The Nature of Truth: A Pragmatic Perspective

by

Heidi Nelson Hochenedel


As members of a liberal democracy, we should be dedicated to social justice, religious freedom, and open dialogue. We strive to defend "what is right," using the light of reason to direct our actions. We are committed to the Truth, in any form in which we may encounter it, be it in a scientific, social, or spiritual context. But what is this Truth that we so confidently seek to discover and defend? What is this social justice, our conception of which is based on our notion of Truth? What does it mean to be rational or logical? Is the Truth really out there- or within us? Is it discovered or created? In this paper I shall attempt to answer these questions by briefly sketching the coherence, the correspondence, and pragmatic theories of truth. In our culture, many people look to science for access to objective truth, refusing to discuss truth outside of a scientific context. Because of this prevalent attitude, much of my paper will focus on scientific models of the world which I will then compare to models from non-scientific disciplines such as history and literary criticism. Some people believe that discussion of moral or religious truth is sterile and look upon these subjects from a relativist perspective, carefully avoiding judgment. The last section of this paper shall address the problem of relativism and pragmatism.
The coherence theory of truth has its roots in the rationalist tradition beginning with philosophers like Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza in the seventeenth century. More recently, the theory has become popular with some logical positivists, who, influenced by their backgrounds in mathematics and theoretical physics, discount the possibility of true knowledge outside of science. Positivists believe that science is the only valid knowledge and that facts are the only possible objects of knowledge. According to the coherence theory of truth, to say that a judgment is true or false is to say that it coheres or fails to cohere with a system of other statements. A true statement then is a member of a system whose elements are related to each other by ties of logical implication as the elements of pure mathematics are related. To determine the truth of a statement is to test it for coherence with other statements within the system. According to some logical positivists, there is one system to which all true statements must cohere and this system constitutes the comprehensive account of reality.
An example of the coherence theory at work outside of a mathematical context, might be one's tendency to discount someone's claim of having seen a ghost or a UFO because such assertions do not fit into an accepted world-view. In the same way, scientists may discount their findings if they do not cohere with common sense or scientific views that are held to be true. For the supporters of the coherence theory, coherence is the meaning of the word "truth."
Supporters of the coherence theory claim that coherence is the only criterion when assessing the truth of statements about the past. For instance the only way to determine whether or not Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky is to compare his statements with other statements gathered from tapes, documents, objects, and testimony. Any historical account of reality must rely on a coherence theory of truth. Even when talking about the present, we use coherence as the criterion for truth. The statement "I sitting here in front of my computer terminal." can be verified by comparing my original judgment with subsequent judgments. Coherence provides the verification between the initial judgment and the subsequent judgments.
The most powerful objection to the coherence theory of truth is the fact that in mathematics, it is possible to have two different, but equally useful systems of axioms that do not cohere with each other. Non-Euclidean geometry, for example, fails to satisfy either the fifth or the second of Euclid's axioms. Nevertheless, both systems are extremely useful and it is not possible to verify which set of statements constitutes the true set. One is loathe to say that the statements in Non-Euclidean geometry are false in an absolute sense- rather, they are false with reference to the system of Euclidean geometry. Some logical positivists argue that mutually incompatible but internally coherent systems of statements differ not in truth but only in the historical fact that our contemporaries have adopted one system rather than the other. According to this view, there can be multiple and contradictory systems of truth. Clearly this version of the coherence theory of truth cannot provide an absolute criterion or meaning for truth. Nevertheless, in practice it cannot be denied that coherence is the most important criterion available for determining the quality of a statement, model, or idea.
Godel's revolutionary paper, published in 1931 entitled "On formally Undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems" further calls into question assumptions made by the coherence theory of truth. In this paper he proved that in any formal system adequate for number theory there is an undecidable formula which is not provable and whose negation is not provable. It is sometimes added that the formula is "true". A corollary to the theorem is that the consistency of a formal system adequate for number theory cannot be proved within the system. Godel's paper showed the limitations of the axiomatic method, ruling out the possibility that even elementary arithmetic could be fully axiomatized or proven to be internally coherent (consistent). Essentially, he called into question the very model for mathematical truth. There are many philosophical implications of this theorem, but clearly the very paradigm for coherence theory, the formal systems of pure mathematics, can be said to be, not perfectly coherent. Godel's findings are a big blow to logical positivists and the coherence theory of truth. Nevertheless, coherence or lack thereof is clearly one of the most important criteria for assessing the quality of any hypothesis or system.
The second traditional theory of truth is the correspondence theory. This theory states that truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact and has its roots in ancient philosophy beginning with Plato. More recently in the twentieth century, G.E. Moore has developed an influential correspondence theory of truth. Moore claims that when we hear a sentence, we do not merely hear the sounds of the letters. We grasp the thing signified- or what he calls, the proposition. According to Moore, a true belief consists in the correspondence between a belief of a person and the existence of fact. Facts exist in the very same way that galaxies and solar systems do- they are out there, independent of the human mind. For propositions to be true, they must correspond to these fact-objects.
Philosophy and other non-scientific disciplines are often regarded with distrust by scientists and technologians, who typically work from a correspondence theory of truth. Philosophers, historians, and literary critics for instance, are able to construct coherent models of history, texts, and reality, but incapable of proving any correspondence between their models and the nature of reality. Two different and contradictory readings of a text for instance may be equally coherent. How then, do we determine which is the "true" reading? In the same way, it is possible to have several contradictory accounts of history all of which cohere with the available evidence. Which account is true, if all are equally coherent? Many believe that the scientific method affords the possibility of proving the correspondence between theory and reality because an experiment can be repeated indefinitely. As a result, it can be shown that one's theory corresponds to the way things are in themselves, whereas this is not the case in other disciplines. One cannot re-fight a battle to show that one's theory corresponds to the actual "fact" or re-write a text to get inside of the author's insights and intentions. Pragmatists argue that any model of reality, be it scientific, historic, or philosophical, is unverifiable in an absolute sense. Scientific models of truth supported and verified by the scientific method are subject to replacement by more useful paradigms when more data become available or as the result of a re-interpretation of the existing data. Aristotelian physics seemed quite impressive before the age of Newton but the Newtonian paradigm was ultimately replaced by Einstein's relativity theory. Certainly it would be unwise to posit that Einstein's theory is invulnerable to revision or replacement. As Thomas Kuhn shows in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientific truth has always been subject to replacement by better, more useful paradigms.(1) Although many may believe that our current scientific theories are invulnerable to revision, this is impossible to verify. No bell tolls to let us know when we have arrived at the Real Truth about objects in the world. Scientific revolutions do not consist in additions or corrections to previous paradigms, they are paradigm shifts, which incorporate entirely new vocabularies to describe reality. Recently, with the advent of quantum mechanics, a new vocabulary has been invented to accommodate a reality so foreign to our intuitions that it is untranslatable into everyday language. Scientists now talk about particle waves and electrons occupying more than one position at any given moment in time. Paradigm shifts are nothing new in science. Richard Feynman writes about this problem as it applies to Newton's law about the constance of mass independent of speed.
Results of an experiment can be wrong only by being inaccurate. For example, the mass of an object never seems to change: A spinning top has the same mass as a still one. So a "law" was invented: mass is constant, independent of speed. That "law" is now found to be incorrect. Mass is found to increase with velocity, but appreciable increases require velocities near that of light. A true law is : if an object moves with a speed of less than 100 miles a second, the mass is constant to within one part in a million. So in practice one might think that the new law makes no significant difference. Well yes and no. For ordinary speeds, we can certainly forget it, but for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more wrong we are. Finally and most interesting, philosophically we are completely wrong with the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to be altered even though the mass changes just a little bit...Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our ideas.(2)


There is no doubt that relativity theory is more useful than Newtonian physics for describing masses moving at high speeds, but does this mean that relativity theory is closer to the Truth than Newtonian physics? Is Newtonian physics closer to the truth than Aristotelian physics in spite of the fact that both theories are wrong ? The best way to address these questions is to consider the pragmatist position. For pragmatists, objective knowledge would imply the possibility of getting a god's eye view of reality. Religions offer this god's eye view and are largely responsible for our notion of the "truth" being "out there." This idea is paramount in the first line of the Gospel of St. John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God....All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made...And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us full of grace and truth. John 1:1-14


The authors of the Bible understood that for something to be True in an absolute sense, it would be necessary for an interpretation of truth to correspond to the meaning that God gave to creation. Jesus Christ was believed to be full of truth because he was, quite literally, the Word made flesh- i.e. God's own intention- the meaning of reality. To view the world from a different perspective, one without a god with a language all his own, is to deny that there is an ultimate point of view from which to view reality. It is to deny the validity of the concept of Truth in an absolute sense. If no god is posited, than it makes no sense to talk about the "right" way to describe an object because an object cannot prefer one description over another. Such a preference could only be felt by the author of creation- not by the object itself. All we can have are descriptions that either cohere or fail to cohere with the evidence. Most pragmatist feel that the world can be satisfactorily described without assuming the existence of a divine being with a language all his own and a meaning for his creation. Pragmatists believe that objects in the world do not have an essence or a nature, and can be usefully described in many ways. This is not to say that people cannot be wrong in their descriptions. Descriptions of texts, history, or scientific experiments can fail to cohere with the available evidence and may therefore be called wrong. Nevertheless, pragmatists deny that it is useful to talk about being "right" in an absolute sense. For pragmatists, it is enough for a description to be coherent and useful. If it satisfies these criteria, it may then also be called true.
Richard Rorty denies Moore's claim that the world is divided up into "sentence-shaped chunks" called "facts." He claims that there needs to be a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the truth or "facts" are out there. In his essay, "The Contingency of Language" Rorty writes:
To say that the truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there- cannot exist independently of the human mind- because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own, unaided by the describing activities of human beings cannot....If one clings to the notion of self-subsistent facts, it is easy to start capitalizing the word truth and treating it as something as either identical to God or God's project. Then one will say for example that Truth is great and will prevail.(3)


In spite of the fact that Western culture has become more and more secular, we still think in terms of divine truth, a term which has been replaced by "objective truth." Rorty is sympathetic to the Kuhnian notion that scientists have become the high-priests of our culture, the privileged few who have direct access to truth. Scientists enjoy a privileged status in our culture because they can predict and control the behavior of the world. It is implicitly assumed that scientific discoveries and projects represent truth in some absolute sense. The success of science suggests that "facts" are really objects out there to which statements must correspond. Does the progress made in science when compared to that of other disciplines not lend credence to the belief that scientific activity gets at the truth of things while other disciplines, such as literary criticism, history or anthropology, do not?
Pragmatists argue that the success of science should not lead one to assume that it ever gets to the real "facts" or the Truth about the intrinsic nature of reality, not because scientists are "wrong" but simply because reality does not have an intrinsic nature. Recall that Ptolemy's system for predicting the movement of the stars was remarkably useful for over a thousand years in spite of the fact that it was ultimately replaced by the Copernican system. It is true that the Ptolemaic system is not as accurate as the Copernican system, but it was a powerful heuristic for the movement of the heavens at the time. In spite of the fact that Ptolemy system worked remarkably well, by the lights of the modern world, it is completely wrong. It may be unwise to postulate that the Copernican system is any less vulnerable to replacement than the Ptolemaic system. Who can predict the course of science and technology? The universe can be usefully described using many different vocabularies. To say that one perspective or vocabulary somehow gets to the truth- the way things are in themselves- is really to say nothing at all other than the latest way of describing the world also happens to be the most useful for our present purposes. Rorty writes:
From our point of view, explaining the success of science, or the desirability of political liberalism, by talk of fitting the world or expressing human nature is like explaining why opium makes you sleepy by talking about its dormitive power. To say that Freud's vocabulary gets at the truth of human nature, or Newton's the truth about the heavens, is not an explanation of anything. It is an empty compliment- one traditionally paid to writers whose novel jargon we have found useful.(4)


Rorty urges us to give up the notion of an intrinsic nature of things. Reality must be viewed from a perspective and with that perspective comes a purpose. Many different and contradictory models can be used whether one's purpose is to predict and control the world or only to describe it. Some models will work better for some purposes than others. Some will not work at all- and these we can simply call "wrong."
Adherents of the correspondence theory insist that the progress of science can only be described using a correspondence model. How is it that science has made so much "progress," and that scientists agree so universally about their findings while other disciplines are so fraught with dissent and stagnation? Pragmatists point out that the object of science is to control the world- not only to describe it. As a result of this shared goal, the scientific community reaches a consensus of ideas much more quickly than do other disciplines, although even the scientific community does not enjoy complete solidarity. Descriptive disciplines like history, literary criticism, or anthropology do not endeavor to control and predict the behavior of the world, only to describe it. Because there are so many ways to do this (which is true even for scientists) it is much more difficult to determine which descriptions are the best. Coherence is the only measure for the plausibility of a model- and as we have seen, it is possible to have a plurality of coherent but mutually contradictory models. For a Marxist, for example, a Marxist account of history as the story of class struggle is very useful and interesting whereas this is not the case for a fascist or a liberal democrat. In some circles, a feminist reading of a text will be much more interesting and useful than a Marxist or psychoanalytic reading. Yet many (and possibly all) texts can be coherently described using any of these vocabularies. In the same way, Newtonian vocabulary is more useful for describing the motion of objects on earth than Einsteinian vocabulary- simply because it is less cumbersome. For this reason Newtonian physics is still taught in schools around the world, in spite of the fact that it is now considered to be absolutely wrong. From the pragmatist's perspective Newtonian physics is true for objects travelling at relatively slow speeds and false for objects approaching the speed of light. The pragmatist has given up the hopeless project of finding a super-vocabulary that will account for different situations with universal axioms. Instead she changes vocabularies as quickly as she changes tools. She thinks of models (scientific, historical or literary) as tools that should be discarded when attempting to perform tasks to which they are not adapted. A pragmatist does not feel the need to describe the motion of objects on Earth with Einsteinian vocabulary any more than she is tempted to try to mow the lawn with a vacuum cleaner. Nor does she despair of being unable to find a tool that can both vacuum the floor and mow the lawn.
So what is truth from the pragmatist perspective? Truth is simply that which is found to be useful to believe. According to this definition, Newton's laws hold true for speeds that do not approach the speed of light but false when they do. Pragmatists adhere to the Wittgensteinian metaphor for vocabularies- i.e. that they are like tools, which are useful for certain purposes. They should not be seen as puzzle pieces in some grand unifying super-vocabulary. Truth then, is perspectival, not absolute. Pragmatists do not pretend that they can ever get a god's eye view of things because most of them deny the existence of a God Those who do not deny God's existence, like William James, think of God as a useful world-view (one of many useful perspectives from which to view reality) having the desirable effect of causing a sense of purpose and well-being in the believer. All pragmatists discount the notion that human beings or any other object in the world necessarily have an intrinsic nature. Instead they believe that objects in the world can be usefully described in many different ways using many different vocabularies. Depending on the purpose, one way may prove to be more useful (or true) than another.
So where is the place for ethics and religion in a pragmatist world-view? In his famous essay "The Will to Believe" William James argues that any belief is subject to revision, be it scientific, ethical, or religious. There can be no "once and for all certification of truth." Whenever we form a belief, of necessity we do so as the result of a leap of faith: James writes:

Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and in the conservation of energy, in democracy, and necessary progress...all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably much less, than any disbeliever in them might possess. The prestige of these opinions is what makes the sparks shoot form them and light up our sleeping magazines of faith. ... Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters, this is most the case. ... We want to believe we have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position toward it... But if a pyrronistic skeptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another- we willing to go in for a life upon a trust and assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make."(5)


Because scientific beliefs are not more defensible than religious beliefs, James urges tolerance of divergence of opinion in these grand matters. He asks that we respect each other's mental freedom. James does not defend the perspective of the skeptic, however. The skeptical perspective does not represent the "right" way to view reality nor is it closer to the Truth than any other. The skeptic assumes that there is a "right" way - but that it is not knowable. The pragmatist denies that reality has an intrinsic nature and that therefore no perspective can be privileged over the other unless it can be shown to be more or less coherent within a given system of axioms. For this reason, neo-Nazis and Nietzscheans can be dismissed as mad because their world-view fails to cohere with the basic axioms that make up the ethical system in our liberal democracy. And while we should attempt to respect the mental freedom of others, in no way does James suggest that we should all live like moral relativists. The relativistic approach to ethics is not somehow closer to "the right" perspective of moral behavior. From the pragmatist perspective, our values are not arbitrary; they are the result of our history and are the best heuristic for moral behavior for us. People who cannot or will not live by these ethical principles- or who threaten our way of life with their principles, cannot be tolerated for the simple reason that they threaten our conception of liberty and justice and our way of life. The pragmatist should therefore not favor a relativist perspective, rather she should defend her own ethnocentric view of morality while accepting the fact that any attempt to ground it in universal principles, will be fruitless. The pragmatist in a liberal democracy must defend her culture's view of the "right" and the "good, " because she is capable of assessing these concepts by these lights alone. Rorty's reading of Rawls echoes these ideas.
Rawls thinks that "philosophy as the search for truth about an independent metaphysical and moral order cannot... provide a workable and shared basis for a political conception of justice in a democratic society."(6) So he suggests that we confine ourselves to collecting , "such settled convictions as the belief in religious toleration, and the rejection of slavery." and then "try to organize the basic intuitive ideas and principles implicit in these convictions into a coherent conception of justice."(7)

This attitude is thoroughly historicist and antiuniversalist. Rawls can whole-heartedly agree with Hegel and Dewey against Kant and can say that the Enlightenment attempt to free oneself from tradition and history, to appeal to "Nature" or "Reason" was self deceptive. He can see such an appeal as a misguided attempt to make philosophy do what theology failed to do.(8)


For pragmatists, our moral principles must be the very axioms upon which the foundation of our political and philosophical systems rely. Therefore ethicists should first articulate what those axioms are and then form a philosophy to suit. Thousands of years of attempting to ground our moral principles in an independent moral or metaphysical order have failed as miserably any theological project to determine the nature of the divinity. We must take these basic ethical principles on faith and allow ourselves to become indignant when they are violated. What we should not do is assume that our moral principles represent the Truth about Human Nature or that they are in any way invulnerable to change and revision.



1. Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1962).
2. Richard Feynman Six Easy Pieces (Addison-Wesley: Reading, 1995) p.3.
3. Richard Rorty "The Contingency of Language" in Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader (Routledge: New York, 1995) pg. 109.
4. Ibid. pg.111.
5. William James "The Will to Believe" in Pragmatism: The Classic Writings (Hackett Publishing Co.: Indianapolis, 1987) pg.192.
6. John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985):225-226.
7. Ibid.
8. Richard Rorty "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy" Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1991) pp.180-181.

This HTML document was created by an unregistered version of WebConvert.
For further information, visit our web sites at webconvert.com or lightspeedsoftware.com