There are a couple of philosophical schools concerned with how to think about truth. To categorize those in broadest terms one can say you have an objectivist camp and a relativist or construcivist camp. The first camp’s basic tenet can be boiled down to that truth is viewpoint-independent, the second camp’s tenet to that it is constructed somehow by individuals or groups and therefore is viewpoint-dependent.
I think that the relativist group does doubt only up to a certain point that there exists actually a different reality for different viewers. Although I myself would say that the perception and conception of a stone and of stones is in fact constructed or shaped by individual brains, I think the underlying chaos, or matrix, to use a more modern metaphor, is only one. I wonder if you ask most relativists what they actually say they think about whether there is such a thing as this concrete stone (or stones in general). I bet most would say there is, which would indicate that relativism, at least in some of its forms, is more concerned with rather high level phenomena, like social truths for example. In any case, I say all this to point out that truth is something different from reality. Truth describes a relationship to reality. It relates statements about reality (“propositions” in philosophical parlance) to reality. And since propositions are made up of words, the question of truth can be be framed literally as how words relate to an underlying shared (if we don’t assume solipsism) reality.
Now, let’s assume the objectivist standpoint in light of what I laid out so far. Science over the long run must lead us to - must converge to - a set of words, related to other words, a semantic network of words, which corresponds perfectly to reality. The question arises of how do we know if that were the case. You would need to agree on some kind of test or mechanism which helps to decide. In the scientific worldview that would be some kind of description of the scientific method, of how we perform measurements and so on. I won’t go much into the weeds here, as it is outside of the scope of what I want to discuss here. The point here is simply that you end up with exactly one set of words and one way of relating them to each other in the right way, such that it reflects the actual functioning of reality, that it corresponds to it.
What we observe amongst humans is something different. Consider the problem of translation. Take for example the professional translation of books. Have you ever read about or heard an actual translator talk about the difficulties of faithful translation of a particular piece of literature, let’s say a novel from Günter Grass from German into French? It is clear that translation is a craft which is often performed by skilled people and that those people can produce really good translations. The question still remains if there in principle can be a perfect translation. Even simple words seem not to translate back and forth between languages perfectly. With the possible exceptions of a few words like ‘and,’ with almost any word you find that there are multiple possible translations given into the given target language. The choice for a concrete translation is left up to you and is based on the surrounding context where the translated word should be fit in. Take any of the suggested translations of the original word and you’ll find the same if you want do it in the other direction, back from the target language into the original language. What you typically don’t get is a perfect roundtrip, like this word translates to that word and that one back to this, or these words translate to these other words and and those translate back to the original words. There is no straightforward correspondence that appears remotely orderly. And again, that goes for many - most - words, not only for special cases where “love” in one language implies “mother-love” and in the other doesn’t, or such culture-specific and apparently untranslatable words as the Portuguese “saudade.” The urban-mythical 72 different words of snow some folks might think of in this context can be interpreted as sort of a different case, I think, as you could argue those are just finer distinctions some peoples have because of needs imposed by the particular environment they live in. There is no mismatch of words involved here. This could be seen as more of a question of a whole broken down in parts, whereas the problem I described earlier is more like fitting a square peg into a round hole.
Now, speaker communities of different languages are not the only example where peoples’ use of words do not map perfectly between groups. It might not be perfectly obvious, but it is ubiquitous, that many misunderstandings between people involve different understandings of particular words. To take but one example, do you think different groups of people, take, say, neo-marxists and free-market-libertarians, actually understand the very same thing by the word “capitalism”? You could of course say “yes, roughly” and then count a list of properties which contain “money”, “markets” and so on. But can they in principle be brought to mean the same thing? I mean could one somehow come up with a definition where everyone agrees, “yes, that truly is Capitalism.” Now, I would ask you to consider the profession of those people actually coming up with definitions, those working for the Merriam-Webster’s and the likes. I’d say the same about them as I said about the translators. Highly skilled people doing their very best at coming up with definitions. But could they find perfect definitions? Ok, I give you one. The only perfect one I am actually aware of. It is completely tangential here and basically completely against the theory I am expounding here, but it is just too beautiful. I cite Tomas Sowell (from memory): “Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.” I think it is even the only science with a clearly defined scope, which I hope should make up for it’s bad reputation as the dismal science. Now, to actually make my point, please try to define a chair. I mean perfectly and unambiguously define a chair, such that it applies to each and every chair and only to chairs. I’m waiting. … Sorry to inform you, but you can’t. You might think you can. But that only means that you haven’t thought about it hard enough. Nobody can, by the way.
Coming back to a possible definition of “capitalism,” I think the problem here appears somewhat more tractable than it does for chairs. Since words depend on understandings of other words, and some words there is a sense in which very basic assumptions of the marxist vs. the free-market camps must influence an understanding of “capitalism.” In practise in a marxist reading capitalism cannot be thought of in any way independent of - somewhere along the chain - the concept of exploitation, whereas in a liberatarian reading “capitalism” is fundamentally rooted in property rights and so on. What I want to bring to attention here is that words are embedded into whole theories. And it is not clear if those theories can be brought into agreement with each other. If anything it is more intuitive that they cannot. From an objectivist reading the interpretation of the situation is that either one theory simply must be wrong, or that both contain part of the truth and that they can be brought into agreement by a third superseeding theory.
As I remarked at the beginning I momentarily count myself as more part of the constructivist camp, but I won’t go deeper into it now as for why. The only thing in that regard I want to tease here is that I don’t think truth is arbitrary, a complaint brought forward by people leaning more objectivist against the relativists. That said, I don’t want to convince you of anything here. Making the case for anything of that nature would require a whole book. What I want to do, however, is to pose the question whether it is possible or not, in principle, for such a semantic network of truths as I mentioned earlier to exist. Can humanity as a whole somehow generate such a network or not? Living in tribes and more complex arrangements obviously required effective communication between humans at all times. And that is based on a common understanding, a shared truth. But (at least) during recorded history groups of people fought over ideas, where they could not form common understanding. This is a difference in kind from conflicts over resources. And where fights are not physical, for example in modern institutionalized science, we nevertheless can observe similar phenomena. Here groups of people, rather than rational individuals, seem to be the right unit of analysis which let us understand the nature of how progress in science really is made, as Thomas Kuhn showed us in “The Structure of Scientic Revolutions.” According to him, scientists work within paradigms, which fall apart at some point, only to be replaced by the next generation of scientists which adheres to the next paradigm. The paradigms by their nature are incompatible schools of thought.[1]
To conclude, the big question for me here is, can we grasp truth as whole? Do the successive paradigms of science converge on a single truth about the world? David Deutsch argues in “The Beginning of Infinity” that we are on a forever quest of finding better and better explanations (where explanations surely are more powerful than mere propositions, although their nature is implied rather than explained in the book). In a way it seems completely logical that we can accumulate more and more truths (“get closer to the truth”) and that our predictive skills and level of control over the natural world therefore continues to grow and always will continue to grow. What I want to get a grip on, however is: Can units of “knowers,” (individual persons, groups, collective organisms, artificial organisms etc.) learn more and more about the world without those networks of truths loose coherence? The ideal web of truths is as big as reality itself. It would explain every fact. And what else would objective truth in toto mean. Of course often we are interested in the truth of single propositions or explanations. But in the end for a decision if they are completely true we would need to know if they stand in conflict with no other truth. Hence my interest in the complete network. Or are those networks bound to “stretch to thin,” when implemented in units accumulating truths about the world? Are ideological (literally) conflicts between groups of knowers a necessary outcome of them accumulating truths about the world in a path-dependent, historically contingent, manner, such that different networks of knowledge end up describing reality slightly differently (and therefore be not perfectly mappable onto one another)?
Wouldn’t that also make a lot of sense, evolutionary speaking? Organisms trying to compress as much reality as possible into knowledge, in order to succeed in acting in an infinitely complex world? And then you just have different groups hosting different meme-plexes, different sets of interrelated bits of knowledge that help them make better or worse predictions and afford them therefore higher or lower degrees of control in acting upon reality, compared to other groups. This is basically good old Dawkins and it definitely makes sense to me.
I will do the open ended-thing here and leave you with no conclusions, as I plan to expand on it in following articles, whereby each article should be self-contained and readable in isolation. Over time the underlying themes which motivate me should become apparent.
In any case, I hope I could spark your curiosity and hope to see you back.
Footnotes
The phenomenon of schools of thought btw. pre-dates institutionalized science and can be seen across all of intellectual history. And there are also schools of kung fu, of different crafts etc.