THE DEFINITION OF TRUTH as consisting in the agreement of the mind with reality, or the correspondence between what we think and what is or is not in fact the way things are, rests on a number of assumptions that have been challenged.
One is the assumption that there is a realm of existence independent of the human mind and of what it thinks. Another is that this reality has a determinate character. Were it totally indeterminate, no statement about it could be either true or false, and diametrically opposite statements about it could both be true or both be false.
The principle of contradiction would not be a basic rule of thought, to be followed in our efforts to get at the truth. We could, at one and the same time, think that a certain state of affairs existed and also that it did not exist, and be none the worse for that in our thinking.
In denying that there is any truth or falsity, the extreme skeptic must ultimately either deny that an independent reality exists or deny that it has a determinate character with which our thinking either corresponds or fails to correspond. It should be obvious at once that, in going to this extreme, the skeptic necessarily contradicts himself. Unless he claims truth for his assertion that there is no independent reality or that it does not have a determinate character, his own position vanishes; and if he does claim truth for his denials, he must do so on grounds that ultimately presuppose the definition of truth.
Should the extreme skeptic not be deterred by the charge of self-contradiction, we have only two choices left in dealing with him. One is to discontinue the conversation as utterly fruitless. The other is to put his position to the pragmatic test.
The pragmatic theory of truth, eloquently stated and ably defended by the American philosopher William James at the beginning of this century, was often misconstrued to be a new definition of truth. On the contrary, it accepted the traditional so-called correspondence theory of truth and proceeded to offer useful indications or criteria for determining whether a given statement was true or false.
The pragmatic view that an opinion is true if it works and false if it fails to work does not tell us what truth is but rather whether the opinion in question is true or false. An individual in a boat drifting downstream is of the opinion that a dangerous cataract is four miles off, when in fact it is only one mile distant. If he relies on that opinion to take a short nap in the sunshine, he will end up in a disaster. The falsity of his opinion is clearly revealed by its not working as he expected.
An opinion passes the pragmatic test by working as we expect it to only if it corresponds with the way things are. It fails to work when it fails to correspond. Its working or not working is a test of its truth, not a definition of what its truth consists in. The extreme skeptic may think he can reject the correspondence theory of what truth is, but can he—does he—reject the pragmatic test as well?
Apologists for that most extreme of nihilistic philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, find themselves obliged to admit that he, while throwing truth out the front window, allowed it to come in through the back door by accepting, however grudgingly, the pragmatic test. Not to do so in the world of action is so obviously suicidal that it cannot fail to overcome the extreme dogmatism of the extreme skeptic.
The pragmatic test of the truth or falsity of particular opinions has significance for us beyond the yeoman service it performs in the refutation of skepticism. It raises a question about what is often called “prediction and verification” as a way of telling whether a particular opinion is true or false.
It has sometimes been supposed, and it is still popularly thought, that if a prediction is confirmed, that verifies the opinion upon which the prediction is based. When an opinion we hold leads us to expect a certain result and that result occurs, the opinion we have acted on has worked successfully. The opinion having passed the pragmatic test, we regard it as true.
There seems to be no valid objection to this view of the matter in the case of opinions about particular matters of fact; for example, that the cataract downstream is only one mile farther. But when we come to generalizations—to statements that are supposed to be true universally or without exception—prediction and verification does not have the same effect.
Any statement that either explicitly or implicitly claims to hold for all instances—all without exception—cannot be established as definitely true by a finite number of observed instances that tend to confirm the opinion in question. The successive confirmations do not verify the generalization in the sense of showing it to be true with finality and certitude. They verify it only in the sense of showing it to be more and more probable; that is, increasing the degree of our assurance that the generalization is true.
Prediction and verification, or the application of the pragmatic test, goes beyond probability only when a negative instance falsifies a generalization. Since the generalization claims to hold universally, or without exception, a single exception, provided by one negative instance, falsifies it with certitude. Its falsity is final and incorrigible.
The notion of probability leads us to what, in my judgment, is the most difficult problem or issue in the sphere of our thinking about the idea of truth. The question can be put simply: Is all probability subjective, or, in certain areas of reality, does objective probability exist? Let me explain the question.
Objective probability signifies indeterminacy built into the structure of reality itself. Subjective probability measures degrees of uncertainty or doubt concerning the truth of our judgments about reality.
To say that all probability is subjective is to say that degrees of probability are always and only measures of the assurance with which we claim that a certain opinion is true or false. The opinion itself, in relation to reality, is either true or false; but when we do not know it to be true with certainty, as is usually the case, we affirm its truth with some degree of assurance less than certitude. When we then say that it is more or less probable, we are not saying that it is probable rather than true. We are saying that it is probably true, and that the degree of probability—the degree of our assurance about its truth—is more than zero and less than one.
The view that all probability is subjective, in the sense indicated above, presupposes that reality is completely determinate—that everything is either one way or another, but not both at the same time. The principle of contradiction is not only a law of thought, to be observed in our efforts to get at the truth. It is also a law of existence. Nothing can both exist and not exist at one and the same time; nor can anything both have and not have a certain characteristic at one and the same time. If the realm of real existence did not conform without exception to the principle of contradiction, that principle would not operate as a sound rule to observe in our efforts to get at the truth.
Games of chance confirm rather than challenge the view that probability is subjective rather than objective. Considering the next toss of a coin, we are compelled by the laws of chance to say that it is equally probable that it will fall heads up and that it will fall tails up. This means only that our degree of assurance in betting on heads is equal to our degree of assurance, or lack of it, in betting on tails. Though the two statements, “It will be heads,” and, “It will be tails,” are subjectively of equal probability, one of these two statements is objectively true and the other objectively false. We do not know which it will be, or rather we know only that there is a fifty-fifty chance of its being one or the other, but we do know with certitude that it will be one and not the other.
Future contingencies, such as whether it will snow on Christmas Day next year, are not indeterminate. The prediction that it will snow is either true or false right now, in advance of the event, but our prediction of what will happen when the time comes around falls far short of certitude. The probability we assign to that prediction’s being true expresses our degree of assurance about it.
Nor do the statistical laws of nature run counter to the view that reality is completely determinate. They merely represent the kind of knowledge we have about certain phenomena, in contrast to the kind of knowledge that is expressed in causal laws. When a causal law is affirmed as true, in the light of all evidence available at the time, the prediction that a certain effect will result from the operation of certain antecedent conditions can be made at that time with certitude. A statistical law of nature enables us to predict certain physical states or events only with a degree of probability, not with certitude. But in both cases the physical phenomena themselves are equally determinate.
Until this century, the natural sciences did not challenge the view that reality is completely determinate and that probability is entirely subjective. The advent of quantum mechanics, in the sphere of subatomic physics, introduced what is generally known as the Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy, or, as it is sometimes called, the principle of uncertainty.
Experimentation that seeks to determine both the position and velocity of elementary, or subatomic, particles cannot fully succeed in both efforts. A certain quantum of indeterminacy, specified as h, cannot be eliminated with respect to either the position or velocity of the particle.
A highly exacerbated controversy ensued between Albert Einstein, on the one hand, and Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, on the other.
Einstein defended the view that the indeterminacy encountered in quantum mechanics should be interpreted as a subjective probability. The probability that the electron occupies a definite position or moves with a definite velocity measures the degree of assurance with which we can assert that it is at that position or has that velocity. In reality, the electron either is at that position or not; it either has that velocity or not.
Bohr and Heisenberg, the leading exponents of the Copenhagen School, defended the opposite position and they have won most physicists over to their point of view. While reality may be, for the most part, determinate, it is indeterminate in the sphere of subatomic phenomena. The degree of uncertainty about the position or velocity of an electron is not just a measure of our ignorance, or lack of complete assurance about it. It points to an objective probability—an uncertainty or indeterminacy—in the way things in fact are.
To overcome the repugnance with which the mind reacts to such indeterminacy in reality, the Copenhagen School introduced what they called “the principle of complementarity.” This, in effect, explained away the apparent violation of the principle of contradiction as a law governing reality as well as thought.
The indeterminacy of the position of an electron or a photon at a certain moment might appear to involve us in the contradiction of saying that it was both here and not here at the same time. But according to the principle of complementarity, its being both here and not here at a given moment can be explained by reference to different ways of viewing the same phenomenon, ways that are complementary rather than contradictory.
The difficult question we are left with is one that everyone must answer for himself. Does the principle of complementarity, which the Copenhagen School found it necessary to introduce in order to explain objective probability or real indeterminacy in the sphere of subatomic phenomena, implicitly involve the reaffirmation of the principle of contradiction as a law governing reality without exception? Does it reveal as well as conceal an admission that Einstein was right after all?
My own answer to these questions is affirmative, but I must admit that whenever I am in the company of scientists, I remain in a minority of one. In my view, the phenomena under consideration are not in themselves indeterminate. They have been rendered indeterminable by us as a result of the ways in which we are compelled to observe and measure them. The effect on them of our methods of observation makes the precision with which we can measure quantities in classical mechanics unattainable in the sphere of wave and quantum mechanics.
There is one other point of indeterminacy that should be mentioned. It occurs in the sphere of mathematics rather than physics. In 1931, Kurt Gödel published a paper on formally undecidable propositions in mathematics. It showed that a consistent, axiomatic mathematical system contains propositions that may be true, but the truth of which cannot be demonstrated in that system.
Of all the spheres of inquiry in which men are engaged in the pursuit of truth, mathematics is the one in which we have come to expect the most complete agreement among all who are competent to judge. Even in the light of Gödel’s argument, that remains the case.
Disagreement among mathematicians about the truth of any formally decidable propositions would be scandalous. That, in any well-constructed mathematical system, there are formally undecidable propositions should not alter our expectations with regard to agreement among mathematicians.
Pivotal in our thinking about the idea of goodness is the distinction between real and apparent goods together with the distinction on which it is based—between specifically natural and individually acquired desires, or needs and wants. Without these two distinctions the line cannot be drawn that divides what is objectively good for all human beings and what is only subjectively good, differing from individual to individual and from time to time.
It should not be surprising that this pivotal point is also the focus of controversy in regard to goodness. The questions at issue are whether human needs can be clearly distinguished from individual wants, whether one man’s needs are another man’s wants, whether needs are unaffected by nurtural and other circumstantial conditions, and whether the satisfaction of needs calls for different goods or different amounts of the same good under different circumstances or for different individuals.
The view that certain things are really good for all human beings under all circumstances is inseparable from the view that there can be objectively true value judgments and prescriptions concerning what human beings ought to seek and ought to do. If the questions at issue about needs and wants cannot be satisfactorily answered, if the distinction between needs and wants is beclouded or blurred by inexpungeable doubts about its validity, the scales inevitably tilt in the direction of the subjectivist extreme, which holds that there is no objective truth in the sphere of value judgments. Whatever appears good to the individual according to his individual desires or predilections is good for him or her and may appear to be the very opposite to someone else. There is no basis for saying that anything ought or ought not to be desired.
As we have seen, the objectivity of truth presupposes the existence of an independent reality that is determinate in its structure and characteristics. The objectivity of goodness presupposes the existence of a human reality—a human nature that is determinate in its species-specific properties, among which are the inherent appetitive tendencies that constitute specially human needs. Individual members of the human species, being all equally human, are innately endowed with the same specifically human properties.
To affirm these truths about human nature and the human species is to affirm the universality of human needs, the same in all human individuals at all times and places and under all circumstances. These truths have been challenged in our century by social and behavioral scientists. At the extreme, it is held that nurtural and environmental circumstances are the primary, if not the exclusive, determinants of human characteristics.
What is called human nature is nothing but a plastic blob that can be shaped in a wide diversity of ways by differences in nurture and in social, economic, and political conditions. Marxists, for example, go to that extreme when they hold that a truly communist society will produce a “new man,” radically different from the human beings who were nurtured and conditioned by the oppressive and competitive societies of the past.
I think that the constant and fixed character of human nature as something genetically determined in the case of the human species (as it is similarly determined in the case of other organic species) can be defended against the doubts or denials that have been leveled against it. But this by itself does not suffice to preserve the clarity of the distinction between human needs and individual wants. It is also necessary to answer the questions that have been raised about the effect of nurtural and other circumstantial factors upon the extent of human needs or what is required to satisfy them.
It must be conceded at once that nurtural and other circumstantial factors do affect the character of human needs and the things required for their satisfaction. Only one fact about human needs remains constant and fixed as a consequence of the constant and fixed character of human nature. The number of human needs has always been the same and will always be the same as long as the human species exists upon this planet.
Changes in the environment under which human beings are nurtured do not increase or decrease the number of their needs; nor, even with the number unchanged, does the naming of the needs enumerated change from time to time with alterations in the environmental circumstances.
What varies from time to time with alterations in the circumstances of human life are the instrumental or implemental factors required for the satisfaction of the invariant natural needs. A few examples may throw light on the point being made.
Man by nature desires to know; or, in other words, human beings, innately endowed with cognitive powers, have a natural tendency to seek knowledge. Knowledge is a real good that all human beings need. How is this need satisfied? In a wide variety of ways—sometimes by individual inquiry, sometimes by parental instruction, sometimes by the funded experience or beliefs of the tribe, sometimes by the institution of schools.
Do human beings need the formal education provided by a school system? Yes, but only as one way of implementing the satisfaction of their basic need for knowledge. The need for schooling is secondary or derivative, not primary or basic. Knowledge is always needed by human beings, but schooling is not.
Another example may be helpful. Health is a real good that all human beings need. But what is needed to implement the satisfaction of this need varies from time to time and place to place. Under the conditions of preindustrial economies, the basic need for health did not require implementation by the derivative need for air, water, and earth protected from pollution by noxious industrial wastes.
Do human beings have a natural need for means of transportation? No, but when, under the circumstances of urban as opposed to rural life, individuals must travel inconvenient distances to go to work to obtain the economic goods that are a basic human need, means of transportation may take on the character of an implemental need. Failure to understand the difference between a basic human need and what is needed to implement the satisfaction of that need leads to the erroneous conclusion that a new basic need has emerged with the emergence of urban, industrial life.
Means of transportation, environmental protection against pollution, the institution of school systems are all real goods, but only because wealth (or the means of subsistence), health, and knowledge are real goods, which, under certain circumstances, require them for their implementation. Wealth, health, and knowledge are always and everywhere real goods, no matter what the circumstances of human life may be. But means of transportation, environmental protection against pollution, and the institution of school systems are not, under all circumstances, required to implement the satisfaction of the basic human needs for the real goods just mentioned.
All human beings need sustenance and shelter. But the amount and character of the food and drink they need or of the kind of protection they need from the ravages of the environment will vary with the clement or inclement character of the climate in which they live and with the propitious or unpropitious character of the environmental circumstances that affect their lives. The need for food, drink, and shelter is invariant. What varies with variations in environmental circumstances is the quality or character of the things that satisfy these invariant needs.
The affirmation of natural needs underlies the affirmation of natural rights. All human beings have the same set of natural rights because all human beings have inherent needs for the same set of real goods. Every human being has a natural right to what any human being needs because it is really good for him to have.
Do all human beings have a natural right to means of transportation, to environmental protection against pollution, to formal schooling? No, because under certain circumstances these goods are not needed to implement the satisfaction of basic human needs. But when, with variations in the circumstances, these goods become instrumental means without which the basic real goods that all human beings need cannot be satisfied, then new derivative natural rights arise. There is no variation in basic natural rights, but only in the derivative natural rights that are rights to the goods which are instrumental in satisfying the human need for basic real goods.
One footnote must be appended to the doctrine of natural needs and natural rights. It cannot be denied that drug addicts and alcoholics have a real need for the poisons to which they have become habituated. Our recognition of the fact that what they really need is not really good for them to have leads us to regard these needs as pathological rather than natural. They exist only in certain individuals under certain circumstances, not in all human beings under all circumstances.
If readers, confronted with the controversy about natural needs and natural rights, should decide against the doctrine I have tried to defend, have they no alternative but to acquiesce in the view that good and evil are entirely subjective as well as in the view that value judgments and prescriptive statements of what ought to be sought or done are neither true nor false?
There is one alternative to which they can repair, but in my judgment it is not a satisfactory alternative, nor one that fully preserves the objectivity of good and evil.
The categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant is thought to provide the criteria for distinguishing between what is right and wrong in human conduct. Whereas the categorical imperative to seek whatever is really good for human beings is based on the needs inherent in human nature, the Kantian categorical imperative to obey the moral law is based on the rational necessity of that law, not upon human nature.
The maxim that we should do unto others what we would have them do unto us (which is just another way of saying that reason requires sound rules of conduct to be capable of universal application) does not tell us what we would have others do unto us. We cannot answer that question in an objective and valid manner without knowing what is really good for us. But, according to Kant, the only thing that is really good in this world is a good will—a will that complies with the moral law, a willingness to do one’s duty according to the moral law.
In my judgment, the Kantian position is unsatisfactory (as I have pointed out before) because it gives primacy to the right over the good. It does this by replacing discoverable natural desires by rationally formulated duties as the source of the moral law and the categorical imperative. This leads to the view that the only thing that is really good is a good will, and this, in my judgment, is a grievously inadequate rendering of the idea of goodness.
It has been said that there is no accounting for tastes. Whether this is true or not is the most important question that confronts us in our thinking about the idea of beauty.
It would appear to be true with regard to individual preferences in the sphere of purely sensual pleasures. The differences in individual taste with regard to foods, wines, climates, or sexual partners may not be accountable. If we had perfect knowledge of individual temperaments and of all the factors that have influenced the development of individuals from birth onward, their differences in taste might be explained. The unaccountability of differences in taste arises from the fact that such knowledge is not available, nor is it ever likely to be.
When we pass from variations in taste with regard to purely sensual pleasures to variations in taste with regard to enjoyable beauty, the question of accountability may require a different answer. Here we have grounds for thinking that experts in a given field of objects are better judges of the admirable beauty of those objects than individuals who have neither the knowledge nor the skill requisite for making an expert judgment.
The experts may not always agree about the gradations of admirable beauty exhibited by the objects before them. They may differ in judging which is more beautiful than another and which is the most beautiful of all. But they are likely to agree in their judgments about which objects are admirable for the beauty that lies in their intrinsic excellence and which should be put aside as devoid of admirable beauty in any degree.
If, in the judgment of experts in a certain field of objects, some objects have admirable beauty and others lack it, why does not everyone find enjoyable beauty in the objects thus selected? The fact seems to be that a vast number of persons are likely to find enjoyable beauty in objects dismissed by the experts as devoid of admirable beauty. Similarly, when the experts do agree about one object having more admirable beauty than another, it does not follow that everyone will find more enjoyable beauty in that object. On the contrary, many will find more enjoyable beauty in less admirable objects.
To say that there is no accounting for such differences in taste is to concede that the disconnection between admirable and enjoyable beauty and the absence of any correlation between what experts judge to be more admirable and what others find to be more enjoyable cannot be overcome. If we could account for such differences in taste (which is to say, if we knew their causes), we might be able to find a remedy for them and, by applying it, remove them.
The existence of experts with regard to both admirable and enjoyable beauty in a certain field of objects may provide us with a clue to the solution of this problem. To call certain individuals expert judges of such matters is to attribute superior taste to them. Their having superior taste consists in their finding enjoyable beauty in objects that are admirable for their intrinsic excellence and, with regard to such objects, in enjoying more the beauty of objects that are more admirable.
What is the source of such superior taste? How did the experts come to possess it? The answer is to be found in the factors that, in the course of their personal development, made them expert judges with regard to a certain field of objects. These factors include their abundant exposure to the objects in question, their patient, attentive, and sustained experience of them, their knowledge about the elements that enter into the production of such objects, and even perhaps their possession of some degree of skill in producing them.
If I am correct in this account of what makes certain individuals expert judges with regard to the admirable beauty of objects of a certain kind, then we are also able to account for their superior taste with regard to the enjoyable beauty of the objects in question.
It follows that inferior taste can be accounted for in a parallel manner. It results from the absence, in the development of some individuals, of the very same factors the presence of which confers expert judgment and superior taste on other individuals.
Inferior taste consists in finding enjoyable beauty in objects that are devoid of admirable beauty or in finding more enjoyable beauty in objects that are less admirable. Our being able to account for it should also enable us to remedy it. The remedy lies in the cultivation of taste by the operation of the very same factors that explain the possession of expert judgment and superior taste.
Knowing the remedy is one thing. Being able to apply it effectively and universally is another.
We know, for example, that the morally virtuous person is one who takes pleasure in acquiring real goods and in making the right choices. But we also know that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to so rear the young of the human race that all turn out to be morally virtuous men and women.
We are left in the same plight by knowing that the aesthetically virtuous or the aesthetically cultivated person is one who finds enjoyable beauty in objects that are admirable for the beauty of their intrinsic excellence. We may have to acknowledge that it remains extremely difficult, if not impossible, to so cultivate the taste of human beings in the course of their personal development that all or even a fairly sizable number of them come to acquire the superior taste possessed by experts with regard to a certain field of objects.
Readers must, therefore, be left with questions they will have to answer for themselves. Can taste with regard to beauty be accounted for? Can good taste be cultivated and bad taste be cured? To what extent can these desirable objectives be accomplished?
Only if the answers tend to be affirmative and optimistic is there any basis for concluding that what is generally admirable in the sphere of beauty should also be generally enjoyable, and the more admirable the object the more enjoyable it should be.