that people can come up with true ideas before there’s evidence for them, clearly, pragmatism leaves something out, which raises a question: on what can you base truth which isn’t directly perceptible in your environment?
I find it important to linger on the question. Let’s look a truth claim which I looked at in the first part: “Lying is a good way of achieving your goals.” If you looked at the consequences of your actions in a short time frame, which is the best time frame for pragmatic framework, then it would be nearly impossible to conclude that lying is bad, especially if your a good lair, since in short time frame, you get what you want. If you increased the time frame then it becomes very difficult to draw causality between the act of lying and the bad outcome which occurs perhaps moths or years later. Because of these reasons it is very difficult to come to the conclusion that lying is bad if you look at the world through pragmatic framework.
It seams self evident that lying is bad, but that’s only because of the culture we live in. It’s not a moral stance which comes naturally, just look at kid’s, they have no issues lying until you start teaching them that it’s bad. There was a time in history when the idea that lying is bad was revolutionary. In the first Persian empire which began 2500 years ago, lying was as Herodotus wrote: “the most disgraceful act capable of being committed was to lie”. In Persian empire lying would sometimes be punished by death. Obviously lying in Persian empire was believed to be bad, but how did they reach such a conclusion? There are facts we know for sure. They didn’t use the scientific method, nor any statistical analyses, nor any empirical, object oriented method — none of those existed at the time. Despite that somehow they got to the punch line.
Most of the important truth claims we have are nether scientific nor objective. Lying is bad, people are equal before the law, there is such a thing as truth, I could go on. If you looked at these claims objectively then it’s nearly impossible to reach them. You could say: “I lied, I got what I wanted, why is lying bad? People are so different why would a homeless person who gives almost no value to society be held just as highly as pillar of the community? Wouldn’t it be better to be more lenient to a someone who does so much good to his community? You can interpret reality in infinite amount of ways why would you think that there is a true one?” I think for every single objective way of looking at these claims there is a horror movie made about it. Just because something is objective doesn’t mean it’s true. What if I said that we can be the source of truth? It’s observable that we have an inherent ability to come up with true general ideas in spite of insufficient empirical evidence for them.
Introduction to realistic truth
The philosophical framework for truth which isn’t necessarily concerned with empirical evidence is realism. Realism is the framework in which Sam bases his conception of truth. Sam points to realistic truth with the following statements:
“I consider myself a moral realist. I would oppose realism with pragmatism. The core tenant of realism for me is that it’s possible for everyone to be mistaken. 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.”It just seams undeniable that there are facts whether or not any […] existing population of human beings are aware of those facts.
The core of realism exists in the assumption that true ideas exist by themselves and by extension that there are universally true ideas. When Sam insists that there are facts whether anyone is aware of them it seams as if he’s highlighting the value of the object but if you actually think about it then he does the opposite. As a reminder pragmatists are the ones that are concerned with the object, when they make a truth claim it’s justified by some external (objective) information which has been observed. If your saying that truth’s exist without the need for the observation of the object then your saying that the object is irreverent. If truth doesn’t reside in the object then the only place it could be is inside of us. The primary source of information for realistic truth claims comes from us.
It’s important to recognize that we have the ability to come up with general ideas some of which are universally true. To be frank we don’t know how we arrive at general ideas at all. You can show a kid that if you have 2 apples and you add 2 more apples to them that now you have 4 apples. You do the same with different objects and different amounts and then the generalized idea comes to their minds that you can do addition no matter the type of object and amount of objects you have. It’s tempting to conclude that principles exist in objects, that the principle of addition was observable in the apple but it isn’t. If you would remember your high school years then you could remember that first of all some people get the idea from a single example while others don’t get it after a dozen. More over sometimes people see different principles within the same pool of examples. You can’t point to a principle as you can point to an object because a principle is an abstract representation of the essence of the object and it’s existence is dependent on us, in the same way as our perception of the color red is dependent on us.
With some back story on realistic truth out of the way we can turn to part of the podcast where Sam give Jordan examples supposedly proving that there are universally true ideas. In essence all of the examples were the same, so I’ll just pick the “hair” example, which is:
There is a 50% probability that you have an even number of hair on your body.
If we exclude the case where there’s zero hair on the body then this claim really sounds like it’s universally true because any natural number except zero is ether even or odd and since nobody knows the number of hair, it’s a coin flips chance ether way. The way it played out in the podcast was that Jordan agreed that the claim in microcosm is true, irrespective of context, but if you looked at the macrocosm then there might be an issue with claims which make the local claim possible which in turn could mean that the local claim is false.
I think that Jordan is on to something and I will return to that thought shortly but I think that there is a distinction that solves a lot of confusion at the local level. Anyone who has tried to do something practical knows that there is a difference between how things should work in theory and how they work in practice. As an example if your lost in wilderness and you know that you aren’t in absolute middle of nowhere then a good way to get out is to just walk straight until you eventually stumble upon civilization. Well it turns out that it’s very difficult to walk straight for extended period of time in let’s say forest. The same applies to the “hair“ example which Sam further developed by proposing that now your life would depend on you having even or odd number of hair. Now there’s an existential reason to determine whether you have even or odd number of hair. First of all you would need to decide what constitutes a hair. Is a hair a hair if there is only the root of the hair and nothing is visible on the skin? For someone who counts the visible hair the answer to Sam’s question might be different that for the one who counts roots of the hair which would mean that the practical outcome would be dependent on context irrespective of the universality of the idea. There is a distinction between an idea and implementation of the idea. As soon as you try to implement an idea you will have to take context into consideration.
If we get back to Jordan’s criticism which centered around the scale of analysis. Most truth claims are based on other truth claims. Any truth claim which is based in language assumes that you can put truth in words. The “hair” truth claim is also based in the claim that you can describe reality in mathematical terms. What Jordan points to is that if there is a problem at any one subsurface claim then the claim your bringing forth might be true within a larger set of falsehood which in turn would make the local claim false. Then again if we are going to call anything universally true then those should be the truths that are based on one assumption which is that you can express truth in language. If you don’t accept that claim then you can’t speak of truth at all.
From this point it would be tempting to conclude that Jordan was right in a sense that there is no universal truth, however that would be reaching too far. The universally true ideas are true as long as they remain as abstract entities and that isn’t merely a semantic difference. When you’re thinking using basic principles, your remaining within the domain of universally true ideas and by doing so you get to avoid infinite amount of complexities and errors with which you would have to deal with if you were using real objects to reason with.
Pragmatic conception of truth can’t be nested within realistic one
Pragmatic framework down right fails when your trying to get outside the local environment. The flaw in realistic framework which you can’t overcome while remaining in it is that you have no good way of determining whether your idea is true or simply a delusion. If your hell bent on remaining within the realistic framework then the best solution to the previous problem is to test whether your new idea fits in within all of the rest ideas you have. Additionally there are methods for testing ideas such as reductio ad absurdum. But then again you can test your ideas against other ideas as much as you like there will never be a concrete answer. This is the main reason for why some discussions can be so frustrating, there is no equivalent of a knock out in an intellectual conversation. When it comes to testing ideas there is nothing like trying them out but that’s a pragmatic method which means that the only way to be sure of the validity of an idea is via pragmatic means.
Jordan stated that realism is nested within pragmatism and I made my case for why it makes no sense. Sam goes the same path only inverted, he claims that pragmatism is nested in realism. I am afraid that I will have to make my case for why this way of conceiving truth makes no sense ether. The reason he makes this claim is due to the nature of ideas. All ideas claim universality even those that explicitly say that their aren’t. Pragmatists essentially claim that all ideas are contextual which is a universal truth claim within itself. Pragmatic truth claim contradicts itself and that’s why Sam states that pragmatism is nested within realism. If we turn back to criticizing realism then the issue lies in proof. Your idea might sound logical and coherent but that wouldn’t prove it’s true, there are plenty of logical and coherent ideas that are murderous and there are plenty of dystopian horror movies made about them as well. If I wanted real proof that your idea will achieve what your saying it will, the only thing you could do is to implement it and show that you would get the predicted outcome — which is a pragmatic method. The only way to prove that a realistic idea is true is via pragmatic means. The ultimate judge of truth value of ideas are the end results of acting them out. Given this fact pragmatism can’t be nested within realism.
Final thoughts
The relationship between pragmatic and realistic framework isn’t as straight forward as both Sam and Jordan advocate — nesting will not suffice. The whole reason why I tried to look at pragmatic and realistic framework trough this ridiculously one sided perspective was to show that it makes no sense to do so, but funnily enough that’s what Sam and Jordan essentially did, admittedly to a lesser extent. All ideas have both elements of pragmatism and realism (objectivity and subjectivity). An extremely realistic idea is just a fantasies, an extremely pragmatic idea is a restatement of the obvious. There is a balance which I didn’t see in the podcast, in the third part I will try to find the proper relationship between pragmatism and realism.
