One of the benefits of teaching is that you get questions from students – the kind of questions that ideally everybody would like to ask, but no one dares to. And the great thing about students is they will ask those questions. One of the questions I was asked recently was: How do we know what is true? So, is there a quick, fast way to know that?
Well, you may have guessed correctly: No. It’s always hard work.
The question of what is true is one of the oldest problems in philosophy. It’s why there is such a thing as epistemology – the science of what is true, the science of knowledge, the science of what we know, how we know it, and so on.
There’s also the difference between knowledge and interpretation. You may know something, but that knowledge does not tell you immediately what that means. There’s a connection between knowledge and action. You may know something, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what to do.
And so these are two of the biggest problems that we have: How do we turn knowledge into something that makes sense to us – into meaning? And how do we turn knowledge into action – action that is necessary?
Also, we oftentimes assume if everybody knew the same thing, we would all know what to do, and we would all know to do the same thing, and it will all mean the same thing to everybody. None of this is guaranteed. We are all different people, and depending on who we are, where we are, what experiences we’ve had, how much we know, how much we are able to do about what we know – all of this flows into whether we can agree with others on not just that knowledge, but also what it means and what we should do.
So this idea that if I could only tell someone what I know, they would not only agree with me, but it would mean the same thing to them, and they would know immediately together with me what to do – and if you could get people in a room together and we all share the information, we all know what to do, and then we can solve all the problems and everything is utopia…
In one way, it would be nice if that was true. But it isn’t. There’s a danger: if that scenario were true, and if this is based on group agreement, couldn’t we also be walking down the wrong path? Could we also maybe come to the right kind of knowledge, but then the situation changes, but we still hold on to the old knowledge because we just agreed as a group that this is what we should do? So that’s one part of the problem.
Then oftentimes we try to find an answer to something, and we are told it’s virtuous to have an answer. But sometimes there is no answer, or we don’t have an answer. Rather than to give the wrong answer or a false answer or something that leads in the wrong direction or is only an incomplete answer, sometimes it may be good to say it’s good to merely ask a question.
Sometimes when we say, “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t think it’s correct,” then the response comes, “Well, how do you know? Prove that I’m wrong.” It’s not your responsibility always to prove someone wrong, because you may know that something is wrong, but you may not have the complete set of facts to say why they’re wrong and what the alternative is – what the truth is.
It’s a trick that some people play on each other. They give you something that’s false, and they know very well that your answer will have to be very complicated, very specialized, and if you can’t answer immediately, they say, “See? I’m right.” But that’s not how this works. This is not how truth works. Sometimes you may know something is wrong, but you may not be the best person to speak on that.
So is everything that’s wrong a lie? I mean, we need to distinguish between these concepts. There is something like disinformation – people deliberately spreading lies or falsehoods. But there’s also misinformation, where maybe you’ve heard something that’s not true and you’re spreading it without actually knowing whether it’s true or not, so you’re doing it unintentionally.
Then you may speak the truth, but you’re doing it in a hyperbolic way. You exaggerate. You say it in a way that it has a specific effect on the audience, and it doesn’t ring true completely anymore. You say, “This is the best book ever written.” Well, who’s to say that? So of course that’ll be a lie. Anybody who says this is the best thing ever, this is the worst thing ever – it’s probably not going to be true. It’s a rhetorical device. It’s a stylistic fit.
And depending on your temperament, your culture, the language you use, the speech patterns that you’re used to, you will sometimes be more hyperbolic or not. Or you may downplay things too, which is… Well, I don’t know whether the word “hypopoly” exists, but maybe that’s what that is.
You probably also heard that term “post-truth.” Are we living in a society where the truth is no longer desired, where the truth is irrelevant? Well, given that the idea of epistemology is a very old one, this problem is not a very new one. We’ve always lived to some degree in a post-truth situation. And humans are very good at rumors. They’re very good at spreading stuff about others, making other people look better or worse, yourself better or worse. And most people haven’t had that information glut that we’re living in. Everything out there is information – we’re hearing things, we’re reading things, and everything’s coming at us with such intensity that we oftentimes don’t know what to make of it.
So what do you make of people who truly believe something even though it is understood it’s not true, but they just believe it’s true because that’s how they feel? As the George Costanza rule says: It’s not a lie if you believe it.
Can you say so-and-so says something wrong, so that’s a lie, that’s a liar? Maybe. But you could also say that person is spreading something that is agreed as not necessarily being correct. Turn it down a little – maybe that’s advice for all of us. We’re all good at not liking others that we disagree with, especially in politics. But to always say they’re a liar – that doesn’t help communication, that doesn’t help society.
Because there can be such a thing as competing truths. I’m not saying truth-truth. I’m saying perceptions, meanings. I mean, is the sky blue? Well, it depends on whether there are clouds, time of day, whether you’re color blind or not, what glasses you wear. The sky can be all kinds of things. There can be a forest fire nearby, and the sky is red. Normally you could say, “Yeah, the sky is probably blue.” Is it really? No. Our eyes tell us it has a certain color because of the way our eyes work, and they interpret certain things in the atmosphere with light that give us the color. So is the sky blue?
Now, if two people stand next to each other and they see the same sky, it may happen to be a blue sky, and someone says the sky is blue, and someone else says the sky is red, and you obviously can see that in this situation the sky is actually blue, you can recognize that the other person is wrong to say the sky is red. But if they perceive it differently than you, and you want to insist the sky is blue even though at this moment it is actually red, you can recognize your mistake. You don’t have to be married to your opinion about reality.
Can there be competing truths when it comes to history? Well, history is always… history is just one thing. Historiography – the way we tell history – is the problem. History is always objective. Things either happened or they did not. Historiography, or the told history, if you will… When you write a history book, it should contain the truth. But history books also have this agenda of teaching people patriotism. So that’s the argument that James Loewen makes in his book “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” which is sadly still relevant.
Because when we talk to others, when we tell people a truth, we are also contextualizing it. We’re never communicating without purpose. Or as the old adage goes, we’re never not communicating. So every time we are speaking, we’re also communicating our values.
Did God create heaven and earth? Well, that depends on what you think God is. If you are looking at religious texts with a sense of complexity, then you’re looking at them differently than if you look at them with a sense of there has to be a person there sitting on a cloud and said, “Here, this is how it should be,” and then it is.
If you see God more as that which is larger than us, that which we can’t understand, that which is beyond our understanding by definition, how can we easily dismiss or approve such a statement? Because we would have to operate against this idea that that which is divine and that which is human are two different kinds of perspectives and realities.
So if God is the term that we use for whatever the strongest force in the universe is, then of course yes, God created heaven and earth, because that which is the creative force is that which is God. If we say no, this human understanding about what God is – that is what we are answering to – may not be the best approach. But no matter which choice we make here in that answer, it depends on our outlook on society. If we say we need to have an answer that gives us a clear sense of authority, or we have to have an answer that gives us a sense of scientific reality, or we have to have an answer that gives us a sense of social belonging – these are all different mandates.
So there can be competing truths without these competing truths nevertheless being lies. But there can also be lies. There are facts about reality, and then there are also the opposite of facts. There can be news about reality, and there can be fake news. If something happened and someone says no, this did not happen, then we know what’s true or false between the two, if we can prove – or we have others that can prove – that whatever happened actually happened.
Do we find truth more in books than online? I wouldn’t say that. It depends on the quality of the book. It depends on the source online. Are witnesses important? Well, human eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. But if you have a large enough number of people that testify to a certain thing, maybe that comes close to the truth.
So there are clear truths that we know because of witness testimony. Did the Holocaust happen? Yes, it did. One example: because we have known from so many people, there’s material evidence, evidence from opposing political camps. Did the moon landing happen? Yes, of course it happened, because there’s evidence from the American and the Soviet side. Unless the Americans and the Soviets both conspired – which at that ideologically critical time I would assume was very unlikely – unless that cooperation happened and they both agreed on this lie, no, it happened. There’s evidence, and it has been explained successfully. Is it fun to play with the idea that the moon landing didn’t happen? Sure, you can have fun with that. But don’t overdo it.
Is evolution true? Well, evolution is clearly a fact. We see evolution happening around us. We see how species change over time. I mean, that’s what we can see. We see this in diseases, we can see this with bacteria and viruses – of course they evolve. You see that development. Do we see humans evolving? Well, there are mutations all the time. We have just created a society in which we ideally have created an environment which allows all people to lead their best lives. If we are lucky, we are no longer living out there in a world where there’s natural selection acting on us because we are a small group of people having to flee predators and dangerous environments and stuff like that.
So there are ways where circumstances can be so stable for a long enough time that there’s not that much evolutionary pressure. So you don’t necessarily witness evolutionary trends for some species on the same time scale as for others, like bacteria and viruses. But we can observe it. There’s enough proof that we’ve dug up, there’s enough evidence.
But that comes back to the question of meaning. What does the idea of evolution mean to you? Does it mean that you’re less a creation of God because humans are apes that changed over time? Well, if you have a very narrow understanding of religion, maybe you feel insecure in your religiosity. But that’s why I’m saying: the wider and more complex your idea of religion is, the more it is compatible with the theory of evolution. And “theory” here means a solid, fact-based, scientific building of thought. That’s what theory means in science. When we say things like “it’s just a theory,” that’s everyday talk. The word “theory” means something else in science.
But science is something that oftentimes changes because the knowledge base that we have changes over time, which may make it necessary for us to revise certain inferences that we have about reality. Some people don’t like the idea that science is not set in stone. Some people say, “Well, see, the truth of the Bible is always true, science keeps changing.”
But that’s because we are speaking of what Steven Jay Gould called “non-overlapping magisteria.” Religion tells us a different kind of truth than science. Religion is about our relationship to that which is larger than us. Science is about our reality around us and about different aspects of ourselves.
But science doesn’t change as much as people think it does. There are such things as settled science. There are such things as facts. Do credentials matter in science? They can, because they ideally demonstrate that you’ve had the training and the experience and the testing – either through publications (peer-reviewed) or through teaching, constantly being questioned by students, having come up with answers. And in that sense, credentials or experience can matter. But they shouldn’t be a fetish either. If someone has a big academic title, they can still come to the wrong conclusions about reality. And if someone doesn’t have a scientific degree, they can still make a discovery and make an observation that can be true.
Science is about what you can observe, what you can prove, what you can show, and ideally repeat through repeat investigations – repeat observations. Or you can predict something, and then that thing actually happens and happens and happens and happens again. So the so-called scientific method is a way to confirm something repeatedly.
When I say that scientific truth doesn’t always change, what about Einstein and Newton? Well, these so-called paradigm shifts may not mean as much as many people think. Newton describes reality that’s closer to us. Einstein, in the theory of relativity, oftentimes talks about situations with different kinds of speeds than we humans experience. But we use the theory of relativity when we have atomic clocks in orbit, and we make adjustments for that. All of this has been proven in real-life situations. But it doesn’t really matter to us necessarily on the same degree.
This information that we have now about atoms, about quarks, about quantum physics – all of this is very important and very interesting. It doesn’t change anything about what we already knew 100 or so years ago about chemistry. In chemistry, whatever’s going on inside a nucleus may not matter. It’s important there are electrons or electrical charges and whatever – I’m not a chemist, I’m not going into that territory here. But oftentimes, the paradigm shifts are occurring at the margins of a discipline, and they don’t necessarily disprove everything that happened before.
So when people say Planck, Einstein, Newton – they all disagree with each other – it depends on where. But settled science oftentimes remains settled science, and we may have to have a footnote added to it. An object falls to the ground in any case, and Newton can tell you why that is and what calculations you need to make. And that is true whether or not we know what gravity is. We can observe gravity whether we have a theory of everything in which gravity, strong, weak, and electrical force are all unified. That doesn’t matter to our everyday reality. It doesn’t matter that Newton already told us how objects falling can be calculated.
So science may change, facts may still remain, or we have little footnotes to facts. And in certain cases, that is relevant to us.
And now back to the question – and I know this escalated quickly into different areas – but what about then how we find out what is true? Oftentimes that relates to the news. What is true depends on what kinds of news we consume. And now here I have bad news for you: You may need to read more than one news source. You may need to read news sources from different partisan perspectives, from different countries. And nobody really can take that work away from you.
Yes, there are websites or services that pretend they can give you a balanced view of the world and of news. Sometimes that can be helpful. But the real answer to the question “What is the truth?” and “Is there a quick and fast way?” is: It’s not that easy. It’s a very difficult question. And you have to do the work. You have to actually learn stuff. And this is becoming more and more important in times of artificial intelligence.
We are now living in a world where some computer algorithm or some computer intelligence may tell you what’s true and what’s false. But we’ve already shown that artificial intelligence can so-called “hallucinate,” meaning if they don’t know something, they’ll make it up. We will probably figure out that artificial intelligence is much closer to human intelligence, that computer networks may in the end work like neural networks, and that this idea that just because artificial intelligence means it’s computers – that doesn’t create objectivity, that doesn’t create truth, that doesn’t create a perspective that is neutral.
So we cannot fall into the trap to say, “Oh, now we have all these different artificial intelligence tools, and now we know what objective truth is.” No, it makes it even harder for us because our knowledge is now even more important to evaluate what AI tells us.
So if you thought I have the answers here for you and you now have a sure way to know what’s true or not – no, I don’t think you assumed that of me. All I can say is there’s no easy path, and we all have to do the work of finding the truth every day, still, for ourselves. And knowledge is something that we have to constantly take in, and we have to constantly make the evaluation of what it means and what to do with it. And no computer can take that duty away from us.
Thank you very much. That probably is not everything I’ll have to say on the topic, but so is life.
[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]
Erratic Attempts 